Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3)

by S. M. Reine

  Neuma remained lounging on the bed as Elise searched Abraxas’s shelves. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for—it had become obvious that the doors in the House had no locks, since there was no reason to try to contain the slaves, so she wasn’t going to find any keys.

  Elise found what she didn’t know she had been seeking in Abraxas’s desk.

  A map.

  “Look at this,” Elise said, dropping into the leather chair. It sank slightly under her weight. She hadn’t sat on anything soft during her days in Hell, so it felt strange to melt into the upholstery.

  Neuma perched herself on the edge of the desk. She had unzipped the jacket of the armor, baring a long expanse of pale skin underneath. She had a few scratches from the battle, but hadn’t taken nearly as much damage as Jerica—fortunate, considering that she was only a half-demon and was much easier to kill than her companions.

  “Is this a map of the House?” Neuma asked.

  Elise set a wooden box on one corner of the map and a knife on the other to keep it from curling. “Yes, this is the House.” The map had been drawn on some kind of thick paper that felt suspiciously like a human byproduct. It showed the entirety of the property: the surrounding walls, the location of every guard tower, the arrangement of buildings, and even the first levels of the mine that had been carved into the mountain.

  Neuma pointed at a rectangular building situated between the mines and the kennels. “Storage?” she guessed.

  It was only then that Elise realized that the map was written entirely in the infernal language, and that Neuma couldn’t read it. Elise had become so comfortable reading the language that she hadn’t even realized she was looking at something other than Latin script. But the word did indeed say “warehouse.”

  Elise’s eyes traveled over the other labels, which were written in tiny, perfect handwriting. She was surprised to see one cathedral drawn on the map—a small building tucked behind the workshops, slightly higher on the mountain so that it would overlook everything else.

  Why would Abraxas have a cathedral on his property? Surely not to honor a God demons didn’t recognize.

  “Take Jerica to the storage unit and inventory the water,” Elise said without taking her eyes from the map. “Watch your backs. I think there’s staff hiding somewhere on site.”

  “Guess we’re not done fighting yet, huh?”

  “Not until the Palace has fallen. Probably not after that, either. Sorry.”

  Neuma zipped up the jacket with a sigh, like having to be clothed was a huge inconvenience. “What are you going to do while we deal with the boring shit?”

  Elise stood, taking the knife from Abraxas’s desk with her.

  “I’m going to mark my territory,” she said.

  For thousands of years, demons hadn’t been capable of performing magic. The Treaty of Dis had written that law with the intent of giving humans an advantage, and it had worked—by restricting magic to mortals, humanity had survived beyond the early wars.

  But the laws that had destroyed a demon’s ability to cast magic hadn’t destroyed any of the spells that they already had in place. The House of Abraxas was old enough that it still had infernal wards etched into its foundations. Abraxas and his forefathers had fed the wards a steady stream of their blood for centuries, binding the walls to them and making sure that nobody could enter who wasn’t explicitly permitted.

  Elise spent hours walking the battlements of the House, squeezing droplets of blood onto each mark that she passed. Magical walls lifted in her wake.

  She glimpsed the colors of magic out of the corners of her eyes and tasted it on the back of her tongue. She wasn’t familiar with ancient infernal spells, but magic was magic; she didn’t need to know how to play the guitar to know when someone was strumming a sad tune.

  The spells weren’t just meant to prevent the House’s walls from being penetrated by hostile forces. There were marks with radiating lines that pointed at each building, blessing them with the protection of her blood. And a few of them connected directly to her, giving her the strength of the House itself when she stood within the fortifications. It wasn’t easy or cheap magic. Abraxas’s forebears must have been incredible warlocks—or incredibly rich.

  Halfway around the circuit, a strange building caught her eye. It looked like it had been carved out of the mountain, with a tall, arched entrance, toothed windows that looked like they could bite, and tall spires of bone.

  It was the church that had been marked on Abraxas’s map.

  She sucked her wounded hand into her mouth, careful not to let her blood fall on the earth as she climbed to the cathedral. It didn’t look like anyone had been there in a long time. There were no footprints in the dust but hers.

  The cathedral had no door. Like the windows, its entrance was filled with jagged teeth, which she had to step around carefully to enter.

  Her footsteps echoed inside the chamber. Hot wind gusted around her, dry and brutal, as she crossed the mosaic of broken stone to approach the altar. There were no pews in this cathedral. There was only an open nave where demons could kneel in reverence and a large statue in the center, which was so tall that the head of the center figure almost brushed the bone rafters.

  There was a similar statue in the Palace of Dis: Yatam depicted as an eight-armed deity, a cold-faced Metaraon, and Teleklos, mortal king of Sparta, between the other two. But even though the figures on this statue were similar in layout, they had been defaced. Metaraon’s head had been removed. The face of Yatam had been stricken so that there was nothing but jagged rock where his mischievous smile should have been. Teleklos was the worst of them all, with so many missing parts that it was difficult to tell that the torso and legs were meant to be human at all.

  Some lesser demons worshipped the original three that had founded the Treaty of Dis, and it wasn’t unusual to see shrines of Yatam all over Dis. He had fucked his way through Hell and fathered so many children that most demons carried some of his blood in their veins. He had found godhood by spreading his seed. It was that reverence that gave Elise what little advantage she had over other demons.

  But it made no sense for Abraxas to have such a monument on his property, especially when it was obvious that he didn’t care enough about the figures depicted to take care of them.

  Another remnant of ancient magic?

  Elise heard a rustling that wasn’t the wind. She tensed, fists tightening on the delicate athame she had been using to cut her fingers.

  “Who’s there?” she called.

  “Don’t hurt me,” was the reply.

  A man stepped out from behind the statue. No, he didn’t step—he slithered. From the waist up, he looked fairly human; his chest was sculpted with muscle, his arms were strong, and his features were handsome, if aged. The resemblance to humans abruptly ended at his hips. Instead of a penis, he had some kind of hooked phallus partially concealed by a flap of scales, much like a serpent. And instead of legs, he had a long tail that supported his weight, making him slightly taller than Elise. The skin below his waist was black with a long yellow stripe, which melded into the olive-gold skin at his waist seamlessly.

  For a disorienting moment, Elise remembered the last time she had faced a half-human, half-serpent with that coloring. She had been standing in the garden face-to-face with Lilith, Adam dead at her feet. He wasn’t as lovely as Lilith had been, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be as dangerous.

  She lifted the dagger that she had been using to bleed herself.

  “Stop right there,” Elise said.

  He paused at Yatam’s feet, hands lifted in the universal gesture of surrender. Even though he didn’t slither nearer, his tail drew in around him, coiling like a cobra.

  “Father,” he said. He spoke the higher form of the infernal tongue perfectly, even though she glimpsed glistening white fangs when his lips moved. “I saw what you did this morning. Impressive, taking down Belphegor. Impressive and stupid. He’ll remember the slight for
eternity, and eternity is a long time to have such an enemy.”

  She hadn’t really planned on letting Belphegor survive eternity. There were ways to kill anything—she was the Godslayer, after all—and once she figured out Belphegor’s weakness, he would be removed.

  “Identify yourself,” Elise said.

  Without moving, he said, “My name is Devadas.”

  “Naga?” she asked. He inclined his head in a nod. There were no naga in America; they thrived in the ancestral lands of India. But all lamia were female, so it wasn’t exactly hard to guess the species of a male half-snake demon. “You work for Belphegor.”

  “I work for the House of Abraxas,” Devadas said. “I was Steward before Abraxas became Judge and inherited Belphegor.” He said the name with no small amount of distaste.

  So he was the one that had been compiling reports. Elise didn’t lower the dagger. “Why are you hiding here?”

  “I sensed your entrance and concealed myself. I didn’t trust the fiends to protect me in the assault.” His slitted eyes flicked from Elise to the statues to the door, as if seeking escape. “Abraxas took almost his entire army to Earth with him, and the staff, as well. Belphegor and I were all that remained.”

  Elise gestured with the knife. “Move away from the statue.”

  Devadas slid nearer, hands still lifted. She paced around him, searching for any hints of weapons, and found none. Of course, he probably didn’t need anything but his fangs.

  A former Steward might have information she needed. She wouldn’t kill him.

  Elise took the belt from her waist and moved to tie his mouth shut.

  He jerked back. The sudden motion made her lift the knife again, and they stared at one another, momentarily frozen. The skin on either side of his neck had stretched out, revealing a half-furled hood.

  “That won’t be necessary,” he said with a quavering voice. “I can help you. I saw what you did to Belphegor. The House of the Father is a large and complex machine that requires careful management, and you’ll need me to keep it functioning in his stead.”

  She was too distracted by what he had called the House to consider the offer. “What did you say? House of the Father?”

  “You’ve claimed it,” he said, as if trying to explain some kind of obvious truth to a slow-minded child.

  Elise didn’t like the sound of that name at all. And she didn’t exactly intend on staying there for long. Her sights were set on a much larger property. “Don’t change the header on the stationary,” she said. “What around here needs to be done?”

  “Care and feeding of the slaves, organizing the centuriae and wait staff, import and export of goods, the mine must be—”

  She cut him off with a slicing gesture. Dammit, she had wanted to take Abraxas’s army, not deal with a small city’s worth of bullshit. “Fine,” Elise said, and it looked like he might faint from relief. A cowardly naga as a Steward. No way that could go wrong. “I’ll have you show Jerica the ropes.” She took a step toward the door, then paused. “How long have you worked for the house?”

  “The House acquired me a hundred thousand quarters past,” Devadas said.

  A “quarter” was what the natives called a day. It was meant to indicate a quarter month on Earth, or the passage of a week. A hundred thousand weeks. What was that, almost three hundred years in Hell?

  She pointed the tip of her knife at the statue. “What happened to that?”

  “It is the work of eons,” he said.

  That had to be his bullshit way of saying that he didn’t know. The Treaty hadn’t been forged eons ago.

  Elise cast a final glance at the trio of shattered statues. The legs on what would have been Yatam’s figure were strange—they had been patterned with scale-like engravings, though he didn’t have a tail like Devadas or Lilith. It wasn’t unusual for artists to get creative with mythological figures, though.

  “Follow me,” she said. When they stepped out of the church, Devadas contracted his hood around his face and moved toward the main house. Elise stopped him. “I told you to follow me. I’m going to the wall.”

  “But the Stewardship—”

  “You’re not leaving my sight,” she said. “Follow me. I won’t tell you again.”

  Three

  The clocks chimed Saturday, and the streets of Dis were empty. Elise moved briskly, unhindered by the soft weight of Abraxas’s stolen robes as she put the gates of his stolen House behind her.

  Devadas slithered at her side. She hadn’t let him out of her sight since finding him in the church. They were walking in front of a truck taken from Abraxas’s fleet of vehicles now, which grumbled like a bull as it inched behind them. The Mack truck was towing a large flatbed—larger than Elise would need, but the smallest that Abraxas had possessed. Jerica was driving. She had one hand on the wheel and a cleaver in the other, which hung casually out the window.

  She didn’t need the weapon. There was nobody to attack them. The streets were contracted by the weight of the silent fear that hung over them, stretching long and endless, making the journey from the House to Elise’s destination seem to take hours more than it should have.

  Where the streets were empty, the skies were not. Kibbeths soared from the wastelands toward the fissure, ferrying hundreds of demons a day to Earth. Elise had tried to stop one of them when she first arrived, only to find that kibbeths had natural defenses against incorporeal attacks; she had become tangled in their tentacles and been forced to withdraw. Direct assaults wouldn’t halt the attacks. She needed to take a more circuitous route to stopping the demons.

  Above, the fissure itself seemed to pulse with the light of a sinking sun. It looked like a blue eye gazing out of a crimson face.

  Just in case, Elise walked under the awnings of abandoned storefronts. She didn’t want to get hit by an errant sunbeam and have a worse day than she’d started out with. Devadas almost slid right over her because he was trying to walk so close.

  She elbowed him away. “What are you doing?”

  “The fissure,” was all he said. He trembled all over.

  He wasn’t looking where he was going and almost bumped into her again. She shoved him harder the second time.

  “Walk in front of the semi,” she ordered.

  If it were possible for a scaled creature to pale, then he would have. It took him a moment to gather the strength he needed to walk in the center of the street with the Mack truck.

  They skirted the edge of the mountain district and followed unmarked roads deeper into the city. The Palace was a distant scion watching over the city—a central point around which the worst of the smoke flowed, the kibbeths flew, and where the fissure was brightest.

  “Have you had any contact with the Palace?” Elise asked Devadas.

  He took a long moment to respond. “Yes. Why?”

  “Who’s in charge there now?”

  The membrane flicked over his eyes. “I’m not sure. I’ve heard rumors, but—”

  “Who’s in charge?” she repeated, interrupting his stutters.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Some say that the staff stepped up to address the day-to-day operations of the Palace. Others say…” His tongue flickered through the air and vanished into his mouth again. “There have been rumors that a prince from Malebolge seized it during the riots.” He quickly added, “I have no reason to believe that’s true.”

  Elise frowned. “Which prince?”

  “I don’t know. Does it matter? It can’t be true. A prince would fly his banner and make it known that he was occupying the Palace, wouldn’t he?”

  She would have thought so. Anyone that was strong enough to take the Palace—even a Palace that no longer maintained the Treaty—should have been capable of controlling the entire city. It would require an army, or at least cooperation from most of the Houses.

  Elise kept an eye on the Palace in the distance as she guided Jerica and the Mack truck to her target.

  They stopped in front
of a block of apartments that towered above the other buildings, like a gravestone among dead grass. Jerica had suggested it to Elise as a convenient hideout in case things went south at the House. The black obelisk had been built for demons that could turn incorporeal—things that didn’t need traditional doors, but benefited from the vantage point of towering belfries.

  The apartments were empty now. The same height that had made the twenty-story apartment building convenient for visiting nightmares put its roof too close to the fissure for paranoid hellborn. Not that being a mile underneath was close, exactly, but still two hundred feet closer to the fissure than the streets.

  Devadas shied back at the street-level entrance. Inside the apartment, there was no light. It wasn’t meant to accommodate things that needed eyes, after all.

  “In there?” he asked. “What’s in there?”

  “That’s not your concern,” Elise said, gesturing to Jerica to help her back the trailer up to the apartments. She indicated for the nightmare to stop a few inches shy of the door.

  Inside, Elise could see perfectly. There were no floors in the traditional sense—only a few platforms connected by a spiral stair where sludgy, half-corporeal nightmares could practice growing legs and trying to walk. Each floor was suspended from the platform above it by wire cables, and everything swayed every time the wind blew hard.

  She climbed the steep stairs. Devadas hesitated a moment before following, hands outstretched to touch the steps in front of his face. His tail rippled, contracted, smoothed, and he pushed himself up the stairs behind her.

  Elise had chosen a platform halfway up the tower and marked it with a few runes. Within the triangle of the marks, she couldn’t see anything with her eyes. But the taste of magic flooded her tongue. Her skull buzzed.

  Devadas bumped into her back.

  “Sorry,” he whispered, though there was no point in keeping his voice down in the empty building.