Emily still wore strips of hound hide over her boots, making her feet immune to bugs, but she couldn’t walk across the moat. She needed a bridge. Her gaze fell upon the landscape of trees.
Branches gleamed like white bones in the night. Emily chose a tree nearest the moat. It had the imprint of a human upon its trunk, but the face was so overgrown, she doubted the person was aware of her.
Taking careful aim, she swung the sword. The blade cleaved the trunk. Moisture seeped from the gash. The eyes of the entrapped person flew open; the frozen mouth hissed like a cat.
Emily swung the sword once more and the tree fell. A puddle formed around the stump. Hesitating, Emily reached to the bark, then snatched her hand away. Again, she touched it. It did not attempt to encase her fingers. It was dead.
She dragged the tree nearer the moat. The trunk was lightweight and porous, but unwieldy.
“Oh. Oh,” cried the person inside, sounding terrified and confused.
Emily tried not to listen. She pulled the tree to the edge and pushed until it reached the other side.
Immediately, beetles swarmed over the makeshift bridge, scurrying across its length. Emily leapt back before they touched her skin. The person in the tree yelled. Beetles scuttled into the open mouth—but the face was so coated with bark, the bugs took no notice. Neither the tree nor the person trapped within appeared harmed by the insects.
Now it was her turn. Emily took a breath, then placed a foot upon the bridge. Beetles skittered from her hide-covered boot. She stepped up. The curve of the trunk made it difficult to walk, so she turned sideways and shuffled. The ravenous bugs avoided her feet.
Emily tried not to imagine what would happen if she fell. She was halfway across when a muck-encrusted arm reached out of the moat and snagged the tree.
FORTY-THREE
Windmilling her arms, Emily fought to maintain her balance as the skeleton-thin hand grappled with the tree. The high-pitched click of insects swelled. On slippery fur-wrapped boots, she bounded along the bridge and leapt for firm ground.
Another arm reached from the teeming mass of scarab beetles in the moat. Then a third stretched out. Fingers over her mouth, Emily stepped back. Her thoughts reeled. People were alive in there. They were trying to get out. What should she do? How could she help?
Before she could decide on a course of action, a resounding crack rent the air, and the trunk split in two. Numerous hands groped the wood, black and slimy against the bone white of the bark. Within seconds, they pulled the tree beneath the surface and disappeared. The beetles continued churning.
Emily was unable to turn away. You can’t help those people. You didn’t come to change this world. You’re here for April.
She shook her head, goading herself to walk. Someone might investigate the sound the tree made when it broke. She had to find cover. Instead of heading toward the castle, however, she stepped to the bank of the moat. She lowered to one knee. Then, as if planning to do it all along, she plunged the caretaker wand beneath the surface.
The resulting flash blasted her backward. Emily stared in amazement as twin waves of light traveled the moat in opposite directions, turning human and beetle alike to dust.
Chain reaction.
Her heart leapt to her throat. She hadn’t meant it to go so far. She only wanted to kill the insects, give the people a chance to get out. The rapidly emptying moat would attract attention. She might as well have sent up a flare.
Shouts disrupted a sudden silence. The air filled with the clap of centaur hooves. Emily sprinted to the castle. She turned a corner and ran flat into an iron pike, knocking it askew. With a shout of alarm, she jumped back as if the metal was hot. In fact, it was bone-achingly cold. Overhead, an impaled woman wailed like a siren. Emily gazed upward.
There were six pikes, each with a woman skewered at the top. One victim was upside down, the point entering her mouth. All six people were eyeless, half-eaten by harpies, or worse. All writhed in pain.
Emily glanced toward the darkness behind her. Then she bulldozed forward, ramming her shoulder into the spears, shoving hard. Tall and top heavy, the pikes fell with little provocation, striking the ground with a thud. Emily kept walking. She risked a look back. The women were pulling themselves free.
Eyes on the nearest gate, Emily pressed against the wall. Ice crystals sparkled on the stone blocks, and she was astonished that the temperature could drop so fast.
A halo surrounded the arched entry. Flaming torches on either side whipped and roared with the wind. A gargoyle head protruded above the gate’s twisted spikes, and the flickering shadows made the sculpture appear alive.
Eyes wide, ears alert, Emily entered the castle. She notched an arrow as she walked, although she doubted she could shoot properly with her freezing fingers. The vestibule stank like urine. It ended at a pair of thick, stone doors at least fifteen feet high and ten to twelve feet across. One side was open. Keeping close to the doorjamb, Emily stood on the fringes of an enormous, brightly lit rotunda.
Dozens of fiery braziers filled the room with heat and smoke. Statues of hell-spawn stood floor to ceiling like pillars. Torches dotted the walls, lighting colorful frescoes upon the walls—graphic depictions of demons forcing steaming liquid down a man’s throat or holding a woman spread-eagled while they removed her intestines with a barbed hook.
Emily peered around the edge of the door. Besides the twelve gates, eight staircases entered the room—four leading up and four down. The up-staircases had statues of hellhounds before them. The ones leading down disappeared in darkness.
She heard a shuffling sound. To her right, a demon climbed to floor level dragging two men. Although the men struggled and kicked, the fiend walked easily, his huge hands encircling their throats. He crossed to a row of ornate thrones in the center of the room.
Emily wondered if the dark stairwell led to the dungeons. She was certain that was where she would find April. How could she get to it without the demon seeing her?
Perhaps she should take the offensive—leap onto his back and slit his throat with her knife. But what would she do with the body? It would be deadly to draw attention to her presence.
Movement broke her thoughts. Demons swarmed into the room. Some came from the stairs and some through the gates. Emily stepped back into darkness.
From behind came voices and the crunch of approaching footsteps. She gasped, glancing wildly about, and then squeezed into a gap in the vestibule wall. She found herself in a crawlspace like Starshine described. It was an insulator—a space of about eighteen inches between exterior and interior walls meant to keep the extreme temperatures out. The double-wall method was found in actual medieval castles. She wondered in how many other ways these fiends influenced Earth’s history.
The cramped area smelled dusty and stale. The floor was gritty; spider webs draped the ceiling. The only light came from cracks in the mortar of the interior wall.
The voices grew nearer. Emily tensed. Three demons stood in the vestibule. She watched them through the gap. They conversed in grunts and growls. She held her breath, aiming her bow, practicing minimal emotions. They only had to look her way to see her—but they did not. They went into the rotunda.
Emily sidestepped along the circumference of the room, working toward the dungeon stairs. The wall at her back was frigid, and she tried not to lean against it. Webs dragged her head. Something skittered down her arm. She swallowed a yelp.
Points of light speared through the cracks in the wall. Some of the holes were large enough to peer through, and Emily used them to keep an eye on the demons as she moved. She stopped abruptly, hearing a scream.
The fiends were in the middle of the room with the two men. They held one to the side while they passed the other from demon to demon along the row of thrones. They appeared to sniff him. He sobbed and shrieked. Bright red claw marks ravaged his naked body.
The elder man struggled against his captors. “Unhand him,” he shouted with an accent
Emily didn’t recognize. “Leave the boy alone.”
A devil, adorned with a heavy necklace, leapt from his throne and approached him. He reached into the man’s mouth, and with a mighty yank, ripped out his tongue. He held it overhead like a thick, dangling worm.
His audience roared—Emily thought it sounded like laughter. Then he walked to the younger man who was still gibbering in the clutch of demons and shoved the severed tongue into his mouth. He forced it so far down the man’s throat, Emily was certain his jaw was dislocated.
The man kicked and choked, his face turning blue. The tongue-less man fell to the floor, convulsing. Demons crowded around him. Emily couldn’t tell what they did next—she only saw his jerking feet pound the floor.
The fiend that ripped out the tongue did not join in the revelry. He sat again upon his throne, overlooking his brethren as if he were an emperor. Emily squinted through her peephole, recognizing him.
It was the devil who took April.
FORTY-FOUR
Emily glared at the devil through the peephole in the insulating wall. She seethed with a rage she could barely contain. She wanted to hack him to pieces with her sword, wanted to put his eyes out with the caretaker wand. For a moment, she considered widening the peephole with her knife and shooting an arrow through it in the hope it found its mark.
But that was reckless. She couldn’t risk capture, not when she was so close to rescuing her daughter. She had to dampen her ire lest they sense she was there. If she ran into the bastard after she found April, so much the better. He was easy to spot—he was the only one wearing a necklace.
Just then three more demons rushed in from outside. They appeared agitated, speaking over one another in guttural spurts. Emily imagined what they might be saying—a leather-clad woman flew across the molten lake on a flying disk, the moat dried up and the scarab beetles turned to dust, six victims toppled inexplicably from their pikes and escaped into the night. Whatever their story, their excitement appeared contagious. Half the revelers leapt from their thrones and followed them outdoors.
The devil with the necklace acted disgruntled by the interruption. He spoke, making grand gestures to those remaining. While the two unconscious men were dragged to a corner, the devil walked to one of the pillar-like statues. He opened a panel in the sculpture’s belly, exposing a myriad of twinkling lights. As he did so, golden lines drew themselves upon the floor, and Emily realized the statues were standing in the shape of a pentagram. The mark of the devil, its true meaning known only to him.
The devil fiddled with a dial. Emily had the impression of homing in on a signal with an old-time radio. Removing his necklace, the devil plugged the crystal pendant into an indentation inside the panel.
The pentagram brightened. It was no longer a flat design upon the floor but a many-pointed star of brilliant light hovering ten feet above the ground. The center grew hazy, the air swirling and shimmering like water. Emily shoved her knuckles into her mouth, staring in horror at Satan’s Mirror.
Within the haze, two faces looked up. A teenage boy and girl. They were towheaded and looked enough alike to be brother and sister. On the floor behind them lay an open book and an offering plate with something smoking upon it.
The devil put his necklace back on. To the teenagers, he said in perfect English, “Do you fear me?”
Emily cringed. It was as if his words rang inside her head—yet at the same time she heard his other words, the grunting gibberish of his own language, and she wondered how he could speak in both tongues at once.
Two demons stepped into the pentagram on the other side of the floating Mirror. Their silhouettes flickered through the swimming images of the teenagers. She wanted to cry out a warning, but it was too late.
“Then come to me, weaklings,” the devil growled.
While he commanded their attention, his cohorts reached through the Mirror and grabbed the two kids from behind. With a popping sound, the demons pulled them through the conduit and into the room. Their skin was raw and smoking. Their blonde hair was burnt away. The girl shrieked, and the demons laughed.
Emily couldn’t stand to watch, couldn’t bear to hear. She leaned away from the peephole, holding her ears, but the screaming went on and on.
She had to get out of there. Refusing to glance through the cracks in the mortar, she worked her way through the crawlspace. The air grew colder, and she heard the moan of wind.
Her route ended at another gate. Emily had to leave the relative safety of the walls to cross the vestibule. She listened for voices, but even the newcomers’ screams were drowned by the coursing gale. The heavy stone doors were ajar. Emily wished she could risk a peek inside to gain her bearings. She didn’t want to overshoot the dungeon stairs.
Streaking across the vestibule, she squeezed into the gap on the other side and continued shuffling between the walls. A draft wound around her as if to suck her out again. By the time she reached the next vestibule, she was shivering.
Emily judged she’d gone far enough along the circumference of the room to reach the stairs. She stepped from the crawlspace, pressing back against the wall, and inched toward the doorway. Masked by shadow, she peered into the torch-lit room.
The demons stood in the fading pentagram. The boy lay in a fetal position on the floor, but the girl had some fight left to her. She punched and screamed as the hell-spawn passed her around.
The dungeon stairwell was a black hole in the floor about fifteen feet away. Emily gnawed her bottom lip, looking back and forth between the stairs and the demons. Gathering her courage, she stepped into the open. She crept sideways, bow drawn, eyes on the center of the room—but the revelers did not look up from their orgy. Even the necklace-wearing emperor appeared drunk on the girl’s horror. He staggered and guffawed in a loud voice.
A miasma of heat and rotting meat belched up from the stairs. Emily gagged. The top step was round and set in the center of the hole. She leapt for it, clinging to it as she climbed out of sight.
What she took to be a spiral staircase was actually a steep cone of circular blocks balanced one on top of the other, accessible from all sides. There were no railings. Emily hugged the stone as she descended the deep steps. Her eyes widened in the dim light. The crack of a whip and an answering scream echoed through the space. Then came the snuffling growls she now took to be the laughter of demons. A creaking sound replaced the moan of wind. Steam hissed.
A vast expanse stretched in all directions. Craggy, red lines split the darkness—a creek bed of flowing lava. Paddlewheels dotted the banks, and people strapped to the spokes slowly rotated in and out of the lava’s reach.
The paddlewheels powered the gears and pulleys of racks. Emily cringed at the number of bodies being ripped apart. Here and there, hell-spawn clustered about the victims, reminding her sickeningly of surgical teams.
The column of blocks shuddered, and Emily gasped. Two demons climbed the stairs. She shimmied to the opposite side, hoping the general misery of the place would cover her fright. One hand on her knife, she pressed back against the stone and tried to be invisible as the demons climbed. They were deep in conversation and passed without incident.
With a glance in all directions, Emily clambered down the steps. At the bottom, she ran to one of the many posts supporting the ceiling. The post held a smoldering torch and a shackled body that was so mutilated she couldn’t tell if it was male or female. Emily recoiled, hiding on the other side, when to her horror, the shackles clinked and the person lifted its head to look at her.
She rushed deeper into the dungeon and hid behind another post, overwhelmed by the enormity of the place. Besides the lava stream, she saw two large pits of glowing embers. Objects swung above them—they were too shadowed to see clearly. In other areas, domed birdcages crammed with people hung on thick chains from the thirty-foot ceiling.
Circular metal grates pockmarked the floor. They looked like drainage holes, probably meant to wash away the gore. Emily wondered if there
was a sewer beneath the castle. That might be a better way out than the tunnels Starshine described.
Emily took a step from cover, intending to examine the grates more closely. A demon approached, and she leapt back. He paused as if he heard her, looking around. With a growl, he moved toward the place where she hid.
She reached for the hilt of her sword, praying the blade would cut through the fiend’s exoskeleton. Before the demon reached the post, however, another demon called out. A group of fiends joined him. They chatted then walked toward the back of the room, stumbling and banging into things as they went—not in a drunken manner, but as if they couldn’t see where they were going. Emily had the impression their yellow cat-like eyes could see little better than a hellhound’s. That might be to her advantage.
They descended a flight of stairs. Emily fought the urge to follow. If Starshine was correct, there was a lounge and a series of well-traveled tunnels beneath the dungeon—a means of escape to the flatlands. The sewers might be a safer way.
With a glance about to be sure she was alone, Emily stepped into the open. She took down a torch from the support post and crept to the nearest grate. She was convinced it was a drainage hole leading to a sewage system. But as she stooped to peer inside, a gaunt, terrified face looked up, cringing from her light.
In a crouch, Emily ran to the next grate, and then the next, waving the torch over the openings. Each had a person inside. The holes weren’t sewage pipes, not a means of escape. They were cells—vertical shafts barely wide enough to allow a prisoner to sit. There were hundreds of them. How would she find her daughter in all this?
Something whizzed past her head. Chains suspended a large, brass boar, swinging it like a pendulum. She noticed wide, human eyes staring out the eyeholes.
Was April in the boar? Was she in a cell or in one of the cages overhead? It would take days to search the dungeon. It would be faster if she could call out. But in order to walk openly, she would first have to kill every demon in the room.
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