“No, just the damned tree.”
“Tree?” the Messah said, staring expectantly. The half-blood noticed his friend was conspicuously free of scrapes and bruises, not even a single splinter. He glanced toward the hollow root from which he’d tumbled then gazed the span of the barren rotunda. There was but a single structure, a petrified arch with a set of stairs behind carved right into a root winding in switchbacks into the ceiling.
Adnihilo sighed, “Never mind that. Do you know where we are?”
Adam looked up at the sky-sized mural, inhaled slowly; his nose rankled at the stench of sulfur.
“Do you recognize it?” the half-blood asked.
“Yes,” the pastor’s son exhaled, “I think it’s a painting of the Devil’s rebellion. They were angels before then, but they corrupted their forms and turned against their creator.”
“What about him?” Adnihilo pointed out the angel with the flaming sword.“ Does that one have a name? Wait—” Something had changed. He could see the face now, golden eyed and fare complected, and soft, almost effeminate. “Wasn’t that angel’s face painted over?”
Adam answered, uncertain. “I don’t think so.” His gaze fell back to Adnihilo, saw the fear in his face and at once drew his father’s rust-pocked blade. “What did you see?”
“There,” uttered the half-blood. Skittering down the dome was the shape of a spider. He drew his own sword. “What is that?”
“What is what?” inquired Ba’al. He and Lilum were just catching up as the spider reached the spot where they’d come from; or so it seemed until Adnihilo realized the vastness of the rotunda. It was miles wide, its dome rising higher than the tallest tower, its petrified arch larger than a fortress gate; yet next to that skittering thing, it looked no bigger than a hovel doorway.
The half-blood glanced from the arch to the angel’s face, estimated the distance. “How long were you searching before you found me?”
“Fuck if I know, Imp.”
“Maybe half an hour,” answered Adam. “Why?”
“That’s why.”
Adnihilo pointed his sword toward the imminent horror. Wiry furred and a blur with speed, it raced the length of the base of the rotunda on gangly legs tipped with spindly phalanges—like human hands, only the joints were all wrong—too mobile, too knobby, covered with black hair that clung to embers as they passed over fuming crevasses and glowing heat vents. The same wiry fur darkened the creature’s abdomen, its fangs as well—each large as a man’s arm—and its head save for three jasper eyes set in descending triangulation.
“Oh, shit!” gasped the bishop, fumbling for his weapon. Useless. Another second and the thing towered over them, standing thrice its height reared onto hind feet. Lilum screamed. Adam thrust his blade into the empty space between him and the monstrosity, point centered at the human face embedded on the demon’s underbelly.
“Wel, wel, welcome!” the spider stammered, wringing spindly fingers. “All of Pandemonium has been eager for your return, inheritor of fire.” The face’s eyeless sockets seemed to turn their attention from the half-blood to Adam. “And you’ve brought a dowry as well! Oh, this will be the most spec, spec, spectacular ceremony! Asmodeus will be most excited. Kimaris as well—but how shameful! I forgot to introduce myself.” The demon dropped to eight legs and dipped its cephalothorax. “I am Paimon, Master of the Arts and Apprentice Architect to Lord Astaroth—though I may well have surpassed him, but you didn’t hear that from me,” the demon whispered playfully. Standing tall again, he addressed the priestess. “And to you, our future queen, my apologies. I did not mean to frighten you.”
“You did not frighten me,” she asserted. “I was just…surprised. The Father gave me no visions as to the… ferocity of his servants’ aspect.”
“The Father? Oh, those damnable titles, giving me conniptions! You must mean King Xanthos. Yes, it is he who sent me to guide you to his very seat—though, only at the behest of the cen, centurion. Ah! There I go as well, using the old titles. He’s a lord now. Lord Beelzebub.”
Ba’al gestured with his weapon like a finger pointing at the sky. His aim was for the hornet. “Lord of Flies, right? The two of us have a contract to complete, so if you’re done prattling on, you can take us to where—” A sudden coughing fit cut the bishop off, dry at first, then wet with phlegm. And when he tried again to finish his thought, that wetness became blood.
Consumption, Adnihilo recognized.
The spider saw it too. “Prattling, yes. I do have that habit. We all do. We’ve had to learn to be patient, you see. Esp, esp, especially myself. Learning to paint helped for a while, but as you can see, I ran out of ceiling.” Paimon paused for a moment to watch the bishop collapse from his hacking. “Look at me, guilty again! I suppose we ought to hurry.” Dropping on eight legs, he started for the rotunda center. “Come, come! The King’s throne is this way.”
Adam looked to Adnihilo, to the spider, then back to his friend—a question, “Should we follow it?” to which the half-blood nodded. Terrified as he may be, what choice did they have? Make for the stairs miles away? And face the abyss again. He’d rather try his odds at fighting the demon, though Adnihilo doubted their weapons could harm it. Even if they could, he thought, searching and finding Paimon among the lowest in the mural legion, this monster is the least of what lies ahead.
“Come,” barked Lilum, “do not be afraid. These are the Father’s servants, the same as you, Adnihilo. And you, Adam.” She stared enchanting into the Messah’s eyes. “Remember why you’ve come.”
“For Magdalynn, and for my father,” the Messah said, though by his darkened mien, the pastor’s son might have uttered, ‘for death and an end to this torturous journey.’
He sheathed David’s rusted longsword, and the half-blood did the same with his sabre. It took the two together to rouse Ba’al from the ground. The bishop struggled at first, fumbling with his opium pipe, desperate for a light; but fighting his own short, violent breaths, the lamp slipped from his fingers, struck a pebble, shattered—his entire body cringed as if he’d been lashed. Then his limbs went limp as an infant’s. “Quickly, dammit,” was all he could manage before the next hacking fit set in, blood dripping from his lips as Adam and Adnihilo lifted him, his arms slung over their shoulders.
Paimon and Lilum waited just ahead. “I truly am honoured,” started the spider demon as soon as the others joined his march toward the petrified archway, “to be of service to the legate’s blood. That’s him up there, as he was during The Rebellion. It was all I could do to honour him.”
“You painted all this yourself?” asked Adam.
“After a thousand years of protest, test, testing the King, yes—him and Lord Astaroth—then another thousand years before it was finished. But for the legate, I’d do it all again. He took me in, like a father, you see. Taught me how to control my…temptations, even let me weave the banners for The Rebellion. Patches, he called me, because I stitched up so many cloths and tabards. You can call me that, too. Pa, Pa, Patches I mean. It’s only the centurion who calls me that anymore.”
Adnihilo glanced up at the mural. “Patches.”
“Yes?”
“That spider painted there, among the legions, is that one you?”
Paimon gasped, “You noticed! Why, yes, yes it is!”
“Then you actually knew him, my father?”
“Like a father, truly. I sup, suppose that makes us like brothers, doesn’t it?
“Would it be alright,” the half-blood hesitated, “would you mind if I asked you some questions about him?”
The spider chuckled. “Of course not! But I doubt there is anything I can tell you which he hasn’t told you himself.”
“I never got to know him, actually. He died before I was born.”
“Never knew him!” Paimon stopped at once; his body went stone still. “Why did no one tell me that you didn’t—I’m sorry. I, I can get emotional. Truly, you never met him even once?”
&nb
sp; “I don’t even know him name.”
The demon turned, slowly, glaring unblinkingly with three jasper eyes. “They haven’t told you anything, have they? Nor me, it seems.” Paimon started again for the arch. “His name was Lucifer, first to discover the dark, dubbed Light Bringer by King Xanthos who blessed him with fire.”
“Why do they call him a traitor?”
For a second time, the spider froze. “Who dared claim the legate a traitor? Was it Seth? Mara? Mephistopheles? I swear on The Rebellion, I’ll rip their mortal hearts out and cast them into the lake of fire! They are the real traitors! Deserters! Renegades! They speak their own sins as if they were others’. No one, not us nor the King, have ever had cause to call the legate’s loyalty into question. He lived for The Rebellion, and he died like the other loyalist, fighting against our great nemesis.” He paused and sighed a high, airy breath. “My apologies, Heritor, for losing my temper. You’ve got too long a journey to waste time listening to an app, app, apprentice’s ramblings.”
Adnihilo glance sidelong at Lilum’s face—still as a mask, lips silent, ashen even for her ordinary complexion—and he wondered what other mistakes she had made. Not just her. Every interpretation, it seemed, was riddled with errors: intentions misread, motivations added, sometimes whole names and events are transposed or erased or changed in memory. Cain, David, Ba’al, and Lilum—was any one of them more right than the others? And what of the demon? Is his recollection to be thought more accurate? The half-blood doubted. What should I believe? Or do we just believe in what we’re taught? Or what we want to be true? He put the question to Paimon. “How do we know we can trust you?”
“‘Faith is that from which one conjures courage and strength.’ Your father’s words right before he, Dagon, and Mara crossed the abyss.”
In other words, we can’t.
“Is that where we’re going?” Adam asked. “Through the archway, I mean, and back up the stairs.”
“No, no. There is no need to risk traversing the abyss. Where we are going is below the ca, cathedral.”
“Cathedral?” Adnihilo said. There was nothing about this barren ground but glowing cracks and fuming vents.
“Yes,” answered Paimon. “Behold, the glory of all Pandemonium! Cathedral Nox!”
At once, the dead earth yawned its fiery maw, rumbled and roared; and three spires soared like black flames belched from the belly of a dragon. They were church towers, twins anterior, the black sheep steep and lonely at the far end of the cathedral, all three and the body between fashioned from the same black stone-glass as the Walls of Barzakh. But this was no crude, cyclopean edifice. Each brick was distinct, shaped and polished for its particular purpose: gloss or matte, some cut into simple square sections, others hewn as sharp arches or hammered thin for roof tiles and smoky windows—there was one of those to each of the spires’ six facets, glass stained shades of black and gray in the shape of grimacing faces with turrets for horns. And the towers wore crowns as well, triangular roofs steep and sharp as pikes topped by black-iron spikes themselves covered in thorns.
“Beautiful, is it not? Lord Astaroth laid the stone, but it was I who did the shaping.” The spider skittered a little faster for the gaping portal. No doors, just an open archway dressed with a decorated gable—three eye-like mandalas set in ascending triangulation. “I truly believe this to be my greatest work yet. There’s just, just, something about it I can’t—” Adnihilo, Adam, and the others halted at the threshold. “Is something wrong?”
“The floor,” replied the pastor’s son, “it’s tilted.”
The half-blood noticed as well, and “tilted” was an understatement. Inside the cathedral was like gazing down the side of a cliff. Rows of columns ran sidelong down the slope, sculpted in the image of tortured souls holding steady the vaulted ceiling, though against what was beyond Adnihilo. Certainly not gravity, for by the end of the nave, the cathedral’s orientation became utterly vertical. He looked at Paimon who reared onto his hind legs.
With a sickly smile and squinting eye-sockets, he repeated the legate’s line then said with wringing fingers, “Be brave, Inheritor of Fire.”
“Thisss half-breed, mortal thing isss to be our champion?” hissed poisonous tones from within the sanctuary. Adnihilo could not see the source from outside, nor it seemed could Adam. They glanced at one another, skeptical, but Ba’al urged them on amidst another fit. One step each, they were straddling the threshold.
“What do you worship in a church in Hell?” asked the pastor’s son to no one in particular.
“The Devil?” guessed Adnihilo.
Again, the hissing voice bellowed. “Ignorant asss well?”
Another step and they were across the portal archway, Lilum and Paimon following close behind. The half-blood’s eyes couldn’t be seeing this right; the huge, vaulted room was illumed bright as day without lamp or candle, as if the soft, orange-yellow light was drawn in from the earthen fissures, borne by the air, bent and twisted toward the gaping black pit center of the transept. He could feel the very heat leaving his body, swallowed up by the darkness residing further inside. Likewise, he could hear the prodigious slithering, see the serpentine shadow of the source of the hissing disdain.
“Lord Astaroth,” said Paimon, bowing to the chimeric demon who lounged coiled on spider silk cushions. Below the waist he was a golden snake; above he was an angel but plump and thin-limbed and with membranous wings. When he spoke, his tongue fluttered.
“Thisss isss a waste of time. Look at him; there’sss hardly a drop of immortal blood. He won’t sssurvive the ritual. I’d gamble he doesn’t even know what is going on—do you?” he spoke now directly to Adnihilo. “Do you even know where you are?”
Lilum stepped between them, “We are within the halls of the Father’s eternal prison, here to free him from his bonds. Did He not explain this to you, or perhaps you have forgotten your position as His servant?”
“With all due ressspect, my queen to be, you are woefully misssinformed. Prison? Perhapsss once, but have you not already witnessed how we’ve shaped thisss world to sssuit our formsss?” Astaroth spread his stringy arms wide. “Yesss! What Ventus thought to be our ruinousss end, I, Lord and Master of Limbo, have molded into a veritable paradissse! I have divided heat from cold and light from darkness, forged order from chaosss and made manifest the very substance of thisss Cathedral Nox!” He slithered off of his silk pile noisily across a floor the texture of rippling ocean or of frozen lava rock. Rounding once around the visitors, the demon stretched to show his full magnificence. With a smile yellow as his oily curls, he answered, “You are wrong, bassstard blooded champion. You are ignorant of the caussse you ssserve. We worship not the King, though true to him we swore our fealty. But no, we do not worship him but that which gave him birth. That which old Ventusss shrinksss from, terrified. We worship the darknesss from which all thingsss enter life.”
“Th, th, thank you, Lord Astaroth,” replied Paimon, “That was a speech to match your work on the cathedral. But I’m afraid we’re running short on time. Lord Beelzebub has a contract with the fading one. Might we have your leave?”
“It’sss no wassste of my time,” the demon lord answered, slithering back to his cushions.
The spider bowed to his master one final time then skittered so close that Adnihilo could make out each strand of his wiry fur. “Climb on, and hold tight,” he said, though Paimon did not wait for confirmation, just plucked them one by one and dropped them onto his abdomen where they stuck to hair like the spines of a cactus: itchy, wreaking of turpentine and pigments. Nauseous, the half-blood watched the vaults and columns curve with the slope of the cathedral down into the earth as Paimon approached the cold and consuming pit. The closer they drew, the more distorted their vision, the more frigid the stale air felt against their skin. Adnihilo shivered; his weather-worn linen rags did little to insulate him, and between his vertigo and his itchy snares, Eyebrows’s breathing technique would be impossible. H
e tried regardless and caught the eye of the spider.
“That breathing, it’s Mara’s triple burner. You met with that deserter?”
“I learned it from a Gautaman boxer.”
“And did he tell you what it is for?” Paimon’s voice peaked, excited. His motion ceased. They’d reached the end of the nave; the pit lay before them. It was colder here, darker and more distorted, as if light were being siphoned right from their eyes. “No, forget what I said. I won’t ruin the sur, sur, surprise—oh, but I want to tell you! I’m too excited!” the spider raved, wringing his hairy fingers, giggling frenetically, he whispered to himself, “No patches, no. You know you shouldn’t—but oh, I want to! I…oh! The breathing, you must be cold in that mortal flesh?” he did not pause for an answer. “Yes, and to be seen before the court. Of course it would only do that I spin you new garments for the ritual—but where is the time? I am but one; I cannot both spin and guide. There’s no help for it then!”
Adnihilo swallowed hard. “No help for what?”
The demon chuckled.
“Patches? No help for what?”
“Servant, answer us!” protested Lilum.
“Forgive me, Inheritor—our future queen,” replied Paimon, his glee overflowing, “sometimes Patches can’t help himself. He, he just has to—”
It happened fast: a black flash obscured by the distortion, the sudden crepitation of tearing hair. Ba’al was first to be hurled into the pit. The half-blood heard his hacking grow fainter by the second. It was all but gone when the spindly hands seized Adam. The Messah called out for his friend, and Adnihilo made to call back—but he was next, ripped free with such violence it knocked the wind from his lungs. Gasping, he felt the world turn over itself. The lights went out. The only sounds were Adam’s shouts and Paimon’s laughter.
†††
Below the cathedral, Adam wandered through tunnels cast from corroded bronze. It was a cavern of cages: the floor, the walls, the ceiling all mere secondary consequences of kennels chained together. And within, each cage housed a slavering black hound. The Messah could smell them more than see their churning fur against the black of the void, though their glowing eyes stood out even better than their stench, like that of corpses, or their ubiquitous noise—growls, sounds low in the throat, deep as the reverberation of drums of Eemah. The pastor’s son shivered. It was cold and getting colder, and the light seemed to grow dimmer the longer he stood still as if it was being carried deeper on the back of the wind—the only hint of warmth in this desolate place. He had no choice but to follow it. Glancing up at the broken bars bent outward a hundred feet above him, Adam knew there was no returning the way he came in.
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