He started forward, and no later did he step then did the dogs of Hell begin their barking. They snarled and lunged, snouts jutting out into the narrow passage way leaving but inches of safe space through which the Messah traveled, his arms to his chest, his hands cupping his ears against the intensity of their riot. Fighting the impulse to run, he placed one foot in front of the other, never leaving the bars before a step was done. A single slip is all it would take—lose a leg in the cage below, twist an ankle and fall prey to the jaws snapping at either side—so slowly he advanced, ruing the slick of slaver and of the matted black feathers that covered the floor more and more the deeper he crept.
Then at once the barking ceased, as did Adam; his attention snapping free from the cage floor, he listened to the sound of movement beyond the siphoned light’s illumination. On instinct, his hand flew to his sword, and his feet pressed for firmness against the wet feathers and bronze. Of course, there was no firmness in this filthy place. His foot slipped, and his leg plunged into the cage below where a hellhound drooled and foamed, voracious. The Messah steeled himself, teeth gritted, eyes shut for the pain of fangs tearing the flesh from his bones. But it never came.
There was a sudden, pungent odor, and it was close, the musk of blood. Adam’s eyes opened and he saw first a piece of meat of some mysterious animal hanging from the beak of a crow-headed demon. It’s arms were black wings, folded tightly to fit the passage; the rest was flesh like that of a Impii man save for the talons below its knees. It stared at Adam unblinkingly with three glowing jasper eyes set into its forehead.
Like Paimon, hoped the pastor’s son as the demon dropped its bloody chunk for the hungry beast now happily distracted. Adam pulled himself back to his feet. “Thank you,” he started, trying his best to hide his shaking knees. “You saved my life.”
“I’ve done no such thing,” spoke the crow in an avian tone. “I am merely correcting Master Paimon’s mistake. Come, quickly. There others are waiting.” It turned and led onward. The Messah followed.
“So it was only me who’s gotten lost?”
The demon did not answer.
They walked a while longer before Adam tried again. He introduced himself and asked the crow for its name.
“Lord Naberius, Second of the Kennels,” it said, and nothing more.
For another mile, they went in silence. The Messah would never have guessed he’d have preferred the company of the freakish spider to that of this Naberius. His coldness seemed unnatural, like a man trying to hide his guilt. Adam had seen it a thousand times and likewise had seen his father break as many men free from their consciences. He began with honesty.
“Perhaps I’m a hypocrite for saying this—you rescued me from the hounds, yet still I’m too scared to trust you—but I have this feeling that there is something you want to tell me.”
“I did not rescue you,” Naberius replied.
“You said as much already, but my leg must disagree. And don’t tell me you just happened to be feeding the hounds. There are too many thousands of them for me to believe that.”
The crow went a few more lurching steps before answering. “I was sent to, ‘fetch the lost lamb.’ Nothing more.”
That was Lilum’s voice, Adam heard interposed with the demon’s own. He thought of the mistakes the priestess had made thus far since they arrived at this Hellscape. Thinking too of her promises, he posed Naberius a question. “I’m not going to like what I find, am I?”
The Crow kept quiet.
“It’s alright. You don’t have to tell me. I came down here knowing what it likely was. But I have another question, something more important. I was promised that this person…this Father or King or whatever he is would return the souls of those who died, that they would come to life again once he was freed. Is that…” Adam hesitated. “… is any of that true?”
Just as the Messah finished asking his question, they arrived at an opening in the tunnel of cages. It was as if a million kennels had been rent apart, their bronze bars refigured into an aviary of sorts. Above, someone had rigged chains and platforms to winches in the ceiling. Below—far, far below—there gaped a hole like the pit in the cathedral.
“There was meant to be a lift, only Lord Astaroth never finished it, so I wish to apologize for the indignity. I must carry you the rest of the way.” The demon cocked his head to look at the pastor’s son—not with the jasper eyes but the crow ones at the sides. Adam smiled, and finally Naberius broke and replied, “As to your question. You should know the Xanthos King wants but one thing and that is revenge. To this end, yes, he seeks to raise the dead. But mortal…you do not yet understand what is meant.”
“‘Yet?’ So I will understand soon?”
“Yes, but such wisdom will only torture you further.”
Adam breathed deep the stench of the Kennels, stared into the pit, exhaled. “So it was a lie. I’m never seeing Magdalynn or my father ever again.”
“No,” the crow agreed. “But I will do this one thing for you, because I will not acquiesce to this craven deception. The legate would never have stood for it either. But know this: I cannot promise anything will be done, but I will take you to Asmodeus.”
“How can he help me?”
Naberius spread his wings in the open air of the aviary. A few black feathers floated of into the abyss on the light and warm winds drawn ever downwards. Then the demon took flight, each beat of its wings striating its flesh with thick, wiry musculature. Adam gawked, amazed, thinking maybe one day he would, in Heaven or Hell, be so freed from the oppression of mortal gravity. And as if in answer, a pair of scaly talons snatched him up at either shoulder.
Circling for the pit, said Naberius between the beat of his wings, “Asmodeus is lord of the Refinery….He alone is master of severing the immortal soul…from the finite dregs of memory…and the incarnated, fleshy material…” Beats went by. They were right above the pit when the crow finished with, “Perhaps their forms and flesh have yet to be rended down.”
From thence there was darkness, then light from below. They’d passed through a cracked dome like that of Limbo into the shared spheres of the Garrison and the Great Lake of Fire. A single, black stone battlement separated the two; atop it, a demon unicorn blasted his brass trumpet, rousing thirty-thousand ranks of corpses dressed in bronze. Every one of their nine-hundred million pikes butted the ground. It shook the entire sphere. The Lake bubbled, and waves crashed over a fleet of iron warships.
“I can escort you no further,” Naberius crowed just loud enough for the Messah to hear. “Find Kimaris of the Vaults. Tell him you seek light amidst the darkness. Farewell.”
The trumpet blasted, and pikes pounded. Talons loosed Adam over the roiling Lake. His stomach turned, and he gritted his teeth, but there was no bracing against the heat and light of the fire. Closer.
Closer.
He struck the surface, sank deeper and deeper down the gullet of the Lake, yet the only burning seemed to be that of his own swallowed vomit. For these were not flames; they were the viscous dregs of sloughed humanity—memories of who their heritors could have been, lit ablaze and brazed together, now but fire of another’s ambition. This the Messah saw as the Lake pulled him under until under became the bank of a black brook at the edge of a forest.
At once, Adam staggered from the water, now aware what it was, and stumbled for the trees and the lights among their branches. They seemed to dance, those lights. Without lamps or candles they shone white among the pale wood. And there was light on the wind as well, golden and warm and always whirling in the same direction—toward the heart of the forest. “Where I must go,” Adam heard himself say, and as if to confirm his utterance, a mare trotted out from behind the trees. Her coat was black and her hooves silent, eyes blinded by cataracts white as her mane. “Poor thing,” the Messah said as he tested her friendliness. Indifferent, he thought, petting her nose to no response. Impatient. “Do you want me to climb on?”
The mare stared,
blind and silent, saddleless, and he with no experience riding but on camels. He took another look at the forest, at the individual trees and their dancing white lights almost silver up close. There was something eerie about them, something familiar and horrible that the Messah could not place. Then he noticed a face carved into one of the trees—all of the trees. He saw the subtle human form, twisted slightly as if in agony. And the wisps of silver light—their own desires burning before their eyes.
Suddenly, Adam could see his own fate in each of the trees, the lights, the shadows in between. He saw his failure, his last desperate dream dashed into fragments at the Devil’s feet. It would last forever, his torture at the hands of the Xanthos King: shards of his failure embedded into the palms of his hands and bottoms of his feet, even the skin of his back so that he could never act nor rest without the pain of remembering. Lies and illusion—
—In truth, the Crest of the King began bleeding down the side of Messah’s neck. His nightmare transformed: before his eyes stood Ba’al in the Devil’s place, a shard clutched between thumb and forefinger, a shard that never belonged to Adam. The pastor’s son watched on from afar, as one can do only in dreams, the bishop slice his nightmare-self’s eye and slip inside the false feelings of guilt. Revelation struck like a bolt of lightning. It was Ba’al who sold him out to the aberrant smuggler, who put the brand on his neck that brought the nightmares. It was Ba’al who made him doubt his virtue, who convinced him he was guilty of crimes he would never commit. And it was him who made me swear it, the oath of devotion to the Xanthos King, a bit of the bishop’s trickery to secure Adam’s soul.
Then it truly is too late for me, the thought arrested his heart but only for a moment before the fear passed over him, receded into the forest, left him alone with the blind, guide-horse. But it’s not too late for Mags and Father. He climbed onto the mare, hugged his thighs against her sides as she galloped for the forest center. Like wind, they moved among the roots and trees, hooves silent. The cinders of will-o’-the-wisped memories grew thicker the deeper they ventured into the wood until they reached the heart tree where the silver lights had burnt out long ago.
Adam’s guide stopped here at the entrance to the Vaults. The demons had carved it into the shape of a mouth in the bark of the heart tree. From inside glowed a silver light, too bright for the Messah to see inside after adjusting to the dark of the deep of the forest, but he swung off his horse onto the cinder floor regardless. He did not have time to waste.
Night-blind and wading knee-deep through cinders, he came into the heart tree where precious memories were stored. The demons kept them locked in little bronze boxes stacked atop one another over every inch of the walls. No matter where the Messah looked, the Vaults shimmered green with patina and pin-pricked by the shadows of thousands of keyholes. Above burned a silver-white glow. Below, a staircase sized to fit a demon spiraled down through the center of the chamber floor. From there, a voice called.
“You,” it said, softly, almost cooing, “you finally arrived. You took your time traversing Andras’s woods, though I suppose that’s only natural when he’s taken his wolf to court.”
“Kimaris?” asked Adam, trying to recall what the crow had told him.
“You’re too late,” the demon cooed, “to see the treasurer. I’ve already hailed him on for his appearance at court.”
“But Naberius told me—” and the Messah cut himself off, unsure who he could trust with the Kennel Master’s information.
“Naberius?” the demon repeated, clicking and clinking with every lurching step of its ascent. Its head appeared first, like that of a macaw, then its arms like wings feathered gold and red and orange and yellow, gilded shackles at its wrists, hands clutching a single burning candle. It would have been beautiful but for the human parts: fatty thighs and torso fit for a Messah child. And its legs were scaled and taloned as a bird’s. It spake almost screeching, “What muckery did that up-jumped loyalist fill between your ears? Is that why you’re late? He led you astray then blamed it on Astaroth’s apprentice didn’t he? Woo, woo!” he cooed, “yes, Phenex is clever to figure it out with only a name. That’s why I am apprentice of the Archives and he works the lowly duty of watching dogs! ‘Lord,’ he is in title only. No one respects him but for that idiot Paimon. Can you believe that he—”
“Phenex?” Adam interjected, hoping to steer the conversation. “Did I hear your name right?”
The demon turned side-face to better see the pastor’s son with a pale, pupiled eye. “Yes, yes I am Phenex. Phenex of the Fifth Choir, apprentice of the Archives under the most wise Lord Aamon—but I am wise, too! Wiser than the Master of Hounds.”
“You can help me, then.”
“Help?” the macaw blinked stupidly, then jumped with a start, “Woo, woo! You have questions for me! I can see it on your face—do not lie, my eyes will see through it.”
The Messah mulled the thought in his mind. Time was dying. He needed this fool to lead him to the Refinery, to Asmodeus. What was it Naberius said? For once, Adam wished that Ba’al was there to talk his way through. Then he understood. Pointing to the demon’s candle, he said, “‘Light amidst the darkness.’ That must mean you, right?”
Phenex glanced at his shackled hands, to the Messah and his hands again. “A light? Why, why yes! Of course! I am the light amidst darkness. It is I, after all, and I alone who shall reclaim his seat in the end. The others have all forgotten, but not I! Not me. I—”
“Oh,” replied Adam, lacing his tone thick with disappointment, “If that is true then I don’t think you can help me. Lord Naberius said to ask Kimaris because ‘The Light Amidst Darkness’ couldn’t possibly find his way to the Refinery.”
“He said, what?”
“He said if I asked you that I was certain to be lost.”
Plumage puffed about the demon macaw’s neck. “How dare he! That lordship has absolutely bloated his head! Well, I will not stand for lies from a lowly Kennel Master.” Phenex spun and started quickly down the stairs. “Come! Come! I’ll not stand for these slanders—as if the Charred Angel and I weren’t neighbors in Heaven and Hell!”
Clink, clink, clink, rang the gilded chains round Phenex’s wrist to the sounds of talons scratching at each stair during their long descent into deeper darkness. The air thinned here with the dimming of the light till it was only the demon’s candle to guide them along their way. It was a bright flame, shining brighter the blacker their descent, but false. Adam could sense no heat from the fire. It lacked something, but what?
Clink, clink….They reached the bottom stair. “Stay close,” the demon cooed, “and look nowhere ungraced by my light. Aamon did not build his Archives with mortal souls in mind.”
The Messah did as bid, though he thought the warning odd. This seemed to him little different than his father’s office at night when he was still a child: a floor of petrified wood, shelves towering ever upward, endless numbers of dusty tomes and piles of scrolls. More than once he considered snatching a book, but each time Phenex would screech before he’d even lifted a finger. “You humans are always the same! Your curiosity and greed get the better of you, then the next thing you know, your soul is being ripped to pieces by the Devil!”
“The Devil?” It was the first time he heard one of demon fail to use the title, king.
The macaw stopped and turned and stared at Adam side face. “You truly want to know?” He gestured with his candle toward a stack of scrolls. “That one there—no, not on top! The bottom, yes, there!”
The Messah pulled the roll of parchment from beneath its brethren on their shelf. He expected a cloud of dust, yet there was hardly a mote. It seemed a demon had handled these recently. That made Adam wary. “What does it say?”
Phenex resumed their journey through the Archive maze. “Read it for yourself.”
The pastor’s son tossed it back onto the shelf, ran to catch up with his guides hastened pace.
The demon sighed, “You see, this i
s why no man shall be left standing come the time of reckoning. They are too craven to see the darkness inside themselves, and because they won’t look, they think themselves pure. Too pure—no, too arrogant to beg for forgiveness. They’ll side with these demons in the end, I know it, and I alone shall be forgiven.” They stopped before a black stone well, a strange sight surrounded by book shelves, and foreboding. There was no rope or ladder by which to descend, only steam like warm breath emanating from its mouth. “We have arrived,” Phenex cooed. “The Kennel Master’s lies be damned.”
“You want me to fall down there?”
“Woo, I believe it was you who expressed the desire to fall.”
Adam peered over the edge and saw nothing but mist, heard only the faintest churning of water. Don’t be craven now, after coming all this way. He gripped the rim of the well to hold his body still—without glancing away from the depths, “So, what was it that was written in that scroll?”
Cooing ensued in short burst of laughter. “It’s too late to ask that now. You had your chance.”
“Yeah, that’s what Naberius said, that it was too late for me, that I wouldn’t be coming back.” He paused, listened as the demon puffed his plumage. “But still, I want to know. And didn’t you want to show me? You picked that one for a reason, right? What was it?”
Salt, Sand, and Blood Page 43