“It’s a story about a boy who betrays his own tribe. He goes through Hell for it, but then he climbs out again with newfound power and freedom.”
Adam couldn’t believe it. “Truly?” he asked. “That is the wisdom too dangerous for mortal eyes?”
“No,” Phenex answered, “It’s just my favorite record in the Archives, but the others all call me foolish for clinging to such farfetched tales.”
“They’re right, you know? But not because of your favorite story.” The Messah swung his legs over the rim of the well and sat gazing into the embodiment of fear. “It’s because you talk too much about yourself. All those things you said about humans being too craven to look, that’s truly about you, isn’t it?”
There was silence, the tiny tinkling of a chain, and the churning of the waters. The mist was warm wafting up from the well. Adam could feel his toes again. He hadn’t noticed they’d gone numb. The he realized too that he’d been stalling, letting precious seconds slip through his fingers. I have to go, he told himself, but just on the cusp of speaking the words, the demon uttered,
“Yes.”
All became darkness as pastor’s son felt shackled hands shove into his back, as he plunged ever further toward the steady sounds of a swirling tide. In the black, he might have fallen a foot or forever—time a thing relative to the race between his heart and mind. What if this was all for nothing? What if he had just spoiled his chances stalling for a few more seconds because he didn’t possess the courage? Would he even have been willing to jump had it not been for the bird? Or was that his plan to provoke the push? Strange questions, those final two. They begged him a third: “Who have you become, Adam of Babylon?”
His body emerged from warm and shallow waters. A voice asked him again, “Who are you?” The Messah bolted upright, splashed onto his feet.
“Did I make it in time? Is this the Refinery? Are you—”
“Asmodeus,” the voice answered, deep as the pitch.
Adam spun in the dark, stopped on the trinity of glowing jasper eyes. They were enough that he could see silhouetted the angel’s body, membranous wings and melted flesh clinging to its bones. And he could smell the demon smoldering—almost feel the heat like fire. “Am I too late? My father and Magdalynn, do you still have them? You didn’t already—”
“I enjoyed that trick you played on Phenex. And the one you set upon yourself. Clever deception for a pastor’s son, though it would be expected from a bishop’s. But you’re not quite either of them, are you, Adam? Who are you?”
The Messah drew his sword, “I’m me and nobody else. Now, hand them over!”
Asmodeus chuckled. “A hero, eh? There’s always at least one of you bastards. But are you certain? The price is higher than you might be willing to pay.”
“Answer! Do you have them or not?”
“Yes, I have them right here in my grasp, but what do you have, Hero? Nothing, not even your own soul to trade. So what are you going to do about it? Take them from me? No, I don’t think so. You’re too honourable a—”
Adam made a desperate lunge and felt his blade pierce flesh in the dark. The resistance shocked him; he hadn’t expected to hit let alone stab inches into the demon’s hide, and now its body had crumpled over, hands in a panic, grabbing desperately at where the sword had pierced. A second’s time stretched over an eon before Adam’s instincts finally kicked in. He extracted the weapon, and the demon let out a cry, not the low tone of the Charred Skinned Angel, but that of a young girl—of Magdalynn.
The Messah’s heart seized. His hands went weak—dropped the sword—and he screamed, groping for where the girl’s body should be. Through the darkness he reached, reached, reached finding nothing but warm vapors and the sense he’d been tricked. Three eyes reappeared behind him.
Asmodeus laughed again and said, “Yes! Yes! You’ll do just fine. You’re kind don’t often venture this far. I think we have ourselves quite the bargain.”
“You’re toying with me,” declared Adam, wiping tears from his eyes.
“Yes, and you’ve been the most fun I’ve had since Lucifer crossed the abyss. It’s a shame I can’t keep you, but there is business to attend. I propose a contract: your soul in exchange for the girl, Magdalynn.”
“But I’ve already sold my soul.”
“And I’ve already rended hers, but I don’t doubt we can cheat death as easily as we can cheat the Devil.” He brandished a bone knife in the glow of his jasper eyes. “What do you say, Hero, to cutting that crest off your neck?”
†††
They watched Adam wash ashore, Adnihilo, Ba’al, and Pandemonium’s court, surrounded by black waters on an isle of iron sand, patches rusted red, a half-moon wall spanning the western end with cyclopean arches. Atop it, benches marked the north and south; but the west itself belonged to the throne: old, yellowed bones of man and animal, bound by sinew, high backed, and uncushioned. A bitter seat, thought the half-blood, donned in Paimon’s spider silk tunic, breathing deeply against the weight of a bronze cuirass. From his waist to shoulders, the armour shaped him trim and muscular. And the demons had plated his extremities as well, greaves on his legs and a cage-faced helm. He squinted passed the thin bronze bars at Adam, saw that the Messah was awake.
“Naberius,” rasped a command from the high seat, and the crow demon leapt from the northern bench onto the pale body, snatching it up with taloned feet, then leaping again and depositing Adam on the sand floor before the King. Something had changed. Adnihilo saw right away the raw scar where the brand had been, and the extra pallor of his skin, and his expression—eyes hard as ice like David’s had been that night at Eemah’s parish, and they were looking at him.
Ba’al coughed and wiped the blood from his chin onto the front of his silk tunic. Weakly, he shouted, “That’s the last of us! We’re all here now!”
A murmuring issued from the demon lords crowding the benches north and south. They’d had grown impatient waiting on the lost human. There was much yet to be accomplished. “Are we at lassst ready now? Shall the Anointment finally begin?” begged the Lord Astaroth from his seat furthest on the northern bench.
“Lord of Flies has the first order, I thought,” replied the half-griffon Focalor, stretching his wings and leonine haunches while his upper, angel half leaned against the parapet wall. Beside him, the vulture winged Murmur nodded his head.
“That would be most prudent. The Anointment can begin once their contract is finished,”
“It begins when I give my blessing,” said Lilum, sat comfortably at a branch-seat at the left hand of the King. She was dressed in silk as well, a silk tunic like the ones made for Ba’al and Adnihilo, white as snow and tied with a sash at the waist. It reminded the half-blood of the dress of the singers, especially as she stood and spoke with command over the Throne Room. “For thousands of years of held faith with the Great Father. I’ll receive my crown before the boy receives his.”
Owl-headed Andras bowed from the southern bench. “As wills the King.”
“As wills the King,” the lords echoed in unison—that is, those lords who spoke. Adnihilo wasn’t sure he heard the crow at all, and the voices of centaur Kimaris and the goat demon Aamon were drowned in the emphaticism of Andras and the Charred Angel.
The King himself sat silent on his throne, his head wrapped in shadow, his body in a sable cloak with what looked like a broach pinned at his right shoulder—that was until the hornet’s eyes began to glow, compound at the sides and three at its forehead, amber all just as the mural depicted. The Lord of Flies, the centurion Beelzebub. He spoke by rubbing together his wings in a nightmarish buzzing, the words seeming to steal into Adnihilo’s brain.
“The court has spoken—Ba’al, we shall begin with you.” The demon hornet disjoined from his place at the King’s right hand, hovered down from the wall, and stopped just above the rust iron sand. Wings fluttering faster than the slash of a sabre blade, Beelzebub hovered and buzzed their terms. In exchange f
or an advance of suspended death and, as a reward, a position of office, Ba’al would give lease of bodily habitation until the route was clear of the Walls of Barzakh.
The bishop’s pained face forced out a grin. “I’ve held up my end of this bargain, and don’t forget, I delivered the others, too.”
“You delivered us?” Lilum scoffed, scanned the benches north and south. “Or was it not we who delivered you—Hear your queen, my court, when I say that this man would have died by my own supplicants’ hands if not rescued the precious wards he was doomed to deliver. I could say the same about our encounter in Mephisto with the Sons of King Solomon, and those are only the times mine eyes have been privy to this mortal’s impotence.” Her voice softened slightly as she redirected her speech. “Lord Beelzebub, I’ve been informed it was your spirit residing in the flesh of Bishop Ba’al. Certainly, you’ve witnessed his dependence for yourself? Then why are we speaking of rewards? Does he not owe this court a debt?”
“You bitch!” was all Ba’al could get out before another coughing fit began. By then, the benches were filled to the brim with whispers, the lower court with the constant drone of Beelzebub’s wings—those holding flight and those performing speech.
Ear-grating, they said, “Step forward, Ba’al.”
The bishop raised his bloody chin, gaped and trembled. Then the fit came back on him and knocked him to his knees.
“Bring him to me, Adnihilo…Adam.”
The Messah didn’t hesitate; Adnihilo watched as the pastor’s son dragged Ba’al before the demon lord. Nor did Adam pause when Beelzebub ordered the bishop stripped of his tunic. This was easy vengeance for him, the half-blood saw—but why not for himself? Adnihilo felt only that his stomach was tied in knots, but it made no sense to him that he should feel nervous and not elated. Had he not finally found his place? But what is this place? he asked himself, watching Beelzebub’s six arms alight upon Ba’al’s head and shoulders. The demon’s stinger coiled under and stuck the bishop high in his chest where he’d branded himself with the Crest of the King. Then there was a pumping sound, like slow swallows of cold, viscous honey.
Strange that Ba’al didn’t scream, thought Adnihilo till he noticed the bishop’s muscles had gone taught as cord beneath his skin. Even his face became as stiff as a statue’s locked in a cross between a grin and a grimace. And his chest, too; it gave no seeming of breathing, nor did his skin turning blue—nearly black, like the hornet’s carapace. Ba’al’s hair turned to spines, his fingers to stingers, his two amber eyes became those of flies and a third sprouted on his forehead.
Beelzebub retracted his stinger and arms from the bishop’s laxing body—not limp but supple, the bishop stood strong as the odious drone of wings continued, “Ba’al of Pareo, for your leal service lent to the King, you’ve been granted a body and soul befitting your title. Kneel, and renounce your old home before the Xanthos Throne.” Happily, Ba’al obeyed, his chest puffed up and his head raised in gloating toward Lilum’s loathsome face. “Now rise,” the demon finished, “as a child of Pandemonium and the Bishop of Cathedral Nox.”
A languid clamor rounded the court, what was presumably meant to be a congratulation. None of the lords were excited, it seemed, that a mortal had been raised to peerage—none save for Astaroth slumped at the far end of the northern bench. He’d just received a second servant; Adnihilo pitied the demon for that.
The first order of the court accomplished, Beelzebub returned to his place right of the King. It was Asmodeus who replaced him, who at once ordered Naberius deliver Lilum to the lower court. She was still bristling over the bishop’s ascendance, anger jutting her jaw and wrinkling her forehead, as the crow snatched her up like a piece of cargo and dumped her a foot from the hard iron sand. She landed on her hands and knees, uninjured, but stained with rust on her palms and the skirt of her tunic. Without getting up, she spun to face the Xanthos King. The half-blood didn’t know what this would be, but he felt certain it wasn’t what the priestess expected.
“Lilum of Iisah,” started Asmodeus, “it was your covenant with the King to remain faithful to his will. In exchange, you have received eternal youth and beauty as befits a the queen of Pandemonium.”
“And I shall stand at his side above all he presides over,” she asserted herself.
The Charred Angel paused. “Yes; however, you have not been faithful, have you?”
Lilum’s breath quickened. She climbed to her feet, tried to wipe away the stains but only managed to spread them. “You dare bear false witness against me in the Father’s presence?” she asked, her tone flattened, her face a porcelain mask pale and brittle, “What foolishness! He knows the truth behind my intentions. You cannot trick him with lies like these.”
Asmodeus’s jasper eyes glimmered gleefully. “Indeed he knows you body, mind, and soul. But why do you presuppose that you know? How many millennia have you lived? Yet still the reasons and consequences of your decisions elude you, hidden behind opinions and delusions of grandeur. That was why you fled Barzakh and branded Light Bringer a traitor. It is why you couldn’t stand to see the Bishop ascend, because if not for him you’d have remained forever lording over your horde of tribal impotents!”
“Lies!” her mask cracked, “Tricks! Nothing you’ve said has anything to do with my loyalty to the Father.”
“Doesn’t it? It seems your spirit blinds you even to implication, but we of the court are philosophers all. And those with eyes can see full well that Lilum of Iisah could never stand the authority of another: you could not with the legate, and you cannot with Bishop Ba’al. Why then should the King think he’ll be received any differently?”
Lilum stole a moment to catch her breath. Her veneer had been broken, and it was all she could do to keep it together to hold her body rigid, to pretend she was calm as she answered the charge, “You know my story well but see it only from your own lowly intentions. They are but the opinions of a servant, or perhaps the opinions of a slave who has become arrogant after so long wearing his golden chains. You call me unfaithful and willful besides, and yes my will has erst stood indominable, for it is the Father and no other whom I shall assent to preside over me.” She turned and spoke directly toward the throne. “Great Father, to whom I have devoted a thousand sacrifices, I would hear your voice in this accusation. Am I not your queen to rule beside you? Have I not been devoted? Have I not earned my place.”
Out from the shadows, the Xanthos King rose from his throne of old, yellowed bones, his cloak unfurling into raven wings that flowed from his shoulders like a frayed sable cape. He stood exposed, God’s mistake: mounted on a frame whose make was human corpses, joints of torn ligaments, movement discontinuous as a stringless marionette’s, glared a ram’s brow lashed to a boarish snout, its eyes like Adnihilo’s, mottled by fire and void. Soon as the half-blood saw it, he felt ready to retch, heard Adam swallow his own. The Messah gasped and swore, and Lilum looked but a moment from fainting, forcing her eyes on the horror, her ears on the depths of the Devil’s rasping voice.
“You have earned nothing, have understood nothing.”
“But the dreams! The visions! I thought you—”
“Stop,” uttered the King, and Lilum’s voice froze in her throat. He spoke again. “Fall,” he said, and the priestess’s knees collapsed to the sand. “You are a servant, a supplicant…a slave. Whore of Barzakh. Your crown shall be a collar—Asmodeus.”
“As wills the King,” the demon replied. Knife in hand, he turned to Lilum and ran the blade between her breasts, dragged it down to her navel. The priestess shuddered in pain, yet there was no blood, just a darkness in her gaping chest as she was thrust into a trance. Her head snapped back, and three horns sprouted—two in front and one behind—the queen’s crown. Asmodeus gripped one to hold her in place as he gestured to Adnihilo.
The half-blood lurched away, and the Charred angel continued to beckon.
“Be not afraid, Heritor. Enter the dark womb and slough off your huma
n soul. You shall return reborn, ready to receive the Anointment of Fire…as your father did before you.”
Adnihilo looked to Adam who in turn glanced to the demon and back again, nodding.
“Go,” the Messah said.
The half-blood stepped forward, bit by bit, until he stood close enough that Asmodeus laid a hand on his neck, atop the crest of the King. Adnihilo closed his eyes. There was a sharp pain where the Angel had touched, then nothing.
†
Adnihilo woke on a bed of golden sand—the soft, warm sand of Eemah. And all around him, walls of weather worn brick ringed round as the Altar, tall as the Walls of Barzakh. He craned his neck and saw the speck of light above. Impossible, thought the half-blood; but it was the bottom of a well, nowhere else to go—or so he thought.
Then came the drums: two close beats with a long pause between, the undulating rhythm of Adnihilo’s heart. Blood! it screamed till his palms were sweating and the bottoms of his feat began to burn. He looked down. The ground had become saturated, made red with the reverberation of the ritual drums. Blood! they called, and blood it was that seeped up from the golden sand. Boiling blood, violent. Already had the bottoms of Adnihilo’s feet become blisters, his ankles red and raw from the vapors alone. And so he climbed, desperate fingers and stinging toes clinging where the mortar had worn away over hundreds of years. But the blood chased after him, urged on from above by a discarnate choir chanting with the beat of the ritual drums.
“Blood! Blood! Raise it up!”
“Raise it up,” uttered the ghost of Cain, his body embedded in the bricks above Adnihilo’s head. The half-blood froze in shock, but only for a second, till the flood caught hot on his heels. Kill the boy, he thought, it’s what Cain would want, and he clambered beyond his mentor’s corpse.
Next, it was a woman’s voice. “Raise it up,” she said, and he knew it was Jezebel before he ever saw her burned corpse fused to the wall. It was his fault, what happened to her; that was all the half-blood could think as his fingers sank into blackened skin, tearing bodily tissue easily as tender meat might slough off a bone. But a heavy heart would only weigh him down, and the blood was boiling ever faster. He focused on the pain of his wounds, the heat of the vapor, and the burning in his forearms and in his back. It was punishment enough, he told himself in an attempt to abandon his guilt.
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