The Heart of Hell Read online

  They found a small, sheltering hollow carved by the wind in the outcropping and set their packs down within it. Lilith pulled the overly long scabbard of her sword over her head and then the strap of her small bag and heard the faintest of clinkings from within. She had been careful to pack the dozens of small, obsidian phials in finely shredded vellum made from the wind-strewn remnants of Dis’ extinct bureaucracy that she had found and gathered up on her last visit to the ruined capital. The phials were empty, but, she reflected, even in their emptiness they represented the true reason for her journey. This venture into the depths of Hell’s Wastes was about regaining a soul. It was about filling those phials with a cure. It was about Hannibal.

  * * *

  The war with Beelzebub was long over. Hell’s new capital, Adamantinarx-upon-the-Acheron, was rising once again, well on the way to being rebuilt not with soul-slave labor but with a willing alliance of souls and demons. This was truly Sargatanas’ legacy, a legacy of hope in a place where no one but he could have envisioned it.

  But Lilith kept her ears open to events elsewhere in Hell. Adamantinarx was not Hell, it was but a benign part of a greater, less forgiving whole, and Lilith knew well enough not to judge the world by what she saw in its once greatest, most progressive city. Disturbing tales from far-flung cities began to filter back to her of conflicts arising directly from the outcome of the war and from the new status imparted to souls. But the most troubling of all the stories was the one Eligor brought back from the wards of Dis. What he reported to Put Satanachia after his visit with the Soul General had been troubling enough that Lilith herself had undertaken the long trek to the ruined capital.

  Escorted by a full, elite cohort of Furcas Legion malpirgim, Lilith wandered the flat acres that were the once-crowded streets of Dis. Above it all hung a vast sigil—Satanachia’s symbol of dominance and possession. And below it the twisted alleys, the grandiose boulevards, the sagging and ulcerous domiciles, the pompous and overblown buildings of state, existed only in memory, leveled by Mulciber in his efforts to protect the Fly. Gone, too, was the Wall that he had built from those bricks. So much was gone. Everywhere, etched upon the glass-smooth surface of the ground, were the geometric marks where the foundations of the tens of thousands of buildings had stood. The Keep, that demon-made mountain of flesh and bone and blood, was all but gone, its single, stark surviving portion—Moloch’s Tower and the area immediately around it—all that remained. Gone, too, was the famed Wargate. She was not at all dismayed that the dark, seeping tumor that had been Hell’s first and largest city was gone, that its sullen and corrupt bureaucrats, its persecuted throngs, its horrific legions, and most of all its hierarchy of prideful and paranoid demigods, Demons Minor and Major, were destroyed. But most satisfying was the knowledge that the unclean creature that had tortured her in mind and body for eons, the Prince Regent of Hell, the Fly, was no more.

  Conversely, Lilith did frequently wonder why her protégé, Hannibal, had so definitively taken up residence in the former abode of his enemy, Moloch. She tried hard to deny the obvious answers, but the longer he remained in seclusion, the more the rumors and her suspicions disquieted her. And so, with Eligor’s tale echoing in her mind, she packed her kit and made the journey to Dis.

  Now, standing before the shattered and deconstructed remains of Beelzebub’s fortress, she wondered whether she had been overly concerned and whether Eligor might have misread the signs. Either way, she wanted to see Hannibal for herself.

  The cohort brought her across the rubble-strewn lava moat that had once been Lucifer’s Belt, the naturally enhanced defense Beelzebub had built around his Keep. Very little remained exposed, with only small expanding patches of lava visible between the massive chunks of melted mortar that had been Mulciber’s Wall. Those souls who had comprised it, the majority of Dis’ damned, had been lost forever, congealed, one indistinguishable from the other, by the lava’s fierce heat into solid, inseparable blocks. It was this rubble that was, respectfully, being cleared. Eventually, the lava would reclaim the place. Lilith clambered over the sharp chunks until she reached the base of the structure, where they began to set up camp.

  Looking up, she saw the pointed, broken base of Moloch’s Tower floating high overhead. Architect General Halphas had provided invocations to keep it floating. The ground beneath it was a network of concentric circles filled in with lava—evidence of where the Keep’s vast underground chambers had been and where Semjaza had been held captive. The tower itself was intentionally impossible to reach save by Flying Guard demons who had to gain special permission to access it. The souls and demons working on demolishing the remnants of the Keep at its base were prohibited from gaining access to the tower itself. This was by Satanachia’s design. While the tower—Hannibal’s residence now—was not to be touched, everything else was to be demolished. No part of the Keep was to remain intact.

  Lilith saw workers, souls and demons alike, moving about, claw-tools in hand, surefooted through the crumbling debris. She watched them for some time and, even from a distance, she noted how different their interactions were. The ancient relationship of overseer and slave was no longer in evidence. Demon and soul seemed intent on coexisting, performing their tasks side by side with seeming harmony. It was a reality of which Lilith had, in the past, only dreamt, a reality brought about by the reforms that followed Sargatanas’ rebellion.

  The tower loomed above and Lilith asked the Demon Minor she had traveled to the capital with, a commander named Dramyax, how she might gain access. Sent to Dis to organize work-gangs, Dramyax seemed distracted and reluctant to help. He was, Lilith knew, a demon of little imagination.

  “Perhaps you can send a glyph skyward to seek a flyer?”

  “Perhaps.” Dramyax’s eyes were elsewhere.

  “Perhaps Lord Satanachia can be apprised of your unenthusiastic service to me?”

  Immediately a glyph soared, and in a few moments a Flying Guard demon appeared. Dramyax bowed cursorily.

  With no more words exchanged she was carried aloft the hundreds of feet to the tower’s broken, floating base. He brought her to the foot of a long staircase and without a word opened his wings and was off. Lilith shook her head and, wasting no time, began to ascend, her clawed feet easily grasping the narrow struts of the bone steps. A damp, fetid odor filled her nostrils, the scent of ancient, severed conduits and eviscerated substructures. Climbing through what little was left of the Keep was a harrowing experience for her. She recognized some of the shattered halls and organic passages; the chambers and their destroyed furnishings and all of it made her uneasy. The passage of time had not dimmed her horrific recollections of the Fly and his insatiable appetites, of that untrustworthy monster, Chancellor Adramalik, and his brutish Knights, of the twisted, pathetic Prime Minister Agares without whose help she could never have survived, of the thing that had once been Faraii, of her trysts with the noble, Ascended Valefar, and finally of her first hopeful thoughts of Sargatanas.

  Halfway up the ragged pile, she paused and peered down through a gaping hole at Dramyax’s demons hard at work setting up camp. They were well-disciplined troops. Dramyax was a good commander, tough but fair despite his shallowness, and during their march to Dis she had watched his troops repulse small bands of freed souls who had taken to the regions between the great cities. While the souls had proved to be tenacious fighters, they had never posed much of a threat. But during these minor engagements, Lilith had, for the first time in Hell, experienced a firm dislike for humans. This had not been her vision for them.

  Pulling her skins in closely around her, she resumed her climb passing curious workers who stopped to look at and bow their heads at the White Mistress as she passed them. Her popularity among the souls as Sargatanas’ consort had risen even beyond what it had been when her name had been whispered among the damned before the Rebellion. Now it bordered on open reverence.

  Roughly a thousand feet up, Lilith marked a change in the degree of demolition
around her. Large gangs of demons and souls were toiling with fervor and, at this height, the tower’s base began to look less like the remnants of a building and more like a giant, talon-shredded cadaver. The winds picked up, bearing upon them the overpowering scent of decay, flapping the raked flesh and shaking the loose bones that dangled from the tissue. Lilith’s toes clutched the smooth bone steps a little more firmly in the face of that noxious wind. Great buckets on long sinew ropes carried torn flesh and foul detritus past her, on their way down to be emptied into the surrounding lava fields. To be cleansed, she felt.

  Nimble as she was, the ascent took hours. Some of the blasted pieces of the Keep were accessible only by climbing narrow staircases that were exposed to the open air. These she negotiated with great trepidation. Eventually, she stepped up and onto the uppermost platform of the Keep and felt the tingling tug of vertigo in her thighs as she gazed, once more, down at the seemingly tiny demons below. The exposed heights were all the more powerful due to the relatively narrow platform, and she backed away from its edge. Lilith pursed her lips, the only gesture she would allow herself that might have been interpreted as evidence of nerves. Rising high into the dirty clouds loomed the exposed and shattered shaft of Moloch’s Tower, a rough-sided soul-brick cylinder—the only such building still extant in Dis—that terminated in a jagged and aggressive crown surrounded by giant floating claws. With the thick mantle of flesh that had covered the Keep now gone, much more of the spire was revealed. It was stained and ugly, even by Hell’s standards, and, by its survival, albeit broken, somehow defiant. And at its apex, she knew, was the abode of Hannibal. How he reached it she could not guess. As she pondered this question, a winged demon separated himself from the other demon workers just below and rose to the platform where she stood. He landed lightly, and she saw that he left his wings half-open, angling them against the wind. He was a burly, barrel-chested demon, probably a former flying infantry soldier, scarred by battle and work. As he approached, Lilith was relieved to note that the inextinguishable fires upon him burned away the scent of decay.

  “My name, my lady,” he said, his voice gravelly, “is Sheggaroth. We received word of your imminent arrival and I volunteered to escort you to the tower’s top.” The demon knelt clumsily. “Are you ready?” he said.

  Lilith nodded.

  “My lady, I have been up there,” he said, indicating the tower top with a flick of his spine-crested head, “more than once. It is a … an unpleasant place.”

  Something seemed to be troubling him, but Lilith was reluctant to press him.

  “I have some familiarity with ‘unpleasant places,’ Sheggaroth.”

  The demon nodded, stood, and extended his arms and Lilith, enfolded in his embrace, allowed herself to be lifted into the air. It was a short flight, with the ash-flecked winds buffeting them, but Sheggaroth was a strong flyer and he landed surely upon the sill of the narrow panoramic window that encircled the tower’s chambers.

  “Please wait here if you would, Sheggaroth,” Lilith said.

  “Of course, my lady.”

  She dropped carefully and quietly down from the windowsill into the ancient stone-flagged chamber that had apparently been Moloch’s living quarters. No lamps were lit and only the vague silhouettes of the room’s sole architectural feature—a raised platform where beddings were present—could be seen in the gloom. An indefinable, heavy scent permeated the place despite the wind that ebbed and flowed, a disturbing muskiness that Lilith had not encountered before.

  She slowly made her way farther into the large, high-ceilinged room, her red eyes adjusting rapidly to the darkness. Moving slowly through the wedge-shaped chamber and avoiding the many heavy columns and the waist-high sharp-cornered ledges, she passed through a threshold and came finally to a wide, round anteroom marked by a shallow circular depression. There she saw the twin stone troughs that she knew had housed Moloch’s fearsome Hooks and saw the runnels that had filled them with the crimson blood of the souls he had dined upon. As she approached the oblong receptacles she let out a gasp—one of the troughs was filled nearly to the lip with blood, thick and red and smooth. Everywhere, large bloody footprints covered the floor.

  And then she saw him, seated on the only piece of furniture that she had so far seen in the chambers, a magnificent throne carved of jet, rescued, she was sure, from the Keep.

  “I knew you would come. Eventually.” His voice was low and rough. “Welcome.”

  “Hannibal,” Lilith said softly in the souls’ tongue. Her ability to speak to souls had improved since the Rebellion. “Thank you. I’m sorry I came unannounced.”

  “It’s good to see you again, unexpected or otherwise, Lilith. I don’t have visitors … the last was Eligor … and so I require little in the way of furnishings. If you like, there are some skins in the other room that you can drag—”

  “I am fine standing.” She could just see the trough out of the corner of her eye. And was that a cage at the opposite side of the room?

  “So, tell me, how is our world since our great lord has Ascended?”

  “It is a changed place. Improved in many ways, still dangerous in many others.”

  “From what I’ve seen, in my few journeys, Hell has now become a place of imagined freedoms. The Salamandrines have a saying: ‘You can channel lava in any direction you like, but it still burns.’ This prison of our sins is no less hot for our achievements.”

  Lilith heard something in his grating voice, something distant and pained.

  “You haven’t found your wife, Imilce?”

  “No. I have searched far and wide. She is gone. Lost to me.”

  “I will see if—”

  “Lilith,” he said angrily. “I’m over it. Do nothing. If she is here in Hell I will never know. And that is probably just as well.”

  The shadowed form of Hannibal seemed to twist on his throne. Lilith could not see his eyes. She moved forward, hand outstretched as if to comfort him.

  “Is there any way I can help you? What is it that you need?”

  Hannibal gave a short laugh, guttural and dangerous. “What I need is to finally be one with my god, Lilith. Now that you have set me on that course, now that he is so much a part of me. Isn’t that what every living soul craves? Even when love or fear of one’s god requires of them acts so questionable, so irrational, so unspeakable, that living becomes unbearable? I’ve listened to too many souls here in Hell who have tried to explain why they are being punished—that this god or that one made them do something otherwise repugnant. I listened and I understood why they had done what they did. In my case, my god was a monster. He asked me to burn my baby alive. And now I am becoming one with him. How can I argue with such bliss?”

  Hannibal rose from the throne and approached Lilith so swiftly and aggressively that she could not step away.

  “Was this what you had in mind for me, Lilith? Look at what my salvation has wrought!”

  Lilith saw a figure that was caught somewhere between tortured humanity and degraded godhood. He stood much taller than she remembered, his arms huge, asymmetric, and muscular, his legs strangely jointed and inhumanly powerful. A low blue flame coursed over him and when she looked at his face, through that shimmering fire, she saw many cold blue eyes now open and glaring down at her.

  A copious amount of drying blood still dribbled from his mouth, down onto his chest.

  “Hannibal, I’m sorry.”

  “No sorrier than I. I betrayed myself, my fellow souls, and now, by becoming this, my dead daughter. All for Sargatanas. His price to Ascend was steep indeed.” He moved away, his gliding stride long and supple.

  “I think you should go now, Lilith. I crave solitude. That is all there is for me now.”

  Lilith’s chin dropped and then she turned, heading back toward the window and Sheggaroth.

  “And Lilith,” Hannibal whispered hoarsely, “do not send Mago here to try to comfort me. I have found that I cannot be trusted with souls, no matter who
they are.”

  For a moment her eyes lit, once more, upon the trough and the footprints and then she realized that along with Hannibal’s some of them were smaller—the bloody footprints of a soul. Without asking Hannibal about them, she moved away from him, her strides lengthening as her relief to be leaving grew.

  * * *

  The protective Abyssal skin across the small cave entrance was still shaking, but the storm was passing, burning itself out as it rose into the sky once more. Lilith’s hand was clenched around Ardat’s, too tightly perhaps, but the feel of another so close was comforting to her. The wind-driven fire spouts that had been mountain high were playing themselves out, tracing swirling corkscrews of burning embers across the ash. When the winds had died down completely, she cautiously parted the skins and saw the entire world ablaze in a coruscating cloud of settling embers. She stepped out and raised her face into the floating cinders, feeling the tiniest of stings as they landed upon her. It was quite beautiful but, she knew, also quite transitory. To find any beauty in Hell was always a small miracle.

  Ardat began to break down the shelter and with Lilith’s help they were soon back en route to the distant Wastes. It was her mission to seek a cure for Hannibal and there was only one demon who she felt could help her find it—Buer. The demon was nearly a legend and his whereabouts were unknown, but she would find him and then she would return and save Hannibal. Again.

  4

  ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON

  Preparations for the expedition to retrieve the Books were nearing an end and, after much impatient walking of the half-rebuilt streets of Adamantinarx, Boudica was more than ready to leave. The Wastes caravan, which consisted of many dozens of harnessed Abyssals, awaited only the arrival of the three centuries of demon legionaries that would protect it.