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side and saw that his remaining Knights, flaming scimitars flashing, were engaged in
furious combat with the Demon Minor Metaphrax and his flying lancers.
Adramalik looked from that fight to the glowing disks of his Knights unfortunate enough
to have been caught up in Beelzebub's petulant rage. Sargatanas' convictions had made
him truly transcendent among demons.
Adramalik remembered his many punishments over the millennia and the pain of each
and, setting his jaw, turned away from the Prince. Beelzebub does not deserve my loyalty,
he thought with disgust, and in that moment, the path he had always wanted to travel
upon opened for him. He raised his hand and shot a command-glyph out to his Knights to
sheathe their weapons and form up around him. He would withdraw and leave the Prince
and Dis itself, taking his Order with him. Wounded and distracted, Beelzebub would not
be able to stop them.
* * * * *
Hannibal felt the sound in his bones before he heard it. Beneath his feet he felt the floor
of the Keep vibrate, felt it yield slightly as if it were shifting. At the present, they were
climbing steadily upward and Satanachia informed him that they were roughly halfway to
the Rotunda. At first he thought the dull sound was diminishing, but suddenly it gathered
into a deep rushing sound and then the floor beneath his feet cracked. Braziers tumbled to
the ground, spreading pools of flame.
Satanachia turned and looked at him with knit brows, listening.
"What is it?" Hannibal asked.
But realization suddenly cleared Satanachia's face and, wide-eyed, he shouted "Back,
back the way we came!"
As one, the vanguard turned, and the command went back down the unending stairs. The
hundreds of confused troops squeezed into the narrow passage tried to maintain some
form of order, but were too slow to respond. The rushing sound from below became the
din of crashing bone-supports and bricks, and the Keep shuddered like a wounded
animal. The floor heaved and buckled and Hannibal saw the long, dim staircase ahead
thrown upward, completely broken apart by some titanic force.
As he fell, through the dust and broken bricks and tiles that flew toward him, he had a
brief impression of something enormous, something vaguely human in form, rising
irresistibly up through the ruptured floor on powerful wings. And as it passed, it gave
voice, a deafening cry of release, pained and hoarse but also unmistakably triumphant.
Hannibal recognized it as the voice of Semjaza.
* * * * *
The Rotunda floor buckled from the lack of support beneath it and formed a fractured and
deepening bowl into which slid hundreds of Beelzebub's legionaries. The ugly mass of
flesh that was the Fly's throne sank into a soup of ashy blood, rubble, and flailing demons
and then suddenly erupted as the entire floor split open.
Eligor's mouth opened in silent shock.
For eons, the few scattered Watchers, buried and nearly forgotten, had been thought of
almost as forces of Infernal nature. They had been in Hell before the demons arrived and,
it was speculated, would be there after time ended. No demon had ever dreamt of actually
seeing one.
Once Semjaza the Watcher had been beautiful, but that was very long ago. Incarcerated,
it had grown immense and mad feeding upon the blackness that lay beneath all of Hell. A
rank odor of age and decay filled Eligor's nostrils.
So tall that it was nearly a tenth the height of the Black Dome, the Watcher floated on six
slowly beating wings that, fully extended, seemed as if they might span the Rotunda. It
had fared poorly in its captivity, Eligor saw. Blind and with its nose eaten away by
worms, its face was a tortured landscape of pits and wrinkles, the chiseled contours of its
skull prominent. Its skin, once golden and miraculous for its magical markings, was a
sickly pale gray and was dotted with holes and covered in sores. Visible, too, was the
ancient, Throne-mandated punishment, the great scarred wound where its genitals had
been ritually, wrathfully, excised for its sins. Upon its wrists and ankles were the burned-
in scars of the elaborate glyphs that Those from the Above had used to cast it down and
shackle it glyphs that somehow Beelzebub had managed to neutralize.
Eligor saw it turn its huge horned and winged head to and fro, trying blindly to sense its
surroundings. Beneath it, the remains of the floor cracked and began to slowly slide
down, sinking of its own broken weight, lower and lower until it separated and dropped,
taking with it those screaming demons that had been clinging to the bricks. When the dust
had cleared, Eligor could see well down into the burning heart of the Keep. When he
looked up he saw the hundreds of his flying demons who had retreated; there were fewer
of them left than he had expected.
Once the sounds of the floor's sinking had subsided, a strange quiet settled throughout the
Rotunda. Only the cavernous sound of Semjaza's breathing could be heard, as well as the
slow flapping of its wings.
And then a soft buzzing arose and a green command-glyph sprang to life from the
deformed figure that was Beelzebub. It sped up toward Semjaza and, without pause, sank
into its head. The milky eyes closed and the six wings beat faster as the message was
revealed. Eligor was sure that the Fly's weapon was gathering itself.
From the heights of the dome a white form descended and hovered before the withered
face of the Watcher. Sargatanas, head ablaze and blue ialpor napta held before him, hung
on gently beating wings so close to the titan that he might have reached out and touched
it with the sword point.
Fearing for his lord, Eligor felt his breath catch in his throat. He could not see whether
Sargatanas was speaking to Semjaza or simply showing himself, allowing the sightless
Watcher to become aware of him. Whatever the case, the effect was immediate and
startling. Semjaza reared backward as if it had been struck, fear unmistakable upon its
face. The Watcher remembers its old captors! It hears the language of the Above and the
sizzle of the flaming sword and is afraid!
A roar of outraged buzzing rent the air and Beelzebub ascended, spreading and engulfing
Sargatanas within himself. In the briefest instant Eligor saw his lord transformed from a
thing of potent beauty to a figure ablaze in the center of a fiery maelstrom of flies. Eligor
saw, too, the layer of glyph-mail eaten away and the flies beginning to penetrate the
white armor. Without thinking, Eligor found himself in a steep dive heading directly
toward Sargatanas. But as Eligor drew near and the flaming green flies pulled away, their
lethal work done, he saw that there was nothing that could undo the damage that had been [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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