Barlowe, Wayne - God's Demon

The plodding footsteps of the enormous Behemoths ahead shook the ground continuously, causing those waves of jostling souls closest to them to move forward in irregular clumps, but somehow Hannibal's nimble steed managed to maintain its footing among them. The Soul-General was close—some thought too close—to the flanks of the advancing Behemoth line, but he felt that his troops should leave little open ground between them in the unlikely event that the giant creatures' line was breached. And he knew that their bone-masked mahouts, in the unlikely event that the Behemoths panicked, would be quick to react. Protruding from each mammoth soul's skull was the head of a long spike that ended inches from the soul's brain; a sharp blow with the mahout's hammer and the spike would be driven home, destroying the soul instantly.

Before him the new Keep Wall rose up, still distant but immense, ascending until it nearly obscured the Keep itself. Bathed in red, it was a sheer, solid expanse covered in an ever-changing net of glyphs that played upon the flat soul-brick surface like firelight through waves of blood. It was the product, he had been told, of Mulciber's genius, and it was a marvel, built, Hannibal guessed, with such haste that it could only have been achieved with the use of every soul's hand and body in Dis. He stared for long minutes as he moved forward, the layer of glyphs mesmerizing in its shifting patterns. Behind that floating shield, the wall was unbroken save for their goal—the single huge gate that lay behind a titanic raised drawbridge a thousand feet above the Keep's base and no longer accessible by its wide bridge, which had been destroyed. Lying between the gate and the Second Army of the Ascension were not only the massed legions of the army of Dis but also the wide, bottomless moat of Lucifer's Belt. Too hot and broad to traverse with any improvised barges, it would, unquestionably, prove a formidable barrier—a barrier that somehow needed to be crossed. Satanachia had already pointed to the gate as their objective, but the distance between the moat-edge and the gate above was too great to cast ropes. And no flyers in any great enough numbers accompanied them, all of their squadrons having been already committed to Sargatanas' maneuver. For the moment, Hannibal could see no physical way of gaining their objective.

Even as Hannibal watched the advancing lines of demons ahead, an enormous bolt of red glyph-lightning, a curse he thought from the ground below, exploded into the ranks of Satanachia's demons, pulverizing scores of them into a thick cloud of black dust that fell back down slowly. Was it sent by the Fly high above in his Rotunda? Was it just the beginning? Or am I letting my misgivings get the better of me? Hannibal had never been this skittish before a battle. Another bolt of lightning, this time closer, jarred him and made Gaha flinch and then more discharges began to burst upward and Hannibal knew for certain that they were not natural. The Fly had created a defensive perimeter and they were edging all too slowly into it. Hannibal would lose many troops to the lightning before they had a chance to engage the waiting army, but there was nothing he could do.

The ground, which looked so uniform from a distance, had become irregular with wide, bubbling fields of dark, cooling lava, making their progress difficult. The Soul-General had not heard of these lakes in his briefing and wondered if they had been churned up by Dis' rampant demolition. He became even more suspicious when he thought he heard dull sounds issuing from within them. Through the shimmer of heat and steam he thought he saw strange shapes in the slowly swirling crust but reasoned that it was nothing more than his imagination fed by the tension of the moment.

Above, the cloud-cover over central Dis was dense, and Hannibal knew that Eligor and his lord must be well on their way, perhaps closer than he expected. The thought comforted him, but he knew that even while their efforts would shorten the battle to come, many souls would be destroyed and many demons would find out how much truth lay in the dread tales of Abaddon.

Suddenly, with a brilliant flash and a great rushing sound, a huge, circular glyph materialized before the Keep Wall hanging many hundreds of feet over Lucifer's Belt. Surrounding its central sigil—Beelzebub's pale green mark— were myriad smaller devices, each, Hannibal recognized from their forms, the sigil of one of Dis' field commanders. He heard a collective hissing intake of breath from the surrounding troops of the soul army as the small sigils detached themselves and flew, arrow straight, into the pools of lava that lay at their feet in front, to the sides, and behind them. It was a Summoning!