36. Max #2
Then he turned and barked an order at his platoon in a language that made the stone hum under my boots.
And I couldn’t move.
I’d prepared for this. Weeks of it, and then ten hours on a dragon’s back. I’d told myself I was ready for whatever waited at the bottom. A rock. Braced. Set for the impact.
It hit me anyway.
Nothing in my life had readied me for a demon general calling me princess and saying your father like it was an ordinary fact about the world.
Real. Waiting. Somewhere inside that black cathedral stood the man whose blood ran in me, whose name I’d worn for twenty years without knowing it.
The one who had never sold me.
My eyes burned. My hands started shaking on the chakrams.
“Max.”
Drakken had stepped in close. As close as the geas’s leash allowed.
“Only corpses don’t feel.” His gray eyes held mine, steady as a keel. “You’ve been a rock since you were eight years old. It kept you alive. It’s not a virtue.”
“Drakken. Don’t.” My throat had gone to gravel. “Not here.”
“I’ll tell you this right here, because you need it.” He glanced at the kneeling ranks and back to me. “You’re standing in Hell, about to meet your birth father for the first time. If that didn’t shake you, you wouldn’t be human. Feel it. All of it. That’s the part no one can take off you.”
He lifted his hand. Stopped it inches from my face, before the burn started.
“And you’re not doing this alone.” His voice dropped. “I’m in it to the end. Whatever’s behind those doors, whatever it costs. You’ll always have me in your corner.”
I breathed the square once, four and four and four, and put myself back together.
I turned to the archdemon. “First, could you find clothes for my companion?”
“No time, Princess,” Asteroth said. “I won’t risk keeping His Majesty waiting. Neither should you.”
Drakken caught my eye. Let’s get it over with. Then he shrugged.
If it didn’t bother him, why should it bother me?
Asteroth led us toward the ocean, and his platoon fell in around Drakken and me in a moving ring of black-and-red plate, a wall of demon elites with the two of us at its center.
“How do we get to a palace in the middle of the ocean?” Drakken asked. “Where are the boats?”
Asteroth lifted one hand and waved it, almost lazily.
Out of the burning water, a bridge assembled itself, span by span, ebony and gold unfolding across the whole distance to the Morningstar Palace.
We stepped onto it. Gold ribbing ran through slabs of black stone, polished to a mirror.
The wealth of Hell.
Below us the ocean burned. The light came up through the amber panes and moved across our faces as we walked, so that we crossed the water as if through stained glass.
“This is the top of Hell,” Asteroth said as we went, and he gave me a sidelong look. “Don’t believe what the silly mortals say about the realm. There are thirteen floors in all. The wickedest souls keep the bottom. You’ll hear no cries of the tormented up here. Lord Lucifer doesn’t care for noise.”
“Convenient,” Drakken said.
Asteroth kept walking a dozen paces before he answered, and when he did, he turned his head. First time he’d acknowledged that Drakken existed.
“Say it plainly, dragon.”
“You keep a torture farm downstairs and a quiet house on top of it.”
“We keep an engine.” Asteroth said it like a steward describing a house rule. “Hell runs on the fuel the souls provide. That is why we harvest them. It is why we fight Heaven over them, and have since before your world had a name.”
“Fuel,” I said. “You burn people.”
“We burn the wicked and the fainthearted, Princess. Eternal death isn’t eternal peace.” He smiled, all jagged fangs. “We love to hear their cries and screams, especially the fainthearted. Hell is no place for charity.”
Drakken said nothing to that. Neither did I.
I looked ahead at the black cathedral and thought about whose house I was walking into.
The palace grew as we crossed, looming ahead of us.
The nearer we came, the colder the air ran. So much for Hell being hot. A deep winter cold rolled off all that ebony crystal, frost feathering the black gem of the bridge under our feet while the sea burned beneath us.
Fire below, ice ahead. My father’s house held both and belonged to neither.
The gates were wings.
Two folded wings of black steel, each one the size of a warship’s sail, feathers individually forged and layered by the thousand, hinged where a shoulder would be.
As Asteroth’s ring of guards brought us up the last span, the wings unfolded, slow and soundless, opening like a bird poised for flight.
There was no mistaking whose wings they were modeled on. Or what it meant that their owner had hung the memory of them on his front door.
We passed beneath, and Hell’s palace closed around us.
The entry hall vaulted up. Light lived in the walls, thousands of points of it set deep in the ebony.
Stars. Someone had seeded the stone with stars.
The floor was black and mirror-still as night water, and it reflected no ceiling at all. It reflected a sky, a wheeling, glittering sky that existed nowhere overhead, so that every step we took, we walked on the memory of heavens.
I’d braced for horror. I got spectacular.
Down the hall’s length stood ranks of statues in white stone, the only white in all that black. Winged figures, beautiful, solemn, every single face turned away.
Our footsteps, the guards’ plate, and under it a single sustained note, so low it reached my sternum before my ears, as if the whole palace were humming one held breath of a song it had started long ago and never finished.
It wasn’t a fortress. It wasn’t a throne room. It wasn’t torment.
It was homesickness, built on the scale of a god.
And somewhere ahead of me, in the heart of it, my father was waiting.