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AN EXCERPT






By Wayne D. Barlowe
 
 
 
“‘Is this the Region, this the Clime,’ said then the Lost Archangel, ‘this the seat that we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom for that celestial light?’ “
 
John Milton
Paradise Lost
 
“Awake, arise, or be forever fall’n.”
 
John Milton
Paradise Lost
 
 
 
 
Prologue
 
 
 

   Ash fell from a sky of umber darkness, softening the jagged chaos of the world below his open window. It obscured his vision so that he could barely discern the distant, broken towers he knew to be there. Only the star Algol, ever-burning, ever-watchful, managed to pierce the dark clouds and tint his room with a subtle ruddy glow.  Eligor sat motionless, as he could for hours, watching the flakes drift down, and thought it fitting that they should come so heavily. He watched the tiny laborers far below, as they tirelessly rebuilt the shattered city of Adamantinarx. The ash fell peacefully; no burning wind played upon its slow descent and so Eligor could write without having to clear his desk every few minutes.
 
   He wrote in ferocious bursts, punctuated only by his countless interviews and his moments of reverie. He wrote because he felt that he had to, and when he wrote it was in the script of angels. Because now it was permitted. The script had come fitfully, at first; it had been so long since he had written in it. The long strokes of his precious quill pen had been just a little too precise, the terminating circles a little too crabbed. But eventually he loosened up, remembering his way, and the letters flew from his pen like lightning. Soon the events of the not-so-distant past were flowing freely and the story of the last days of his lord, Sargatanas, took shape.
 
   Eligor barely remembered the flight from the battlefield back to the palace. He had only the vague impression of passing through the shredded clouds of war with his troops, an elite squadron of Flying Guards, and of being so weary that he could barely stay aloft. There was too much to say between them, and therefore no one said anything.
 
   Beneath him the clouds had parted to reveal the dark landscape. From their altitude the world looked as it always had. Vast olive-brown plains, like sheets of skin, rended and folded, were cut by flowing, incandescent rivers of lava and pocked by scattered outposts, pin-cushioned with fiery-tipped towers. The fires of Hell still blazed, at least, and Eligor had tried to convince himself that all was as it had been.
 
   On they flew, their spirits beginning to lift, but when they entered Sargatanas’ wards all their fantasies vanished. There were virtually no intact buildings to be seen, so complete had been the need for its bricks, for its souls. Where once had been laid out a vast and bustling city, there now was a dismal grid of tumbled blocks and foundations. Like some newly excavated ruin the city of Adamantinarx lay exposed and broken, its empty streets only discernible with the greatest effort. Colossal statues stood tilted upon pillaged pedestals, ornamental columns were strewn like broken bones across avenues, and the once-active river harbor was submerged for many blocks in the absence of its former embankment.
 
   Sargatanas’ palace had fared little better. Looming up from the mount in the city’s center, it looked dark and ominous. The immense, domed building was pierced in a thousand places, its walls ravaged for their bricks, allowing the wind, cinders and ash to move freely within. Eligor closed his eyes when he first saw the palace. Here was the home of his lord, abandoned and subject to the fury of Hell’s fierce elements. Empty.
 
   He and his traveling companions alit upon the rim of the dome’s oculus and, wings folded, peered down into the once-great Audience Chamber. Nothing could be seen.
 
   They descended into the darkness, silently. As they dropped down, the only light came from the fires guttering atop the Guard’s heads, reflected as tiny pinpricks of flame that gleamed back from the innumerable, distant gold columns that ringed the space. It took many minutes to fall to the floor and once there, many more for them to cross the space to the exit, so great was the chamber’s size. In the flickering flame-light they could see only portions of the silver-white sigil - his sigil - that was inlaid into the soot-covered floor. Sorrow once again washed over them as they looked at one another. 
 
   The party entered the wide corridors and here the pierced walls allowed enough light from outside to penetrate, creating an irregular patchwork across the floor. Their muffled footsteps echoed around them as they walked away from the Audience Chamber. They did not bother to light the torches that lined the walls, mostly because to do so would reveal even more of the disarray. The sighing wind from outside, they agreed, would have extinguished them anyway.
 
   They picked their way through the palace, stepping around tipped-over cases, torn tapestries, smashed friezes and tiles and the rich furnishings that had given their lord his little pleasure. All were covered in mounds of ash which, when kicked up, suffused the hallways with a dense, choking fog.
 
   Eligor was the first to enter the Library and all could hear his sharp intake of breath upon seeing the devastation. He had spent so much of his time there, most of it with his lord. They wended their way through the giant piles of enormous, heavy books pulled from the shelves and left in moldering tumuli. The wind whistled over them, rustling the pages back and forth, blowing ash and bits of parchment in small whirlwinds around them like swirling motes of memories.
 
   Eventually the party split up. One by one each Flying Guardsdemon broke away to descend deeper, on his own, into the palace, seeking their rooms and, perhaps, their lost purpose.  Eligor wondered what they must have thought upon reaching them, each finding their own personal chaos.
 
   After clearing away a mound of debris, Eligor entered his own chambers, high atop the main tower, and found them to be ankle deep in ash. His desk, still firmly growing from the floor, was an island in a sea of cinders. His books and papers were barely visible, scattered on the floor by the winds which came freely in through a new and gaping hole in the wall. Oddly, the obsidian-glassed window was intact, banging open and closed in the same hot wind. He pulled it shut and latched it, feeling odd that this was his first act upon entering his personal world. The hole yawned just next to the window and he stood at its verge, his cloaks and folded wings flapping, looking down at the ground so far below. He would begin the reconstruction of his life immediately, fill the hole, clear the floor, tidy the shelves and set his desk in order. He had a mission now. He had to reveal everything. He had to tell his lord’s story.
   
   

 I
 
 

ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON

   There was the Fall. And no one was permitted to speak of it, or of the time before or of the Above. But it was the Fall that established many things in Hell, not the least of which was the distribution of territory.  The future wards of Hell were randomly determined as each Demon Major, on his own sizzling trajectory from the Above, plunged headlong, meteoric, into the unknown wilds of the Inferno. Some impacted far apart, setting up their realms in relative seclusion and safety, while others, less fortunate, found themselves in close proximity, able to see the rising smoke of their neighbor’s arrival. These close arrivals began plotting and campaigning as soon as they could gather about them enough minor demons to form a court. The fratricidal wars that erupted lingered for millennia, occasionally flaring up into major conflagrations. These were the volatile times of Settlement and they were never forgotten by the survivors. Many of Lucifer’s original Host were lost, but those that remained, the strong and the cunning, established powerful kingdoms that would grow and prosper.
 
   When Eligor Fell he found himself upon a smoking plain cratered with the barely moving bodies of a thousand fallen demons. They lay, as he did, stunned, twisted by their furious descents and glowing from myriad tiny embers. Eligor had been a foot-soldier in the celestial Host, attached to the seraph Sargatanas’ legions and could remember nothing of his final moments Above. Somehow, as he Fell, he had managed to stay near his general’s flaming smoke-plume.
 
   Eligor came upon Sargatanas as he stood upon a wind-whipped bluff, unsteady, the steam of his descent wreathing him. Transformed from luminous seraph to Demon Major he had lost all of his heavenly trappings and none of his dignity. A corona of embers flitted away from his massive head and Eligor saw it form into a great and complicated sigil for the first time. Sargatanas had been one of the fortunate ones, a demon who had fallen, uncontested, in an infernal region harsh and inhospitable, albeit rich in minerals and perfect for city-building. Glowing milky white upon a flat plain before them, and bending around a tall central mount, oxbowed a slow-flowing river that would be named Acheron. Here, Eligor somehow knew, a great city would rise.
 
   They stood silently, watching the shower of fiery contrails, the paths of slower descents as they approached their new, unwelcoming home. Eligor glanced over at his lord. He saw Sargatanas looking up, beyond the contrails and beyond the clouds, and saw him close his burning eyes.

 
#
 

   A great number of demons gathered about Sargatanas as he set about the founding of his city.  The earliest, mostly unknown to him, were those who had descended nearby and, after meeting with him, agreed to join his van. Others traveling from afar, more often than not, had known him from before the Fall and wanted to be by his side, perhaps for comfort, in the new world.
 
   Eligor’s intuition had proven correct; Sargatanas had seen the same potential in the land near where he had Fallen. The boundaries of Sargatanas’ future city were vast, yet the Demon Major had walked them himself, pointing out to Eligor the specific features of the landscape that had provoked his interest in this particular spot. The great river, especially, had won Sargatanas over. As he and Eligor approached its steep banks, they smelled a distinct saltiness carried upon the thick air.
 
   They peered down into the languorously flowing Acheron and both of them could see tiny forms, indistinct and writhing, in the thick water. An unaccountable, deep sadness filled them as their lungs filled with the mist-laden air that rose up and, after a moment, Sargatanas shook his great head and spun away. The gesture surprised Eligor, breaking the odd reverie that had fallen about him.
 
   They left the river and ascended the gradual rise to the projected city’s periphery where, standing assembled in a seemingly endless line twenty ranks deep, were countless souls. They were a miserable, deformed crowd, crying and trembling, as yet unaware of what was going to befall them. Sargatanas drew himself up, smoothing his robes as he walked toward them, deaf to the echoing pleas that filled the air. Eligor, too, ignored them, grown accustomed as he was, to the souls’ ways.
 
   They were the first arrivals, souls who had been sent as the vanguard of humanities’ effluvia, the damned. A steady stream of them had been arriving since shortly after the demons’ Fall and while he was repulsed and by them and their ways, Eligor found himself fascinated nonetheless. 
 
   Their appearance was as grotesque as their croaking chorus; they were as varied and individual as the capricious laws of the demons could create. Somewhere in Hell, somewhere Eligor would never visit, a veritable army of lesser demons had their way with the endless flood of souls as they entered the realm. Legless, headless, corkscrewed, folded, torn and pierced, each soul wore but the thinnest mask of mankind. No two were alike. And pushed, as if into gray clay by a giant’s hand, into each soul was a black sphere, heavy and dull. Sargatanas told Eligor that the Demons Major had fashioned these globes, filled with the essence of the souls’ transgressions to serve not only as reminders of their punishment, but also as a means for the demons’ control. Beyond that he did not say but Eligor marveled at the simplicity of it. As he and Sargatanas passed them, Eligor looked into their fog-white eyes and wondered what they knew, whether there was any remnant at all of their previous lives to be found in the gray husks.
 
   Sargatanas approached his new Architect General, greeting him warmly. The Demon Major Halphas, thin and flamboyantly spined was bedecked in layers of clacking, bone-ornamented robes while above his head blazed his new sigil, an elaborate device which now incorporated the sigil of his liege, Sargatanas’, as well. Halphas was smiling as his lord approached. Around him were a half dozen other demons, his assistants, each of whom looked at their lord with anticipatory pleasure.
 
   “My lord,” Halphas said dramatically, his smile revealing through his destroyed cheeks myriad tiny teeth, “we await but your command and the walls’ foundations will be laid.”
 
   Sargatanas examined the deep trench and took the maps from Halphas, comparing what he could see with the glyph-dense diagrams that appeared on the chart. He nodded and handed them over to Eligor who studied them briefly.
 
   “You have done a flawless job, Lord Halphas. It is obvious to me how much effort went into your careful plans. And I checked the city limits; they are just as I laid out without the slightest deviation. Excellent!”
 
   “Lord, I am pleased,” Halphas said modestly in his scratchy voice. “The Overseers only await your command.”  
 
   “We cannot begin soon enough,” said Sargatanas. He raised his faintly steaming hand and with a small gesture, a flick of his hand, created a simple fiery glyph that immediately fractured and sped off to the many attending demons. They, in their turn, dutifully produced their own glyphs that rose into the sky and these, flying along the outline of the wall, galvanized the distant demons who began the process of converting souls into bricks. The wailing grew in intensity but none of the demons paid it any attention. Conscious of their lord’s presence, they were too intent upon beginning the job at hand, as the wall’s foundation started to take form around them.
 
   Eligor watched in amazement; this was the first time he had witnessed any real construction in Hell. The techniques, he knew, where relatively untried. As each glittering glyph touched a selected soul upon its black sphere it would instantly transform from a solid globe into a thick, black liquid that flowed down into the ground. And even as the liquid began to pool the glyph’s true meaning impacted upon the soul, hammering it, compressing it into a brick, wringing out what little blood there might be and then sending it tumbling into position in the wall. Silencing its cries forever. And upon each brick, stamped in relief into its wrinkled surface, was the sigil of its lord, Sargatanas.  
 
   Black and oily Scourges, demon-tamed Abyssals that flapped their short wings and cracked their cranium-mounted whips, darted about keeping the quavering souls in line. Eligor loathed them but had to admit their effectiveness. Pressed closely together, the clay-colored souls reacted to the commencement of construction in various ways. Some collapsed, some knelt sobbing, while others, wide-eyed, looked stunned and seemed unable to move. Most stood and pleaded at the top of their voices while a few desperate individuals attempted to run, though Eligor, who was watching all this intently, could not imagine where they thought they would go. Time and again, he would watch the well-trained Scourges fly away in short pursuits, mindlessly flailing them until they collapsed. Once they were still, the souls were hooked and brought back to the trench’s edge. None ever escaped.
 
   The Overseers, arms out-stretched, repeatedly created their conversion-glyphs with such rapidity that the overall impression of the growing wall was one of a luminous ribbon of twinkling fire, a radiant necklace set upon the dark bosom of the Hell.
 
   The Overseers were, under Halphas’ able tutelage, extremely skilled; it took enormous concentration to create, size, and shape the bricks and set them in place quickly, and some of the demons openly competed with their neighbors, racing to complete their sections.
 
   The broad trench filled smoothly and efficiently. Huge gaps were left for the seven massive gates that would be built. Halphas’ calculations were perfection; Sargatanas had said many times that he thought him the best architect in Hell. As a raw material the souls were malleable and - best of all - plentiful. A hundred souls every foot created the beginnings of a wall twenty feet thick and ten feet high - nothing compared to what the finished wall would be, but a start nonetheless. 
 
   Eventually, as the numbers of standing souls diminished, the wailing tapered off to be replaced by the low moan of the hot winds. Algol was setting; the long day’s work was done. More souls would be collected, more wall would be created and eventually this moment would become nothing but a distant memory for demon and brick alike.
 
   When all was done for the day, Sargatanas walked along the fresh foundation for some distance, hands behind his back, inspecting the site. He was smiling broadly. His city would be built and this ceremony was its harbinger. His elation was unmistakable and Eligor and the others could not help but be swept up in it.
 

#

 
   Eligor watched with growing wonder and enthusiasm as Adamantinarx-upon-the-Acheron rose, layer by layer, like a dark, growing crystal from the fleshy ground. As a moon is to a sun, so was Adamantinarx to the cities of Heaven. Under the guiding hand of Sargatanas, the city’s planners did their best with the materials at hand to emulate the splendor of the Above. Eligor suspected that those similarities in architecture were born merely out of the desire of the demon-planners to live as they had, and not meant to be a cynical parody of a lost world. At times, as he walked the growing streets, Eligor felt at ease, even at home. But at other moments, moments when the memories of his former life came to him, the dark evocation made him sad.
 
    The great hunts that Sargatanas organized to rid the nearby Wastes of the Abyssal fauna and the Primordial natives would help cheer Eligor at these times. It was impossible for him to not share the wild exhilaration that everyone felt, charging through the chaotic landscape after the fearless wildlife and he would soon forget his sadness. The indigenous creatures of Hell posed a continuing threat to the construction of Adamantinarx and it was challenging, even to former angels, to run them down and destroy them.
 
   The city grew quickly and was populated just as quickly. There was no shortage of ready inhabitants. Hell, Eligor thought often, would never have a problem filling its cities. Soon not only demon workers, but demons of all description as well as gray, twisted souls by the hundreds of thousands strode the broad avenues dwarfed by the enormous buildings; the only requirement to existing within the city’s boundaries was fealty to Sargatanas’ bidding.
 
   And when Adamantinarx had grown for ten thousand years, the two demons had found themselves together, surveying the great city from one of its lofty towers. Eligor, in a moment of sincere enthusiasm, had turned to Sargatanas and said, “This exile, my lord, has not been nearly as grievous as we had, at first, thought. So much has been achieved!”
 
   Sargatanas looked at him and said, “But Eligor, this is only the beginning of the beginning.”
   Sargatanas’ voice, all harmonics and rumbles like the woody intake of some giant pipe-organ, had sounded sardonic. He had no reply for his lord. They had spent so much time in hell already. He would always look back at that small conversation as the moment when the enormity of their banishment - of their shared eternity - crystallized.
 
   Perhaps, Eligor had thought during this early period, this is why there is such frenetic building. Like beasts who groom themselves when confronted with the insoluble, the demons, confronted with the eternity of their damnation, built. What else could they do but attempt to make this place their own? If they had to live in this place forever, they would try to tame it first, make it their own. But he knew that Hell could not be brought to heel. It was a living place, a place with its own will.
 
   Sargatanas went about his tasks with a preternatural intensity that bordered on the obsessive. He never tired of directing the large and small matters of state. It was, Eligor guessed, his way of not thinking about the reality of their situation. He seemed, too, to be preoccupied with the affairs of his neighboring fiefdoms. His mentor from before the Fall, Lord Astaroth, bordered his largest ward and this pleased him. Astaroth was old, genial, perhaps a little inept in his governing and Sargatanas looked with some dismay at his old teacher’s failures. But, in those early days, he posed no threat to Sargatanas or his realm and peace reigned.
 
   Adamantinarx was not dissimilar, in its composition, from many of the cities of Hell; its flagstoned streets ran red with the blood of its souls, its soul-bricks sighed and blinked as one passed them and its countless low buildings groaned and shuddered like any others in any other infernal city. But it was also the least tortured of Hell’s cities and its underlying openness was due solely to Sargatanas’ will. Just as Hell’s capital, Dis, was a horrific reflection of its creator, Beelzebub, Adamantinarx seemed, to its demonic inhabitants, as tolerant as its lord. There was a difference, a nobility, to this demon. Eligor could see it, as could any who entered his court. When he laid the foundations, high atop the center mount, for his many-bastioned palace, Sargatanas consulted not only with Halphas but also with each of his chief underlings. Eligor saw how this openhandedness affected the court, how it served not only to bring together each demon, but also how it made them loyal to Sargatanas.
 
    During one such consultation, high atop the windswept crag, Sargatanas had convened a general meeting to discuss the number of tiers the palace would have. The hot, ember-laden wind whipped Halphas’ plans about, making it hard for all to see and Sargatanas bent down to gather a few rocks to anchor them. When he had arisen, a newcomer had joined the party, having climbed the steep ascent unseen by all. Eligor’s hand went to his sword as did a half dozen other demons’.
 
   “Do you not know me?” the shrouded figure asked, putting down a long, narrow box and looking directly at Sargatanas. A long, bony needle pierced the flesh of his hood, holding the heavy folds closed save for a gathered hole left for speech.
 
   Sargatanas was a full head and a half taller than all assembled. It was a habit of his, when confronted or challenged, to fold his arms and straighten up to his imposing full height. The bony plates of his face began to shift subtly while the flame that crowned him grew more brilliant. The gathered demons knew the signs when he grew impatient and each looked at one another with anticipatory relish.
 
   “How can I possibly know you, cloaked as you are? Your sigil is not lit.”
 
   “Surely you must remember me ... from before the Fall. My voice, at least, must be familiar.”
 
   And of course, Eligor thought, that was the most absurd thing he had heard in a very long time. No one’s voice had remained the same. The bells of the Above had left their throats long ago, burned away by the fire and the screams. The newcomer was playing a foolish, dangerous game.
 
  Nonetheless, there was something compelling about the words that made Sargatanas look more intently at the enigmatic figure. Sargatanas’ personal Art was to divine the hidden, but, strangely, in this case he seemed unable.
 
   “Draw aside your hood.” The rumble in his voice was unmistakable.
 
   “Perhaps - if you were to ask me in the Old Tongue...”
 
   “My old tongue is gone. Only this sharp one remains.”
 
   “Well then, perhaps your ears and eyes are as they were Above.” The figure slowly reached up with a skin-covered, gloved hand and withdrew the bone needle from his hood. “Micama! Adoianu Valefar!”
   “Valefar!” exclaimed Sargatanas and rushed to embrace him.
 
   Eligor and the others watched in wide-eyed astonishment as their lord released the Demon Major, the purest joy pouring forth from him. Here, Eligor knew, was his dearest friend from before the Fall, the loss of whom had been spoken of only briefly, and to only a select few, for all the long millennia. Valefar’s absence had been a great blow to Sargatanas, as if more than just his great heart had been torn from him by the victorious seraphim.
 
   “Where have you been all this time?”
 
   “I was in Dis,” Valefar said, dropping his chin. “I lingered there much longer than I would have liked. It is not an easy place to leave, once one enters.”
 
   Sargatanas put his clawed hand upon his friend’s shoulder. “Ah, Valefar, all that is behind you. You are here now and here you will stay.”
 
   Picking up the long, metal box, Valefar swung it easily over his shoulder, the charred plates of his face shifting into a broad grin.
 
   Together they descended the mount. As he passed, Sargatanas nodded to Halphas who began to roll the plans into a tube; the palace could wait.
 
   Eligor saw how Valefar’s arrival seemed to complete his lord. Though both figures were physically greatly transformed by the Fall, it was easy to see how they might have been before the great battle. Sargatanas’ carried his looming, flesh-cloaked form more lightly. And Valefar, who knew his somewhat secondary role perfectly, also knew exactly how to prize his lord away from his dark moods. His was a lighter spirit that seemed, to Eligor, totally out of place in Hell.