Okthuura Yal-Gjaknaath, Tartaruan Range, borderlands of Hell
Baroness Yulupki’s eyes were closed, her coils writhing with pain as she tried to force the chorus back into harmony. The ritual had started to go wrong as soon as the portal begun to form. Instead of a single unified psychic push, there was discord. The closest human sensation was ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’; the ritual needed pure chords, but some of the naga were holding the wrong notes. The situation had rapidly deteriorated as each naga tried to stay in ‘tune’ with her neighbors, magnifying the initial dissenting voices into a psychic cacophony.
“All of you, follow me!” Yulupki screamed, over the wails of her subordinates and the hissing of the lava. It was hard to know if the naga on the other platforms heard her, but telepathy was out of the question in this din. The effort had dried out the tips of her tentacles and the energy began to arc back to the surrounding flesh, charring the scales. To the naga it seemed that her body was on fire and her brain was being squeezed in a vice, but gathering strength she didn’t know she had, she made a final push to stabilize the portal. She was somewhat surprised to find it actually working. Her strong, clear stream of psychic energy stood out clearly in the haze and the other naga rallied around it.
“That’s it, hold it, a little longer!” Why hadn’t that damned gorgon opened the portal yet? She couldn’t keep this up, if the signal didn’t come in another minute they’d just have to…
The wash of feedback hit Yulupki like a brick wall. She collapsed onto her pallet, barely hanging on to consciousness. The raging psychic turmoil had been replaced by a numb calm. ‘No, that can’t be, oh no…’ Her pitiful cry rang with the anguish of a human whose eyes had just been torn out.
From her vantage point on the crater rim Euryale had been watching the ritual with mounting concern. She was not yet a participant, but she could sense the unbalanced forces and the resulting instability in the half-formed portal. At the same time, she could sense Megaaeraholrakni’s progress over the human city through the mental link with her handmaiden. That link had just dissolved into echoes of pain, confusion and panic before disappearing entirely. Mere seconds later, what could only be described as a psychic shockwave had rushed out from the centre of the crater. The gorgon could barely make out the great snakelike forms through the dense smoke and heat shimmer, but she could tell that nearly half the naga were down and the rest were thrashing and wailing. Behind them the shrines were breaking out in glowing red patches, as local hotspots began to melt the metal.
Euryale launched herself from the rocks, determined to save the ritual. She pushed questions of what had gone wrong and who would pay out of her mind. That could come later. Her wings billowed taut as they caught the strong thermal and she soared over the bubbling lava. The thick smoke stung the gorgons eye’s; she couldn’t see clearly, but the series of bright flashes and a tortured groan probably signaled the collapse of one of the shrines. She was right over the portal now and she could feel it swelling and ascending, pushed out of the volcano’s throat like a cork in a barrel.
It was the moment for Euryale’s own supreme effort. She put everything she had into a single release aimed directly down, hoping to slam the portal down into the lava in the same act as pushing it over the threshold for opening. For a split second the smoke seemed transparent, as the entire crater was lit up by a storm of dancing lightning. Then noise and motion returned and Euryale was falling, the air whistling through great burning rips in her wings. The lava below convulsed, dropping and splashing and throwing out great chunks of magma. Desperately she tried to ride the thermals clear of the maelstrom before she was swatted from the sky or consumed by the fire.
Chapter Fifty Eight
Heavengate, Hell
The stones upon which Shakoolapicanthus walked were smoothed from the guards' tread over dozens of millennia. He could almost see his reflection in them, he thought, as he continued pacing along the top of the defensive wall.
The wall – it was massive, the work of millennia. It had been built, at first, of mounded earth, but the earthworks had long been replaced with huge blocks of granite. Fifty times the height of the tallest Dukes, the huge loop towered above the surrounding foothills. A human looking down on it from the air would have thought it looked nothing more than a giant tire sticking out of the ground. The outer face sloped gently down toward the plain, crisscrossed with trenches and ringed with smaller fortifications, parallel to the main wall. The inner face sloped sharply down toward the large inner ring. It was faced with granite, polished by the sweat and blood of thousands of lesser demons and enslaved humans to gleam in the dull, striated light.
Faced entirely with polished granite, that is, save for a small staircase almost too narrow for the scrawniest demons to walk down. That staircase was joined to the ramparts at the top of the wall by a small, nondescript crenelation, which Shakoolapicanthus found himself approaching for the twentieth time since his shift had begun. This was the final circuit, and he was ready to be done with his portion of the guard duties. There was just one task that remained.
He passed the standing guard, taken from Satan’s personal legions. They stood fifty feet apart all around the wall for the duration of their shifts, staring impassively down at the large building in center of the wall's inner ring – and stepped backwards down onto the staircase, as though he were climbing a ladder. The steps were also smoothed by continual travel, but far rougher than the smooth stone to either side. For a moment, he contemplated what a rush up that wall would be like, then shuddered at the thought of even trying, let alone in the face of tridents raining down magic on the attackers. This was a unique fortress, designed to keep attackers in, not out.
At the bottom of the wall, he straightened and turned around. The building was before him, towering over him even as it was dwarfed by the ringing wall; a giant demon-made mountain of stone, is what it was. A ring of demons stood guard about it, and twenty were orderly clustered about the only entrance, staring at it as though it were a poisonous snake about to bite them. Shakoolapicanthus stopped before them and said, “I am entering the Gateway.”
The demon in charge of the guard challenged him in the ritual. “Who are you to enter the Gateway?”
“I am Shakoolapicanthus, a captain of the Guard. I see that all is well within.”
“Shakoolapicanthus, a captain of the Guard, I will permit you to enter the Gateway. Bring word of the inner guard.”
Shakoolapicanthus nodded, the demons before him parted, and he stooped as the guard raised the iron portcullis. As he passed beneath it, he shivered; the feel of iron nearby always made his back crawl. It was the only place in all of Hell where iron had a use; it was rumored that the gate's construction had cost the lives of fifty demons, and that a thousand naga had enchanted it with the strongest spells imaginable.
The iron behind him, he made his way forward through the low, twisting passageway on his hands and knees. It was uncomfortable, and certainly made walking impossible for even the lowliest demons or angels. The stone around him seemed to weigh down on him, to close in on him.
Never too soon, the inner sanctum approached and the passage widened. The first thing that tipped him off was the stench of blood. He rolled his eyes – Again. The two sides sometimes made points by bursting into the realm of the other and slaughtering the guards before dropping back to the relative safety of their own homes. Once, the raiding parties had encountered each other; it had taken two centuries to alleviate the tensions from the resulting bloodbath. Another consequence of the raiding was that only the lowliest, unluckiest demons were chosen to be the inner sanctum guards; Shakoolapicanthus speculated that the same was true of the other side.