Somebody was up to no good that was certain. Crucifixion pointed to Yahweh and his people but they rarely came down this way. He had heard that a delegation from Yahweh was on its way to visit Satan but who knew what for. Wise demons did not involve themselves in the affairs of those so high up for when giants fought, midgets got trampled. The most likely bet was that one of the Dukes was making a power-play, trying to expand his influence over the netherworld at the expense of Chondrakerntolis’s Duke. Now that would make sense.
Something weird had been happening recently. The number of souls that had been arriving in hell had suddenly accelerated, rising by orders of magnitude. They’d been dispatched to the various regions of hell of course but at every level the numbers were being hidden so that their essence could be used by the lower-level demons instead of restricted to those of higher caste. Was that why Jarakeflaxis had been killed? Had one of the Dukes or Greater Demons found out that human life essence was being diverted and settled for that public punishment. But if it was an example, why was there no indication of what it was an example of?
That question so Chondrakerntolis that he never noticed the thin wire stretched across the pathway. His Beast saw it but the threat it represented didn’t register. The prime characteristic of a Beast was its unthinking ferocity, caution was not a desired attribute. As a result of their inattention, neither was quite aware of what happened next or the skill with which it had been planned. The wires were attached to push-pull detonators fixed to four claymore mines, placed so that their victim was the center of an X defined by the cones of cubical metal shrapnel they generated. The wires also tripped a timer switch on four one-kilogram blocks of Semtex that had been buried under the path’s surface.
Chondrakerntolis tried to make his brain work, he was surrounded by flying mud and dust, his body ripped by wounds that sprayed his green blood around. His Beast was down, its front legs and one of its claws torn off, it’s body broken and bleeding. Even as he watched, the path surface erupted, shredding the already-dying Beast and throwing its parts around. The connection was inevitable, whatever the reason for the death of Jarakeflaxis, he was also to be its victim.
The mud and mist stirred and three figures emerged. HUMANS!. Chondrakerntolis cudgeled his dying brain into absorbing this data. Humans had done this? How? They were cattle, prey to be milked of their life essence, nothing more. They had killed him? How?
A human female knelt beside him and he heard her voice. “Somebody told us you couldn’t be killed. Guess they were wrong huh?”
Chondrakerntolis tried to reply but couldn’t. As his vision faded out, one question tormented him. What happened to demons when they died?
Watch Tower, Banks of the Styx, Fifth Ring, Hell.
The thunder, strange and mysterious had echoed around the Fifth Ring. Naxalavorsetys looked over the rim of his tower, there wasn’t much to see, just the seething of the mud in which the humans spend eternity on the edge of drowning. Just to be sure, he fired off a flare, lighting the area around the tower a bit better. Still nothing. He shrugged, strange noises were not unknown in hell. It was nothing to worry about. His shift would be over soon and he could go back to his normal life. The regular legions were all being called away and the jobs of the guards were being taken over by civilians such as him. This was something that he did not like at all.
The second blast was very definitely something to worry about. It was stunningly close, Naxalavorsetys felt the superheated air blast at his skin, felt the shock-wave pummel him. More importantly, he felt his watch-tower lurch as a major portion of the stonework on one side was blown away. His tower was collapsing and he realized what that meant even though he couldn’t comprehend how it had been done.
It wasn’t the fall that killed Naxalavorsetys, it was the wreckage of the watch-tower landing on top of him that did the job.
A few minutes later the two three-human strike teams joined up and set off for the next target.
The Division Wall of the Sixth Ring, Hell
Kerflumpus always enjoyed stretching his legs, even if just to torture a few humans here and there. Now, he was marching out of the Sixth Ring into the Fifth he proudly threw out his chest and swung his arms. News had been all over about the crushing defeats inflicted on the insurgent humans, and his legion was mobilizing to move out and continue the pursuit of the shattered human nations, to spread out and batter their world into submission.
The prospect excited him. They said that the sky in the human world was different, that it was light and dark, instead of the dull orange-and-brown striation. Well, now he would get to see it – and to experience crushing the humans and driving them before him, to taste their panic, blood, and flesh, as a member of the second army to pour from the portal into the humans' plane.
Kerflumpus was in the second platoon of his legion; ahead and to his left, the commander, a Greater Demon, was swaying with the gait of his Great Beast as it stepped off the Styx bridge. Its arched tail curled over his head, and he was sitting in the saddle with a bored look on his face when, with a sigh, his head exploded. Kerflumpus caught it out of the corner of his eye, and swung around with horror, as every other demon in the unit did.
Suddenly, something similar happened to the demon next to him: there was a whistling sound, and then they were both staring in horror at the fist-sized hole that had opened up in his chest. Spattering green blood all over Kerflumpus, he staggered a few steps and fell over the parapet of the bridge into the slow-moving, murky Styx below. All across the bridge, it seemed that demons were falling at random every ten seconds or so, and the situation was proceeding nicely toward absolute pandemonium: the head of the legion was held up at the forward edge of the bridge by the dead commander, milling about with no idea what to do; the tail of the legion was crowding into the bridge with no idea what was going on. Meanwhile, the legion ahead of them was marching off along the road into the mists of the fifth ring, with no idea what was happening behind them.
There was obviously some wizardry at work here, heretofore unknown in hell. In sheer, undiluted panic, Kerflumpus charged his trident and loosed it off the bridge. He was watching the head-sized ball of magic zip across the river toward the far side when the air punched him, blanking out all sound as he was thrown up, spinning in midair. All around him, he saw other demons thrown up, some weakly flapping their vestigial wings; it was almost comical, and it was the last thing he saw before the masonry fragments and shrapnel shredded him.
Across the river, Lieutenant Kim whistled as the bridge blew. It was more spectacular than she'd expected; the initial flash of detonation was impossibly fast, and the blast wave ripped apart the bridge as though it were made of sand, sending Baldricks flying. She nodded back at McInery and Tarrant. “Good work placing the semtex, Mac and Bubbles.” The two were grinning ear-to-ear.
Behind them, two of the other three members of Tango-one-five were setting down the M107s. “Good shooting to you guys, too,” said Kim. It hadn't really taken much; the Baldricks had been tightly packed on the bridge, and all they'd had to do is fire into the crowd. The. 50 caliber Mk213 bullets had done a fabulous job. As usual.
After surveying the scene for few minutes and letting the two pilots – both avid big-game hunters before their units were called to Iraq – pick off a couple of more bad guys and the commander of the next brigade-sized unit, Kim hoisted a satchel of webbing onto her shoulder. It had about two dozen more bricks of Semtex, the detonators, and several boxes of ammunition. “Okay, boys. We're done here. Let's head out and get the next ambush set up.”