Chapter 202: The War 1

Luceriel

The barrier held, and Luceriel had expected nothing less.

He stood at the edge of the upper terrace with the wind dragging at the emerald silk of his wedding robe, the phoenix clasp still pinned in his hair, and looked down at the Demon King the way he might look at a stain on a marble floor.

Four centuries sealed beneath the earth, and Draca still stood like a man waiting for applause. He had lifted Kaevian’s borrowed face toward the barrier with an expression of genuine surprise, as though the world had been rude to him personally.

Luceriel found that he enjoyed it very much.

"Luceriel." Elios stood two paces behind him, with Solmira at his side, both of them glowing faintly gold in the grey light. "We are ready."

"I did not ask whether you were ready," Luceriel said without turning. "I told you where to stand. Stand there, lend me what I require when I require it, and do not speak to me again unless something is on fire."

Solmira’s mouth tightened. She said nothing, which was the wisest thing he had ever seen a deity of Elysium do.

At the base of his skull, the bond stirred.

It still felt foreign, that second presence folded against his own, warm and dark and entirely too pleased with itself. He had lived his whole life inside a mind that belonged to him alone. Now there was a door in it, and a demon leaning against the frame.

Whenever you are ready, husband.

Luceriel closed his eyes for one second. Do not call me that inside my own head.

Where else would you like me to call it? Out loud? I am on the north tower. I would have to shout.

Pazuzu.

Yes, my love. Feeding you now.

The power arrived before Luceriel had finished drawing breath, and it did not feel like help.

It felt like a river being forced through a channel carved for a stream. It came in dark and hot and tasted faintly of smoke and iron, and it poured into the cracked places of his core that the curse had eaten over long months, filling them, sealing them, until for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, nothing inside him hurt.

He opened his eyes, and they were burning green.

Luceriel raised his right hand, palm out, toward the figure standing in the dust below, and spoke in the oldest tongue he knew, the one the heavens had used before they learned to lie.

"Aeth’ura sol vaelen. Oruth miren, oruth kael."

(Hours of the first dawn, kneel. Kneel where I stand, and stay knelt.)

The words left him as light.

Rings of emerald script unfolded in the air around Draca, one within the next within the next, like the faces of a great clock nested inside themselves. They turned once, grinding, every character along their edges blazing, and then they stopped.

So did Draca.

His laugh ended halfway out of his mouth. The dust drifting around his shoulders hung in the air like motes caught in amber.

A strand of Kaevian’s hair that had been lifting in the wind stayed lifted, curled in place, perfectly still.

Behind Luceriel, Solmira and Elios lifted their hands, and thin threads of divine gold wove themselves through the emerald rings, reinforcing each character one by one.

Luceriel felt the weight of the hold ease by a fraction and despised himself for being grateful.

"Go," he said, and his voice carried down across the terraces without any demon’s trick to help it. "The clock is running. I will not wait for any of you."

His brothers moved.

---

Uriel went first, which Luceriel would never in his life have predicted.

The Sin of Sloth walked to the lip of the flood aqueduct with his hands in his sleeves and an expression of mild inconvenience, as though someone had asked him to fetch a cup of tea from the far side of the palace.

The first lord was already charging him, a massive figure wearing the body of an old soldier whose armor still bore the rusted crest of some kingdom that had fallen before Verolona was built.

Uriel yawned.

Then he lifted one finger and murmured, almost too softly to hear, "Selune dor, ahl vessa. (Wake, and remember you are heavy.)"

The aqueduct rose.

It came out of its stone channel like a sleeping beast lifting its head, a wall of grey water taller than the terrace walls, and it did not crash.

It simply fell over the lord, slow and deliberate and inescapable, the way sleep falls over a man who has fought it too long. The borrowed body went under and did not come back up.

Something tried to crawl out of it instead. A smear of red-black light, the lord’s true essence, tearing free of the drowned corpse and streaking upward toward the rift.

Taizel was waiting.

The Sin of Gluttony stood on the far bank with his mouth slightly open, and when he spoke, his voice had lost all of its lazy sweetness.

"Hael morun. (Nothing leaves my table.)"

The fleeing light bent in midair as though a hand had closed around it, and then it was pulled, screaming without sound, straight down into Taizel’s open palm. He closed his fist. He swallowed once, visibly, and wiped the corner of his mouth with his thumb.

"Bitter," he remarked. "Far too old."

Luceriel felt the anchor break.

It traveled up through the time lock like a shudder running up a rope, and in the frozen figure below, a thin black crack opened across Kaevian’s left cheek, from the corner of the eye to the jaw. Draca did not move. But his eyes did.

They rolled slowly upward in their frozen sockets and found Luceriel on the terrace.

And the serpent, which Luceriel had not frozen, because the serpent had never been part of the plan, uncoiled.

It was far larger than the vision had shown. Two heads, black-scaled and wide as carriages, rising out of the dust on two long necks that seemed to have no end.

One head turned toward Seraphel’s wards, where the mortal still stood pressed against the inner layer.

The other turned toward the upper terrace.

When it opened its jaws, Draca’s voice came out of them.

"Ah," said the serpent. "The proud one. The one who dies on his knees in the dirt."

Elios took a step backward. Luceriel did not.

"You are thinking of a different version of me," he said. "That one had not yet been introduced to you properly."

The head struck.

Luceriel did not freeze it. Holding one target was the entire discipline of the plan, and he would not break it for an overgrown worm. Instead he lowered his left hand, flicked two fingers toward the descending jaws, and spoke with the particular contempt he reserved for things that should have died long ago.

"Veshan oruth. Tel’maris, tel’maris. (Let the years you owe come due. All of them. At once.)’’

The serpent’s head reached him already old.

Its scales went grey mid-strike, then white, then began to flake away like ash from a burnt page. Its fangs yellowed and cracked and fell from its gums one by one. Its eyes clouded over into milk.

By the time the jaws reached the lip of the terrace they no longer had the strength to close, and the whole enormous skull struck the flagstones at his feet and crumbled into a heap of bone dust and brittle skin that the wind immediately began carrying away.

"You spent four centuries sealed away," Luceriel told what was left of it. "I thought you might like them back."

Behind him, he heard Solmira let out a breath that was very nearly a laugh.

The second head was already moving toward the wards.

Luceriel turned, and something fell out of the sky between the serpent and Seraphel.

He had seen Pazuzu fight before. He had been pinned to bookshelves and walls by him, had crossed blades with him in the dark, had watched him hold a god of Elysium by the throat with one hand while looking faintly bored. He had believed, somewhat smugly, that he understood what he had married.

He had understood nothing.

Pazuzu landed on the terrace below with his black wings spread wide and his violet hair blown back from his face, and he was not smiling.

That was the first thing Luceriel noticed, and it frightened him more than anything that followed. The purple gems at his ears had begun to glow. His eyes had gone entirely dark, violet swallowing the whites, and two slender black horns had risen from his brow that Luceriel had never once seen before, curving back through his hair like a crown he had simply been choosing not to wear.

Vaelith coiled around his shoulders, both violet heads raised and hissing.

The serpent’s remaining head reared back to strike, and Pazuzu lifted one hand toward it and spoke in a language that made the stones beneath Luceriel’s feet go cold.

"Kaar’meth ul’vashti. Nehru abaddon, nehru sael."

Luceriel knew only a few words of the abyssal tongue. He knew enough to understand it.

’’Open, ninth throat. Remember what you once swallowed, and swallow it again.’’

The ground beneath the serpent opened.

It was not a pit. A pit has a bottom. This was a darkness so complete that the grey light seemed to bend toward it and vanish at the edges, and out of that darkness came hands, dozens of them, long-fingered and black and far too many-jointed, closing around the serpent’s neck and jaw and throat. The serpent screamed with Draca’s voice. The hands did not care. They pulled, slowly and without effort, and the head went down into the dark inch by inch, thrashing, until the last of its scales disappeared and the ground closed over it like water closing over a stone.

Silence followed.

Pazuzu lowered his hand. He looked up toward the upper terrace, and for one heartbeat his eyes met Luceriel’s across the whole of that distance, entirely black and entirely inhuman.

Then he winked.

You are staring, husband.

Luceriel realized his lips had parted. He shut them. I was assessing.

Of course you were. Keep holding him, darling. You are doing beautifully.

I do not require your commentary.

No, Pazuzu agreed, and there was something warm under the word, something that made Luceriel’s chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with the spell. But you have it anyway.

Then he was gone, wings beating, back toward the north tower, and the river of power running through the bond did not falter for even a second.