Chapter 65: Tartaromachy

 

I looked up and shook my head. My shroud was on the ground in front of me. I put it on, wincing with every move. I couldn't see. I took off my shroud, propped myself up with one arm, held up my shroud, let the blood drip off the rings, then put it back on. I scanned around me; saw Turk holding his leg, saw Abdiel stand and stretch his wings, saw the massive tear in the ground, like a canyon, and saw Pandemonium twisted and bent, laying on its side like a python dragged out of its hole by a sarchus. Then I saw the gryphon wheeling overhead, its wings ablaze from the glow of its mangonels and ballistas. The Angels were all gathered around outside their reavers. Many of the reavers were scorched from battle, and the face of Pandemonium was never viewed by my eyes, for the reavers had mangled it while they dragged it from the earth. It seemed that Regis was in an even greater hurry than Blitzkrieg to consummate. As an afterthought, I searched for Belial, but saw no sign of him, though he could have been any one of the oil stains drenching the ground around Pandemonium.

I rose to my feet, seeing that both had been shod, and saw that Turk's leg was bound with a tourniquet. Qatar was there, and a few of the giants, and to my great joy so was Tall Mountains Call. I did not see Goro or any other of the conscripts or Cataphracts. There was no sign of the Devils, not even Patches. I strained to think, and remembered a few flashes. Belial congealed and lifted his head in the air, and before it sagged over onto the ground, he managed to wrap his tongue around Turk's thigh.

There was a clamour from within Pandemonium's wreckage. I turned. We all turned. But he moved too fast. For such a hulk, how could he move so fast? He had his helmet on, a ghastly thing, coated with a shifting paint that made the faces on it look alive. He was on us before anyone could react, lifting Abdiel in the air by his wings and tearing them from his body. Abdiel might have cried out, had he not fainted. The soil beneath him drank red wine.

Regis was on Blitzkrieg then, and I'd never seen a creature rage like the army chief of the Chalcedony order. Tendrils of blue light sprouted from his back as he roared his battle cry, and he hovered over the ground, the dirt beneath his feet rising and holding till he'd passed. He had a blazing sword in one hand and a whip of lightning in the other, which he wrapped around Blitzkrieg's ankle with masculine command. There was a rush of wind before Regis took off with his trophy, and after they rose the Devils emerged, firing their terrible keening cannons and flame spouters and chakrams and incendiary bolts and chain dervishes. They mounted a huge gastraphetes to a turret, hurled molten bombs that rained liquid flame, and when it seemed no new weapons could be fielded, they summoned the remnant of Warcloud, though it was swollen and sluggish from having recently fed.

The Angles all rose in the air and nocked bows of pure light. They loosed their glowing shafts, meeting Warcloud with a wall of photons that cut the parasites down, then fired a barrage at the Devils, greatly thinning their ranks before closing in. It seemed the Devils wanted to lash out in anger, while the Angels wanted a sporting fight. There were losses on both sides, as both fielded dreadful weapons, but the Devils were already diminished, and their mechanized cleavers and saws were far outclassed by light bearing swords and polearms of the Angels.

I cut a length off my tabard with my knife and managed to suffocate the flames licking at Abdiel's clothes. I wanted to save Qatar as well, but she had been bathed in napalm, and by the time I even reached her she would have been dead, so I shrugged away the cruelty of triage and watched the battle in the sky. 

They had risen high, but I could see the light of their weapons in the darkness, clashing and shooting and bursting. The gryphon shone floodlights upward as it circled beneath them, and then I could see more than the lightning and fire they hurled at each other. Blitzkrieg was free of Regis's whip now, and tread the sky on jets of red flame. Now and then he would turn and blast one of Regis's blue tendrils with it, causing the Angel to drop, but always a new tendril would sprout, and then Regis would strike with his sword, or his whip, or summon a charged burst from the air around Blitzkrieg. A few times I saw Regis fire a volley of small missiles from his forearm, and Blitzkrieg produced a whip of his own that seemed to chip at Regis's armor when he landed a blow. In the end they were clutching at each other's throats, and I saw bursts of red or blue light whenever one would hit the other with his fist. Then there was a shattering of glass so loud that we on the ground could hear it, and Blitzkrieg fell like a meteor.

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