Ruled by Steel (The Ascension Series #3) (25 page)

Ace drew her toward the right side of the tunnel, claws clicking as he stepped over the tracks.

“What is it?” Elise asked, thrusting the lamp over his head.

The light gleamed on the ridged floor but cut off abruptly a foot ahead of her, dropping off into an open pit so steep and dark that her lantern couldn’t begin to penetrate it. Elise’s eyes were good without light, but not
that
good. It was impossible to see the floor below.

She hurled a loose rock into the darkness.

After a long moment of silence, she heard the rock hit. Judging by the length of time it took the sound to echo back to her, she guessed that the nearest wall had to be a few thousand feet away. Large, but not endless.

A weak breeze stirred around her, cooling the air a few degrees and making the deeper tunnels groan again. Was there another way out through that pit? An airshaft, an emergency exit, a crack in the mountain?

She found something that resembled an elevator a few feet farther along the edge of the pit—though it was little more than a platform with low railings. From the look of the chain, it needed to be manually operated. She let Ace on before joining him, closing the swinging gate behind them. She hung the lantern on the railing and took hold of the chain.

Elise loosened the chain, and they dropped slowly toward the floor of the cavern.

It was a long way down. They squealed along slowly, inch by inch, as she unspooled more of the chain. Her enlarged shadow was projected on the wall beside them.

As soon as they hit the floor, Ace jumped off of the elevator and darted into the darkness. She had to jog to keep pace with him.

There were metal plates stacked along the wall, each several inches thick and twenty feet wide. They looked like they were meant to connect to each other like puzzle pieces. What could Abraxas have wanted with the plates? A road? A platform? A bridge? She could only guess.

Elise put a hand over the torch to dim it and let her eyes adjust. From the bottom of the pit, she could see that the cavern was at least large enough that it could have devoured a city block with room left over. An empty basin occupied the center, blackened by scorch marks. Small gargoyles lined either side of it at regular intervals. The style of carving on the sculptures seemed primitive—not an emulation of medieval or Renaissance art as she had often seen in the City of Dis, but something that predated that.

The only way through the room was to pass through the basin. The other sides were filled with razor-sharp igneous cones, as if waiting to bite anyone who tried to cross.

Ace trotted toward the basin, sniffing the air. He set a paw on the first step.

Stone groaned. The floor sank under him.

Something began grinding in the walls.

Elise reacted on instinct. She leaped for Ace, grabbing him around the midsection and hauling him off of the step just in time for magma to gush out of the furious faces of the gargoyles. It splattered over the basin and stairs—exactly where Ace had been standing.

She hauled him back as he thrashed and snapped, growling like a demon himself. His muzzle battered uselessly against her arm as he tried to bite.

“Sorry, you ungrateful mutt,” Elise said, dropping him.

She had scared him with the sudden touch. He backed up to the wall, hackles raised. His snarl sounded like an accusation.

The basin was a trap—the gargoyles were still pouring magma over the floor, quickly pooling into a scorching lake that reeked of rotten eggs. The brightness of it made Elise’s eyes ache. The hairs on the back of her arms curled at the proximity, and she backed up a few feet, keeping her distance from Ace so that he wouldn’t think she was going to grab him again.

“Guess that’s what the metal plates are for,” she muttered. The fiends had been using them as a way across the lake of magma.

Why the fuck was there a lake of magma in Abraxas’s mine, anyway?

She didn’t need to build a bridge to cross to the other side. She phased into shadow, wrapped herself around Ace, and jumped them across to the other side. His ears were flat to his skull when they landed, and he slunk away from her with his tail between his legs. He was not thrilled by the transport.

“Deal with it,” Elise said again to his retreating posterior. “I could have just let you burn, you know.”

The look he gave her was almost sullen.

The opposite end of the magma lake led to several tunnels, all of which were dark. The fiends had painted the floors in front of them. Elise stepped up to read what they had written.

Their clumsy handwriting was barely legible. The one on the left said that it was a dead end, leading to impenetrable bedrock. The center tunnel said something about roads. But the third was the most interesting. All it said was “temple,” and then, below that, “caution.”

“This was never meant to be a mine,” Elise said. Ace wasn’t interested in her observation.

He followed her down the tunnel toward the temple.

Remembering the pressure plate that had activated the gargoyles, Elise kept an eye on the ground as they walked. There were more sculptures mounted on the wall of the tunnel. Their open mouths were filled with gaping darkness through which Elise could smell brimstone.

Once she knew what she was looking for, the traps were easy enough to avoid. She just had to walk around the offset stones. She guided Ace with a hand on his collar, too, which he just barely tolerated. They had to move slowly, using the few feet of light that the lamp gave them to spot the triggers—of which there were many.

Someone
really
hadn’t wanted people going down this tunnel.

Elise was thinking about turning back when the tunnel began to widen again, turning into a second, smaller cavern.

Her torchlight glinted off of a tall figure that stood in the center of the cavern, glistening and white.

She froze, waiting to see if it would move. It didn’t.

When she drew closer, she began to make out details. It looked very much like the statue of the three people that was in Abraxas’s cathedral on the surface, except that the faces weren’t broken off on this one. All eight of Yatam’s arms were intact. His delicately carved features were beautiful, but much more square than she remembered—Yatam had possessed an almost feminine beauty, difficult to distinguish from his twin sister’s.

In fact, the longer that Elise looked at it, the more she thought that it wasn’t meant to be Yatam at all. She had never seen him depicted with a serpent’s tail before. This statue had a forked tongue protruding from his lips, wide eyes set on either side of his head, and a flat nose. The only resemblance was the long hair sculpted to make it look like it was blowing back from his face.

Elise climbed onto the base of the statue, lifting the lamp to get a better look. The angel wasn’t Metaraon, either. It was a woman. She had a strong jaw, a sword held loosely at her side, and a missing wing. The absent wing was deliberate, not damage to the statue itself. When Elise leaned around the angel, she could see the care that had been taken in rendering the stump.

And the human wasn’t Teleklos, either. It was another woman. A
mortal
woman.

It was the same statue as the one in the temple above—but it was not the same three people that Elise expected to find.

“Who are you?” she whispered.

A warm, dry breeze whistled down the cavern, coming from the opposite direction of the other entrance. When it died, Elise realized she could hear faint movement echoing through the tunnel. Ace snuffled through the muzzle.

They weren’t alone.

She kneeled beside Ace. “I’m letting you go. Don’t bite me.” Elise unhooked his muzzle. He tore off into the darkness, leaving her standing with the basket in her hand.

Elise followed the sound of his clicking nails. The cavern’s rear tunnel intersected with one of the other paths—she could tell, because they had painted “road” on the junction, too—and the noise was coming from up ahead.

Red light filled the tunnel as it sloped upward. It grew steeper. Elise almost had to crawl to reach the top.

She stepped into open air in a small valley of rock. There was no way to tell which way Ace had gone—he had already run off. She wasn’t worried about it. He knew who had the bottle of water.

Elise climbed to the top of the valley opposite the tunnel’s exit. There was a large pile of black rock against the cliff, as though there had been a recent landslide, but it didn’t block her view into the wastelands.

The supposed mine behind Abraxas’s house had cut straight through Mount Anathema and opened into the desert beyond. It was different from the wastelands to the east; there were no gaping wounds in the earth here, no fiery pits emanating the screams of the damned. It was high desert caught between two mountain ranges. There was low, brittle scrub bush the color of blood-flushed meat, and iron trees with bare branches that looked like claws raking at the sky.

And there was also an army encampment.

Her breath caught in her throat as her eyes swept over the gathered legions. This was where many of the city’s inhabitants had gone—they had gathered behind the mountains, out of sight from the fissure, where any brave invaders wouldn’t be able to find them. Many were already organized into lines that marched toward the city through the mountains. That had to be the slowest route. It would take days to reach the Palace and its bridge like that.

But another, smaller line was moving in her direction. They were going to take the pass under the mountains.

With an unpleasant jolt, she realized that they were going to enter the city through the House of Abraxas.

She needed to get back.

Elise turned to look for Ace…and the mountain
moved
. She took a step back from the cliff, staring hard at the pile of rocks that had slid from above. It moved again, unfolding an arm from underneath its body, and then a leg.

She wasn’t standing next to a huge pile of rocks after all. She was standing next to a demon as big as the cliff itself.

Since she hadn’t been looking for something that big, it hadn’t occurred to her to look for enlarged features. But when two spheres bigger than her head exposed themselves, she realized that they were eyes. Then she saw the flat nose, the slit of the mouth that was nearly the size of the cave’s opening.

The demon sat upright. He made the ground shake when he moved. His cloven hooves were as tall as Elise, his legs furred, his wings vast enough to blot out the sky.

Elise remembered those hooves and wings. She had seen them when he tried to force his way through a portal to Hell in Northgate.

It was Aquiel, the Prince of Nightmares.

“Looking for me?” he asked. His voice was the rumbling bass of an army marching across the wastelands, thousands of feet pounding against stone. His accent was refined. It was like listening to the mountain speaking the infernal tongue.

Elise held her ground, fists at her side, as she lifted her chin to meet his gaze. He may have been a
very
big demon, but he was still just a demon.

“Actually, I was looking for Belphegor. Seen him?”

“Not since this morning,” Aquiel said, eyes narrowing to red slits. “I sent him to visit with you, Godslayer. He should be outside your gates at any moment.”

He recognized her. He knew that she had taken the House of Abraxas.

And he had sent Belphegor to attack while she was gone.

Shit.

Elise began backing down the rocks, putting the breeze through the tunnel behind her so that she could follow it down. She didn’t dare turn from him.

Aquiel stood. The sweep of his wings blasted dust into her face. She coughed and waved a hand in front of her face. “For the Prince of Nightmares, you don’t look much like your people.”

“You’re confused,” Aquiel said with a dark smile. “I was not made the Prince of Nightmares because I am a nightmare, but because of my ability to control them. I sense that you are like them. You have the ichor within you, the ability to phase. Your abilities are within my control, Godslayer. You can’t begin to fathom what a mistake you’ve made in coming here.”

Elise moved to rip off a glove. Spells that could kill Belphegor might also be able to kill Aquiel, who was bigger but not necessarily tougher.

But before she could peel the glove higher than the heel of her palm, Aquiel reached for her.

His fist closed on her midsection. Elise tried to turn incorporeal to jump out of his grip—but couldn’t. Her eyes widened.

Aquiel’s booming laugh shook down his arm. “I am Prince of Nightmares, and you are nothing but a bottom feeder.” His breath blasted her hair back. Sputum flung from his bottom lip and splattered on her neck, hot and wet.

“I have the blood of the Father,” she grunted, kicking at his wrist, squeezing her arms in his grip, trying to loosen just an inch of wiggle room.

“No father of mine. He may have fucked and birthed half of Dis, but I come from depths far beyond his seed.”

She was off the ground, legs dangling. Aquiel lifted her toward his mouth. A painting flashed through her mind—the image of Jupiter, a vicious god, ripping his children apart with his teeth. Aquiel’s maw was massive. She was no child, but he could easily bite her in half if he wanted.

Her fingers closed around the cold, hard butt of the pistol.

Elise squirmed an arm free and brought the gun with it.

His tongue slithered over her shoulder. Elise grimaced. She could barely breathe through his stinking breath, could see nothing but the back of his mouth and the path of jagged fangs between them, the bloody muscle of his tongue.

Elise lifted the gun. She didn’t have a chance to aim. She pointed her arm into his mouth and fired.

The bullet hit his upper lip, leaving a pinprick that oozed blood. It didn’t stop him from trying to push her into his mouth.

Elise fired again and again, bracing one foot against his lower jaw and the other on his upper teeth. The shots seemed to vanish into his stomach. She pressed with all of the strength she could gather in her thighs, fighting against the pressure of his hand and arm. Aquiel was laughing, like it was funny for his food to fight against being eaten.