They found another pile of skulls only a minute from the first. It, too, was surrounded by burning bushes. They pushed past it and onward to another pile of skulls, bigger than the first. Two dozen starving souls circled it, performing the same task.
“Where is the master?” Adron asked a soul.
They spared only long enough to point in the general direction the group had already been moving, before they lifted what had to be a brute skull back onto the pile.
Adron shrugged and gestured to Vin and Julisa. The two big demons took the lead again and pushed on through the swirling shadows.
More heavy rumbles continued, flowing in the same cadence but growing ever louder as the group came closer to whatever awaited them. If it was the master making the sound, that wasn’t good. It couldn’t have been an unmarked, making a noise like that. But someone who could touch the strings had pulled them down under the swamp, so who or what was it?
“Look,” Faust said, and nodded to the side. Another tunnel. Same on the other side of the cavern, an opening showing another tunnel. “Looks like all the tunnels lead here.”
All roads lead to Rome.
The next pile of skulls drew them all to a stop. It was bigger than all the previous piles combined. Hundred of souls knelt around it, some bowing and worshiping, others working in the light of the burning bushes to keep the pile from collapsing. A never ending effort to stack the skulls higher, from shaky hands and arms of skin and bone. Each soul was numbered 666, and each soul looked on the brink of death.
Remnants grew nearby. The group hadn’t run into any for a while, but down here in the maze of pillars, remnants half crawled up from the ground. They were quiet. With broken fingernails and shattered teeth, they clawed and bit at the rock they grew from, but none of them screamed.
The darkness boomed. “Come forth,” it said, and Mia squeaked. With all the rumbling bass of an avalanche, the sound vibrated through her skull, and she took a step back and clutched her egg.
The skulls rolled down their pile, and the souls, even the worshiping ones, pushed themselves back to their feet and resumed their task. Skulls on skulls.
The voice had said come forth. Mia’s demons looked at her, and she shrugged and looked back at them. What else could they do but go forth?
“Um, where is forth?” she asked.
“The visitor’s chair before you. Climb.”
She gulped. Visitor’s chair? There was no chair. There was only the pile of skulls.
Growling, Vin stepped aside and motioned to the pile. He looked angry. Did he know what the fuck was going on? Julisa turned, too, but she looked just as confused as everyone else.
Apparently, only Mia felt absolutely terrified, because Adron, Kas, and the incubi looked more curious than anything. They gazed around in the darkness, trying to spot things in the black where the flickering firelight couldn’t reach, while Mia couldn’t stop staring at the skulls some disembodied, booming voice had just asked her to climb.
She squinted up past the skulls, at the black above. Something moved up there, but the burning bushes were too bright. Like trying to see into a dark forest at night while sitting around a bonfire.
“Adron,” she said. “Take the egg.”
Adron took the egg without a word, the sling too.
Deep breaths. Don’t panic. Panic accomplished nothing. They were trapped underground, pulled down by this thing, and if they didn’t play ball, there was a good chance they weren’t getting out alive.
Or maybe it was all smoke and mirrors? Maybe whatever this thing was, this master, they weren’t a threat? Maybe… No. It, or he, was literally being worshiped by a host of betrayers. It wasn’t a trick.
Mia climbed. The skulls didn’t cooperate. Her sandals sent more skulls sliding down the wall of white bone, and the souls below slowly but surely put them back, some reaching high, some working from the bottom. None of them looked at Mia. None of them frowned. With empty expressions, the dying piled the skulls. How’d they pile them so high?
So very high. Mia climbed. Some skulls were lodged in place and made good anchors. More were not, and the pile disagreed with every second step and pulled out from under her. But she climbed. She loved climbing, and she was light, but every meter she made pulled her stomach out through her throat. Soon she was higher than Julisa. Soon higher than Vinicius. The pile was far wider than it’d seemed at first, the burning bushes unable to illuminate its proportions.
It wasn’t a pile of skulls. It was a small hill of skulls. Millions. Maybe tens of millions of skulls.
She climbed.
Panting, she stopped at the top. Standing was impossible, each skull twisting and rolling underneath her. She sat, spread her weight out on her butt and legs, and looked back down below her. Ten meters high? Twenty? How the hell had the souls piled the skulls up this high? How–
Movement in the darkness shut up her, and she sucked in a breath.
“So it is true,” the darkness said. It was roundish, whatever it was, and it shifted slightly like something alive might, but the details were lost in shadow. The light of the burning bushes couldn’t reach it. “The unmarked have come.”
“I… um… yeah.” Gulping, she tried to stand again. No good. Without wings and a tail for balance, no human was standing on an unstable pile of spheres. “I don’t understand. Who are you? Did you pull us under the swamp?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
“A plot has begun, and I had to make sure. Chaos reigns above. Angels swarm on orders from a broken council, and the invader has penetrated the cracks of this Great Tower. I had to know.”
Oh god oh god oh god.
“Who… Who are you?”
The rounding shape came closer, and closer, and closer. A head? It had spikes on it, like a demon, but it looked so… fucked up. Shoulders were connected to it, and a torso, but the shape of what had to be a face looked malformed.
It came closer, and Mia lost all sense of scale as it brought in the side of its head to her. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness, the burning bushes below and out of sight, and she squinted at the entity.
Almost half of its face was missing, but otherwise, it did look like a demon. It had a snout, and red and black eyes, and horns, but the similarities ended there. It had multiple rows of teeth, but not like a shark. It was like it had one mouth on top of the other. It had six eyes, and that was on the side of the head she could actually see, the side that was missing enormous chunks, as if something had clawed them off.
A single eye was as big as her whole body.
“I am Asmodeus.” He spoke slowly, the act of moving his lips an effort unto itself.
Ice ran through her veins. Asmodeus. One of the names she’d read in Lucifer’s book, back at the Death’s Grip spire.
“One of the Old Ones.” She stared, and her eyes drifted down from its head over its body. Most of its form was hidden in a lake of black shadow, but hints of it were visible. It wasn’t just the face the creature was missing a chunk of. Its mangled body sat in a pit, deeper and wider than the cavern where Mia and the other demons waited. They’d traveled a tunnel, and the piles of skulls were just… decorations along the path that connected to the main chamber. A chamber big enough to hold fucking Godzilla.