Gord knew instinctively what he had to do. "Go!" he said aloud to the dark blade as if it were a living entity. "Seek the demons out — spare none!" As he uttered that command, Gord willed the weapon to arrow toward the monstrous pack that still came ahead. Many of the demon-beasts had escaped the effects of the kanteel's music, and these things still thundered on, bent on devouring him and his companion.
The sable-hued sword sped out as if it were a bolt. Straight through the leading behemoth it shot, passing through the demon-beast from front to rear. The thing shrieked in agony at the passage, gouts of gore fountained from it, and it collapsed into putrid jelly an instant later. That was hardly the end of it, however. The long blade arced and spun in the foul atmosphere of the uppermost layer of the Abyss as if it were a faicon after a flock of doves. Back it came, sliced through a saurian neck chopped tree-trunk legs from under another of the chimerical demons, gutted a fourth, lopped the outstretched pincers of a fifth — all in the space of as many heartbeats.
Gellor found it difficult to play his ivory harp. After the initial chords had been struck, the kanteel seemed to turn and twist as if it wished to escape his fingers. The troubador knew it was the evil of the nethersphere resisting the music, not the magical instrument. Bringing forth power from within, Gellor controlled it by building a mental image of the little harp held steadily. He pictured his hands grasping it firmly yet gently, and then thought of his long fingers touching its silvern strings. The forces bent on preventing its playing were pushed back dispelled. With a grim look of satisfaction at the success he had thus achieved, Gellor placed his fingertips upon the row of argent wires and once again sent out the sweet, ascending ripples of sound from the kanteel. Predatory demons a mile distant turned away from the wash of music he brought forth.
Initially Gord had concentrated on the ebon twin of the bright blade he clasped in his right hand. Its attacks upon the pack of great demon-beasts had been envisioned by him, and the sword seemed to respond as if it were an extension of the young champion's will. The herd of ringing lesser monstrosities no longer surrounded the two men. Those nearer to Gellor had been slain, wounded, or driven off by the music the bard brought forth from his magical harp. Before Gord, though, there was still a horde of howling horrors, and three or four of the towering demon-beasts were nearly upon him. Letting the dark brand do its work as it would, Gord prepared to face the onslaught with the shining portion he still held.
A leering thing with a froglike mouth splitting its wolverine head was almost upon the young champion. Despite its porcine body and flipper legs, the monster moved fast. Gord raised the diamond-bright part of Courflamme, aiming at the demon's outthrust head. The sword's tip suddenly spat forth a black bolt of force. The crackling ebon dart sheared off the top of the fiend's head, and the impact of it actually flipped the demon's massive body over in a somersault.
Without pausing to view his work Gord turned and faced his next foe, now aiming the long blade as if it were a wand. Again the inky core of the weapon sent forth a blast of dark power, and another of the charging demons died. It became almost mechanical thereafter Gord pointed the blade, willed destruction. and another monstrous beast crashed down dead. Again, again, yet again. Soon a half-circle of twitching demon corpses formed a barrier in front of him, a wall so great that the young champion could see nothing but its stinking height.
In desperation, Gord moved backward, readying for yet more of the terrible things to come pouring over the barrier of corpses. "I'll blast you all!" he shouted defiantly, cutting a semicircle in the air before him with the bright blade. The gesture brought a withering geyser of soot-tongued flame from the sword's crystal tip, and the inferno of black fire disintegrated the reeking pile of demon-flesh. A dozen of the smaller beasts, busy feeding on the bodies of their larger kin, were caught by the torrent of destruction and likewise made into corpses. A handful of the massive fiends, the slowest of the pack, suddenly floundered to a halt at the sight of what had occurred. Even such minuscule brains as theirs could discern the fate that awaited, should they come closer to the small man who had seemed such easy prey. They flopped and rolled and turned, seeking escape.
Gord didn't allow that. Even as his comrade sent forth fresh ripples of sweet sound to play havoc among those demons who still opposed the troubador, Gord leaped through the breach in the massive wall of dead fiends, and with arm outstretched brought his blade into play again. It was as if he were skewering tied fowls. Black radiance sped from Courflamme's point, and a lumbering thing convulsed in its death agony. Another elephantine demon shot yards into the air as the burning ebon force struck and slew it. Foul thing after even more disgusting one yammered and went into nothingness as the weapon sent its destruction through each in turn. Straight as arrows the bolts of force sped, well beyond the range of the best bows. In minutes not a single living demon was anywhere in sight before Gord. Then the young man turned to see how Gellor was faring.
A rippling peal of harmony greeted Gord's turning. "Most impressive, my young friend," Gellor told him with a second little run of the kanteel's silver strings as an accent to the compliment. "My little harp sent the demons tumbling and breaking well enough — but that blade of yours spits out magical bolts as if it were Cabbac's own Baton of Blazes."
"Not an impossible inspiration, Gellor. After all, the Uncaring One is of neutral disposition," Gord said dryly. Both men chuckled, for they knew that the god of all magics was indeed uninterested in affairs of any sort except those that pertained directly to dweomers and their spinning. Cabbac did not prevent his lieutenant from siding with Balance, but the father of magics himself remained purposely unaware, aloof. "Seriously, though, I do think that one of the Twelve Great Magicks of Cabbac was set within the sword."
"Quite possible," Gellor concurred as he eyed the desolate, dun landscape that stretched into infinity around them. Leprous ochre growths and lIvid gashes of terra cotta were the only relief to the dull, decayed brown that colored this part of the plane. "Ugh!" the troubador added, noticing the ground that squished under his feet for the first time since the two had trod upon this tier of the Abyss. "Nothing in this place is right or clean!"
"A bit cleaner now, with those heaps of offal manuring the ground." Gord quipped, spitting at the corpse of the nearest demon.
"Shit to shit," Gellor agreed. "But where to next?"
"We jump from this place to the buttes off there," the young champion told the bard. In the vast distance there were several tall, flat-topped hills rising like uicers from the mud-colored terrain. "The entrance to the next spheres lies there."
Gellor didn't bother to ask his comrade how he knew that. The information was simply in Gord's brain. "Need we progress from first to second, second to third, and so on?" the troubador inquired, dread evident in his tone.
"Nay. Whatever levels of this cesspool we can bypass, we will," Gord told his friend. "We need not prove anything, accomplish anything, save reach that place where Graz'zt and his allies wage war with the throng of demonkind who side with Iuz. From the central portals, we can step onto any one of a score of these spheres," Gord said reflectively. "I think, though, that we must opt to pass to the eighth plane next, and from thence make our way slantwise through several of the interposing levels, to reach the midrealms as quickly as possible."
"Then why not pass directly to the lowest tier we can attain from the central gates? There, I perceive, is a portal which enters the three hundred third of the spheres of demonkind."
"Think on that again, Gellor," Gord said as if instructing a pupil. "Does your mind note anything unusual about the plan?"
The bard concentrated a moment, then nodded curtly. "Right. I sense a clot of evil blocking that path."
"You sense right, Gellor," Gord confirmed. "I felt it immediately. Infestix and his rotting lieutenants are gathered there. He has gathered with him a legion of daemonkind, along with sundry demons and other scum of the netherplanes to greet us. His decayed brain labors for naught, and by my route we sidestep his trap and foil the ambush with ease."
Although Gellor didn't mind playing a secondary role to the Champion of Balance, the one-eyed hero was by no means along merely to serve as a ready sword. His own mind was at work on the problem, too. "A sly demon spy reports our slaughter here to the Lord of Death even now, Gord," he told the young thief. "Infestix will soon enough note our route and send forth his fastest companies to block the way. From the eighth tier let us go directly to the Soulless Sounding., .
"Bold, very bold. Yet I think you are wiser than I, my old friend. It is a dangerous and demanding way, but one which only the lords of the Abyss can normally manage. No being less than a netherlord can survive its passage. It will take us longer, prove more perilous, but allow us the greater chance of swift and sure arrival when all things are taken into account. Let us go there, then!"
Side by side, the two heroes strode across the endless leagues of the foul layer that was the entry to the Abyss. In a short time, thanks to their innate force, they came to the lowering bluffs that housed the gateways to the next twenty tiers of the agglomeration of planes that formed the depth of evil called demonrealm, the Abyss. A few hundred lesser demons were there to contest their entry, prevent them from going on; but those malign guards died in vain, swiftly and without great effort from the pair. A clear and bright melody from the kanteel, some dark and deadly lightnings from the rejoined sword, Courflamme, and none stood to oppose them.
Bottomless pit, toothed maw, steely sphincter, raging cauldron of lava, grinding millstone, and more. Each such obstacle disguised a means of entry to another of the many tiers beneath the first With a sharp prod from his sword, Gord caused the metallic sphincter to open, for it warded the way to the eighth sphere. "Quickly now, Gellor," he told the bard. "As soon as we arrive below, we must make for the Soulless Sounding with all speed!"
Gellor shook his head in assent, leaped through the opening, and vanished. Gord followed. The razoredged circle snapped closed, but it was too late. Champion and hero now stood upon demonkind's eighth tier.
Chapter 4
A SWARM OF DUMALDUN skirmishers covered the field, their numbers and power obscuring all behind them. The tall, bounding dumaldun with their bristlecovered bodies and grinning, opossum heads seemed to be everywhere, discharging volleys of frozen-acid javelins, bringing forth clouds of poisonous, cloaking vapors, capering and daring the serried ranks of opposing demons to come forth and fight with them. The long line wavered.
"Stand fast there!" The command came from Vuron himself as the thin, white demon lord paced along behind the triple rank of mixed demon soldiery. "If any breaks formation, I will personally skin him inch by inch!" The troops heard and believed. Squat gila-monster demons, the fesroo type, braced as they stood with saw-edged glaives in the forefront of the horde. Immediately behind these reptilian demons Vuron had placed a like number of wulox, tall, thin creatures with storklike heads and spindly arms. Thin as those appendages might be, the albino general knew that the wulox could wield their needle-tined military forks well enough on any foe that managed to slip between the jagged blades used by the fesroo. In the third rank stood a mixed grouping of yet larger and more ferocious demons — goat-horned klebguzig with both pincers and fauchard-like mancatchers ready, tiny-winged gashnulfu whose pig eyes glittered as brightly as their pole axes, and even a few bat-faced raloogs, whose spiked flails and terrible swords would exact much from the enemy when the time came.
The first rank was held in place by the press of the bigger, fiercer second. In turn, the middle was kept still by the terrible third row of great demons who stood behind them, waiting. Behind all of them paced Vuron and his captains, the latter down to a handful now. Vastyi, the Master Toad, was there, still staying because of his hatred for Iuz. Palvlag too remained steadfast, and thus so did the company of raloogs, flame-demons whose might was feared by all lesser demonkind.
Hunched Nergel was at hand as well. Fear kept him allied with Graz'zt's viceroy, Vuron — fear of what the enemy would do to him even if Nergel abandoned the six-fingered king of the Abyss. Nergel had prosecuted the war too well by half ever to regain favor with Iuz, Orcus, and the rest, and after wreaking havoc in Mandrillagon's own palace, and kidnapping all of the demon prince's harem, there could never be peace with Demogorgon's faction either. Holding the line were Vuron, the three captains, and one other thing. The albino general in charge of Graz'zt's last horde also possessed the final third of the mightiest relic of Evil ever forged.
"Send out our own velites to disrupt those turds!" The urging came from the sharp-curved chest of Nergel as the crooked demon viewed the antics of the enemy skirmishers.
Vuron restrained the remark that sprang to mind. Instead, he pointed off to the side, at a scattering of cowering dretch and rutterkin. Those pitiful few were all that remained of the thousands which had filled the light corps at the beginning of the campaign. "Do you think they will serve?" the albino asked Nergel sweetly.
Nergel either ignored or missed the sarcasm. "What matter. Lord General? Their deaths will serve well enough."
"Yes, I suppose so," Vuron admitted. There was no way either force could use height to spy out the other side's position and movements. The ground was board-flat, and no demon taking to the air would survive more than a second or two. Hundreds of missiles, a score of dweomers were all ready for just such targets. If even a small break in the screening swarm of dumalduns could be made, it might be enough to allow Vuron a glimpse of the foe. "Find a squad of boorixtroi to drive them forth," the albino told Nergel, "and make the drivers themselves stay in the fight for as long as you can."