Free Son of Perdition (Chronicles of Brothers) by Wendy Alec Page B

with a green sulphurous gas. The Dark Cabal Wizards swooped down through the vast open dome on their biogenetically engineered monsters until all 666 were gathered in the aisle of the North Wind. As one, they bowed low before Lucifer.
    Lucifer raised his sceptre.
    ‘I summon the Twins of Malfecium – the Grand Wizard Phaegos and the Grand Wizard Maelageor.’
    The Twins stepped forward. Their physical features were almost identical. Each had two shrunken rotating heads, their long, pointed chins resting on their chests. They stared up at Lucifer from bulbous, straw-coloured eyes that glittered malevolently. Their flesh had a cadaverous green pallor and their sparse white hair fell to their waists. Under their muslin cloaks each had three hunchbacks and, on either side, grew six immense feathered seraph wings.
    The Twins were Lucifer’s super-scientists. The Grand Architects of his depraved schemes. Their days and nights were spent huddled in laboratories a thousand miles below the scalding ice rings of Mellenzia in the barren wastelands of the Underworld in the Crypts of Nagor.
    It was here that they performed the most vile of their iniquitous procedures. Biogenetic engineering; poisonings; amputations; limb and head grafts; lobotomies. Agonized screams of torment resounded day and night from the Labyrinths of Angor as the harpies of Gilmagoth, under their tutelage, violated each rule of decency and contravened every tenet of Eternal Law with their cloning of the bestial and the Angelic.
    The Twins were purists. They maimed, tortured and disembowelled banshees, trolls, demon-vampires, and experimented on all that roamed the underworld unaware. They spawned an army of misshapen new species – grotesque deformed monsters.
    Winged Vampire-Behemoths, sixty-six-eyed Cyclops, Scaled Brobdingnagians – the foot soldiers of Gehenna. These monsters of the Army of the Fallen were prepared to be unleashed at the last great battle fought against the Nazarene – Armageddon.
    But the Twins’ greatest conception – their consummate work of genius – lay beyond the eight Great Vaults of Vagen in the Sarcophagus of the Furies.
    The vial that contained a single genome.
    The Seed of the Serpent.
    Lucifer’s genome.
    Lucifer’s angelic DNA, recently biogenetically re-engineered by the Twins of Malfecium to correspond precisely with the growth cycle of human DNA.
    The Vial of Sacred Progeny.
    It had lain for millennia beneath Mellenzia. Awaiting the day when technology in the Race of Men would be advanced enough to complete the sacred task.
    Lucifer sensed that the Twins’ journey this day was connected to the genome.
    He gestured them nearer.
    ‘Maelageor,’ he said softly to the Twin at his left. ‘You requested audience.’
    The Grand Wizard of Maelageor stared out at Lucifer with hooded eyes.
    ‘Your Excellency.’ His voice slithered, his tongue distended and mottled. ‘It concerns the Vial of Sacred Progeny.’
    Lucifer stared at him intently. Waiting.
    ‘Sire. We have found one in the Race of Men of skill beyond any other. His proficiency in the field of biogenetic engineering leads us to believe he could be suited to the sacred task.’
    Phaegos stepped forward and bowed deeply.
    ‘Your Excellency. He is the Race of Men’s leading expert in genetic manipulation and gene splicing.’
    Lucifer rose. He paced restlessly before the throne, deep in contemplation.
    Abruptly he turned to Maelageor.
    ‘You are sure? I will tolerate no more error. Hitler failed me,’ he hissed. ‘The Nazi eugenics programme, their manipulation of human DNA . . . ’ He spun around to stare at the fresco of the Nuremberg rally above him. ‘Mengele, Clauberg, Brandt . . . We gave them every blueprint crucial to the task of cloning. All led to failure!’
    Maelageor raised his head.
    ‘Your Excellency. The Race of Men’s technological progress in the area of genetics has greatly accelerated. The year 1981 finds it still primitive, but