Free Phoenix in Shadow - eARC by Ryk E Spoor Page B

exhaustion.
    And then there came a sound: the sound of an incalculably huge lock opening.
    Directly before him a gate began to slide open in the impregnable black wall. Sterile, sharp white light poured from within that gate, a light so cold and dead that its touch seemed to leach away color and life. Silhouetted against that light was a black form, round in outline but with hints of much worse.
    As Condor’s eyes adjusted to the fell light, he could see the Thing more clearly, and wished he couldn’t. An ovoid, leathery-skinned body was supported by four talons like those of a gargantuan bird of prey, and sported night-black wings like a monstrous bat. A long, flexible, wattled neck held a long head that shone like black bone or perhaps the carapace of an insectoid abomination; the dead-white glowing eyes certainly had the pupilless, faceted look of the eyes of most insects, but the mouth was long and jagged, as though the beaked mouth of a snapping turtle had been crossed with that of a wolf, or perhaps a dragon. The long, slender tail included black, bladed spines.
    And then it spoke.
    The voice was startling. It was pleasant, gentle, sweet, like that of a young girl—though beneath and behind it, almost beyond the range of hearing, was an undertone that sounded like distant screams.
    “Condor False-Justiciar, step forward.”
    It was the last sort of voice he would have expected from that monstrosity, and it added a crowning touch to the horror.
    But I long since left my choices behind . Shakily, he walked towards the monster.
    It smiled, a flexing of a face that should be incapable of flexture, another horrifying tiny detail. “Well done. You have arrived precisely as directed. The King of All Hells will be pleased indeed, for to cross the land called Hell is a considerable feat.” It turned and moved a wing down, an ebony ramp. “I am to bring you to the King immediately.”
    The wing was frighteningly solid beneath his boots; it did not feel like a leather pinion, but rather a bridge of stone. The creature’s back was softer, dry and flexible as the hide of the elephant Condor had seen once; yet there was something repellent about it, perhaps a faint scent of dry decay, as of a house abandoned in the desert for centuries.
    Smell of decay or no, the Demon—for such Aran knew it had to be, and a powerful one indeed, to be sent on a personal errand for the ruler of the Black City—leapt up and arrowed into the now-darkened sky with speed and agility a smaller creature would envy.
    Now Aran could see the city from above, and knew his horror had not reached its limits. The Black City stretched from horizon to horizon, a ten-mile circle of blackness—black walls, ebony buildings, night-shadowed streets, all arranged in perfect circular arcs. The city rose slowly, a vast cone-shaped arrangement of structures and roads all converging on the gargantuan castle in the center, itself echoing the design of the whole: a ring of walls, a ring of towers, and in the center a great single keep that rose up and somehow faded away; it hurt his eyes and mind to look at how it went from something that was to something that was not . At intervals along the great outer walls were guard towers, posts with guards and with great engines of destruction that looked like nothing he had ever seen.
    Below, demons—monstrous forms of all shapes and sizes—moved busily. Many were marching, drilling—parts of an army so huge that Aran couldn’t grasp it—but many others seemed to be going about their business as though they lived in an ordinary city. Yet even there something seemed wrong, off , as though even in living daily lives there was something terribly twisted and unnatural about them.
    The Demon upon which he rode flew straight up one of the great throughfares, a road running true as a sword-stroke to the central tower. The gates of the castle were already open, and nothing challenged his mount as it flew directly up to the door