Abaddon - Chapter 20

Day Twelve

The Enemy did not allow Percival to march into his territory quite as easily as Percival had allowed the Enemy into his. He had hoped it might be possible to tramp down to his chosen battleground unmolested, but the City's army was forced to fight for every step it took. This was unnerving, but, Percival told himself, would only wear the Enemy's forces down slowly as they threw themselves fruitlessly against his well-prepared defences. It would, after all, hardly be possible for the whole five-hundred-man mass of the Enemy to deploy itself against him in a series of raids launched up and down a vertical cliff.

Reality brought him down to earth, and several kilometres lower. Percival's strategy had been based on the fact that his army would advance slowly, like a brittle star feeling its way along the sea floor, surrounded by a screen of scouts. These outlying infantrymen, chosen for keen sight and an ability to climb like demons, had been trained to fire on any incoming motion by firing on it frantically, doing a backscuttle, and screaming like stuck pigs to sound the alarm. The racks of paper darts loaded on their bowstrings, or the newer, more effective weapons Percival had obtained for his scouts from the upper world, might miss their targets - indeed, were almost guaranteed to. But they would still deliver their payloads to the rock around an incoming Enemy, and those payloads would, in theory, still be deadly even then.

However, a scout, almost by definition, would be used up every time the Enemy made an attack - the first attack would probably always be deadly, the red devils out in the dark invisible until they moved to strike. And the Enemy knew the tactics of stealth worked, and would have no intention of deviating from them. In reality, it would be Percival's troops who would be worn down.

The first encounter took place on the first day of the march, with the column still well inside City territory. The column was moving at a snail's pace, in rigid military formation, followed and preceded by scouts sweating on the dark rock faces above and below, the unseen nine-tenths of the army's iceberg. Woman and child camp followers held up, not sputtering brands of tar-wrapped rags, but battery-powered torches and halogen lanterns stabbing out fierce white light into the dark. Percival was convinced he had been correct in his assessment of the relative worths of a crate of Armalites and a crate of Ever-Readies; down here, it was the ability to project light, not lead, that won battles.

However, with every man around him holding a spear or bow or Armalite and training it on the dark facing outwards, Percival felt thoroughly ridiculous. To any observer, the entire column of march must resemble a giant, hairy caterpillar.

He had insisted the column assume and hold battle formation as soon as it left the City gates. This, he knew, might tire his troops; but recent events had shown that the Enemy would attack right up to the walls and beyond. Besides, the army's discipline was strong, and the formation holding.

Then one man screamed, and all was confusion.

The man who screamed must have been a scout - what was screamed were the words, "MULT'OSTES!", from somewhere ahead and below, followed by the WHOOSH of a volley of paper darts and the almost silent spitting of the scouts' new weapons. Many, many weapons being discharged, by the sound of it - had the entire front line of scouts let go their bowstrings at once? Were there that many Enemy out there in the black?

Immediately, the entire army turned and loosed its bowstrings in the direction of the infantryman's yell. Percival heard a gasp of disbelief, and then a flurry of leathery wings rustled overhead, making volley-of-paper-dart noises with every wingbeat.

He had not known bats could live so deep down. They were small, but with surprisingly impressive wingspans, and were covered with fine fur that glowed like gold in the magnesium light of the torches. Comically, every other bat was spotted a bright royal blue. The scout had hit his target.

"False alarm", suggested Percival. Loquax leaned forward to peer over the edge, and nodded. Of the scout who had fired the volley, there was no sign. Percival suspected more of the main column's missiles had hit him than had touched any other living thing.

If we kill one of our own scouts every time one farts or coughs or stumbles, we'll be running out of troops fast.

He told Loquax to issue orders to the troops to be more careful.

***

The next encounter wasn’t a false alarm.

The Enemy’s tactics of ambush were unbeatable against Citizens; but the City had two secret weapons, and they were fixed in Percival’s eyesockets. It was actually laughably easy for Percival to spy out the Enemy scouts. Several of them were lurking on the high rock up above the column, evidently intending to hurl rocks down upon their victims. The Enemy were clearly visible by the burning red orbs of their eyes, which, as Percival had predicted, no Citizen in the column appeared to be able to see.

Percival ordered the front of his column to advance to just outside rock-hurling range - but within Armalite and Kalashnikov range - and halt. Meanwhile, the rear of his column was to separate and march back up the spiral of the Roman road until they were positioned upward and forward of the lights of the main unit. His scouts, meanwhile, were to climb the cliff to a position, again, just out of range of the Enemy ambushers, and prepare to advance on a signal from below.

Percival could not bring himself to hope the trap might work perfectly - he could see the little group of would-be bushwhackers so easily, it seemed unthinkable that they might not be able to see him. But they remained in place, evidently secure in the smug knowledge that they possessed an evolutionary advantage, as unable to see Percival as a man holding a torch is to see a man standing in the dark a mile away. They remained unperturbed even when the rear half of the column shuffled into position vertically above them, outflanking them entirely.

Hardly believing that the Enemy had cheerfully watched him put their testicles in the vice, Percival cranked down hard on the lever. The order to advance was given. Word whispered up the cliff like an autumn breeze sweeping leaves off trees underground; the Enemy must surely hear it. And indeed, at that point the eyes did shift about slightly on their ledge, as if agitated. But still they did not move.

Percival’s line of scouts was surely advancing now, although he could not see them. The troops around him, however, by the bright light of the halogen torches, could; the intense, focussed expressions they held bore witness to the fact...

- And then a chorus of Jew’s-harp TWANGs from far above, followed by a rustle like an army rushing forward through autumn leaves, signalled that combat had begun. The front rank of scouts had loosed their weapons at the Enemy. A spatter of pale blue water-soluble rainfall fell across his cheek, the cluster of eyes up above moved frantically, and a luckless scout who had seen the Enemy a fraction of a second too late became the first casualty of the battle by sailing down the cliff to a horrid impact on the road surface up ahead.

But up above, Percival’s armed forces were already exacting payback. Automatic weapons fired in both of Percival’s ears, deafening him instantly, and tiny flashes of sparks bounced off the cliffs above in the dark. Bowstrings loosed like a flock of twittering birds, and clattered off rock like fat ladies rolling on bubble wrap. But enemy bodies came down off the rock along with broken arrows. The sheer volume of fire could hardly have failed to hit a target.

There were no enemy eyes remaining on the cliff above, but still both columns continued to rain down and fire up missiles onto what was in all likelihood now bare rock. Percival yelled loudly enough at Loquax for him to shout and signal frantically and call a stop to the waste. The Army ceased fire, though it had not relaxed; Percival could feel troopers next to him in the press of bodies, trembling with excitement like dogs held back from a kill.

He walked forward, keeping his eyes on the gloom above in case an unnoticed pair of eyes suddenly blinked into existence. The single Citizen scout casualty lay thoroughly and irreparably dead on the road surface. As Percival had instructed, the front of the scout’s body had been smeared a bright yellow with stage greasepaint. The back of his body, meanwhile, had been painted a vivid azure blue. To his fellow troops in the ranks behind, he would be perfectly visible; to an enemy up ahead, he would be as black as the abyssite around him. Percival had experimented with red torchlight and multitudinous shades of yellow.

The Enemy troops around the scout, meanwhile, were spotted with Percival’s secret weapon. The paper missiles - combination darts and waterbombs - had contained nothing more deadly than a mixture of Royal Blue enamel and luminous radium paint, which, whenever it had hit an enemy trooper, had spotted him with bright reflective points of light that Percival’s own troops could easily see, and even when falling on the abyssite behind the Enemy, had provided a brightly-spotted backdrop against which a moving Enemy, however dark, could easily be distinguished. Percival’s scouts had operated like Special Forces teams laser-painting targets in preparation for air attack. The front rank of the scouts, chosen men, were carrying the new weapon from upper Earth - compressed air paintball carbines of the very latest type, electronically triggered, capable of accurately loosing off fifteen rounds per second in flat, accurate trajectories.

The grand troglodyte army had won its first engagement.

The same pattern, with only minor differences, was followed in the next few encounters between the City’s army and the Enemy. Just as the English had had the tables turned on them after Agincourt, so the former effectiveness of the Enemy's tactics now worked to their disadvantage. The English had persisted with the same longbow-and-yeomanry strategy that had reliably defeated the French for a century, despite the fact that the French had by then acquired cannon and were now defeating them. The Enemy, meanwhile, were persisting in the stubborn belief that Percival's army would continue to blithely walk into their ambushes, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. They pursued a monotonous strategy of lying in wait high above the roadway, sometimes in small numbers, often in large. Percival was amazed that no-one in the City's army had even noticed this habit, but such was the blind, unreasoning panic an assault by invisible monsters engendered that no-one seemed to have bothered to give any thought to analyzing the enemy's tactics.

Now, however, the monsters could be seen; and now that it no longer had to take to its heels, Percival's army was beginning to think on its feet. Percival issued no orders allowing any quarter to the Enemy wounded. Instead, he specified that any wounded were to be killed immediately. This, he knew, would prevent them from being killed slowly. Was that a good enough excuse for his willing participation in their slaughter? Would Stephanie have approved?

The battlefield was approaching now, the broad, flat ledge where two armies could conceivably field a large number of troops against each other at once. Percival, who had been beginning to hope the Enemy might never give battle with anything approaching his entire force, was mildly surprised to see an opposing army already lined up in battle array on the shelf below - or so he surmised from the neon array of eyes, clustered together like red blood cells in an aneurism. The Enemy, he was pleased to see, did not line up his troops in good order. Percival's own troops could have passed an inspection carried out on their formation made with a protractor and tape measure - and with every victory they won, they were growing stronger.

But the Enemy evidently had at least one strategist worth his her or its salt; that strategist had realized that the tactics of ambush were not working and had failed to slow down the City’s juggernaut, which therefore needed to be stopped some other way. The way which was now being attempted probably wouldn't work either, but it displayed a disturbing tendency towards organized thought.

The Enemy had arranged his troops so as to completely cover the ledge. In particular, the tapering entrance to it was defended so that Percival's men trying to gain the ledge would have to fight four men to a row against a rank of five or six of the Enemy. However, the Enemy had also totally crammed the ledge with his men, who were completely visible to Percival from above. Not wishing to waste an opportunity, Percival ordered the column to halt directly above the ledge, and to pick up whatever rocks and roadstones presented themselves and sling them down over the precipice.

It wasn't possible for Percival's troops to aim - they were unable to see the Enemy - but with the opposing force so tightly packed together, aiming wasn't necessary. Red Enemy eyes were rapidly interspersed with showers of white sparks as rocks hurled from a great height literally exploded in their midst. The mass of eyes swirled like liquid, even more like erythrocytes than ever, as the crowd below surged in panic. Some were actually being swept over the cliff by their own comrades, and many, to Percival's gratification, began to haemorrhage back down the long narrow track towards their own city.

"Is the Enemy's city like your own?" he asked Loquax.

"Olim sic erat. Urbs similis urbis nostris erat.", said Loquax. Once it was. It was a city like our own.

"What happened?" said Percival.

"Hostes", said Loquax acidly. The Enemy.

"It was a city of people like yourselves, as old as yours, and the Enemy attacked and killed them all?"

"Senior quam noster. Omnes interfecerunt hostes." Older than ours. The Enemy killed them all. "Quamquam non Romani, sed Persae, erant", Loquax added, as if this in some way excused the Enemy’s activities.

"Persians?" said Percival.

"Custodes templi", said Loquax. Guardians of the Temple.

Percival ordered the column to proceed downward with appropriate caution, a row of scouts at the front, two rows of riflemen behind them. If he had to fight his way onto the ledge, he reasoned, he would give the Enemy a taste of the worst he had to offer straight away - no sense in encouraging the foe to stand around and fight.

The Battle of the Ledge was over in a matter of minutes; the Citizens' army did not lose a single scout to enemy action. Percival's front rank danced in, released a flurry of paint, and scampered away through the second rank, who opened up on the joyous Enemy charge triggered by the retreat of the scouts. Ten or eleven of the Enemy fell before the charge faltered, the remainder being saved partly by the sheer mass of bodies left by their fallen comrades. Sensing defensive terrain, Percival ordered his front rank up to exploit the line of bodies as a natural breastwork. He noticed that he had lost two of his riflemen due to barrel explosions, the inevitable result of holding the trigger down on full automatic on a very old weapon. It was an AK47 and an MP44 that had exploded; among the oldest weapons in his arsenal. Other troops armed with more reliable (though less deadly) compound bows moved up to take their places. The compound bows, Percival reflected, might even terrify the enemy more, simply because the rifles were not made out of parts of the Enemy's dead relatives.

The battle was a rout, delayed only by the fact that the Enemy troops simply could not evacuate the ledge quickly enough. Percival reflected sadly (sadly?) that, if he hadn't been so successful in thinning out the numbers of the Enemy by dropping rocks on them earlier, the crush of Enemy troops on the ledge would have been far greater, and annihilation close to total.

As it was, the bulk of the Enemy army fled, and Percival gave no order to pursue. He doubted anyone would have obeyed one even if it had been issued. His army, by now, was used to advancing one step at a time in good formation; above all, it understood the dangers of pelting forward headlong into a dark that might contain an invisible enemy.

Inside perhaps ten minutes, the ledge was Percival's. He gave the order for a temporary camp and a few moments of rest; long enough to boil water, cook meat, perhaps even grab a second or two of sleep. But Percival, having seen what he himself had already done to an Enemy army that had lingered on the ledge, did not want his troops to stay here. Instead, to a chorus of complaints in rat-Latin, the column was ordered to pack up and proceed almost as soon as it had sat down. For the next ledge, Loquax had told Percival, was the ledge where the Enemy had his city.

There were no further attempts to ambush the column - this disturbed Percival, as it was further proof that the Enemy was revisiting his tactics. And when he set eyes on the lie of the city itself, Percival's heart sank.

The Enemy city was dimly lit by bioluminescent algae that suggested, rather than overtly describing, the alien outlines of its buildings. Unlike the Roman city upcliff of it, it was a city of domes, but not yet of minarets, as it had been built well before Islam. The Romans, true to their national character, had built an unadorned utilitarian city, well suited to the hardships of an existence a mile below ground. The Persians had sealed their own fate in attempting to build a city that was beautiful.

The massive, overarching domes were hopelessly impractical in an environment where your enemy could rain down rocks upon your roof at any moment, and hardly allowed for the placement of adequate numbers of archers and acroballistae. The curtain wall - what remained of the curtain wall - was only half the height of the one that surrounded the City.

But the Persians, like the Romans, had known well enough to build their city underneath a very large, completely unclimbable overhang, slimy as a snail's foot. And the curtain wall was manned - Percival could see red eyes slinking furtive round the battlements. The Enemy's military strategists had decided right this time. Stone walls were a potent defence against gunfire. Massed projectile weapons had been Percival's main advantage so far, but right now they looked set to become one of his weaknesses too. If the Enemy had even a few short-range, inaccurate slings, javelins, crossbows, whatever, then from behind those walls, they would be able to pick off Percival's infantry at their leisure whilst his scouts struggled to send darts over the walls. Until the scouts were able to paint the Enemy, the Enemy would remain invisible and terrifying to men who were watching their comrades keel over hit by shots coming out of nowhere.

Would it be possible to lay siege to the place? Percival mused that he did not have a reliable food source. He kicked himself immediately, however, when he remembered the City's army had just created itself a reliable food source by killing some fifty enemy combatants in the Battle of the Ledge. All that was needed was for a detachment to trundle back up the Roman road - was it still a Roman road this deep down, or a Persian one? - harvest the bodies, maybe lay their meaty bits in pickle or smoke them. He was astounded at the ease with which he now contemplated cannibalism.

The Enemy, on the other hand, did not have a reliable food source. The Enemy were expanding into City territory because food was scarce in their area. Percival had by now seen too many City corpses with teethmarks in the bone to doubt this. The Enemy had no reliable food source, because Percival's army were their food source.

Correction - had been their food source. Would be no longer.

As well as dispatching part of the army up-cliff to convert Enemy corpses into long pork, Percival detailed a small group of scouts and soldiers to locate a water source. This far down in the world's bowels, truly clean water would be hard to find, but his people had strong stomachs. The trick, Loquax had informed him in a long and difficult discussion, was to find places where water had filtered through the rock, not drained directly down from the surface sewers far above. This, with an impervious rock like abyssite, was difficult. Once he had located a source that was unlikely to dry up, Percival allowed the search for water to continue, with the difference that every new water source located was now to be poisoned.

The Enemy launched no attacks on the City's forces throughout all this; nor did Percival's food column uphill face any trouble. They were, however, still irritatingly alive; the red eyes continued to gleam out of the dark behind the battlements. Percival knew all too well that he had neglected to bring, or even to design, any effective siege weaponry.

Mining the walls would be impossible; down here there was no soft soil, only impenetrable rock. Greek Fire the Citizens had in abundance; what they lacked was an effective projector that would take it over walls to burn buildings. The walls did not look in themselves to be combustible.

And then he began to realize how the Enemy citadel needed to be assaulted. They were Persians, after all, not Greeks. It ought to work.

He consulted with the Queen's lieutenants, a volatile bunch prone to chattering excitedly in mole-Latin at speeds he was guaranteed not to understand. One of the human-femur handcarts the Army had brought with it for logistics and supply was commandeered. A number of man-hide infantry shields were located and sewn together. A number of soldiers were assembled, soldiers - this was the most painful part - who Percival felt he could afford to lose.

The Enemy were being given a gift, but it was essential they not suspect they were being given it. They had to be made, in some way, to think they had won the gift without assistance. For instance, Percival suspected the Enemy would never believe he would be so hard-hearted as to allow his own men to die. Any poisoned pill Percival handed out would best be sweetened by ordering good City soldiers to prevent the enemy from taking it, by laying down their lives if necessary. By reverse psychology, what you appeared to be trying to prevent your enemy from doing, he inevitably did. The more men died, the better. The better troops, the better. The harder they fought, the longer they took to die while the rest of Percival's army stood and watched and did nothing to help them, the better and more convincing.

This was a moral dilemma.

Why am I even bothering to think about this? If Her Infernal Majesty's to be believed, whatever I do, whatever I say, I'm still coming back in triumph. She didn't even entertain the possibility of failure. The sin is already as good as committed, and there is no choice between good and evil, hence no salvation and no God. I am merely a mechanical assembly of flesh finding the path of least resistance through life.

Mind you, she didn't entertain the possibility of me not getting my arms and legs hacked off either. I can still be triumphant if I'm being carried in on a litter. And what she says is only what she knows. She doesn't know I did a good job. She wasn't here. I was. I am. And I want to come out of this knowing that I did my damnedest.

He resolved to sacrifice as many guns, and as few men, as possible.

***

He had to admit the penthouse looked the part.

It wasn't a penthouse in the Ritz Hotel sense of the word. It was a sappers’ shelter, an armoured roof in the shape of a deep inverted V, designed to keep out, not rain, but slings and arrows and Greek (or Persian) Fire. Its only purpose was to protect its occupants while they attacked the walls, though it only had loopholes enough in its own walls for two or three riflemen or archers to defend it. It did, however, have space for five or six men to stand or crouch inside it. The only conclusion that could be drawn from its appearance on the battlefield was that whatever attack on the walls was intended would be coming in from underground.

The penthouse moved on eight hurriedly improvised bone wheels, which, due to the jury-rigged nature of the design, were incapable of being steered; Percival hoped no-one on the other side of the walls would notice. The assembly could only be pushed across the ledge where it had been assembled in a straight line up to the massive gates of the Persians' city.

The gates were the city's main weakness, insofar as there were none. They had originally been made of wood - plated, Loquax said, with lead - and some fibrous scraps of these gates hung off rotted hinges at the one and only hole in this side of the city wall. The Romans, making use of the large quantities of freely available metals coming down from the newly industrialized world above, had replaced their gates with steel. The Persians - and after them, the Enemy - had had no such luxury.

The penthouse was, in fact, totally undefended right now, though Percival thought it best not to advertise the fact too obviously. The payload inside the machine was heavier than the lead that had been poured to tile its roof, and every man inside the machine was required to down weaponry and put his shoulder to a strut to heave the contraption inch by inch toward the walls. Half the wheels, inadequately designed, had stuck fast and were being dragged rather than pushed. Percival hoped fervently that the Enemy did not use fire arrows.

The penthouse rolled forward, like a predatory tortoise sneaking up on an unsuspecting lettuce, towards the walls. As a siege weapon, it was hopelessly inadequate. The wheels were creaking under its weight; it could not move fast enough to prevent the Enemy from sallying from the walls and capturing it. As the protection to a sappers' minehead, it might have been adequate if there had been any rock hereabouts that wouldn't blunt the bit on a pneumatic drill in the first ten minutes. The Nazis had had to blast out their chambers using dynamite.

Arrows clattered from the wall, at first like the few spots of rain that fall before the storm, and then like the storm itself. Percival saw several of them go straight through the lead tiling. Shortly afterwards, a crewman's body was gradually made visible by the excruciating creeping progress of the siege machine's carapace. There was little blood; an Enemy arrow appeared to have pierced his heart.

Before long, the penthouse was a mass of arrows. Its progress was considerably slower than before; Percival crossed his fingers and hoped that it would be able to crawl close enough to the Enemy for the plan to be accomplished. The soldiers within it had been instructed to move their payload up to the Enemy gates, and then to defend the Engine at all costs. Percival had promised them the support of the Army. Behind them, the first rank of the Army's scouts and archers stood obediently idle, watching the engine move further and further into the open jaws of what the Enemy probably thought was his own trap, but which was in reality Percival's. Percival had had the rear of the penthouse nailed opaque with thin skin sheeting, to make sure his sacrificial victims didn't see their comrades standing still thirty yards behind them. They must remain under the illusion they were being supported by the main line, he had reasoned. Nothing must slow that inexorable forward crawl. And in order for them to carry out their task, they must also die without ever once knowing their Army had stood by and watched them die. Percival knew how the Citizens' peculiar brand of precognition worked. There must be no possibility of a man seeing his future and attempting to shirk it.

Then the jaws of the trap snapped shut. Enemy men erupted from the walls, hurtling forward at the flimsy structure, piling every ounce of strength they had into the spear-points they flung home into the wood. The walls were not armoured with lead sheet like the roof, and Percival saw blood spray from underneath a wheel like red steam from a car radiator hose. Then the Enemy were all over the penthouse, ripping tiles from the roof with grips that could twist a man's face loose from his skull, stabbing spears into the wood like harpoons into a dying whale, screaming in whatever bizarre language they used. Screams of dying men were sounding from the penthouse; good men who had only done what Percival had asked. And still, Percival's army stood and leaned on their shields and did nothing.

Percival became uncomfortably aware that the attention of his entire line of troops was fixed on him.

"We can't advance", he said to Loquax desperately. "That's not the plan. If we approach those walls our troops won't be able to see to shoot. If we take back the penthouse the Enemy won't be able to take the bait. You know that." Gunfire - Stetchkin and Kalashnikov gunfire, the cheapest he could afford to give away - was coming from the ports on the siege engine, which were purposely ill-designed, difficult to shove a gun up behind and shoot accurately out of. The shots were hitting nothing. Everything was going perfectly to plan.

Nevertheless, Loquax stared at him severely.

"What? What is it? If you're expecting me to pull some great tactical coup out of my bumcrack, why don't you just save us both some time and TELL ME WHAT IT FUCKING IS?"

Loquax lowered his gaze and looked back to the walls, where Enemy troops were now dragging some of Percival's soldiers out of the engine. He heard the sounds of bone spears going into flesh.

Everything was going to plan - and everything, he decided suddenly, was wrong.

"Right", said Percival. "Right. It doesn't matter what I do, right?" He motioned to the soldier next to him. "Quinte - da mihi telum tuum." As he cradled the soldier's M16, he realized, with a sudden cold prickling on his skin, that there had been one trooper in his army all along who could see to shoot the Enemy.

"MECUM portas OPPUGNATE!"

His first few shots blew the Enemy soldiers off the City troopers they had been molesting. Percival, after all, had used an M16 before, even if only on a shooting range for recreation, and the City's artillery had fired perhaps five or six shots with a rifle in their lives. His next few shots, delivered from the hip as he ran forward into No Man's Land, scattered the Enemy's archers from the walls. His next few held back a tide of Enemy troopers swarming through the gates to attack this one presumptuous warrior of the City's. His next shot was not a shot, as the firing pin bit down on air.

He reversed the gun and slammed the butt into the face of an Enemy trooper attacking him with a spear. He heard teeth splinter, but still the man fought on. Luckily, as the trooper was lining up for a second thrust that would probably have spitted Percival, he was killed by one of his own side's arrows fired from the walls.

And then Percival's army arrived.

Snatching up a Stetchkin dropped by a dead trooper, Percival picked it up and hosed the battlements on the other side with bullets. The Stetchkin had a drum magazine and was still partly full. Such was the fear the Enemy had of gunfire, particularly gunfire that seemed uncannily likely to hit them, that they remained huddled behind their merlons. Percival was almost entirely sure he had hit nothing at all.

Further up and down the walls, Enemy archers were letting fly at City soldiers, but the entire army was surging inward to the gates like sand into the neck of an hourglass. A mass of troops formed up behind the penthouse like bubbles behind a cork; the penthouse shifted forward at a breakneck crawl, skidding on broken wheels, and Percival heard the screams of the men he had intended to save being crushed beneath it. Had they been fated to die after all?

The Stetchkin jammed, and Percival threw it away. Instead, he fell to directing the soldiery to shoulder the siege engine through the gate and up the main street between the crumbling colonnades and verandas of the Persian city. Percival dimly remembered the inner part of Dante's Hell being ringed by the parapets of a city named Dis, named after its ruler. Every colonnade in this version of Dis hid a spearman, every rooftop an archer, every veranda a harem of Enemy females pelting the City's army with bits of building. They seemed willing to dismantle their own metropolis for ammunition to throw at Percival. Gunfire, from one or two men who had actually managed to struggle free of the penthouse, and arrows from the remainder of the army, were eating away at these creatures; Percival's scouts had painted the town blue with airgun pellets, and the enemy were very far from being invisible now. But the City's forces were taking losses. He yelled to the nearer of the Queen's lieutenants, and to Loquax, to sound a withdrawal.

He had expected the commanders to gawp at him in disbelief; to his amazement, they simply nodded at their sergeants, who proceeded to scream their heads off at the rank and file, who proceeded to obey without question.

The Army was still taking heavy losses as it withdrew; Percival could hear the screams of the wounded, but could not see them, because by this time he had dipped under the tiling in the penthouse and was groping about in the dark as the incomprehensible mutterings of Enemy troopers surrounded the engine.

At length, he found what he was looking for, and began looking for something, anything, with which to set light to it. Matches had been made for this purpose, and several of them were still secured to the inside of the penthouse carapace.

He hesitated, knowing that the act of striking the match would alert the Enemy to his presence.

It doesn't matter what I do.

He struck the match. It flared like a firework, bigger and faster-burning than surface-dweller safety matches. He heard Enemy yells from outside the carapace as he touched the match to the fuse.

It doesn't matter what I do. But how do I get out of this?

The light of the match showed him how. He snatched up what he'd found tucked in an angle of the structure; it was reassuringly heavy, full of other people's trouble. Enemy feet gathered round the penthouse; three spears stabbed through the tiling to his left. He cocked the weapon as loudly as he could. The feet scattered backwards. At least two of the feet fell over in their haste to get further away from Percival.

It doesn't matter what I do it doesn't matter what I do it doesn't matter what I do -

He came out from under the carapace and shot people a lot whilst running at full pelt towards the City gates, screaming to the City's soldiers to lie flat and cover their ears. Spears shivered past him. And then the world behind him went hot and bright and red and he realized he had forgotten to cover his own ears and someone turned the world sideways-on and smacked him around the face with it.

When he rose to his feet, his ears were singing and spears were still rushing past him, but were in the hands of his own soldiery running inwards through the gates. He had difficulty staying on his feet. Men were screaming and dying and bashing each other with awful force, and one half of the visible universe was on fire, but all this violence was happening in perfect, serene silence. A man died to his left, quietly, decently and without fuss. Screaming. An Enemy soldier was spitted wriggling under five or six spears ripping into him like carving forks.

Citizens were used to winning victories by setting fire to the battlefield; it was a tactic they had used against the Russians and Americans, and which they had employed to the extent of setting their own city alight only days before. They were accustomed to fire. The Enemy was not, and ran shrieking from it. And naked flame and the streets of the Persian city, filled with refuse, got along like a thousand houses on fire. The detonation of a hundred gallons of Greek fire spread out like a brilliant orange weed in a poorly tended garden. The only danger was that the sheer heat of the flames might burn so fiercely as to deny access to the city to Percival's reserves still leaning on their shields outside; but there were, he told himself, plenty of other holes in the walls. And the Enemy were now plainly outlined against the fire, and Percival's archers were having a field day. Bizarrely, the creatures seemed to have little concept of ducking behind cover against bowshot. Why should they have learned to, after all? Were they not invisible? The City's coordinated, disciplined way of making war was paying off, particularly against opponents who seemed to possess no reactions in between racing slavering to berserk attack and scattering in panic. Percival did not blame them. After all, he reasoned, if these creatures were anything like Citizens, they must know the outcome of the battle. They knew who was going to win, and who to lose.

This must be the way wars were always fought down here. One side smug with the knowledge of its inevitable victory, the other one totally demoralized and fleeing almost before combat had even begun.

He wandered nonchalantly over a gap in the wall, occasionally raising the gun and shooting somebody. Most of the combat now taking place on the streets was now hand-to-hand, less because the troops had run out of room or ammunition to shoot than because both sides were blinded by the brilliance of the blaze. The combat had become one of impact and contact, of sensing the enemy's position by touch once spears, swords or riflebutts were locked. Both armies appeared to be fighting with their eyes tight shut. But Percival's forces were pushing the Enemy slowly backward through the streets, every column of march in every street being led by a lieutenant or a sergeant, a tribunus or a decurio, shields locked together like the smooth fascia of a patent stabbing and mangling machine.

They were nearing the further edge of the city now, the splendid conflagration of the metropolis lighting up the entire Abyss. For the first time, Percival could see that the Persians had build their town on a rock promontory that walked out into the drop, terminating in a skycraper-sized abyssite column which soared up into the dark overhead to become the overhang which protected the city; a natural bridge whose arch was maybe a hundred yards across and just as high. What process of erosion or deposition could have created it, Percival had no idea.

The city crowded around the rock column on both sides, narrow streets and buildings clinging to the cliffs as if painted on by optimistic artists. At least one ugly scar of rubble showed where, Percival imagined, a building had given up clinging and crumbled into the gulf. The fighting around the column was fiercer; scouts and archers were needed again, as the streets were too narrow for lines of locked shields to be an advantage. Loquax led the assault around one side of the column, and Percival and Penelope Simpson's lieutenants around the other. As usual, the Enemy were easy to spot, providing ready-made targets whenever they opened their eyes. Percival's men, meanwhile, advancing under the cover of gigantic magnolia shields, seemed all but impossible to find with an arrow. Squadrons of great taupe bats flapped overhead, making a noise like pennants rippling in the wind.

Then, finally, Percival's half of the army came out onto a flat platform of rock where no building existed. A level pavement had been built, but had been left bare, an act of rare reverence in an area where horizontal surfaces were at a premium. This promenade was punctuated only by a number of bronze or copper rings fixed directly into the pavement. Possibly those who had built the pavement had acquired the knowledge of how to make concrete from the Romans upstairs, and had planted the rings in the wet cement. The rings were thick, perhaps the thickness of a man’s thumb, and, when Percival weighed one in his palm, heavy. They would have worked well as tethering points for draught animals, maybe, or livestock waiting to be sold at market.

But there was only one form of livestock down here. And the fastening points, he noticed, were spaced out in such a way that a human being could be made to lie outstretched between them, all four limbs lashed down to the flags. The promenade was a place of execution, not a public square.

Yet it was not the promenade that most interested him, because beyond it, lit up suddenly by the collapse of a burning building way behind him in the city, was a thing Penelope Simpson’s diaries made cryptic mention of, which Ivan Gushin had said existed, which Ministry archaeologists had uncovered references to in sources dating back beyond the Dark Ages.

The Inner Temple. The Oracle. Iste Locus in Alto - “That Place Below”. In Herodotus, , “Hades’ Audience Hall.” In Ivan Gushin's final conversations with Penelope Simpson, the Captain had of course been speaking in metaphor when he'd referred to the entire city of Na as 'The Outer Temple'. By 'The Inner Temple', therefore, Gushin had been referring poetically to the entire Abyss, and not to any actual building as such. Such was the opinion of the very best experts the MoD had consulted.

Percival now knew that he was looking at that building.

The structure was a Graeco-Persian fusion like the Tomb of Mausolus, a massive pile of stone crammed onto a precarious spire of foundation, presenting aspects of both Persian and Hellenic art. Percival remembered that the Mausoleum had been a Wonder of the World. Carved above the entrance was a Farohar, a winged bearded man symbolizing God. This temple, he reflected, had been built at a time when the prophet Haggai was threatening his fellow Judaeans with dire divine retribution if they failed to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. The walls of the temple were crammed with bas-reliefs depicting the Sun, the Moon, and winged lions with human heads and beards that would put the most enthusiastic Mormon to shame.

“And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle”, recited Percival out loud, “and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men...And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle.”

Loquax looked at him oddly.

“And they had a king over them”, continued Percival, “which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.”

The sightless eyes of twenty or thirty winged, gold-crowned quadrupeds stared out of the stone at Percival. No-one seemed to have attempted to pry the gilt away from them; down here, steel, gunpowder and human flesh were all more valuable than gold. But steel rusted and flesh rotted, which was why they were sold at a premium; gold did not corrode, and the temple gleamed with it.

It was built on a separate spire of rock which had originally been a mere extension of the archway that protected the city. This, the one and only approach to the temple, had been carved painstakingly into an ornately-fretted causeway, decorated with bas reliefs of Lord Mithra carrying out the tauroctony, the act of sacrificing a bull in which he was always, unfailingly, depicted, and whose meaning no archaeologist had ever satisfactorily explained. The causeway was not only ornamental, however; it was also defensive. It was only a thin man wide, and the gaps between its paving stones big enough to make sure it would be more than just bears who got anyone who walked on the cracks in the pavement. Effectively, it was a set of stepping stones thirty feet in height, each stone separated from the next by three feet of absolutely nothing. Percival had no doubt that at least a dozen Enemy bows would be trained on any man attempting to hop, skip and jump his way into the temple.

However, before getting to the causeway, they would need to cross the promenade. Percival's army stayed stopped, almost comically obedient, waiting for further commands, crowded into the alleys between the smattering of buildings round the precipice.

Percival bent to the flagstones and picked up a single long, black feather, lying among others in a coating of moist grey garbage that overlay the flags like soil. The feather was alarmingly large; surely it had to come from a bird of eagle size or larger. Further feathers poked out of the dirt a few slabs further on. The larger ones were flight feathers; there were smaller ones that looked like the down on a young chick. Many birds had once not only lived here, but had almost certainly roosted too.

There was only one type of flying bird that grew to such a size, and it was no eagle. Even down here, buried under tons of rock, a vertical mile from any flying bird, in a place where every exposed surface dripped with moisture, the Zoroastrians had built a Tower of Silence, giving their dead back to the world without sullying earth, air or water. Even down here, they had tried to be true to their God. And this, of course, was why they had died out.

Beneath Percival's feet, the stuff on the flags squashed like rich loam. Parts of it crunched. The occasional rib or pelvis poked up through the marl. This was what human flesh became if enough people were left to rot for long enough. Vultures couldn't finish everything.

He held the feather up to the cold white light of the lanterns. Despite the noissome greyness covering most of it, one edge of it - the leading edge, the edge lying poking through the litter - was a brilliant, unclotted crimson. Percival clamped a hand down on the shoulder of one of his men, who was beginning to steal out across the flagstones with intent to attack the Enemy.

Cautiously, he took a halogen lantern from the hands of its bearer and swept it right at left across the pavement. The pavingstones gleamed scarlet as a sunset in Hell.

"Blood", he said, to no-one. "Sanguis", he repeated, for the soldiers' benefit. "Sanguis multus", he elaborated.

"Hecatombe hoc accidit", opined a lieutenant behind him.

Percival shook his head. "Hoc nec sacrificium neque proelium erat." Whoever had spilt this blood had covered the ground as finely as any interior decorator. Whoever had bled this blood had been neither a sacrificial offering nor a soldier wounded in battle.

Should he advance, or should he cower here in the rosy glow of the city he had set alight, just because he had encountered Enemy behaviour for which he had no explanation?

All of a sudden, a clatter of steel, bone and anything heavy enough to hit with sounded from the other side of the promenade. Loquax's forces had arrived. Their last few poor remnants of Enemy opposition backed into the square, piebald with Royal Blue marker paint and bright red blood, tempting targets for Percival's archers. Many of the Enemy broke and ran as soon as they burst into the square, ensuring that their remaining comrades were outflanked, surrounded and slaughtered. Loquax was visible at the head of his cohort, yelling what Percival knew, even before the words issued from his lips, was an order to charge.

It was logical behaviour - taking advantage of the enemy's disarray. But Percival knew suddenly - and surely Loquax must also know - that it was suicide.

"NOLI OPPUGNARE!" yelled Percival. "TERRA PARATA!"

- yet even as the shout died in his throat he knew that there was not, nor could be, any Latin translation of the words 'prepared ground'.

The Enemy general, whoever he was, was not an unreasoning beast, but a man, and an exceptional man at that. He had noticed that the Roman barbarians from uphill had been fighting using unfair tactics, colouring their skins and shields to make themselves invisible. He must have had prisoners of war of his own, and had experimented with the dye colours most readily available to him. And now, Loquax was charging full tilt over a field of the colour that most readily identified him to the enemy.

Loquax, at the head of his charge like a latter-day Alexander, was a latter-day St. Sebastian within seconds. Trailing blood like a spiral galaxy as he tumbled end-over-end, he tripped the troops that followed him and slowed their progress as they, in turn, became targets.

How had the Enemy realized the advantages of light and colour so quickly? Did they, perhaps, have an instinctive understanding of it, because of their peculiar biology? But surely that could not be the case. Their colour perception, like that of the Citizens, was narrower, if anything, than that of surface-dwelling humans.

The bowshot was deadly accurate, coming from dark voids in the bas-reliefs that crawled across the face of the Temple. He should have realized that, down here, even art would have a purpose.

Only a hundred yards away, his army was being reduced as methodically as meat being fed into a grinder, and he was standing watching, doing nothing to help. With every new wound the arrows made, his soldiers bled out fresh red blood that made them even easier targets.

There had to be a solution to this. There had to be a way through.

He realized almost instantly that the solution was, in fact, simple. It just wasn't pleasant.

He motioned to his lieutenants to give the order for a general withdrawal.

***

The Enemy continued to shoot up those already wounded; even those already dead. Many screamed and whimpered and moaned for help, but Percival, knowing the Enemy were only attempting to lure his remaining men back into the killing ground, did nothing. He attempted to push to the back of his mind, without success, the fact that one of those bleeding to death, scared and in pain, out there might be Loquax. But if Percival had sent his entire army into the killing field, the result would have been a subterranean Agincourt.

He ordered the army to set up camp in the slime, and brew up as best they could. No sense in attacking on an empty stomach.

Behind him in the dark, the screaming and the pleading continued.

***

Eventually, he stuck a thumb down into the muck and pulled it up to the light for scrutiny. It was black.

He looked up at the circle of squatting lieutenants, and nodded.

"Sagitarii primi", he cautioned. "Atque lux nulla." The lieutenants clapped fists to their chests, bowed, and scuttled away. In the dark, preparations for combat began quietly. Palms were dusted with a suspiciously bone-white powder to make sure of a steady grip on swords and spears. Blades were notched and dipped into the erstwhile human gunk that covered the ground, to ensure that wounds would be ragged and become infected. The liquid crunch of soldiers trampling charnel grime under unshod feet filled what was shortly to become the battlefield.

Almost immediately, eyes flicked open like dim lanterns behind the bas-reliefs. Percival climbed noiselessly up from his command post in the dirt at the edge of the promenade and onto a handy piece of statuary - an abyssite pedestal depicting, on its sides, men with beards smiting other men with beards - which he had earlier earmarked for this moment. Lying full length in a comfortable shooting position above the unseen heads of his own troops, one hundred yards from the Temple, he clicked the M16 into semi-automatic mode, sighted down the barrel, and began sending shots into the architecture.

He was not the best of shots. Occasionally he missed. When he missed, constellations of sparks cascaded down the faces of ancient prophets, and many works archaeologists would have killed to see were ruined. Most of the time, however, he hit, and the lanterns he was aiming at went out.

Volleys of arrows nevertheless continued to fly out of the dark, bowstrings twanging with a sound like progressive jazz guitar. This time, however, the archers' aim was relatively random. The single and simple drawback of using human captives to paint your battlefield blood red was that, in under an hour, the thickest coat you could apply would dry to jet black. Percival's insistence that his troops advance across the bloody blackness spaced out crouched behind Enemyskin scuta was also paying dividends. He heard as many wet SPLATs of arrows belly-flopping into the formerly human muck as he did dull THUMPs of arrows thudding into the hide shields. The occasional exasperated gasp as a head bit into flesh was so uncommon as to be negligible (except, he conceded, if you were the one being bitten).

Before long, Percival's troops were ensconced on the city side of the causeway into the temple, crouched behind a double wall of shields, virtually invulnerable, pelting the near side of the building with target painting darts and a good deal of heavier calibre ammunition. Every time Percival saw a pair of eyes, he shot what was between them; but the Enemy were by now learning to pop up, attack and drop down before a bead could be drawn on them.

On the plus side, they now showed signs of running low on ammunition, only sending the occasional shot out through the temple walls. Of course, this might only be a ruse; their commander might be hoping Percival would throw his remaining men into a mad dash over that last few tempting metres of causeway that could not possibly be long enough to be dangerous.

Making the rifle safe, he eased himself down off the low roof, narrowly avoiding skidding in the bony leftovers underfoot, and padded as silently as possible in the direction of the noise.

Moans and groans were still sounding all around him. He groped low about himself in the dark, trying not to disturb arrows well entrenched in wounds. There had been no time yet to deal with the fallen.

"Loquax!" he hissed. "Quo es?"

"Hoc", hissed a voice far to his right. He had to clamber over several corpses and not-quite corpses before finding one that was still breathing, though a hedgehog's hide of arrows that was moving up and down in it with every breath it took.

"Moriturus", wheezed the corpse, "te saluto."

"Haud moriturus es", lied Percival. "Why did you attack?"

"Hodie mortuus fuisses", gasped Loquax, "nisi pro te mortuus fuissem. Gravissimus es." You would have died, if I had not died instead. You are very important.

"I'm not that important, Loquax", said Percival.

The little creature shook his head, wincing as this caused the arrows to catch in his side. "Non comprehendes gravitatem tuam. Homo gravissimus mundi es." You do not realize your own importance. You are the most important man in the world.

"You knew you were going to die", said Percival.

"Scimus omnes se morituri iri. In hoc sunt omnes Sibyllae." We all know we are going to die. In this one matter, all men are prophets.

He fulfilled his prophecy. His eyes were so large and luminous that the sudden lack of life behind them seemed impossible. Percival considered slapping Loquax in the face and telling him faking wasn't funny. Yet the little Citizen seemed to be holding his breath for an awfully long time.

The Battle of the Temple still raged, though the Enemy were now getting the worst of it. However, it remained to be seen how the gulf between city and temple could be crossed; the stepping-stone causeway was intelligently defended, flanked by gorgeous relief carvings of bizarre metaphysical activities - men with crowns on their shoulders kneeling before a man crowned with rays of sunlight or lightning, a bearded magus prostrating himself before a gigantic winged figure holding a staff the height of the temple wall. There were plenty of dark spaces in those carvings, and Percival felt sure the Enemy had archers and ammunition in reserve to occupy those spaces.

He let the body of the diminutive translator down gently, and carefully opened the flap on his breast pocket, which contained the one final surprise he had hoped would be unnecessary.

Slowly, methodically, he popped the top off the auto touch-up spray and, being careful to protect the temperamental mechanism of the M16 with his off-hand, applied the spray liberally and democratically to his entire body surface as if it were anti-perspirant. First of all, his whole left arm was made yellow, as if by spreading jaundice; then the left side of his torso bloomed magnolia, then his leg turned canary-coloured. Then he switched the can to his left hand and infected his right side with the same livid cast as his left. Finally, he shut his eyes and applied the paint to his head. It felt cold on his skin. He didn’t open his eyes for several seconds, letting the coat take hold. It would, he knew, be murder to get it out of his beard.

He waved the spray up and down his rifle; then, remembering that the rifle might not be so useful in close quarters, reached down to Loquax's body for the Tokarev the translator always carried, fumbled in the little creature's bandolier pouches for the pistol's associated paraphernalia, slotted a fresh magazine into it, practised using the unfamiliar cocking and safety action, and painted it, too, yellow. Then he dropped the empty paint can in the dirt and stood dripping cadmium yellow onto the pavement. He did not feel invisible.

He had kept the palms of his hands clenched throughout. Now, he opened them and scooped a hand into another of his pockets, which contained a fine white powder. He rubbed his palms together, letting the stuff crumble between them. There was no chalk available down here; powdered human bone would just have to do.

He moved away from the sound of bowshot and gunfire, feeling his way with his feet through the human slurry to a point where the flagstones ended. He felt his way over the lip of the edge; there was masonry beneath, big coarse slabs that offered easy purchase to his boots.

Can't fall in any case. I could dive into the Abyss and return triumphant if I wanted. I am the World's Most Important Man. I can't fall. God, who Nietzsche foolishly believes is dead, will not let me -

The masonry ended in rock. His feet crunched on what he at first thought were eggshells from hundreds of years of birds' nests, but when another falling and fulminating building in the city behind him lit up the ledge, turned out to be row upon row upon row of tiny birds' skulls.

The rock offered foot- and handholds. It was, so far, relatively easy to traverse. But he had to go down as well as across.

Now the hard part started. Away from the glare of the burning city, round the end of the promontory and into the moat between temple and town.

Luckily, the Persians had not been able to help their artistic urges. Even down here, the rock was carved, into big, helpful shapes of birds and men and demons, as easy to climb on as a ladder. He could feel his way across the face, moving easily from prophet to prophet, feeling the big square outlines of the stepping stones, slightly broader at their bases than their heads; they afforded him a surprising amount of cover as he edged in towards the front of the Temple. There were no Enemy troops down here; the Enemy had learned by now to put all his men behind good strong walls, in case some unseen force should strike them dead between the eyes from an impossible distance.

However, a man behind strong walls could still easily pour down boiling oil on a man trying to climb them. And Her Majesty's prophecies don't preclude me returning triumphant with horrific facial burns.

For this reason, Percival worked his way around the front of the Temple to its (hopefully) relatively undefended side. Here, around the lion-pawed feet of a stone Abaddon - he had started to call the winged, crowned Persian man-beasts by that name - the wall became less alive with carvings, more difficult to climb, but almost certainly also less well defended. The carvings here were sparse and shallow, without the elaboration of those on the front of the building, which had almost certainly been made so to conceal arrowslits. At first, he was afraid he would not be able to scale the wall in such an absence of iconography, but, with a determination that would have terrified him only weeks earlier, he managed a chimney between two carved patriarchs and came up underneath a tiny window, too small for anything but an arrow or a bullet to travel through.

One foot on the two thousand-year-old head of one magus, one foot on the head of another, Percival precariously drew the Tokarev from his belt, made it unsafe, and pulled out a long silencer from a battledress pocket, which he screwed into the muzzle of the gun with exquisite care.

Then, one-handed, he reached up, curled his fingers round the lip of the arrowslit, and walked himself up the surface of the wall, four fingers between himself and a fall into infinity. He came up, was confronted by a pair of huge red glowing eyes, and made a third, less luminous red eye between them with the pistol. He waited patiently, but no more eyes showed themselves. He now had to face the dilemma of whether to put the pistol away. He could not climb further upwards without doing so; nor could he enter the building via the window. Also, his hand was getting tired.

He put the gun away, rendering himself defenceless, and rested his left hand by shifting his weight to his right. Then, he reached up into space above himself. There had been a Farohar up above the window on the wall, he was sure of it. Sure enough, his fingers found a hold, probably a wing or a crown or a bit of beard, impossibly high above him at the full extent of their reach. Holding his weight on that tenuous strip of stone, he removed his other hand and reached it, too, upwards.

If I fall now -

But I can't fall.

He pulled himself up with strength he had not been aware he possessed, powered on by the knowledge that he not only could do it, but would. Downward lay only death; upward was the only place to go.

He found himself on roofing tiles. There had once been far more tiles on the roof, which was roughly pyramidal in shape. The roof's original tiling seemed to have been imported from somewhere sunnier up above; over the years, it had been replaced with stratified, fragile abyssite of a variety Percival had never seen before. Over still more years, even these tiles had been lost, probably more by the action of water or falling rock than by wind. After dealing with the tiles, the groundwater had wrought heavy damage on the interior. There were massive, rotten holes that appeared to go deep into the lower storeys. Only the sheer solidity of the building's construction - the walls were as thick as those of a mediaeval fortress - seemed to have saved it from collapse.

He had originally assumed the building was on fire; a pyre of thick black smoke was rising from it, after all. Now, however, from closer in, he knew that the smoke was not what it contrived to seem. Outlying plumes and puffs of it were issuing from gaps and cracks in the tiling where the roof had caved in, it was true, but the majority of it was rising from a thick, squat structure in the shape of four daevas at the roof's apex, each daeva leering evilly at a separate quarter of the world. The smoke was coming out of a chimney; it was supposed to be there. But it wasn't strictly smoke. Percival was certain that, as he approached it across the plane of the roof, parts of it cast about idly in his direction, as if blown by a subterranean wind that wasn't there. He retreated hurriedly. The smoke returned to billowing upwards as smoke should.

There were no red eyes visible in the depths inside the building. Percival eased himself down, unable even to see his feet, let alone where to put them. At first, he could not find a foothold, and he was forced to dangle in the dark, legs flailing, hips swinging, until he had a place to stand. All around him now, he could see glimmering eyes rushing back and forth through openings in the structure - doorways, stairwells, wall collapses?

He swung down onto a solid stone floor, taking out the pistol. A pair of red eyes bustled towards him out of the dark, eyes which might have been behind a bow that had shot at Loquax, and he shot at them. He rose and felt his way along the corridor, past a dying man. To his right, a doorway, regular-sided, opened up - inside the doorway, more pairs of eyes were milling about, chattering excitedly. The owners of those eyes might have been directing the volleys that had taken down Loquax's charge. He raised the gun, hand shaking, and shot all of them - he thought he remembered firing three times - before they even knew they were under attack. He was now in a cramped, low-ceilinged space with a single narrow window that he could only identify as such by wiggling his hand through it; it admitted no light. The space was now half full of bleeding humanoids; he stood on some accidentally as he passed, but they only gurgled feebly. His aim had been good.

There were many more red eyes in a larger chamber further on; a huge one, by Abyss standards, the size of a suburban living room, extending both ahead of him and below. One end of it was a jewel mosaic of brilliant, irregular shapes of light; the sort of light that came from automatic gunfire and burning cities. He tried to turn some of the shapes of light around in his head, recognized the wide open eyes of an angel, the gaping jaws of a daeva, the dark shadow beneath a simurg's wings.

He was looking at one of the two wings of the temple front, the ones out of which enemy archers had targetted his men. Had targetted Loquax.

He began picking off the red eyes from behind.

The Enemy troopers in here were not buck naked like their more deceased companions outside, but groaning under the weight of heavy leather aprons sewn with flat steel ingots that he instantly recognized as votive tablets, the common currency of the underworld - another surprise. He had never suspected, nor been told, that the Enemy had such heavy armour; it would certainly have stopped any number of bone arrows that hit on its plates. Unhappily for the plates' wearers, pistol bullets went through them like birds through air.

At first, his success was almost comical, as the Enemy assumed the gunfire was still coming from outside, and took cover and returned fire by frantic turns as he continued to drop them one by one. Then, one of them clearly spotted him; a pair of eyes swung round to fasten directly on his position, there was a yell in the troglodyte gabble, and a silhouette on the end of the line of eyes leapt to its feet and jabbed a finger at him.

Percival edged into the chamber and opened up with the M16.

***

The slaughter had been ferocious, interrupted only by brief pauses to slap in fresh magazines. The rifle barrel was warm to the touch, even through the polypropylene sheath. Percival's trigger finger was beginning to get cramp.

Lord, what have I done? Have I not admitted to myself that these are men like me? Men who can plot and counterplot, develop strategies, respond to a change in tactics with one of their own? These are not animals, and this is not extermination. This is war. And I am a Field Chaplain caught red-handed by the Almighty with a weapon in my hand.

With only one fully manned shooting gallery now remaining behind the temple statues, the City's troops were able to rush across the stepping-stone causeway in testudo formation, crouched behind shields heavy with arrows. As soon as Percival had stepped out into the galleries at the front of the temple, as soon as muzzle flashes had been seen inside the building, the army had known at least one of its own was inside. The remainder of the battle was a foregone conclusion. He could hear them now, raging through the rooms behind him, taking their revenge on the Enemy who had caused them to cower behind their own city walls for so long.

Percival was now standing in what he imagined must be a Holy of Holies; a circular, colonnaded chamber, at least partly collapsed, with Aryan script picked out on its walls in gold. The walls themselves were marble, punctuated by abyssite carvings - farohars, but turned over so that the bearded head in the symbol was not looking upwards towards Heaven, but falling downwards into Hell. Percival was now absolutely sure that he was standing in a temple, not to Ahura Mazda, but to Angra Mainyu, to Darkness, to the Lie. Daevas stood round the walls - not capering in gay abandon, as on the walls of some Hell Fire Club where rich sybarites played at worshipping Satan, but standing stiffly to attention, stylized in stone, like soldiers. The armies of a Hell that meant business.

It made sense. Zoroaster may have swayed the Achaemenid kings into worshipping his One God, but the mindset of the ancient world was to hedge one's bets as far as divinities were concerned, and surely worshipping the One God didn't preclude also dabbling in a little veneration of Marduk, Ra, Astarte or, what was that other chappie, the one who was the One God's opposite?

The inscriptions curled around the walls in all the alphabets of the Achaemenids - Aryan Cuneiform, Demotic, Phoenician, Sanskrit - even Greek. Percival, a clergyman (albeit a heavily armed clergyman) could read Greek.

"I, Ariaramnes, who am king in this region, have built this place to pay homage to the Lie."

Ariaramnes. He had heard that name before, in an Ancient History class. Surely this king could not be the King Ariaramnes? But Ariaramnes was his name, and he described himself as a king.

Cyrus the Great, the first Achaemenid King of Persia, had been succeeded first by his son, Cambyses, then by Smerdis the Pretender, then by Darius. However, this put historians in a quandary, as, although Darius admitted he was no blood relation of Cyrus, he nevertheless described himself as the ninth in a line of kings leading back to Achaemenus, who hence gave his name to the Achaemenid Dynasty. Darius also named another of his nine kingly ancestors as a King Ariaramnes who was described (by himself) in a golden tablet found at Ecbatana as 'The Great King, King of Kings', a title which properly was only ever accorded to monarchs of the Persian Empire. But if Cyrus and Cambyses had preceded Darius, and been monarchs of the Empire, what could Darius's ancestors have been kings of?

The answer appeared to be: Hell.

The Persians had considered this place to be important. Even though it lay outside the borders of their world, they had conquered it and built their temples here. They, like the Nazis and the Greeks and Romans after them, had been fascinated by the fact that a substance existed here which made men babble the future, but which appeared at the same time to corrupt them into beasts. The Persian kings must have realized the implications for long-term strategy, and attempted to harness the power of the Abyss for help in running their Empire. But how to do so, when they had just agreed to a compact with Zoroaster which demanded high morality, the worship of light and fire and all that lay above the earth? They could hardly be seen to be stealing away furtively into burrows in the ground to consult with what could only be emissaries of the Lie.

So they sent their own emissaries here, men who willingly damned themselves in the eyes of the Zoroastrian faith, men who were instructed to enter into the service of Angra Mainyu and pipe back any truly useful lies the Lord of the Dark might have. Such as, for example, detailed lies on the current disposition of the armies of the mainland Greeks. However damned they might be, those men would become important to the Empire, trusted advisors at the right hand of royalty. Might they even have become important enough for the Achaemenids to have handed over their kingdom to such a man?

Darius had been, by all accounts, a good king. He built roads. He built new capitals at Persepolis and Susa. He organized the empire into satrapies. He allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple in Jerusalem. He expanded the empire (though temporary setbacks were inflicted on him by rebellious Greeks). Percival had lost count of the number of Latin texts he had translated at school which had begun ‘Darius, rex Persarum...’

The roof above his head, a double dome, was held up by an outer and an inner circle of columns, heavy, squat, businesslike; no graceful fluted Doric or soaring Gothic here. These were pillars built with a hefty safety margin, far, far thicker than they absolutely needed to be, and engineered, not in sandstone, slate or even marble, but in the midnight blue flecked with tiny starlight glimmers that could only be lapis lazuli. In the Greco-Roman world, lapis had been the preserve of the Persians, and a rarity even to them, coming only from recently conquered Afghanistan. In the Middle Ages, miniscule quantities of it, ground into a powder, had fetched astronomical prices as perhaps the only artist's pigment more valuable than gold. The sheer value of the pigment had been the reason why the Virgin Mary's robe was always depicted as a rich, deep blue. And here Percival was, standing in the middle of a room made of it. The columns couldn't be solid lapis - could they?

What was inside the inner row of columns would remain a mystery; Percival had no doubt, though, that what was in there was intended to constitute the temple's Holy of Unholies. He based this assumption on the fact that the spaces between the columns were solid curtains of Oracle Smoke, so dense that it was cold on the eyes to look upon. Percival had at first been skeptical about reports of the Black Smoke being 'burning cold' and 'like liquid ice'; but a single glance in the direction of the smoke curtain sliced into his eyes like a winter wind. Pulling his lighter from his breast pocket, he flicked up a flame, which stood up straight and tall; there was no breeze in the chamber. The smoke appeared to issue from somewhere in the floor between the columns, and travelled straight up into the ceiling, where he imagined it must vanish into some series of purpose-built vents. He had no doubt, though, that the moment he approached the Smoke, it would stop rising quite so vertically and come out to meet and greet him.

It was, in fact, some moments before he noticed the most interesting fact about the room, which was that there was a human figure standing quietly next to the Smoke curtain, watching him.

How did he get in here? I've been all the way round the room. There's only one way in.

Isn't there?

It was not standing in a combat-ready crouch, frightened, agitated, ready to fight or flee. It was sullenly erect and relaxed, staring him down like an equal. It wore no armour, and appeared to carry no weapon, unlike any Enemy footsoldier Percival had so far seen.

"Necandum est. Interficendum est."

But by far the most disturbing thing about the creature was the pattern of little cruciform weals leopard-spotting it from the buttocks to the shoulders; so regular as to be almost like ritual scarring. Certainly, these had been deliberately inflicted. Unfortunately, Percival was also almost certain he knew who had done the inflicting.

"Non dolere potest." These words were spat out by lips he had thought capable only of babbling like an ape. Had the early European explorers thought the same of the Australian aborigines?

"Non humanus est."

Sweet holy Jesus, he's their leader.

The City captured their bastard general and I set him free. After showing him all our most secret military schemes in gorgeous lavish detail. Allowing him to formulate counter-strategies. To arrange the slaughter of prisoners, the sprinkling of the promenade with their good red blood. A field of red the size of a baseball field, in which the Enemy leader knew from personal experience he could easily locate a single chocolate eclair which Loquax and his arrow-riddled comrades might miss. Percival remembered how the red dye used by his simple-makers had been the easiest of the three to produce; the Citizens had used the same method to make it as the Enemy had, and it had come from the same source. He remembered particularly uncomfortably how his soldiers had revelled in holding struggling prisoners over the mixing buckets and slitting their throats whilst Percival's own pet Enemy was made to watch and learn. As learn he evidently had.

The creature grinned a row of huge teeth at Percival. Percival smiled back. Neither smile was friendly.

"Quam diu hortatus es", mimicked the prisoner. "Homo qui non adest est."

"Moriturum", said Percival, "te saluto."

But somehow, he knew what would happen when he raised the pistol to his eye, lined up on all the ironmongery in the centre of the thing's chest, and pulled the trigger. The action chinked like a pocketful of loose change, and the object of Percival's affections was still obnoxiously alive. Its smile grew wider. Percival shrugged, unloaded the M16 from over his shoulder, cocked it, and began to raise it to a shooting stance.

The creature smiled again, and stepped back into the Smoke curtain, as easily as a crocodile slithering into water.

Evidently this was how the Enemy general had managed to sneak in here unnoticed. But how could he live in the stuff? Even the Citizens avoided it. If I stepped in there, I'd come out a cannibal, a homicide, a drug addict and a Daily Mail reader. Condemned to live out my life like a jaded actor playing out a script he already knows by heart.

Somehow it was this last possibility that frightened him most. Lose your freedom to choose, and lose your soul.

What do I do now? I can’t see to shoot.

As if mocking him, a grey sliver of bone quivered past his ear and shattered on the cuneiform carved into the lapis, flung with enough force to erase an entire sentence. Percival’s opponent had a good spatial memory.

So did Percival. He took aim at the point where the sliver had been flung out of the Smoke and fired. He saw movement to his left, spun and fired again, just in time to see a human head duck back into the murk. His shot erased a whole paragraph on the other side of the room. Prudently, he took several steps backward. A bone shard flew past his eyes again, editing the lapis. Splinters of semi-precious stone stung his forehead.

“Diabolus est”, spat the dark.

A head ducked back into the Smoke at another location; he spun and fired again, this time remembering to aim not at the head, but at what was behind it. Unfortunately his opponent had remembered this time to shield his body with a pillar. Percival’s shots ate into the pillar, but almost certainly killed nothing.

“Homo qui non adest est”, echoed the voice from the Smoke in glee.

Percival took two steps to the side this time, still keeping a discreet distance between himself and the Smoke curtain. A further bone splinter flew out of the black at him; this time he was forced to dodge it, losing his balance in the process. A head popped out of the Smoke arrogantly, right in front of him, grinned when it saw his rifle was not up and ready, and disappeared back into the interface.

I don’t get this. I keep moving. How can he tell where I am so easily?

Hang on. Every time he flings another dart, his head pops up just afterward.

He’s prescient. He’s an Oracle Smoke addict, and he’s using the side-effects of the drug on me. Bastard! I thought they weren’t allowed to do that. A bone javelin flickered past his ear; he took no action, but waited for the head to pop up, then shot at it, just too late.

“That was cheating, Loquax”, said the voice from the Smoke reproachfully.

But he isn’t cheating. He’s missing me, every time. Just missing me doesn’t break the laws of causality...

...okay, maybe it bends them a little. He’s not going to kill me, even though he knows exactly where I am, because he knows he doesn’t kill me. But he isn’t above grazing my cheek with a dart to let me know he could kill me if it weren’t for all these pesky laws of physics.

But if he knows he doesn’t kill me....

Eventually, I do take him down. All I have to do is keep my nerve, and STOP SHOOTING ON BURST-FIRE. I wonder how much ammunition I've wasted already? A good soldier is supposed to keep a shot count in the back of his head.

The face peek-a-booed out of the Smoke again. This time he was ready. The firing pin, however, bit down on air.

Ah. I've wasted that much ammunition.

"Bravo, Loquax!" said the creature in a plummy Home Counties accent. "Well done!"

Percival felt his teeth grind together.

I know what you're trying to do - trying to draw me closer in. Make me one of you, just as crazy as you and the Citizens and Lady Penelope.

I'll come close enough to kill you, and no further.

Reaching into a battledress pocket, he slid out the KCB-70, and clicked it into position on his gun muzzle. He had to duck in the process of doing so, as another trio of darts was flung at him with the precision of a circus knife thrower. He ducked with the agility of a knife thrower’s Beautiful Assistant. Keeping to the script.

Now, let's see whether you've ever seen a bayonet before.

A face popped out of the Smoke. Percival jabbed with the bayonet and lopped the bridge of its nose off. It yowled, despite the fact that it had almost certainly known it was going to lose a nose in advance.

The Smoke swirled; the face resurfaced at a different location. Percival whirled the gun round and caught it in the remnants of its face with the butt.

This is getting easier. I'm reacting to its pattern, is what I'm doing. Uh, whatever pattern that is, that is. Must be doing it subconsciously. Oh yes, I'm far more clever than I think.

The face twined round a pillar. Percival nearly took its eye out with the bayonet, laying its cheek open. It was difficult to see how heavily it was bleeding. It might be just pretending to bleed.

I have the better of it now. I am going to kill it. I am going to crucify it.

Then the entire Enemy stepped out of the Smoke directly in front of him, so slowly that he did not even bother to jab it with the bayonet as it could not possibly present a threat, arms crossed like an entombed Egyptian pharaoh, holding two bone javelins. And grinning, through the blood that was now running down it, blood the same colour as its own flesh, like a melting wax candle. On the creature's cheek was a big, welling droplet trembling to break free of its face and fall, and Percival knew exactly where it would fall on the flagstoned floor, as if the tiles were Cartesian coordinates.

Oh dear.

"You are going to attempt to hit me in the right shoulder", said Percival. "But your javelin shaft will break on the pillar behind me. In attempting to ward the blow off, I will fail signally to do so, but will catch you on the way back and sever a major artery in your left arm. Then you will attempt to ward off a stab to your right side. You will lose your balance, possibly weakened by sudden loss of blood, and fall over, though my blow will miss in the dark in any case. However, I will then strike in a third time - and, I am afraid to say, a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh time - which will kill you."

The creature grinned at Percival like a cathedral gargoyle.

"But there is something missing. Something I can't see. Can you help me out? It's hazy."

The thing put up both of its javelins - pathetic weapons against a razor-edged bayonet - and stepped back smiling into the Smoke.

"Thank you", said Percival.

"This one, in case there is any doubt", said the creature, "is for Loquax."

"This one, in case there is any doubt", said Percival, "is for Loquax."

He stepped forward into the black. It was like jumping into cold water, without the resistance cold water would offer. It moved and swirled about him like water would, but his limbs moved as swiftly as they would have done in air. He breathed easily, despite knowing in his heart of hearts that what he was breathing was no longer entirely oxygen/nitrogen. The cold seemed to worm its way into every crease and wrinkle on him - into his nostrils and his ears, caressing every hair on his head, threading its way up his urethra like mercury rising in a thermometer, numbing his flesh exactly like novocaine spreading from a dental injection, even down to the euphoria that novocaine would bring.

He played the part. He felt the bone splinter, felt the bayonet bite down into flesh. He stabbed hard, several times, killing the Enemy quickly rather than leaving it to bleed to death slowly full of puncture wounds as he might have done had it been a friend. His final thrust pushed the creature back out of the other side of the Smoke and the ring of columns, and he collapsed onto one arm, one side of his body warm with someone else's blood, the other cold with Smoke condensing black on his battledress in living droplets.

"Gratias te ago", said the creature, and died.