His laughter rang out, threatening to overwhelm Leagh, and she twisted away, jamming fingers in her ears and screwing her eyes shut.
When Leagh finally found the courage to open her eyes again, she saw Sheol, the last of the Demons now above ground, step into the hole that led to the stairwell to Sanctuary.
"I pray to every god in every existence," Leagh whispered, "that you have found a way out of there, Axis."
Chapter 38
Sanctuary No More
Through the night and into the morning Axis rode Sal through the frantic preparations, sometimes stopping to murmur encouragement, other times to help lift provisions into a cart. And always he kept turning his eyes to the sky.
In the end, it was the woman he was helping to settle her children into an already crowded cart that suddenly exclaimed and pointed upwards.
Axis jerked his eyes skyward.
Emerald cracks were zigzagging and wriggling their way from a point just off-centre across the entire sky.
As the emerald cracks widened, a sickly silver gleamed through.
"Gods!" Axis cried, and without further ado, grabbed Sal's halter, sprang onto her back, and pushed her forward at a gallop through the shouting, pointing, terrified groups about him.
Six shapes crouched across the chasm that the silvery bridge had once spanned.
They were no longer recognisable as humanoid, or animal, or even as Demons. They were just great, dark, slimy masses of shifting black and pink and orange that oozed pure evil.
There was an outer ring of five crouched about one in their centre. The central mass was Roxiah, drawing on all the power of the Enemy within Niah's body, and using Rox's soul to magnify it and then distribute it to the other five Demons.
And from there, all six hurled it at the enchantments that protected Sanctuary.
It felt good, the destruction of this beauty, and that good itself increased the power of the Demons to the point where they had power to spare, and sent crazy spurts of it out into the universe to dance about the stars and disrupt the harmony of the Star Dance. It knew, that beautiful, melodious power that sang through the stars, that the final confrontation was nigh.
"Urbeth!" Axis screamed as he dashed through his palace and up to the balcony where Urbeth spent much of her time. "Urbeth!"
"She's not here." Azhure: beautiful, calm, terrified. Dressed in a midnight blue robe and a thick, scarlet cloak.
She took Axis' arm. "She's downstairs. On the lawns behind the palace. Most others are down there with her. I've been waiting for you. Where have you been? Urbeth has been —"
But Axis was already moving, and Azhure ran after him.
A gigantic fissure appeared in the sky above Sanctuary.
Whatever lay outside that crack, on the outer side of the Dome that protected Sanctuary, was of a much lower pressure than the atmosphere inside.
Sanctuary's air streamed towards the crack. Clouds screamed as the low pressure outside pulled them towards the ever- widening crack.
The dark mass of the Demons grew larger as they tasted the inevitability of Sanctuary's death, and that further increased their power twofold.
Axis, as everyone else, stopped and stared for a heartbeat or two, unable to come to terms with what they saw.
Then something huge and powerful thudded into his back.
A white paw. One of Urbeth's daughters stood behind him. "Move!" she growled. "Mother is anxious to go!"
"As am I!" muttered Axis, but he ran forward onto the lawns anyway, Azhure a half pace behind him.
And again, Axis stopped, stunned by what he saw on the ground rather than what was happening leagues above him.
Somehow, in the intervening minutes since Axis had seen the first tiny cracks appear in the sky, Urbeth had managed to get all life within Sanctuary into line.
Literally.
Before him stretched a column the breadth of five carts wide. It snaked back across lawns and through orchards and groves and fields as far as Axis' eye could see.
To his left Urbeth, several times her normal size, paced anxiously back and forth at the head of the column.
"Hurry!" she roared, and Axis jumped. He turned slightly, and whistled.
Pretty Brown Sal trotted out from behind the palace and over to Axis, her halter rope trailing.
"Have you a mount?" Axis asked Azhure.
She shook her head. "I hadn't even thought of it. But I can travel in one of the carts —"
Before she could finish, Axis seized her waist and lifted her up onto Sal's back. An instant later and he was behind her, pulling her back against him and turning Sal's head towards the column.
"Just like old times, isn't it?" he whispered in Azhure's ear, and she laughed deep in her throat, and shook out her raven black hair, and for a moment both of them rejoiced in the thrill of once more being together against danger that appeared insurmountable.
Axis' arm tightened, and then they were cantering down the side of the column towards its head.
