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Chapter 2: The Castle Maneuver

Trapped. No way out, no way to call for help. Tuco climbed up to the battlements and stared out for a while. All around E-Temen-Anki was deep, dark forest. Clouds drifted overhead. There was no sun to drift across the sky, so it was impossible to tell if day was passing, or if there would even be a night. He picked absently at the edges of paper with his claws, and a little bit of scripture tore away. It read, "Go to the ant, thou sluggard. Consider her ways, and be wise."

Well, he'd already faced the temptation of sloth once, hadn't he? With nothing else to do, he strolled through the keep, wandering through its paper rooms. There were dozens of bedrooms, with huge beds piled with blankets and pillows made of cloth and stuffed with feathers, not paper. There were special rooms with latrines inside the building, and wherever the holes led, they did not drain inside the walls but somewhere else entirely. There were grand ballrooms with polished paper floors, a library filled with books (more scripture), and an armory stocked with a variety of fierce-looking weapons, from which Tuco appropriated an axe that was made not of paper but of some kind of hard, silvery metal. He couldn't really tell whether the metal was heavy, as nothing felt heavy to him these days, but it had a nice heft in his grip, and it might, he thought, be useful in trying to effect an escape, if necessary.

He found a massive paper dining hall, and beyond that, an enormous kitchen stocked with cooking implements, real food, and a real fire burning under a black cauldron suspended in a paper hearth. Further exploration yielded parlors, sitting rooms, a solarium, a music conservatory, and uncountable closets, all stocked with paper. He also discovered a wide stairway and followed it down to a basement with an actual dungeon. There were cells, their bars black wrought iron, spearing up and down into the paper ceiling and floor.

Curious, Tuco crouched down and grabbed a bit of torn paper sticking up from the hole and peeled it back. It tore away with a satisfying rip. Perhaps he could simply tear his way out, if he needed to? With the tip of a claw, he worked up another edge of paper and tore that one back as well. The edge of the third leaf dragged painfully along his finger, and he instinctively put it to his mouth; the paper had sliced it open, and he tasted the copper-sulfur flavor of his blood as he delicately probed the cut with his tongue tips.

The power of the castle healed the cut almost instantly, however, and then he felt that strange surge of energy as before--this time not in his bones, but as a flush of pleasure that burned briefly in his skin, as though a enjoyable, full-body blush. He withdrew his fingertip from his mouth and examined it. His fingertip looked strange: slightly thicker somehow, the flesh pebbled with odd, tiny bumps. They were miniscule on his fingertip, but swathed his whole hand, growing larger up his arm. On further inspection, all of his skin had changed subtly. He slid his hand across his chest, feeling broad, flat, overlapping shapes there, almost unnoticeable, but different, as though his flesh had been covered with some sort of protective layer. More of the pebbling went down his thighs, swathed his ankles, and even altered the grip of his toes on the paper floor beneath him.

"Does the castle change me somehow to stop me from being hurt again?" he wondered aloud. Thoughtfully, he picked up the axe he had retrieved from the armory. Its edges gleamed silver-sharp. It was probably a mistake to try that... but after a minute or two, boredom and curiosity got the better of him, so he held it in his right hand, gripping it tightly, his forearm bulging into solid globes of tension. He set his left thumb against the blade and pushed. There was almost no pain, but the blade sank in, far deeper than Tuco had intended, and blood welled up around it. He dropped the axe and resisted the urge to suck on the wound, instead watching with curiosity.

It had just begun to throb with a deep, sharp pain when the wound closed, a thin clean line amid the smear of red blood. For a moment, Tuco thought that was all that would happen, but then an intense, overwhelming flush radiated out from his thumb and suffused his entire body, as though he were burning with a fever. He fell backward, catching himself on the heels of his hands, his back arching as his skin prickled and crawled. The experiment had been a mistake, he knew now, but it was too late to do anything but deal with the consequences.

His skin flushed redder and redder, as though filling with blood, tightening as it did, into thick, banded slabs across his enormous, panting, chest, moving down over his abdominals, around his arched cock, and down over his sac and the length of his tail. Not slabs, he realized through the intensity of the sensations. Scales. The wide, flat scales of a serpent forming across his chest and down his belly. He lifted his arms, watching in astonishment as the light pebbling of his skin solidified into round, snakelike scales, a brilliant crimson on the insides of his arms, a duskier red, darkening to near black on the opposite. The backs of his fingers hardened into thicker scales that merged with the claws at his fingertips, giving his hands a taloned, gargoyle-like look. He writhed as the prickling moved across his back, up his neck, and down his legs, his toes curling as they thickened.

And then it was over. He lay panting, the enormous chest heaving in his vision now a segmented red, though if anything, the tight, form-clinging lines of his scales seemed to accentuate, rather than conceal, his swollen brawn, almost as though the muscle threatened to burst its way out of its armoring. Shaking a little, he rolled to his feet again. His huge arms and thick legs were coated in scales like glittering rubies. He brushed his fingertips across the muscle of one forearm; the scales there seemed as flexible as his own skin, and though he could feel the layer of protection, neither his forearm nor his fingertips had lost any sensitivity.

He looked down and, with his toes, nudged the axe lying on the floor. "I'll wager you couldn't cut me now," he murmured aloud. "I expect I couldn't break a bone again, either. This place merits its reputation. It makes you safe from anything that might hurt you. But you cannot leave." And, he thought, somewhat ruefully, looking down at his scale-armored form, it makes you less human with every change. "I shall have to be cautious if I don't plan to remain here forever."

And then he thought of the burning-gimlet eyes of Flavros, and wondered if he would ever leave, if anyone had ever escaped E-Temen-Anki.

Well, if any prison could be escaped, surely one made of paper would be easiest. His tail swaying, he crouched, picked up the axe again, and hacked away at the hole he had made in the floor near the cell. The axe chewed through the paper like... well, paper, and presently, Tuco had managed to tear away a hole that looked down into some kind of room below. The room was darkened, but with his devil sight, he could easily see rocky floors--not worked stone, but craggy, as though a passage in a sea-cave. He tried to remember the keep that had been just below his but could not recall what it had looked like nor how it had been constructed--he had been too excited to reach the top of the steps.

With his talons, he scraped away more of the paper, widening the hole. Peeling it back revealed thin, ribbed iron bars underlying his paper floor, arranged in a mesh, with square holes wide enough to get his hand into, but too narrow to permit much past them--the swell of his forearm allowed little past his wrist. "Well," he said to himself, "all this strength has to be for something." He planted his feet against the ground, gripped the iron bars with both hands, and pulled upright, bracing with his legs. At first it was surprisingly easy--the bars plied to his strength like young tree branches, pulling apart. But soon he was pulling against the spots where the bars joined together, melted into each other. He tugged harder, clenching his teeth. All around him the paper floor rose, with the sounds of tearing and crinkling barely muffling the groans and shrieks of metal as it bent in response to his power. He lifted a minor hill before him, and even the nearby wall bent slightly, tugged inward by the upward pull of the floor. But soon it was as though he was trying to lift the entire floor, the whole castle. Stretched out in his grip, the iron bars dug into his fingers. His shoulders ached and burned, his arms complained, his legs and back throbbed with the effort of trying to tear apart an entire iron floor.

And then suddenly the ache was gone, and the pleasure flooded through his muscles again. He stumbled backward, letting go of the iron bars and holding his fingers up before him as they visibly thickened where the bars had dug into them, causing discomfort. His arms pulsed as though flexing, and throbbed larger, the muscle healing itself where the work had torn it, and growing back stronger, just as it had in the stone yard when Belphegor had transformed him. Forearm pressed into biceps, each of them swelling thicker. He felt his shoulders growing massively, mounding up, his back bulging with new sinew and strength. His legs swelled beneath him, nudging each other farther apart. And then he stood, his chest nearly pressing into his chin as it heaved with his breath, his musculature that much closer to the immobility that Belphegor had swollen him into the previous month.

He grimaced down at the stretched floor. It seemed that the keep would protect him even from the minor injuries of overworked muscles. Beneath the torn paper, the floor was a little geometrical hill of stretched iron bars. His arm could fit through the widened hole between them, but after his sudden growth, only just. He didn't dare try to widen it further.

Crouching by the edge, he braced both hands against the sides of the hole and pushed his head through. The expansive spread of a castle stretched out below him. The hole he had peeled away was not too far from a tower that thrust up from the walls below. The castle itself did not appear to be made of worked stone, but natural, as though a rock had one day just decided to grow, forming mottled walls around asperous rooms, thrusting towers like gnarled, rough-hewn fingers toward the sky. Three of those towers rose to support Tuco's own castle, his paper fundament crinkled and folded around the rising spires. He could see no one about in the castle below.

"Hello!" he called, his great voice booming across the stones, echoing from empty walls. "Is anyone down there?" When there was no reply, he called again, and again, until finally the surface of the courtyard below rippled and shifted, the shadows rearranging, and where once there had been a random pattern of twisted stone, now a deep, pitted face appeared. It must have been twenty feet wide, and was almost skeletal, its rocky cheeks drawn and gaunt. Huge tusks jutted from its closed mouth, and below its enormous, wide devil horns, two deep-set eyes glittered with hellfire.

"Whose voice calls to me after all this time?" Its voice was that of boulders grinding together. Its fiery eyes wheeled about as it searched for Tuco.

"Here!" Tuco called down to it. "Up here! I'm in the castle above!"

The flames of its gaze turned to him. "So. After all this time, the Baronet has sent me a neighbor. And what are you called, little devil, and what lured you here?"

"My name is Tuco. I came here to keep safe and keep my friends safe."

"Friends." The face in the floor rolled the word around in its mouth as though tasting a forgotten flavor. "The Abyss has changed indeed. All here came for safety, Tuco. Mortal souls, devils, even an angel or two sequestered away in E-Temen-Anki. Few outside know that it is protector and prison alike. Now that you are trapped here, you know as well." The whole castle beneath Tuco swelled and deflated several times, like a bladder, with a great, grinding, wheezing sound. It was laughing. "Or you will soon enough."

"Forgive me," Tuco said, and then mentally chided himself--devils would not ask for forgiveness. "But are you... the castle itself? I've never seen a talking castle before."

Those fiery eyes stared into him for a moment as though scouring his soul. "I am prison and prisoner alike, as are all in E-Temen-Anki. We are its body, its strength, its walls, its clothing. And you, Tuco," it added with another stone-grinding, wheezing laugh, "are its little paper hat."

"I don't understand. How can you be prison and prisoner at the same time?"

"Are not we all? Every soul constructs its own prison, and it builds it of itself. The walls that hold you within them came from you. This is why you cannot break free; by damaging your keep you damage yourself, and the power of this place will allow that only once. Now you walk about freely in your paper passages, but as the years, the centuries, the eons drift by, you will change."

"Only if I harm myself, surely," Tuco protested.

"So I believed, too. So I believed. I was a fine and strapping devil, smaller than you, as near as I can remember, before I came here. When first I realized I was imprisoned, I tried to escape, just as you do now, and in the effort harmed myself greatly. My bones grew stronger than iron, my skin harder than diamond. I grew, formed crags, and spikes, became a thing of stone. And I told myself I would attempt no more; if I could not secure my freedom, I could at least preserve my mobility, my form. But with idleness and unchanging safety came a growing intolerance; where once a broken finger would have pained me, now a stubbed one did, and my fingers grew together so that I could not stub them. Where once a deep cut would have aggravated, now, a minor scratch felt intolerable, and my skin grew thicker until it lost all feeling. I stood or lay in one position or another, and my bones ached, or my muscles wearied, or I simply felt discontent, restless, uncomfortable. After millennia, every minor sensation became an irritant, every movement of my body an aggravation. And so I changed more and more, losing what could feel, for no feeling is truly safe. And eventually I became my castle, and my castle me, and so, I presume, it has happened to everyone else taken here. Baronet Flavros comes by to taunt me now and then. He promises that when I can no longer move or speak, my soul will be his entirely, and my power will be turned toward the magics that imprison others. It is how he became so powerful and rose to the rank of Baronet--claiming the souls of those he has captured."

Tuco shuddered. "That's awful. I don't think I should like to become a castle. Is there truly no escape?"

"None for you, little devil," the creature below him rumbled. Its great fiery eyes grew brighter and smaller, as though peering into him. "But perhaps there is for me. Have you a rank in the Abyss as well as name? And tell me: what do you think of your new home, hmm?"

"I am Sir Tuco. And I suppose I would like having a castle all to myself very much, were it not a prison. I can't see how paper walls make a very sturdy one, though."

The castle beneath gave him another searching look, and he abruptly felt so horribly transparent that he almost drew away from the hole in the floor to hide from the devil's gaze. "Hmm, well. My name was Lord Abalam--no, I never rose so high as Knight. But surely you understand, oh great Sir Tuco, that it is not paper that entraps you, but words."

Tuco frowned. "I don't understand."

"Words are thoughts, ideas, beliefs, everything you and I traffic in. Everything that we use to corrupt--to free the humans, and everything the Adversary has used to enslave them. Words can call us and bind us and doom us. There is nothing more dangerous to a devil than words. Of course," Castle Abalam added in a soothing if gravelly tone, "you know all this. No doubt the suddenness of your imprisonment has made you forgetful."

Condescending though the devil might be, Tuco thought he understood. Of course scripture could bind any ordinary devil. Scripture was holy, untouchable by the devils. Tuco was surprised all the castles in E-Temen-Anki weren't made of it. But why should it keep him imprisoned too? He was not a devil like these others. He'd never willfully used his power to harm anyone, poor Walstein notwithstanding. He believed in the Almighty, although admittedly in a distant sort of way. The prayers of Mass did not scorch his mouth, nor communion wine his tongue. And yet this was his special prison, constructed by his own soul out of the laws and stories of faith, meant to keep him here, meant to keep him... safe.

The winds of the Abyss blew through his castle, and a million pages rustled in them. Was that truly what his religion meant most to him? Safety? And that was one of the temptations, surely written on at least one of the pages surrounding him. Let not a desire for safety close your heart to others. He could not leave this castle because he could not leave the words of scripture behind. Who would do so when all could see that devils were real, and thus the Almighty and all his angelic hosts must be real as well?

"Sir Tuco, I do not wish to interrupt your reverie," rumbled the voice from below, "but if I may ask: you are an incubus, are you not?"

"I--" He still was not used to that idea. He wondered if he ever would be. "Yes, I am."

"And with four horns as well, I see. Interesting. Well then, Sir Tuco, if I may be presumptuous, I believe you yourself could free me from this prison, if you were so inclined."

"Free you? How could I do that?" Tuco asked warily.

"Why, consume my soul, of course. Push me over the brink of ecstasy, and then claim me as your own."

"I don't understand. Then you'd be--" He'd been about to say, "dead," but of course death didn't apply to demons and devils, who wore mortality only as a costume. "Just imprisoned somewhere else," he added lamely, still not entirely sure how all that worked.

"True, true," Lord Abalam said in considering tones, "but your prison would not change me further, would it? Unless, of course, to do so to me pleased you, but you do not strike me as an unkind devil. And as vices go, lust is a more enticing one than safety, wouldn't you say? I mean, of course you would. You're an incubus. But think of it from my perspective: I can lie here, as a castle, waiting until all my stones are fixed and my voice falls silent, and even my eyes no longer blink, forever unmoving, bearing the weight of castle after castle stacked atop me as E-Temen-Anki grows into eternity and Baronet Flavros feeds on my power to fuel his wretched machinations. Or," he added, "I could be given a moment of pleasure I've all but forgotten and dwell within the realm of a Knight of lust. Perhaps within your palace you will see fit to grant my form again, perhaps not. Perhaps you will device torments of pleasure, or perhaps those of pain. Either way, it will surely be more interesting than being a large box in a stack of boxes for all eternity."

"I see your reasoning," Tuco said. He'd nearly said yes. But he was supposed to be a devil after all, and a devil ought to be wary. "But why should I help you with this?"

Lord Abalam nearly spluttered lava. "Why? I am astonished at the question. Why should you, a devil trapped in a prison with no real way to gain another soul ever again, agree to consume the soul of a Lord of the Abyss? You must have a great wealth of souls indeed to turn down such an offer. But if you need other reasons, within a human year or a thousand, my voice will fall silent, what remains of my body will be gone, and you will have lost your chance. Perhaps you will be fortunate, and the castle beneath mine will contain an incubus who would consume your soul, thus freeing you. Or perhaps it will be another poor devil eager for you to free him. Either way, you'll have more power in your stores, and be one step closer to the bottom. What have you to lose, Sir Tuco? Have you not already lost your humanity?"

"What?" Prickles moved across Tuco's shoulders and arms.

"It is all too plain, dear incubus. I know not how it came about, but you have not been a devil for long. There is too much you do not understand, too many mistakes. And your soul is raw and pink, like the flesh of a fingertip just below the bed of a nail. No, you were mortal recently, and an innocent one, too. How I should have loved to taste that soul of yours. So fresh, so delicate, a live thing plucked and eaten directly from the soil."

And beneath Tuco, the whole castle shuddered, as though it were made of blocks and someone had shaken the table on which it sat.

"It's true," Tuco admitted. "I don't know why it is happening or how, but it seems each day, I grow more devilish. At first I thought it was only demons changing me, but there is more to it, and I don't know how to reverse it, or stop it.

"Then I will make an agreement with you," Lord Abalam thrummed. "I confessed I know not what has altered you, but I know of something that may explain it. I will tell you, but only if you agree to consume me, and thus free me from E-Temen-Anki."

Tuco thought it over, but not for long. There seemed to be no drawbacks, except that once he'd finished, he'd have no one to talk to. And if he learned something about what was happening to him, that could be invaluable, provided he ever found a way to escape this prison.

"All right," he said. "You tell me what you know about what has happened to me, and I will... er, consume you so that you will be free. And I promise not to be cruel to you once your soul is mine," he added, feeling magnanimous.

Far below him. Lord Abalam's eyes flared bright and eager. "This is a joyous day for me Sir Tuco. Soon I will be free. Then listen well. The first souls created by the Adversary were the angels, many of whom he rebuked, and they became devils. The second souls were the Nephilim, the giants, whom the Adversary hated and destroyed. The third souls were humans, whom he claimed to love best of all. To the humans and Nephilim, he gave material bodies so that they might walk the physical world. To angels, he gave a logos, or essence, a spiritual form with a power of creation like his own. Just as a body must obey the laws of nature--it must eat, slumber, fall when lifted from the earth, so does the logos of angels and devils follow laws. Angels cannot help but guard creation and all that might threaten it; devils cannot help but answer desire and alter that creation. Both must come when summoned."

Tuco frowned. "Wait, does that mean that people could be summoning angels instead of demons?"

The face below showed a lot of very jagged teeth. "Few humans summon an angel and live to tell of it. I would not suggest you try. But all of us who are summoned are drawn by our mantles to the summoner, usually into a circle of binding, sometimes without. The tale is known in the Abyss of Nabonidus, King of Persia, who above all else hungered for power over the mortal world, more than any human could hold. And yet, though his court magicians summoned demons and devils to grant him conquest after conquest, those demons and devils granted only their desires, and not those of the King. And thus were the great monsters of the world formed: the chimera, the basilisk, the minotaur. And King Nabonidus's lust for power went unanswered, for he would not risk his soul in a summoning of his own. Finally, driven to desperation, he asked of his magicians why the logos of a devil or angel could not be summoned into a mortal body. He ordered them to study and discover a ritual that could accomplish this, granting a human the essence and power of the First Created, but with the soul of a human."

The eyes in the face of the castle courtyard had gone distant, but now they turned back toward Tuco with a keen focus. "If King Nabonidus's magicians succeeded in creating a successful ritual, none know. But King Nabonidus failed at completing it. One day he went mad, tore off his clothes, and fled his royal palace to live in the fields and consume grass, believing himself to be a jackass. And certainly his soul is here in the Abyss, property of Lucifer himself, who guards it jealously. But there are rumors that the ritual survived, copied and translated secretly by a sect of mad scribes. Whatever may have happened to it since are beyond my telling, for I have been imprisoned for millennia, with little news of the mundane world, save what morsels Lord Flavros chooses to taunt me with. If the ritual did survive, it would likely be found in a place of great learning, a place that did not fear demonology. Have you visited such a place, Sir Tuco?" Lord Abalam's fiery eyes flashed. "Ah, I thought so. And a ritual was performed, and now you find yourself with human soul and devil logos, imprisoned in the inescapable fortress of the Abyss."

He laughed an earthquake laugh. "Poor creature. Your god will not save you here. And if I have discerned your secret, so will others. You will never be safe. You require my power more than ever. Well. Devour me, then, and free me."

Tuco stared down at him, his mind whirling. He looked down at his bulging, red-scaled forearms and talon-like fingers tipped with thick black claws. The logos of a devil. And not just any devil. Sathanus, Prince of the Abyss. Everything that was happening felt too big for him, too overwhelming. Not to mention what was happening with Lord Abalam, beneath him. How was he supposed to free a literal castle from the vault of the Abyss? He leaned up, kneeling by the hole he'd torn in the floor of his own castle and tried to still his thoughts and his breathing, tried to remember his arousal.

It didn't take much, he found. Despite everything that had happened, his fist-sized balls were ready. A Knight of Lust always had arousal at hand. His thick, serpentine shaft, lying across his thigh, stiffened, lifting into the air, the fleshy barbs standing out, glistening. But how was he to arouse a castle, one he could not even touch?

"Well?" came the voice from below. "I have given you what you wanted. If you've the essence of a devil, then you cannot dismiss a bargain. You are bound to free me."

Tuco leaned back down to the hole, and as he did, his tip slid across the pages of his floor, smearing his drooling precome across the sacred words. "I will," he called back down. "But how am I to arouse you if I cannot touch you? And where is your... er..." He scanned the bastion below.

Eyes glared between cobblestone lids. "Are you an incubus or are you not?"

Tuco felt the heat of a flush. "I am. I..." And he remembered lying in bed, twisted in arousal, unable to keep it from radiating out to his companions, to a refectory full of apprentices, to an entire monastery, enticing all of them into lust and making their souls ripe for devouring. He leaned over the hole he'd torn in his dungeon, past the iron bars he'd wrenched apart, and gazed down at the being below, a devil lord as large as an actual castle, who had demanded to be devoured. No, ordered it. Bound him. Aren't you tired of being bound? Yes, he thought. I am tired of it. And he is only a mere Lord of the Abyss. Are you a Knight, or aren't you?

"Ask me to do it," he said.

The face below him shifted with uncertainty. "But you already agreed to--"

He should do more than ask. "Beg me," Tuco suggested. "Beg me to consume you."

The fiery eyes below him flashed. "I don't have to. You are bound by bargain."

"I said I would take you," Tuco said, showing his fangs. "I didn't say when." The lust was surging in him now; he enjoyed toying with this creature that had surely preyed on many other humans.

Lord Abalam's eyes widened, and then a spark of excitement flashed in them. "Perhaps you are more devil than I took you for. Please, Sir Tuco, Knight of Lust. Please grant me ecstasy and sweet release. I beg of you."

"I am your master now," Tuco growled. "You belong to me."

The castle beneath him seemed to lower its towers slightly, its stones shrinking. But below the face in the craggy courtyard, one jutting mound of stones rose, grinding and loosing dirt as it ascended. "You are my master," Lord Abalam admitted. "I belong to you. My soul is yours entirely, to tease or torment for all eternity."

"Good," Tuco said, and shifted so that Lord Abalam could see his erection, thicker than his wrist, its head rising up to his chest. At the same time, he sent a pulse of lust toward the transformed devil, as powerful as he could muster.

He must have become stronger since consuming Asmodeus, for Lord Abalam's stone body shook with desire, the entire structure lifting in the air as some unseen architectural spine arched. Stones shook and fell as the devil cried out in unexpected arousal, and the hillock rising beneath its face became a spire, its tip oozing molten rock that spattered onto the stones below with a hissing sound. "Oh Sir Tuco," Lord Abalam moaned. "I will be yours forever." Towers on either side crumbled and flexed craggy fingers, dropping worked stone as they broke free of their solidified forms, arms sixty feet high reaching toward the magma spire and tugging at it. Made of stone or no, there was no mistaking that shape. Its tip bubbled with inner fire, and as Abalam's tower-arms groped at his volcanic erection, flaming globs of lava flew upward, spattering the bottom of Tuco's dungeon, smelling of sulfur and desire.

Lord Abalam's eyes fixed on him, rolling with infernal lust, and as they did, he felt his shaft changing as his incubus nature altered him to the imprisoned devil's desires. It grew heavier, pulling at his loins, at first listing forward with its own weight, and then rising again. Already straining, it grew impossibly harder, lifting higher and higher, and ever more heavy. He set his fingers to it and found its flesh as unyielding as stone, though still he could strain and make it swell under his touch. Soon, despite the brawn in his body, the weight of it threatened to pull him forward, and his tail snaked itself around a dungeon cell bar to steady him. He gripped his changing shaft with both hands as it continued to lengthen, developing sharp angles. Then it seemed to lighten, growing paler and more translucent, until a spire of diamond rose from his loins, extending far above his head. His balls churned, burning with some inner inferno, and a line of yellow light rose up his diamond cock, spilling liquid fire out of the dungeon to spatter onto the courtyard beneath him, the fiery droplets bouncing where they landed, skittering across the courtyard below as cooling pebbles.

He felt Lord Abalam's desire, a creature who had once had a humanoid form, but had become an elemental of stone and structure, locked into place for millennia, now briefly freed. He felt the devil's ache as fingers of worked stone slid, eased by flowing magma, down a shaft achingly full of fire, and he wanted to drive his hardened cock into Abalam's foundations, force him out of his rigid immutability and into life and joy and survival and intimacy once more, to make him live again. His own shaft gushed lava. Not a climax, not yet, but it rained shards of hot desire down on Abalam, who moaned subterranean cries and thrust his jutting mountain up toward Tuco, spraying his own eruptions of infernal ecstasy.

Tuco closed his mind and power around Abalam as he might catch a fly and squeezed, at the same time sending the devil a surge of all his lust and desire.

The castle beneath him changed. The working of stone blocks melded back into something like stony flesh; the constructed towers became arms again, the face in cobblestones lifted on a rising, horned head atop a powerful neck. A chest thrust itself above the stones in an explosion; hips rose from flat bulwarks. His change made Tuco's prison, perched atop him, rock and sway like a sapling in a gale, pitching him to hands and knees. He gripped the bars of his prison with fingers, toes, and tail, barely able to keep from being tossed about the room as the castle beneath him arched and bucked. Then all went nearly still, but for a tense tremble. Tuco peered past his diamond rod, out of the hole in his prison, in time to see the edifice on the precipice. Its jutting spire, full of molten stone, rounded, became a cock again, albeit a stone cock the size of a castle tower, just in time for its volcanic eruption. Molten lava, musky and hungry, gouted out in gushing arcs as Lord Abalam clutched at it with both craggy hands and roared so loudly that Tuco's ears were filled with ringing.

The bottom of his dungeon burned away, leaving only a latticework of glowing iron bars as an eruption of magmatic come engulfed and flooded it. The lava washed over him, smelling of hell and male, and he was only distantly surprised it didn't burn. He was still too lost in the waves of arousal that crashed through him, sending him bucking against his dungeon floor as it smoked and ignited, his diamond shaft scraping against the iron bars as he did so. But he was an incubus now, and could manage his own lust; below him, Lord Abalam's eyes and mouth went wide, and then a fountain of light poured from them.

His soul boiled out of his stone body, and Tuco leaned forward and drank it down. Ancient power poured into him, full of brittle memories and forgotten sins. Abalam had been a devil of greed, and he had hoarded souls like a paranoid dragon, filling his desmenes and jealously guarding them. But the Baronet Flavros, though in the shape of a leopard, had been more like a leech, bleeding Abalam over the centuries, sucking him dry, taking the power of his souls for himself, leaving Abalam to watch helplessly as his great fortune of souls was siphoned away. It was that, more than any irritation or torment, that had turned his flesh to stone. His soul was eager to be free; far from resisting Tuco's hunger, it surged toward him, filling his eyes and mouth with light.

Tuco swallowed him in gulps, and as he did, the castle-man beneath him shrank, moaning a thundering ecstasy as he climaxed his soul right out of his body. The fire from Abalam's eruption had spread, and red and yellow flames rose all around Tuco, but their heat was pleasant and embracing, the thick smoke of burning paper like air after a spring rain in his lungs. His dungeon sank lower and lower as Lord Abalam shrank beneath him, the paper castle wobbling atop the diminishing stone one. Now he could see the prison below Abalam's--a copper sphere, red and orange light warping across its polished surface as it reflected the blaze of Tuco's burning prison. And still the soul-light poured into him. Abalam shrank until he was the size of a house, and Tuco's prison listed to one side, landing with a crinkle and clatter against the burnished sphere below, forcing him to hang on tightly to avoid pitching across the floor. And then Abalam was the size of a hut, and then only a man, and then an odd, toy-sized, man-shaped castle, squealing in shrill pleasure. And then he was gone. The light of his soul vanished between Tuco's jaws.

His prison rocked gently back and forth on the copper sphere that supported it. The flames were going out, and where they had burned papers away, there was a rustling like leaves in autumn, and new pages unfolded to reform the walls that had incinerated.

And then Tuco was alone again. It all seemed very quiet and still. He got to his feet, his tail swaying. He considered using his diamond cock to try to bend apart the bars of his prison, but discarded the idea -- that would hardly work. And what if it broke? he asked himself, wincing internally. With a mental suggestion, he reformed it back to the hefty, demonic thing Asmodeus had given him, and walked through flickering flames back up the stairs of his dungeon. Perhaps he should have waited. It would have been nice to have someone to talk to for a while longer, at least. And though his prison was a little closer to the ground, he seemed no closer to escape. Somewhere inside him, the Lord Abalam was awaiting torment or teasing.

Tuco climbed up to his battlements and crouched atop one stone, looking out over the world of the Abyss and feeling a bit like a gargoyle. He didn't know what to do now. There was so much about being a devil that he didn't know, hadn't thought to ask. He waited. If there was a sun in the sky, he never saw it, but the day faded into night. The sphere of the Abyss lit with starry lights twinkling across it. From here it almost looked like the view from atop Abyssus Abbey. And yet if time passed, he couldn't feel it. No tiredness settled into his mind, no hunger or thirst nagged at him. His muscles never wearied of their position. He simply continued.

For a while, thoughts raced across his mind: thoughts of home, of his changes, of the terrible future that awaited him. He thought of Etreon, Pike, and Braxus, and wondered how they were faring under the overbearing rule of Brother Gabriel. He thought of poor Lord Krastor, trapped in the Throat of the Abbey along with Almighty knew who else. And then, after a while, his thoughts began to repeat, so he let them go, and there was nothing inside him but stillness.

But some of that stillness was different than before. There was a space within that stillness, a dark and quiet place where a castle shaped like a man stood, fiery eyes unseeing. Waiting. What would he look like if he were not so architectural, Tuco wondered, and even as he considered it, the stony shape of the devil became more animal, the rock crumbling to reveal gleaming white scale covering a muscular build, a large stomach, and a face like a bull's. Tuco recognized the shape of those yellow eyes as they widened. Abalam, no longer a Lord, turned his gaze upward. "Master Tuco?" he asked, and his voice, once subterranean and rumbling, now sounded small and timid. "Have you come to torment or tease me?"

At the word torment, Tuco could not help considering what that would be like, just for an instant, but in that instant, Lord Abalam screamed as a fiery handprint burned itself across his chest, leaving a blackened brand across the white scales. And before Tuco could stop himself, he considered "tease," and the bull-man fell to his knees as his cock swelled upward. He shuddered in agony and ecstasy, and Tuco could feel the two mingling within him. Without even meaning to, he had altered this devil's soul, giving him an erotic taste for fire.

I must be cautious, he told himself. My power over these souls is absolute.

They are yours to toy with as you choose, another voice inside him suggested. Have they not earned damnation? Any fate other than torment is undeserved benevolence. Use them in the way that delights you most.

And that voice was not like his, but here in the stillness of his mind, he thought he could hear it more clearly than ever--indeed, had been hearing it for some time now. Was it his own devilish nature growing stronger? He wished he could talk to Abalam, and then abruptly he was there, looking down on the devil, who was so small Tuco could have plucked him up between thumb and forefinger.

The white bull-man stumbled backward in surprise. "Master?"

"Abalam," Tuco said, and at the booming sound of his voice, the little devil quailed.

"Do you wish to devise fates for me?"

Tuco considered that, but feared to think too much on it lest every whim that passed through his mind be something that happened to the soul within him. "Not just yet," he said. Not, at least, until he learned how better to manage souls under his power. And until he learned what was just. He didn't like the idea of tormenting anyone, but Abalam had been cruel and merciless in his life. Would it be wrong to let that go unpunished? "What happens to you when I am not here?" he asked.

"Whatever you decide should happen, Master," the devil answered. "Until you arrived, my soul waited in repose."

"How do I find other souls of mine?"

Abalam looked frightened at the question. "Please do not... think of ideas for me in anger, but I do not understand how you cannot find them. Do you not simply think of them and find them? How did you find me?"

At the question, Tuco considered Asmodeus, and abruptly, Abalam was gone, and there was Asmodeus, standing in the darkness, his gaze vacant, waiting. A flash of anger surged through Tuco at seeing the devil that had altered and hunted him. Surely he deserved a terrible fate. He didn't deserve to be an incubus at all; he ought to lose everything that made him so proud. No sooner had he thought this then Asmodeus cried out in the darkness, looking around. He clutched at his enormous horns with both hands and they broke away, crumbling to dust between his clawed fingers. Then, as he stared in horror, his enormous, swinging dick began to retract, slowly drawing back into him, thinning and shortening even as he groaned and tried to hold onto it with both hands, then only one.

Good, thought Tuco savagely, but drew his attention away from this soul before he could do any more harm.

How many souls were within him? There were three, six, twelve--little lights of souls glimmering in the stillness within him. His inner gaze drew farther and farther back, and there were more and more of them, points of light spreading in all directions, until his vision was filled with them, more little glints of souls than there were stars in the sky. How could he ever keep track of them all, much less design eternal fates for all of them?

He wondered if there were any he knew, and when he considered the question, his gaze narrowed in focus, and suddenly there was Uncle Roddy, a miller's assistant who had beaten his daughter with sticks, and then there was old Casty Longfellow from his village, who had never gone to church and was rumored to be a witch. And there, Will Jennaway, the baker, who as far as he knew had never done anything wrong. He hadn't even known Will had died.

And then his gaze took him to souls that flickered in and out, as though not really there. He focused on one of them that felt achingly familiar, and found it was Etreon, lying in the darkness, and fading in and out. Of course, he had part of Etreon's soul now, didn't he? Part of everyone's souls in Abyssus Abbey, though in most cases a very tiny part. Was Etreon dead, too? But no, he could feel that the young man was not dead, but only sleeping, and the confusing, shifting images of his dreams played inside him. He searched through a wide and ever-shifting desert, filled with shadow monsters and crumbling buildings of sand, calling a name that he couldn't pronounce.

"Etreon," Tuco said, and then he was there in his friend's dream, filling the sky above the desert.

"Alkeides?" Etreon looked around, and then up and up, his eyes bulging. "You're--uh--enormous!" And somewhat awkwardly he clutched at his robes. "Where are you? We can't find you anywhere. Hob says another devil took you."

"It's true. I'm trapped in the Abyss, in some kind of prison called E-Temen-Anki. Can you tell Hob and the others? Can they find a way to help?"

"I wish I could," Etreon said sadly. "But this is only a dream. You're not real."

"But this is real, Etreon!" Tuco burst out. "I mean, yes, it's a dream, but I can talk to you. Your soul is inside me. Can you remember that when you wake? Find Hob, tell him the name E-Temen-Anki! If he recognizes it, he'll prove it to you. Only make certain it's the real Hob, and not a fake. Find him, Etreon! Do it now!"

And with that, Tuco focused on Etreon's flickering soul, asking him, no, willing him to wake.

The light of Etreon's soul winked out like a candle.