SWNOVELS Chapter 13
Zeus took another narrow trail to the base of the parade ground’s southern wall and without stopping he drove a bolt of lightning into the ground and used its power to vault over. It was like falling into a nightmare. Smoke floated over the parade ground, billowing up from unseen sources beyond the walls. Clots of demons surged against a wavering phalanx of armored Lions bristling with spears and swords and lion’s head shields and bellowing fury from under their maned helms. It seemed a small number of Lions. Behind the soldiers huddled a frightened mass of people—more townspeople, the elderly, women, children, also wild-eyed, but with fear not lunacy. There at the center of the line, wearing his Nemean lion skin stood Hercules, striking with a viper’s precision with his war club, a hulking ruddy-brown chunk of sacral ironwood gifted to him from a Nubian kingdom. But even he looked hard pressed, and if the center collapsed….
“Hercules!” Zeus clutched his hand into a fist and flung lightning into the leading edge of the demonic throng, blasting away several in a cloud of flaming limbs and black gore. Surprised, Hercules looked about to see where the help had come from, spotted his father, and winked, then crushed a demon head. Zeus hammered his fist into the dirt and sent a crackling wave of lightning into the torrent of monsters crashing against the faltering Lions. With a lusty battle cry, Hercules drove forward with his club and shield, pulling his Lions with him to take advantage of his father’s strike.
The horde fell into disarray, and the demons turned on the humans among them, tearing them up with talons and teeth. Although tiring, Zeus kept up his barrage, while Hercules and the Lions continued to move forward step by grinding step across the parade ground gone muddy with blood and innards. It seemed the tide was turning, and Zeus wondered how Hades and Poseidon were faring. As Hercules approached the main gate, something changed and the horde heaved forward in a chaotic spill of demons and humans as a huge shape drove them into the flashing blades of the Lions.
A massive steed slid to a dusty stop just inside the gateway and bellowed so loudly it echoed off the parade ground walls. Some beast the likes of which Zeus had never seen. A horrific mishmash of animal parts flung together. A thick rhino’s body propped on heavily muscled legs and broad cloven hooves that stamped the ground. Blue-black skin like scalloped armor. Blood dripped from the rows of thorny protrusions studding its drooping belly. A long rat’s tail ending with a heavy club of bone menacing the air in a slow wave. A swaying jackal’s head with eight bulbous spider eyes and boar’s tusks jutting out from either side of long jaws filled with jagged shark’s teeth and hung with thick ropes of silvery drool. But worse than that, was its rider.
A giant of a thing with pus-yellow skin, wearing red chest plate with a huge ruby in the center and a helmet radiating bull-like horns. A red cape shedding tatters of blood-colored smoke hung from its heavily muscled and veined shoulders and draped across a saddle slung with brutal-looking sword and hammer. One spiked gauntlet clutched black reins, the other held a long war scythe, which was propped casually on a shoulder.
Zeus’ newly augmented Grace whispered a name to him: Karn, a duke of Hell, released along with his legions, when Belum escaped the temple in the Shattered Vale.
Zeus saw fiery eyes beneath the helmet’s visor surveying the scene. And beneath those eyes a mouth twisted in cruel laughter. Karn’s scrutiny halted sharply on Hercules and giant ragged red wings, lined with veins and tipped with long, saw-toothed spurs, spread from under the cape. The steed moved toward the phalanx with astonishing speed and Karn swatted Zeus’ son across the parade ground. Hercules skidded across the ground and came to a stop in a twisted pile. He didn’t move. But with a terrible roar, the Hell steed did.