Still flying at the end of the formation of dragons, Embar Dea dived low, keeping in the center of the void that led down through the levels of Hell. Rish had instructed them to keep close to the middle, rather than the edges, where missiles might be aimed at them from the Hellish shores.
Embar Dea's doubts had been burned away on the dive, as Heaven fell far behind and a crack opened up in the Sea of Night to let the Celestial armies through. Embar Dea had one last glimpse of Earth, serene and blue from this great height, half-concealed behind the veil that separated the worlds and that no radar or other human equipment would ever show. The moon, at which Embar Dea had often gazed, was even less clear, hidden behind a bright smear of light, its own magical field. Then they were through the veil again and flying down toward Hell. They were not, Embar Dea knew, doing the right thing, and yet it was the thing that had to be done.
Now, she could see the land that lay at Hell's floor, wrinkled and yellow like a beach from which the tide has only just drawn back. They were so high that Embar Dea knew that the sandy ridge was a mountain range, the hole, tiny enough to have been made by a child's toe, was in fact a colossal crater, and that the little sandworm coils above the surface of that sand were the kuei, flying between the dragons and the troops of Hell's Emperor.
At the sight of the kuei, Embar Dea's whiskers bristled and her mouth opened in an old, involuntary cry of war. The kuei: bred to fight dragons—bred, some said, from dragons, in one of Hell's unnatural experiments eons ago when monsters roamed the human world itself. Embar Dea's cry was picked up and echoed by Rish and the others and it circled the walls of Hell, reverberating in a dreadful consuming howl.
"Dive!" commanded Rish. "Dive!" and they went down and down, arrowing toward the waiting coils of the kuei.