The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (76 page)

Faster than the eye could follow, Danner punched, gouged,
and ripped the demon to shreds, all the while screaming incoherently in rage.
One arm fell to the ground, Danner’s hand-print still burning in the flesh from
where he’d torn through unholy flesh and sinew. Before the demon could even react
to the pain, Danner dug one fist into the creature’s neck and ripped its head
in half from the inside-out.

Then he turned his attention to the remaining demons. The
same horror and terrible acts he’d witnessed the demons inflicting on their
human victims, Danner now visited on them twofold. He did not take an eye for
an eye, he took both eyes. He did not tear loose a limb, he ripped all four
arms free and then opened the demon up from the inside with his bare hands.
There was no justice to be had, nor mercy as he tore revenge from their very
flesh. Demonic blood sprayed from their mangled bodies and splashed over him,
where it hissed and steamed away without his ever feeling it.

When the last of the score of demons lay sprawled on the
ground, three of its four arms missing, it stared up in horror as Danner
stepped forward to finish it off.

“Mercy!” it cried in its horrible voice, raising itself on
bloody stumps to hold its one good arm protectively above its face.

The plea enraged Danner, and he surged forward with a pump
of his wings and tore the demon’s throat out with one swipe of his burning
fingers. The unholy flesh crackled and blackened in his grasp, but Danner held
onto it until nothing remained but a puff of black dust that fell through the
cracks of his fist. By that time, the demon itself was destroyed.

His hunger for vengeance still unsatisfied, Danner turned to
the damned souls, who were too terrified to move. He rushed forward, only to
find his way blocked by Caret and Brican. Their faces were scarred with tears,
but they stood resolutely before Danner to block his path.

“Danner, stop!” Caret yelled at him. The words bounced off
the flames that consumed Danner’s mind.

“Danner, this isn’t right! This isn’t justice! This isn’t
even human!” Brican shouted. “Stop before you go too far.”

Danner bellowed in fury, seeing only that his desire for
revenge was being denied. He leapt into the air and swooped over the two
denarae, charging down on the damned souls with murderous intent.

Then something red sprang into being in front of him, and
Danner saw the outlined form of a demon. He screamed in fury and tore through
the vision, which had the effect of diverting his path from the damned souls.
Danner looked about and saw the red form again, and once more he sped toward it
only to pass right through. His failure to inflict damage only maddened him
further, and the flames in his mind burned even more fiercely.

“DANNER! STOP!”

The commanding voice broke through the wall of blue flames and
registered in Danner’s mind, and he pulled up in shock as he finally recognized
the hazy red image before him.

It was Kaelus, and the voice had been his uncle’s.

“You are a paladin of the Blue Facet,” Birch’s voice said
insistently, and Danner was unable to resist the words. “You stand for justice
in the world. You embody a virtue held dear by all who believe in the goodness
of the human soul. Justice, not revenge.”

Danner shook his head and screamed in anguish, some part of
him unwilling to just let go of his murderous rage.

 “Listen to me, Danner,” Birch’s voice said. “The
commander of Hell’s armies is a Black paladin now, but he was once a member of
the Red Facet. He embodied courage, just as your friend Garnet does now, but
Malith is now cursed by his own choices, and what was once a virtue has become
his greatest vice. His courage has become overconfidence and brazenness, and
that is the reason for his transformation. If you continue on this path of
senseless mayhem, you walk dangerously close to the same line he crossed. You
will cross from a Blue paladin of justice to a Black paladin of terror and
revenge, and there may be no turning back.”

The smoldering blue flames in Danner’s mind were replaced by
the cool, blue waters of reason that hit him like a tidal wave and doused his
fury in an instant. He realized his eyes were clenched shut, and when he opened
them the fiery red image of Kaelus was nowhere to be seen.

Danner sank to the ground on his knees and buried his face
in his hands. His tears coursed down his face in a fiery blue trail, but they
were cool against his flesh and helped soothe his torment. He felt the denarae
and damned souls around him more as dim outlines on the edge of his awareness.

When Danner looked up, his eyes were only for the crumpled
and bloody form of his best friend. He crawled to Trebor’s body, dimly aware
that several shapes
-
either denarae or
damned was beyond his ability to discern
-
hurriedly got out of his way. Danner reached Trebor and wept for his friend,
tormented by his loss and Danner’s own inability to save him.

His tears rained down in an azure trickle of fire, and they
splashed on Trebor’s body and disappeared without a trace. After a timeless
moment of weeping, Danner reared back his head and howled forlornly into the
sky. Every window in a three-block radius shattered with the force of his cry.
The denarae around him instinctively followed suit and roared their own lament.
Even the damned souls added their voices, and what might have been a cacophony
of agonized yelling instead rang forth as a clarion of love and a knell of
mourning.

As the echoes faded, Danner slumped over Trebor’s still form
and was silent.

Death is a private matter. Consider every possible meaning – they are
all true.

- Dwarven Proverb

- 1 -

Garnet pulled Siran’s elves back, feigning a retreat. Had
there been one central commander of this small force of demons, and had he
known anything at all about strategy, the ploy would have had as much chance of
succeeding as a marriage between an elf and a dwarf. But Garnet had no
counterpart, no demon commander observing the battle to know his forces were
already being decimated. To the demons on the field, it seemed as though
Garnet’s forces had finally been pushed back, so they ran howling after them,
heedless of the danger.

The elves turned their backs to the damned souls and ran
with a speed only the fleet-footed demi-humans could achieve, and they quickly
put distance between themselves and their pursuers. Seeing their adversaries
getting away so easily, the creatures charged mindlessly after. Then, at a
mental command from Garnet relayed to a denarae he’d left with Siran, the elves
turned and met the first ranks of the damned with bared steel and ground them
to black dust.

The damned souls and their demon overseers were strung out
in a long force to charge after the elves, and the sudden reverse of tactics
sent them into disarray, tripping and clawing each other in their confusion.
Into this chaos, Shadow Company suddenly materialized on each flank and struck
with stunning force. Marc and Guilian attacked from the north, and Michael from
the south, and they sandwiched the demonic forces and squeezed them together in
a lethal press. Then Flasch appeared behind the demons, and even Garnet wasn’t
sure how the most nimble of his platoons had managed to slip its entire force
behind the demons undetected. The Violet paladin struck ruthlessly, and that
was the final nail in the coffin. The demons were destroyed utterly, and the
mortals were left to celebrate their survival and evaluate their damages.

Garnet was still aloft with his father on the yellow dakkan.
At Garnet’s behest, they flew the length of the Barrier to allow him to take
stock of the battle and see where his company would next be needed. What he saw
made his breath catch in his throat and dragged his spirits – his high sense of
triumph and hope – through the mud of despair.

The soldiers around the blue
Ash’Ailant
had not been
able to hold back the sudden attack of damned souls that had slipped past
Michael’s platoon, and the
angelstone
megalith lay
shattered and strewn about the courtyard in a dozen pieces. The remnants of
that demonic attack had already been dealt with, but with the destruction of
the Stone, the assault against that courtyard had already slackened off.

Farther north, the courtyard of the yellow
Ash’Ailant
was already filled with damned souls and the familiar drolkuls, but Garnet saw
a new breed of demons in the courtyard. They resembled giant praying mantises,
were only slightly shorter than a man, and sat on four hind legs while
attacking with two forelimbs. And they moved so
fast!
Their movements
were a blur as they attacked with short spears or their bare hands
-
instead of proper hands, however, the
demons had one-piece, flattened forearms that were sharpened on two edges to
create living sword blades. Garnet couldn’t understand how they wielded their
spears without hands, but then he saw one of the demons throw a spear from a
clawed grip, and a moment later its forearms changed into the bladed style, and
Garnet was reminded of a demon’s amazing ability to change its own shape.

“Those are the childris,” Garet shouted to his son. “Birch
told me about them. I think they’re the one force of demon he actually fears,
and I can’t say as I blame him. The bastards are faster than a sneeze and damn
near impossible to bring down.”

Indeed, the childris were the deciding factor in the
courtyard, and nothing could stand before their onslaught. Two dozen childris
managed to empty the courtyard of living bodies in a matter of minutes, and
Garnet watched their lethal ferocity with stunned amazement and the beginnings
of fear in his mind. If his denarae, formidable as they were, went up against
such a force, they would be carved to pieces in seconds.

Too quickly, the yellow
Ash’Ailant
was destroyed, and
the childris turned their attention to the stairs leading to the walls atop the
Barrier. They divided into two forces and climbed opposite walls, and where the
childris passed, they brought death.

The only thing saving the other courtyards from being
similarly overrun was the childris’s apparent inability to scale the walls in
the way the other demons and damned souls could. They had to wait until the
gates were forced open, and in all places the human and demi-human defenders
were putting up the fight of their lives to prevent that from happening. Small
groups of childris were formed up outside each gate waiting for their chance to
spread the slaughter.

All this Garnet saw in the single pass of Garet’s dakkan
over the Barrier. Garnet thanked his father and then leapt free of the dakkan
to glide back down to his troops below. Garet was free to join the battle
again, which he did after only one backward glance at his son.

Garnet landed and was already surrounded by his officers and
the commanders of the other groups who had volunteered to fight with them.
Siran was foremost among these, silent and inscrutable as he calmly leaned on
his twin-bladed
halven
and regarded Garnet with eyes
devoid of emotion.

“We’ve got problems,” Garnet said without preamble. “I…”

He stopped as a loud shout arose from somewhere deep in the
city. Garnet knew automatically that something terrible had just happened, and
a feeling of grief and loss swept over him with a force that nearly staggered
him. The others around him were similarly affected, but when Garnet asked the
denarae, even they couldn’t say what it had been. Whatever had happened, it was
too far away for any of them to reach with kything.

Putting the strange experience behind him, Garnet continued
grimly.

“Six of the
Ash’Ailant
have fallen,” Garnet said.
“The seventh won’t last long the way things are going. The white Stone is in
the center-most courtyard, and it’s being assaulted by childris demons. They’re
big damn bugs that move with the speed of lightning, and a handful of them just
emptied a courtyard and destroyed one of the Stones in only a few minutes. I
don’t think even we can stand against them, but I want ideas.”

“Where are they?” Siran asked quietly.

Garnet turned to look at the elf commander in surprise.

“They’re moving from the yellow courtyard up either wall,”
Garnet replied. What did the elf think he was going to do? “They’ll be inside
the white courtyard in a few minutes, and those climbing the other wall will
probably circle around and join them soon after.”

“Very well,” Siran said, then he turned on his heel and
started to walk away.

“Siran, you can’t go!” Garnet cried.

The grim-faced elf stopped, then turned very slowly to face
Garnet. His eyes were dull and devoid of emotion, as though he were dead
already.

“I go where I choose,” Siran said flatly. “I have joined you
because I was needed. Now I am needed elsewhere. I wish you luck and life. May
the sun not set upon you this day,” Siran said, and he kissed his fingertips
and gestured toward Garnet with respect. Then he turned and was gone. The
Elan’Vital melted away more quickly and silently than Shadow Company ever had,
leaving a confused Garnet to stare after the vanished Siran.

- 2 -

Danner opened his still-burning eyes and saw Trebor’s
headless corpse on the ground before him. Red blood stained his armor and newly
gained cloak a wet, sickly black, and Danner remembered with a shudder how very
near his own cloak had come to turning entirely black, permanently. Blood
stained a nearby pile of snow, slightly melted where the steaming, crimson
liquid had splashed. That blood was Trebor’s.

It was hard to think of Trebor as dead, even faced with the
evidence less than an arm’s reach away. The concept seemed too unthinkable, too
impossible for Danner to accept, and yet his best friend lay slain, and it was
Danner’s fault. His impetuosity had prevented them from properly planning and
implementing their attack and had Danner kept his head, he would have stayed
close to his unit and friend to protect them. But instead, Danner’s indulgent
rage had caused him to ignore reason and rush headlong into the battle without
bothering to consider the consequences.