Hero of Fire

by P. E. Padilla

  “The first thing we need to do—” She was interrupted by shrieks and thunderous footfalls, even louder than before.

  They poked their heads around the gate to see what was happening. Demon hordes rushed back into Hell, colliding with those waiting to get through the gate. Once the initial clash settled down, the ranks bulged out to accommodate the extra bodies.

  Within a minute, all the demons were back on their side of the gate, and the heavy doors swung shut with a clang.

  Kate and her squad were trapped in Hell with no way out.

  16

  Kate’s gasp sounded like a geyser of steam in their area on the other side of the gate. She hoped the demons hadn’t heard it.

  Trapped. They were in Hell, and the gates had closed. There were what had to be thousands of demons just on the other side of the obstruction blocking their view, and Kate and her squad were cornered with no way out.

  They were going to die. There was no way out.

  “Kate,” Peiros’s soft voice said. She jumped and realized he was close enough to whisper in her ear.

  “Kate,” he said again quietly. “Please do not panic.”

  “Panic? Panic? Who says—” She paused to take a breath. Was it getting hotter? “Who says I’m panicking?”

  “Your eyes are twice their normal size, you are having trouble breathing, you are shivering and sweating, and you are darting glances everywhere, looking for something to jump out and kill you. Please be calm. Getting excited will not help our situation.”

  She wanted to scream at him, to slap him, to turn and run from him. But somewhere deep in her mind, she realized he was right. Dante’s voice played in her head. You must remain calm in turmoil. Those who die are the ones who panic. He could have been talking to her in this very situation.

  After removing her mask—the others had already done so—she took a deep breath and released it. She repeated it three more times, closing her eyes to focus on her racing heart. When she finished and opened them, Peiros was still standing there patiently waiting for her to come to her senses.

  “Better?” he asked.

  “Yes. Thank you.” She took another breath and turned to the rest of the squad. “Okay, please give me your suggestions on what we are to do. This situation is…unfamiliar to me.”

  “It’s unfamiliar to most of us,” Jurdan said. “Those who have the gates closed on them almost never return.”

  “You are not helping matters, Jurdan,” Peiros said.

  Jurdan appeared to consider what he’d said and paled. “I-I mean, it wasn’t about our situation. I was just commenting on how—”

  “I think we should try to force the gates,” Aurel interrupted. “After the demons move out, of course.”

  The demon horde was indeed moving away from the gate.

  “What good would that do?” Benedict asked. “Are we going to run away and try another time to kill Thozrixith? We have a mission to complete.”

  Aurel glared at Benedict but didn’t say anything.

  “If we try to leave, can Molara charge up the blinding stones again for another try?” Peiros asked.

  “No,” Kate said. “I don’t think so. She said it took them weeks, if not months, to charge. We still have the stone to cloak us for our escape, but if we leave now, we’ll either not have any to get in again or we’ll only have the one to get into Hell again, but not out.”

  “We can’t force the gates anyway,” Jurdan said. “It has been tried, from the outside as well as from this side. We are still not sure exactly how the demons open the gate. It may be a power certain demons have or talismans used by the higher level creatures. All we know is that we are at their mercy when it comes to getting the gates to open.

  “We can take trying to get out off the table for now. Until the demons want to open them again, we’re stuck.”

  Aurel nodded his head sadly.

  “Anything else?” Kate asked.

  The silence answered her as fully as anything they could have said. All she heard was the grunting of the demons as they arranged themselves into whatever groups they used and prepared to move somewhere.

  The Order really didn’t know much about the demons at all. All the centuries of fighting them and studying them, and humans still didn’t know what kind of structure their army had. If indeed there was any structure. For all they knew, there was no organization, only masses of bodies thrown at the shield wall.

  But what if there was some type of structure? What if there was intelligent design and planning, strategy and foresight? Maybe they’d underestimated the demons. Some of them. Wasn’t that why she and her team were in Hell to begin with, to kill a planner and strategizer?

  She shook her head. She could sit and philosophize another time. Now was a time for action. The heat burning inside her demanded it.

  “We’re going to go through the army and kill Thozrixith,” she said.

  For faces that rarely showed strong surprise, what Kate saw made it look like her team had been ambushed and poleaxed.

  “Pretty Kate,” Aurel said calmly, “there are thousands of demons between us and the demon lord. Even we could not cut our way through to kill him.”

  Kate looked at the huge man; the flickering orange light gave his brown skin a burnished copper glow. Even him? Even Aurel would rebel against her?

  Peiros must have seen the fire in Kate’s eyes because he blinked and a rush of words came out of him. “Kate, let us think for a moment. A suicide mission is sometimes the only honorable thing to do, but I do not believe now is such a time. Throwing ourselves at the mass of demon forces would do nothing but waste our lives.”

  Kate glared at Peiros, too, but he continued quickly.

  “If we toss our lives aside thus, there will be no one to finish the mission. There is just us. No one will be able to get into Hell to finish it for us.”

  Kate tilted her head. That sounded reasonable, but they had a mission to complete, an order to fulfill.

  “We have orders,” she said, without much of the fire she had felt a moment before. “We need to kill that demon lord before he can implement his plans.”

  “This is true, Kate,” Peiros said politely, in the manner in which he always spoke. He had put his hands together and dipped his head at her over them. “We must complete the mission. But we must complete it in the way that will ensure the survival of the most members of the team. The Black is not so large that we can afford to lose a half dozen of its members.

  “We must complete the mission, yes, but we must be strategic in doing so. We cannot simply charge in against such great odds. Do not you agree?”

  All the energy in Kate’s body leaked out, taking her anger and the fire with it. She slumped and let out a long breath.

  What they said made sense. Not a mutiny, then, just common sense. What was she thinking anyway, wanting to cut through so many demons to try to get to Thozrixith?

  “Yes,” she finally said. “You’re right. It was a stupid idea.” She couldn’t look them in the eyes.

  “It is nothing,” Peiros said. “The first time I came here, I was so overwhelmed by how oppressive it is, I very nearly went berserk and revealed our position to the demons nearby. My two teammates wrestled me to the ground and put their hands over my mouth until I calmed down. It took several minutes.

  “This place is not fit for humans. It does things to the mind. You will be fine, now that you are aware of it and will watch for it. We are here to support you, Kate. If we cannot convince you of a contrary action, we will follow your orders, even should it mean our deaths. You must know this.”

  She raised her eyes and looked at him. He gave her a smile. All the others also appeared to be friendly. Except Benedict. That creepy smile of his could never be comforting.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now that I’m thinking clearly again, let’s figure out what we’re going to do.”

  The five men didn’t speak, but most of them nodded. Visimar was distracted by someth
ing. He kept looking past Kate’s shoulder. It made her eye twitch, but she wasn’t about to turn. She wouldn’t put it past the man to be playing a joke on her, though he seemed too polite to do so.

  “As I was saying, we need to come up with a plan,” she said. “There has to be a way to get through the demons and to Thoz—Visimar, what is so interesting behind me?” The man was fidgeting, as if he wanted to interrupt her but thought it rude to do so.

  Visimar Torten tilted his head and squinted. “They’re gone.”

  “They’re…they’re gone? What do you mean? Who are gone?” Kate spun to look behind her, around the opaque back of the gate. There was not a demon in sight.

  “How the Hell—” she started, but then changed her mind. “Did you see which way they went, Visimar? Did any of the rest of you?”

  “I am sorry, Pretty Kate,” Aurel said. “I was paying attention to our discussion.”

  “I, too,” Peiros added. “I saw nothing.”

  “I could see nothing beyond the back of the gate, I’m afraid,” Jurdan said. “Even had I not been engrossed in what you were saying, I would not have been able to see them go.”

  Benedict shook his head, not bothering to speak.

  “I didn’t see where they went,” Visimar said. “I looked and they were gone. I checked back because I didn’t believe my eyes, but they were still gone.”

  “Damn,” Kate said. She frowned at where the demons had been. “Well, at least they won’t be hard to track. A force that big, it should be no problem.”

  “That is not altogether—” Peiros started, but Kate interrupted him.

  “Let’s go. We need to stay close so once we figure out how to infiltrate the force, we can implement our plan immediately.”

  She went around the gate at a fast walk toward where the demon army had massed.

  “But Kate,” Peiros said.

  She paid him no heed, but instead started jogging. Within a minute, she stood where the army had been.

  There was no trace of them.

  “There’s no trace of them,” Kate huffed and kicked at the ground. “Not a claw print, an overturned rock, trash, blood, nothing. It’s like they weren’t even here.”

  “I tried to tell you, Kate,” Peiros said. The whole squad had followed her. “There is something about the land here. It either hides the passing of anything going over it, or it takes no prints to begin with. Even Jurdan’s tracking skills cannot work here.”

  Jurdan was one of the best trackers in the Black, which meant he was one of the best trackers in the entire Order. Kate’s heart dropped in her chest, bounced down the inside of her leg, and sat in a lump on the bottom of her foot.

  “Damn,” she said again.

  Kate sat down on the ground. It was either that or collapse. Her knees felt weak, and she didn’t have any energy. It had been sucked out of her.

  What were they going to do now?

  17

  She sat there for several minutes, her mind churning. She was too inside herself to notice what the others were doing. They didn’t interrupt her musings, so whatever they did was fine with her.

  Kate cast her eyes over the landscape. The rugged terrain reminded her of an area she had passed through on her way to Faerdham Fortress so long ago. Some of the other recruits had called the area Chelisin’s Churning—named after the explorer who found it—and it looked like something had destroyed it utterly.

  There were no trees there, no vegetation at all, and the soil looked to have been turned over to a depth of more than ten feet. Wondering what could have done that, Kate’s ears had picked up the stories others were telling.

  Long ago—no two people seemed to agree on the exact time—there was a battle on the spot. It was before Brasea, before the gate had been found. In that time, so the stories went, magic was still strong in the world. A battle of two great mage armies had rendered the place of their fight lifeless and unlivable.

  The terrain before her seemed scarred in the same way. Had magic caused the devastation, she wondered, or was it the way the land always was in Hell?

  With her back to the gate, the landscape off to her left rose up into a series of broken hills and folds. To her right, it was flatter, but a flash of color would spark occasionally, signaling a gout of fire coming up from the ground itself. Those were one source of the flickering light ever present in this place, though not the only one.

  Were there plants of any kind in Hell? They had enough food and water for about two weeks, possibly longer if they rationed it carefully. This was not the kind of place one lived off the land.

  In fact, Kate thought that maybe it was the kind of place that the land lived off you.

  What was she doing here? She was out of her depth. She had no place in this team, let alone leading it. She’d made a mess of things so far. No one had died—yet—but the mission had just started. What would happen when things really got rough?

  Dante’s voice sounded in her head. You have the raw talent to be the best, Kate. My job these past years was to give you the skills. You are capable of so much more than you realize.

  On top of that, Molara, Wilfred, even Captain Achard came unbidden into her mind. They believed in her, hinted—or came right out and said—she could handle whatever came her way. The captain gave her command for a reason. He must know something she didn’t. Still, it was a comforting thought.

  She came out of herself, got to her feet. She met the eyes of each of the five men as she did so.

  “Okay, we need to figure out what we’re going to do. We have a mission, and the fact that we don’t know where our target is and that we have what looks like hundreds of miles of rough terrain to search through doesn’t matter.

  “You are all more experienced than me. Help me out here. What do you suggest?”

  Aurel flashed a grin at Kate and gave a small nod. She had seen the exact same look before on her father’s face. It was a kind of pride. Kate looked away before she started to blush.

  “I may be able to help a tiny part,” Peiros said. “I do not know where the demons went, but I can sense something in that direction.” He pointed off slightly to the right in relation to the gate at their backs. “It is almost as if I am hearing the demons speak, but behind a thick wall. It is…a murmur. I do not know if it is significant, but it is all I have.”

  “It is definitely significant, Peiros,” Kate said. “Thank you. Anyone else?”

  “We can use Peiros’s ability to hear the demons like a compass,” Benedict said. “Maybe it’ll get stronger the closer we are.”

  “Psht.” It was Visimar. He had a condescending frown on his face.

  “You have something to say, Crater?” Benedict shot back.

  Visimar’s mouth twisted into a grimace and he colored slightly. It wasn’t embarrassment, it was pure anger. Kate had always been too polite to mention the scarring on his face. Benedict didn’t seem to have such inhibitions.

  “Nothing,” Visimar said. “You, in your limited intelligence, would just repeat it anyway. You’re good at doing that, at stating the obvious that someone else has already said.”

  “Listen,” Benedict said, “if you want to—”

  “Enough!” Kate said, stepping in between the men before it came to blows. “Things are stressful enough without us fighting with each other. Does anyone else have anything useful to say?”

  “The demons can move quickly,” Jurdan said. “When they want to, they can cover more miles in a day than a human army. Luckily, they are rarely in a rush unless there is an enemy directly in front of them. Their normal, lazy gait is much slower. If we walk fast, we can catch them. It may take a day or two, but we can catch them.

  “Then, of course, we would need to figure out exactly how to get to the demon lord. But hey, at least we’ll have something to talk about as we pursue them.” He smiled widely and jerked his head toward where Peiros said the feeling pointed toward.

  “That sounds good to me,” Kate said. “Le
t’s head out. Peiros, if you would direct us, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Peiros headed in the direction Kate hoped they would find their prey. She also hoped the ones they pursued were not too much for them.

  They took off at a rapid clip. It was all Kate could do to keep up without actually lifting her knees and running. Jurdan saw her difficulty and drifted over to her.

  “It’s a method for walking fast. It’s hiking, really, and not the typical military marching the Order prizes so much. When I first made Black, it took me more than two months of extended missions to finally get the hang of it.

  “You don’t have that much time. If you run, you’ll tire yourself out more quickly. Think of it as a circle, with your knees making a loop, but not rising too high.”

  He walked sideways and pointed at her knees as they moved. His finger described an egg shape.

  “You see,” he said, “you don’t have to lift your feet farther than it takes to move to the next position. Let your body get into a rhythm. Once you figure it out, it will seem as natural as…well, as walking.” He winked at her and then drifted away, tapping each of the others on the shoulder.

  The entire group slowed down slightly, causing Kate’s skin to warm even more than the elevated temperature could account for. She hated feeling like the weak link, but what could she do? Until she learned how to keep their pace, she definitely appreciated them slowing down a little.

  The terrain opened up in front of them, barren hills with the occasional gout of flame erupting. The fire seemed to always come out at the same places, so it was easy to keep from getting burned. Kate stopped to inspect one—carefully—and found a jagged rent in the ground, out of which emitted not only the flame on occasion, but also a foul smell. What kind of place had she landed herself in?