by Chloe Garner
So he stood up.
His knees ached, his back was sore where it wasn’t crackling from the sword heat, and he nearly sat back down from a fit of dizziness, but he was up, and then he was moving.
One foot and then another foot.
Damned dress shoes. He never wore anything else, because it was a part of the costume, but they weren’t doing him any favors on the hellplane geography. He had no traction, and his feet had no support when he stepped on something that was smaller than his foot. He felt every piece of gravel and every uneven spot in the ground as he went over it.
He put his hands in his pockets and counted his tattoos.
He knew them all, knew the power they had, what they did for him, why they were where they were. He could feel them as he counted them, like someone running a finger across his skin, tracing them out again. They were all active, all engaged, and all on the verge of being empty.
He didn’t want to die.
More than anyone in the history of the planet, he suspected, he didn’t want to die. As he walked, though, he considered that there were probably worse ways to do it than this. If he died here, he’d end up a demon, rather than a loose soul. His self-determination would be intact. Demons didn’t have freewill in the way that humans did, but there was still a difference between the ones who had it and the ones who didn’t. There were masters and there were slaves, but it was all hell.
He was going to end up here one way or the other, and he knew that there were an awful lot of demons looking forward to what they were going to do to him, stripped of his freewill and his self-determination. If he just died here, at least the worst thing that could happen wouldn’t.
It was fatalistic, but it was how his mind worked. He had to consider it.
And then reject it.
Because like hell was he going to let a pack of skinless demonic mongrels take his life from him. He was going out in a self-induced ball of fire when he was too old to know better.
He’d already decided that.
He was Carter and they would pay for presuming to attack him when he was weak.
Onward.
The terrain as you got closer to the range got rougher and rougher, until it flattened completely at the range itself. It was at that point that you could start to see the local-earth geography rather than the range, the way you saw it from Hellcity. Billions of people were all out here, spatially arranged in a pattern that the demons had spent all of time speculating about.
He climbed and descended, doing irreversible damage to his shoes. Normally, this path was nothing to him, something he barely noticed out of a sense of the common. Today, he kept trying to stop to rest, only the metallic core of his awareness driving him forward. There was no rest.
There was never rest.
He heard hellspeak ahead of him, and he stood straight, taking stock one last time of where he was, how much further he had to go.
It was less than a mile, probably. Maybe less than half a mile.
He just had to keep walking. Keep going.
Fight when he had to fight.
Keep going.
He wondered if he should have sent Samantha away. She would keep the gate clear, so if he needed to make an exit at speed, at least he could get through the gate without having that final ambush happen.
He wondered if he’d remembered to tell her not to actually cross without him.
She knew that.
Right?
He missed the feel of a sword in his hands.
He felt naked.
In the bad way.
A demon peered at him from over a low ridge and he watched back.
This was it.
He was going to make it or he wasn’t.
The demon hissed and called to demons still out of sight, telling them that he was here.
He let his head wobble, then hissed back at the demon, cursing it in hellspeak, and ran.
He wasn’t fast. Not like they were. But he didn’t have to get away. He just had to cover as much ground as he could. They were going to keep coming, and the more time he gave them to put together a plan, the more of them he was going to have to deal with doing more and more clever things.
He lay hands on the first demon to come in range, ignoring the fact that it bit him, and spoke words powerful enough to ash the creature.
The rest hesitated.
He kept going, a walk now, but kept moving. Another one approached, and he punched it in the face, left-handed. That was where the angeltongue curse strongest against demons was, there out across the backs of his fingers, in ultraviolet ink. It wasn’t enough to ash this one, but it did knock him back and buy Carter a few more feet before he had to deal with the next one. He dodged and hit a third, then threw that one into the second, running again.
He was so slow.
So slow.
A demon jumped on his back, raising a dagger to stab him in the chest, and he cursed, grabbing its arm and holding it up as he summoned power again.
Four minutes, if he went fast. Six if he didn’t.
He had to hold out six more minutes.
He smashed the demon into the ridge, ducking as another demon swung a sword at him, and threw the demon on his back onto the ground, moving out of the way as the blade behind him came whistling past again.
“Enough,” he said. He wove magic, pushing the demons away from him, bringing down darkness. Confusion.
There were shouts as they worked through the magic he was using and someone started trying to counteract it, but a demon in hell had a very different list of magic available to them than one who had been steeped in earth-plane ambient magic for even a few weeks.
And these weren’t earth plane demons. They fought like demons, with claws and teeth before swords, but with a brutal power that was ultimately stronger than he was.
He pressed on.
More steps. The demons in this group had tapered off, though he hadn’t driven them away. The more hot-headed members were now under control and a tactical leader was setting an ambush. Carter veered right.
It was a huge gamble.
Out here, this close to the range, the geometry of the hellplane was notoriously unpredictable. Only on a radius could you be sure you were going in a straight line. Everything else curved and bent wickedly, such that if he got a little bit of space between him and the demons, if they couldn’t trace his exact path, they could try to run toward him and just get further and further away.
He had to be outside of line of sight for it to work, though, and he was taking risks of his own. If he couldn’t make his way back perfectly, or if he tried to do a disciplined approach to Samantha’s radius, he could end up hours away from where he wanted to be, and he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to survive that, at this point.
On the other hand, he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to survive an onslaught of the number of demons he could hear talking on the other side of the ridge.
This was his opportunity, and he took it.
The ground didn’t really matter. Remembering where any given landmark was was basically guaranteeing he got lost. He had to trust his ability to take the right vector off of the radius, and then follow that same vector back, even when the landscape looked completely different from what he remembered.
The bulk of the hellplane was static. Complex, geometrically, but static. If you took the right route, you would always end up at the mine where you expected to be.
The range, though, was a special kind of treacherous, and there weren’t many people who knew that as well as Carter did.
He jogged, hoping not to stumble across demons that had banked on him taking this exact risk, and then squatted behind a boulder, listening.
They were still not far away. He could hear them first shouting to each other directions and reprimands then, as he waited, increasing levels of anger as they couldn’t find him.
He didn’t like it, this hiding solut
ion, but leaning against the rock, empty of magic and bleeding through his suit jacket and down his arm, he needed the smart play, not the heroic one.
How far off of the radius had he gone?
He listened to the shouts. They were getting more and more spaced out and more angry.
They were searching for him.
And then he tipped his head to the side, recognizing one of the noises.
That was the radius marker.
If he hadn’t done this search, himself, a half-dozen times for various reasons, he wouldn’t have known it, and if the demon running the group hadn’t been trained by the same demon Carter had trained with, it wouldn’t have matched. But both things were true, so when the demon whose job it was to stay on the main radius, to keep everyone from wandering off down bad, twisted curls, made the croaking noise that kept them in range, Carter saw his window.
That demon was by himself. On the radius that no one else could find without him.
Carter stood and sprinted directly at it. Huge risk.
Huge risk.
But it was the right risk.
There was another reverberating croak, and he sped up, running up the side of a small hill and coming into view of the radius marking demon. It squealed and tried to warn the rest of the demons, but he was on it too fast, destroying it with the magic in his hands.
It put up a good fight, opening a long gash down the inside of his arm and destruction at the base of his neck that he didn’t even want to know about, but he was running again. On the right radius, with no demons able to find it again and follow, he was home free.
In sight of the gate, he almost ran smack into a pit lord who was standing watch there.
Carter skidded to a stop, impressed at the stature of the demon. He was at least ten feet tall, probably twelve, with great big ram’s horns twisting out from his head and fingers whose knuckles were as big as Carter’s wrist. The brute carried a club made of metal-studded rock.
Devastating.
Carter held completely still, not sure how the pit lord hadn’t heard him running up. He was puffing like the first day of track practice, and he might have actually kicked rocks into the backs of the demon’s bare feet.
Carter took one very cautious step to the side, more back than sideways, trying to gage the sweep that club could carry.
He was just going to have to run for it.
Surely a beast that size would be slow.
Right?
Even as slow as Carter was?
Surely.
He moved foot over foot, trying to make sure he had plenty of room, for when the demon finally spotted him and swung. Include a lunge…
“Aspen, get in here. I’m tired of holding him,” Samantha called.
He tipped further to the side, and Samantha held her arms out to either side, exasperated.
“What did you do?” she asked. “You’re a horror show. Get in here.”
He tipped a fraction further, looking up at the face of the pit lord.
They weren’t magically astute. They got where they were by brute force.
She’d locked him down.
His eyes wiggled, and maybe a tiny muscle in his jaw, but Samantha, at less than a quarter his mass, she’d completely incapacitated him.
“How did you do that?” Carter asked, standing straight again and coming to stand in front of the demon, peering up at him.
Samantha unleashed a spiel of hellspeak at him, the good stuff, full of anger and violence and hyperbolic threats, and he turned.
“Where did you learn to curse like that?” he asked.
“I am not holding him for your benefit,” she said.
“Yes you are,” he answered.
“You’re bleeding all over the ground,” she said. “Get through this gate so I can get it closed.”
He took one last look up at the demon and shrugged.
“Sorry, big guy,” he said. “You heard her.”
He heard Samantha sigh and he grinned as he turned.
“How bad is it?” Samantha asked, coming to meet him partway.
“I’ll live,” he said, losing a lock in his knee and nearly dropping to the ground. Bad timing.
She reached over and tried to take his pulse, but both arms were damp with blood. She wiped it off on his suit.
“I’m going to have to put all of this back together,” she said.
“It isn’t as bad as it looks,” he said, his voice breaking. He cleared his throat and tried again, but the adrenalin that had carried him this far was abandoning him, leaving him exposed and beyond exhausted.
“Go,” she said, pushing him toward the pair of posts. He stumbled across the hellsgate and landed on his hands and knees. He looked over his shoulder, but he couldn’t see Samantha any more. He wasn’t certain she’d jumped back across until he heard her groan. More than six hours standing like that was enough to make any body cranky.
“Carter, I need you to either go close this gate or hold it while I do it.”
He nodded at the ground, feeling the rush of magic from being on this side of the boundary. He soaked it in, letting it happen naturally for a minute, and then drawing harder on it. He could have taken possession control of his body if he’d chosen to, but he didn’t want to corrupt his relationship with the sword like that.
“I’ll hold the gate,” he said. “You close it.”
He crawled over to her, using the posts to help him get up, then walked around behind her, putting his hands above hers on the posts and felt the buzz of energy there, using himself as the conduit to hold it closed. She slipped away and went to the metal canister, dragging it into position and opening it. He closed his eyes, relaxing and letting his body regain awareness of health, not bothering to watch as the splash of blood ran across the ground, hitting the side of his shoes and up onto the cuffs of his pants.
They were a loss, anyway.
He felt the power of the gate collapse, and then he was just holding on to a pair of iron bars.
“That’s got it?” Samantha asked. He stood, rolling his jaw and twisting his head the other direction.
That had been interesting.
“Let’s get you inside and see how bad this is,” Samantha said.
“What do you know about ordination for an epic sword?” Carter asked. She shook her head.
“I’ve read about them, but no one talks about the details.”
“Your job is to shut up,” he said. “Not a sound.”
She shrugged, and he held up a finger, menacing.
“I mean it,” he said. She shrugged bigger and he reached behind his back, untying the sword there and letting the leather fall away. The metal was still uncomfortably hot to the touch, but it wasn’t going to do permanent damage, so he held it. Shrugged out of his jacket and left it on the ground sopping up pig’s blood, then unbuttoned the cuff on his sleeve and rolled it up past his elbow. Left hand, right arm. He drew the blade across the inside of his arm, the sharp of the metal peeling through his flesh like it wasn’t even there. For the first instant, he was looking at the inside of his arm, then the sword went through the artery and his blood splashed the length of the blade.
He kept going until the metal hit bone, then finished the draw so that the length of the blade was covered in his blood and held her vertical in front of him.
“Diana,” he said.
It didn’t take long enough for him to worry if it was going to work. The gash snapped closed with a hot, healthy buzz, and the sword cooled.
He drew a breath, closing his eyes and wrapping both hands around the handle.
There she was, a living flame, confident as a dancer, strong, unyielding, aware that she was perfect and that only he deserved her.
He breathed again, then slid her behind his back. She found the leather thong there without slicing it, but they both knew she was going to need a much better sheath, long term. He nodded. Wondered if this was w
hat it felt like to be in love.
Samantha looked a bit gray.
“If you fall down and impale yourself on her on the way upstairs, you’ll have deserved it,” she said. “That was stupid.”
“That was the point,” he said, reaching out to stabilize himself on one of the posts. “I’m going to go upstairs and get a glass of juice and a granola bar. Get this cleaned up.”
She started to argue, but he walked away without listening to her.
He was drained empty, but he was here. This was his home, and he was not going to show fear or weakness here. He wouldn’t feel fear or weakness here. He went and pushed the button on the elevator, letting his head fall back a fraction so that he was looking down his nose at the doors.
No one was going to be ready for him now.
No one.
He slept on the couch for a day. More than once, Samantha came to try to tell him to do something, or to check on him, and he growled her away. At one point, he was aware of two female voices talking, and he was getting his energy up to tell them to shut up, but when he sat up, the apartment was empty.
He slept with Diana against his back. She was patient, but only a little longer. There would be a moment not long from now when enough would be enough. He took her to the shower with him when he finally woke up for good, going over the trivial set of injuries from the day before. Nothing had actually gotten him that good. It had just been the blood loss. He glowered at the bite mark on his right forearm, wishing he’d done something more spectacular about that one.
When he got out of the shower and dressed, he came back out of his room and poured another glass of orange juice. Downed that and poured another, then made a sandwich. Stacks of ham with an extra piece of bread in the middle to give the whole thing stability, mayonnaise and cheese and one piece of lettuce for color.
He sat at the table and devoured it, going back for more juice twice, and he was sitting, licking his fingers when Samantha came home again.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
“Shopping,” she answered. “How are you feeling?”