Chapter Ten
The next morning we sat huddled around the ashy remains of the fire in the damp morning air while Neve outlined what the day had in store for us. My muscles were so painful, it felt like they were actually trying to detach themselves from my bones, yet from what Neve was saying I would be doing the same amount of walking as I had yesterday.
The previous day had been fine and clear, but not hot. Perfect walking weather. The sun was already bright, so today would likely be similar, but being as how sunrise had only happened a few minutes ago, making it roughly five in the morning, the air was still chilly.
I sat on the ground, the soft serge jacket Neve had given me wrapped tightly around my chest and legs, trying to wake up. I was gasping, gasping, for a coffee. Or a cup of tea. Or a coke. I’d have taken a coke. Just anything that contained some caffeine to help me get kick-started. I took a sip of water from my canteen, trying to pretend it was a Grande Americano. Nope. Didn’t work.
‘...if we don’t manage to get to Hawksrest by sunset there are plenty of places to set up camp tonight, but if we do, we can take lodgings at the Golden Hind, rest up for the night. Any questions?’ I briefly thought about asking whether there would be a chance for a shower soon - it was now forty-eight hours since I’d last washed - but guessed the answer would probably be no.
We packed up the camp, which didn’t take long, ate a quick breakfast and set off along the packed dirt road through the thick woodland. I wondered how many miles we’d covered the previous day. Average walking distance was, what, three miles an hour? And we’d been walking for about twelve hours. Thirty-six miles. Jesus Christ. Thirty-six miles. And we’d probably be doing the same again today.
Musing on this depressing fact, I barely even noticed when Kallista stopped in her tracks right in front of me. ‘Wait up.’
She held a disc of green glass surrounded by ornate metalwork around the size of her hand up to the light and peered at it. A small cluster of bright dots flickered with the same jerky movements as bacteria under a microscope. Oriel was trying to look at it over Kallista’s shoulder while she elbowed him backwards.
‘Kallista, what is it?’ Neve asked quietly.
‘Just back from that copse of trees ahead there.’ She gestured off into the distance with a flick of her finger. ‘Looks like a nest.’
Raelthos slouched against a tree, as if he was waiting for his photo shoot to begin. ‘Do we know how many there are?’
Kallista squinted at the green disc, shook it and then thumped it with the heel of her hand. It gave an annoyed wheeze. ‘Around twenty, I’d say. No more than that.’
Demons. Oh god. They were talking about demons. Twenty of them. Twenty demons. I tried to look as unconcerned as the others did while my heart tried to gallop straight out of my chest. Admittedly, only last night Oriel had told me that we might see demons but this hadn’t prepared me for the fact that we might, you know, see demons.
Neve moved so she faced us all. ‘So. We have a decision to make. By rights, we should go in and clear out this nest. But technically we’re on another mission. We have our weapons, but none of the usual equipment or backup, so we’ll take a vote.’
Kallista snorted and hitched her bag further up onto her shoulder, giving Neve a withering look. ‘There’s no decision to be made,’ she said. ‘We’ve all sworn an oath, in case you’d forgotten. We are paladins; we fight for the gods and we do not stop. Ever.’
Raelthos made a face that clearly said he would be quite happy to stop, if it were up to him, but he caught Kallista’s sharp look and nodded too.
‘I’m in,’ I said, wiping my clammy palms on my trousers.
‘Er, no you’re not,’ Oriel said quickly. ‘Do you not remember what I said to you last night? The bit about running and hiding?’
After overhearing Neve’s comment about me constantly sneaky-looking at Oriel, I’d spent the whole morning only looking in his direction when I absolutely had to, letting my eyes skitter over and around him, but now I stared at him in amazement. ‘Yeah, if we’re being attacked. This is an ambush. Our ambush. I’m in,’ I repeated.
The others watched with interest and I could feel the heat rising on my cheeks. Neve looked like she was watching a soap opera before her face smoothed over. She looked at me carefully for a couple of seconds before nodding slowly.
‘It’s decided then.’ Neve ignored Oriel’s mutinous glare and threw her pack down by a tree, unsheathing her sword. ‘It’s daylight, so most of them will be in the nest. It may be guarded, so we’ll need to take them out first. Kallista, we’ll need fireballs to clear the nest: Oriel and Raelthos, we’ll take out any who try to escape. Roanne, assume cover with Kallista and take out any stragglers. Everyone clear?’ A silent chorus of nods. ‘Good. Let’s go.’
The forest grew denser and darker as we moved further away from the road. Quieter too, like the woodland creatures could sense the evil that had invaded their home and had moved elsewhere. Or had been eaten.
Oriel strode along next to me. ‘You shouldn’t be coming with us,’ he said, with the air of a doomsayer. ‘This isn’t your fight; you’re not a paladin, you could get hurt.’
Neve motioned for us all to stop and Oriel gently pushed aside an overhanging branch. I looked down the hill into a dip in the ground, and there they were. Demons. Actual, real, freaking demons.
They were human-shaped, which was the strangest thing that stuck me about them. I don’t know what I’d been expecting - hell beasts, perhaps, or amorphous fiery blobs. Instead of skin, their bodies were covered in dark brown scales, giving them a carapace a bit like a beetle. They had larger eyes than humans, shiny and oily-black. Even though we were well covered, it felt like they were watching me.
Three guards stood perfectly still a little way away from the nest’s entrance, their large eyes moving this way and that, scanning the forest for movement. The nest itself was a large dome shape made entirely from sticks and rubbish, just begging for a flaming arrow to be launched into its roof.
Neve snapped her fingers softly to get my attention. ‘The guards all need to be taken out at the same time so they don’t alert the others. Kallista can take two; can you manage the other with an arrow?’ I nodded and Neve turned to the others standing waiting expectantly. ‘The rest of us will take cover in that dip behind the nest. As soon as the guards are down, we’ll come out. I want fireballs and flaming arrows in that nest and when the demons try to escape we’ll attack.’
Oriel turned to me, his eyes full of trepidation, and I thought for a moment he was going to order me back to the road. Instead, he reached at my side for my hand, curling his fingers around mine. ‘Please be careful,’ he said as I tried to ignore the warm fizzes spreading up my arm. ‘Find some good cover and stay behind it. Don’t do anything heroic.’
He let me go and made his way over to Neve. As they moved through the brush, circling around the demon nest, I saw Neve say something to him, an earnest look on her face, and him nod solemnly in reply.
The rocky outcrop was tiny, but it was the only place with cover and a decent view of all three guards. After a great deal of passive-aggressive elbow-jostling for room Kallista and I took aim, but suddenly there was a movement from the nest. Another demon came out and went over to the path, effectively cutting us off from the road and from Neve.
This was a problem. No matter how I turned it in my head, three missiles into four guards just didn’t go. Kallista sat back down on her heels and swore under her breath. ‘What are we going to do now?’
‘If you can take out the one on the path and the one by the door, I can take a shot with two arrows and take out those two over there,’ I suggested.
She looked at me doubtfully. ‘Can you do that?’
‘Yeah, I’ve done it loads of times,’ I lied. Well, I’d seen it done. Once. In a film.
She looked up over our rock but Oriel and the others were out of sight on the other side of the clearing, waiting for the g
uards to go down. We couldn’t wait much longer and risk one of them coming back to see what was wrong and running into the guard on the path. Kallista frowned worriedly before nodding tersely at me and we took aim again.
I carefully slotted two arrows into my bow and pulled the string back across my chest. The bow creaked softly and satisfyingly and I held the pose, aiming carefully. Kallista crouched beside me, her hands glowing with white light, before she nodded at me to fire.
I loosed my arrows and time slowed like treacle. Kallista’s energy bolts were dead on target, but my arrows were flying wide. My gamble had failed.
I heard Kallista’s sharp intake of breath and my insides turned to ice. Please, no, please, no, I thought to myself desperately.
Then the light in the clearing shifted and my arrows hit home, piercing the demons’ large insectoid eyes.
Kallista let out a surprised huff of laughter and she turned to me, eyes shining, before remembering that she didn’t like me and her face rearranged itself into its usual sulky lines. ‘Come on, we need to burn that nest down,’ she muttered.
Whirling her hands round each other, wisps of fire coalesced like candy floss and with a flick of her wrist she launched the flaming sphere at the opening of the demon nest. I whipped out some of the flame arrows Neve had given me and fired one into the roof and one into the side wall. Their high shrieks brought Neve and the others out of the shadows.
The roof of the nest caved in with an impressive eruption of sparks and the rest of the demons fought their way through the spreading flames to safety, only to be met by three angry paladins carrying a selection of heavy weaponry.
Oriel took the first demon out with a long dagger through the eye before any of them even registered the presence of the Protectorate, but demons carried on flowing from the entrance of their nest, far too many for three people to manage. I loaded my bow and dispatched the next demon at the same time as Kallista sent a blade of energy frisbeeing through the air, severing its head. ‘Any chance you could have tried going for a different demon?’ she said acidly. ‘Bit pointless, us going for the same one, wouldn’t you say?’
‘My arrow got there first,’ I pointed out, pulling another one from my quiver.
She levelled a poisonous glare at me. ‘Just take that one over there.’ She pointed to a demon just about to pounce at Neve, who was already trying to land a killing blow on one of its brethren.
I aimed my bow in the direction she indicated. ‘You’re not my boss, you know,’ I said as my arrow whistled past Neve’s ear and into the demon’s eye.
‘You’d be a damned sight better trained if I was,’ she said, whirling another fireball out of the ether. ‘But in any case, for the purposes of this mission, I am your boss.’ She tossed it over to the nest with impressive force and was rewarded by the remains of the structure folding in on itself.
‘What? How?’
‘You’re a Zero,’ she reminded me, smirking. ‘Therefore I outrank you. As do Oriel, Raelthos and Neve. So do the little Blessed kids back at the Citadel who barely know how to hold their swords properly. Hell, even the man who cleans the toilets in the Protectorate barracks outranks you. Now, if it’s not too much trouble, could you possibly kill the demon over there that’s trying to escape?’
I looked down into the clearing, at the three paladins fighting. It was chaos. Or at least that’s how it seemed at first glance. After a few minutes, I realised that Oriel and Neve moved and span and hacked in perfect synchronisation, their movements like dancers, perfectly complimenting each other. She would advance to push a demon back and he would skewer it through the neck. Oriel would drop to the floor and Neve would rush forward. Between them, Raelthos faded in and out of sight, always seeming to know what the other two would do next, turning up where he was most needed.
Torn between petulance at Kallista’s bossiness and a desire to take more demons down, I raised my bow and was about to aim when the air shimmered and Raelthos suddenly materialised. ‘Jesus!’ I squeaked.
‘Try not to kill Raelthos,’ Kallista said waspishly.
Unfortunately, my squeak had not gone unnoticed. A demon that had been circling Oriel looked up in the direction of our rock and saw me. Its mouth opened in a rictus smile, blue spit dripping from its jaw. It started striding towards our rock.
Oriel spun on his heel, neatly dispatching the head of the demon he had been fighting and saw it. ‘Neve!’ he hollered.
Neve looked over, her eyes widening. She dropped to the floor, rolling out of the reach of a set of claws and sprang back to her feet, sprinting towards the demon. At the last second she span round, locking her arms with Raelthos’s and flung herself backwards using his back as a springboard. The demon ran straight into her boots as she kicked its face with both feet, kangaroo-style.
It staggered backwards towards Oriel, who swung his sword and caught it with an uppercut, like they were playing demon ping pong. He caught the weak joint in the demon’s neck and its head went sailing through the air and landed with a thunk a little way away.
Finally, the remains of the shanty-like nest burned to the ground, smouldering ashes floating across the clearing on the breeze, settling here and there on the bodies of the fallen demons. Kallista and I made our way down the leafy slope into the clearing where the others were cleaning their weapons of the sticky demon ichor.
I looked down at the demon at my feet, one of the guards I took out. I don’t know what I’d expected; that its face would look gentler, somehow, in death? It didn’t. The hard, brown scales were stretched tight around its eyes, and its lips were slightly parted, showing its elongated canines. I felt something build inside me, a tiny, primal voice that made me want to pull my lips back and snarl at my defeated enemy.
‘Hello? What are you waiting for?’ Kallista said in my ear. I straightened up and she looked at me impatiently. ‘You need to collect your arrows and clean them so they don’t rot. They don’t grow on trees, you know.’
Heroically resisting flipping Kallista my middle finger, I started to pull my arrows from the demons I’d felled - which, incidentally, made a noise I would happily go for the rest of my life without hearing again.
I yanked hard at a particularly stubborn arrow and was about to give up when the wind blew a warm gust across my face, carrying the smell of the demon with it. Its stench was of rotting meat and hot garbage. My vision clouded and a dart of deep abiding joy at its death shot through me. It wasn’t enough that this abomination had been killed once; I wanted to kill it again. And again. And again.
The wind shifted again clearing my nose and, horrified at my reaction, I ran behind a tree to heave my breakfast up.
In a second Oriel was by my side, gathering my hair away from my face and rubbing my back. ‘Go away,’ I groaned, ‘you don’t need to see this.’
He ignored me and carried on rubbing my back in large circles. ‘You didn’t need to get the arrows yourself,’ he said quietly. ‘I would have done that for you. It’s your first time in the field; I’m surprised you haven’t keeled over.’
Yeah, that would be all I needed: passing out and landing in a lake of vomit. My stomach clenched again at the thought. ‘Mind your BOOTS!’ I shouted and hurled again as Oriel danced nimbly out of the way.
When my stomach stopped convulsing and there was only spit and bile left, Oriel handed me a large linen handkerchief. I wiped my mouth and we made our way back to the others.
‘Are you feeling better?’ Neve asked with concern. I nodded.
‘So pathetic,’ muttered Kallista.
‘Kallista, don’t be mean,’ said Raelthos sharply. ‘At least she didn’t completely lose it like you did with your first kill.’
‘Shut up, Raelthos,’ Kallista snarled.
‘A-boo-hoo-hoo...’ Raelthos wailed, his hands over his eyes in a girly-sobbing fashion. ‘I’m a mur-her-her-hurderer....’
‘Shut up, Raelthos!’
‘I-hi-hi-hi’m going to go to he-heh-heh-he
llllll.....’
‘SHUT UP, RAELTHOS!’ she screamed, the freckles on her nose popping out. ‘I killed a human; she killed a demon. A demon! And she’s acting like what she’s done is somehow a terrible thing.’
‘Shut up! Both of you!’ roared Neve. ‘Roanne, sit down over there and drink some water. Raelthos, you go with her.’
I propped myself against a large horse chestnut tree and began to sip slowly at my canteen. Raelthos positioned himself next to me, stretching his legs out and crossing them at the ankles. Adrenaline was still coursing through me, making my whole body tremble.
‘Kallista’s right, you know,’ he said mildly. I raised my eyebrow at him. ‘For all that she has an unfortunate way of expressing herself. You shouldn’t feel bad about killing demons,’ he clarified. ‘It’s likely you’ve saved a number of people from an unpleasant death. I wouldn’t let it weigh too heavily on your conscience.’
He was right. I knew he was right. What was making me hurl was the joy I’d taken in dispatching them. In the fraction of a second between loosing an arrow and it hitting its target, all the facets of my life seemed to slot together like a giant crystalline puzzle, leaving me with the sensation that I was doing exactly what I had been born to do.
And it terrified me.
‘By the way, the human she killed? A rapist who was trying to summon an archdemon into his own body to give him the physical strength to commit even more imaginative acts of barbarity. Nice, eh? We knew what he was planning, but we couldn’t take him out until he had willingly let the demon possess him. Anything non-demon is strictly off-limits, you see.
‘Our general, Illvelios, sent Oriel and Kallista out to take him down; it was one of their first missions together.’ He caught my look of surprise and his expression shifted slightly to that of a tiger circling its prey. ‘Oh yes, they often get thrown together, so to speak.’ He said ‘thrown together’ as if he really meant ‘into bed together’. Remembering what Oriel had told me about Raelthos seeking out your weaknesses, I kept my face neutral.
‘Anyway, they were staking this demon-summoner chap out and the second they got the nod Oriel burst in with Kallista hot on his heels. The demon’s first act in his new skin was to lash out at Oriel. It didn’t take him down - he’s a strong boy, as you may have noticed - but it stunned him for a second and a second was all it needed. The demon advanced on him and Kallista set off an energy bomb, focussing the epicentre in the man’s brain.
‘She had no choice in what she did. If she hadn’t taken him down, they would both be dead. You should have seen her afterwards, though. Tears, moping.’ He sighed and stared ahead. ‘First kill is always the worst and the fact that they’re evil doesn’t make it as easy as you’d think it would.’
He suddenly looked a lot less swaggery and a whole lot older. I wondered how many demons he’d killed over the years. ‘Do you ever get used to it?’
He was silent for a while and I began to wonder if he hadn’t heard me. ‘No, not really. But I think that just shows you’re holding on to your humanity. If you felt no regret at killing, what would differentiate you from the demons?’
‘How do you do it? Day after day? How do you not go mad?’
‘Haven’t you heard?’ he asked wryly. ‘We’re heroes. It’s our job.’
‘Yes, I think someone did mention that, now I come to think of it. You’re the heroes; I’m the Zero.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Raelthos said. He looked across the clearing to where Neve was squaring up to Oriel. He was holding her off by planting his hand over her face. ‘You’ve thrown your lot in with the Saldana twins. That seems pretty bloody heroic to me.’
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