The Demon's Call

by Philip C Anderson

  The early-morning sun slid over the eastern horizon and touched the zenith of Rilbin Tower to the west. For a few seconds, the light between them swelled and formed an orb that broke only when the light from the east had fully replaced the shadow. Demons hissed and cawed against it.

  Trees rustled, and the rock Russell now commanded reacted to their movement. By a thought that Russ couldn’t be sure came from him or the essence inside the stone, he found her, the soul in his pocket inexorably called to its counterpart. She sat on a felled tree’s stump. Giant splinters bit into her thighs and ass.

  “Come and found me?” she said. Fel flaked from her and pulled the nether into the forest’s space, creating a breeze that shouldn’t have reached that far into the darkness. “Can’t stay away, we suppose. Your end approaches, Grand Master. We hope you’re not ready for it. The hearts of men are so fickle when death threatens to take them.”

  “I will chase you through all the realms of hell if it means freeing Coroth of your kind. Death has no power over me. Your master should have told you that.”

  She laughed. “No, just dear Lillie.”

  “Mark the words,” Russ said, then he left her alone in the dark.

  “Grenn,” he said when he returned. “One last thing before we do this.”

  “Waddaya need?” Grenn still hadn’t found his breath, and he swallowed heavily.

  “I don’t know why the Goddess put her with us, but She did. And I can’t help but feel it was for a purpose.” He paused before he went on. “You’re gonna need to trust her—Willa, I mean.”

  Grenn exhaled. “I know.” He looked off to their left, to the Priests gathered under the purple lobster.

  No humor eroded Willa’s face while she watched the conversation’s flow. But her ears flicked, she found them staring, and her tale swept either way behind her. She waved in a small gesture.

  A meager smile crossed Grenn’s lips, and he returned a sign of his own: a snap and a point of his finger, after which Willa returned her consideration to her own company, and Grenn looked to Russ, who watched him with a discerning glare.

  “What?” said Grenn, defensive. “You were out a while, and I’m pretty good at talking when I need to be.”

  “I just thought”—

  “We’re not buddies or anything. It’s not hard to get along with someone when you want to, though.” He paused. “Plus her, Russ? Even if I were looking.”

  Russ paused, but he’d assured himself of what he said next that night at the fire. “It would piss off a lot of Karlians to hear this, but they’re the future—Coroth’s and the Order’s.” He considered the demons across the field from them. “Something has to be.”

  “Not too far of a stretch when we need Ley-Light to beat them now.” Grenn looked eastward, where a clear sun rose, and he breathed. “Getting to be about that time, huh? Do ya have anything more before we go? Talking’s kinda helped.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Sage advice. Even just saying don’t die would be better than nothing.”

  Russ huffed. “Keep yourself safe, especially now. Don’t play the hero if you can help it.”

  “Almost nobody can help it. It just happens.”

  With the light, the demons’ mutterings grew, and their line approached uproar as the seconds passed. Through comms, the command tent issued orders to those who needed them in the last moments of the night. “Priests on line to subset two,” Russ heard, clean and subdued.

  “Here’s somethin the old quartermaster used to say while runnin us through drills,” Russ said. “When you make a choice, let it be one you think is right, not one you think is easy. Let no one tell you otherwise—no one—because if it’s hard, it’s probably right.”

  “Fantastic.”

  Russell chuckled before he raised his helmet. “Let’s do this.”

  He stepped forward and turned to address the Order’s ranks. “This is it!” he yelled. His voice echoed across the flats. “My Karlians, my Priests, and all gathered, our time has come.” Those marshaled turned their attention toward him. “In this hour, we are one—one in the Light of the Goddess Karli, entwined now in the strength of the Goddess Leyna. Together, like no other time in the past, we face evil like no other in the same. The gods in their infinite wisdom have given us the power to fight against this new sin that threatens to extinguish us. Again and again, our fathers and mothers of yore fought to provide our world the safety it required, and again and again, the Light has shone through a darkness that wants nothing less than our extinction. What say you?”

  The Order cheered. The demons blared for the commotion, and the world awoke with sound.

  “I beseech each of you: Remember! We are the Light in the darkness, and where the Light cannot go, we do in its stead, to protect those who can’t guard themselves, to safeguard the corners of this world where shadows linger. Not only because the Goddess Calls us, but because we must. To go against this imperative, there is no more callous a dereliction. When the writers of our history make record of this day, they will tell not of the carnage or death, but of the magnificence of our resolve and the beauty of our fledgling power’s combined breath. Our actions this day will echo into eternity as we stand truly together for the first time against the night and say, ‘No more! No more!’”

  All down the line, the members of the Order erupted in a unanimous voice. “No more! No more!” they echoed.

  The demons matched their noise with callous hoots, and the ground trembled for both.

  Russ raised his hammer and faced the demon’s line. “For Coroth!”

  “For Coroth!” the Order shouted in one voice.

  Russ stepped toward the demon line, and in the language of the Light, he yelled, “Karli’i narthe!”

  The members of the Order responded: “Pas roxe!”

  Russell marveled in the energy, and he looked back at Grenn. “Kill any that make it past me.”

  He turned and set his feet. His armor’s thrusters jetted him forward, and he swung his hammer. A golden glob of Light-energy flung across the battlefield. The demons screamed. One sped toward him and hurled a mottling of dark power, which missed, and Russ’s hammer found its point against the wretch’s skull.

  For a few seconds the world filled with silence. Then the demons roared, and the War began.

  5

  Behind him, the rest of the Order charged. Priests ported to their positions and reached the line, where they shot Ley and Light into the land. A raging fire of purple and green and red thundered fifty feet high and ensconced the demons between wood and flame. The foul beasts hollered, and when the first of them stepped glibly into the holy fusion, it collapsed, burned in an instant. For a few seconds, that seemed enough, but after another, a giant lunged through, howling as the flames scathed its hide. It landed on the other side, its skin charred and molting, and smashed its hammer onto a Priest, who crumpled under the monster’s blow and moved no more.

  His area of flame dropped, and a window opened for the infestation to pour through. The first of them shrieked in mania and launched themselves past the giant toward the next Priest. She defended herself and smote her aggressor to ash while maintaining her part, hers a blurred dance of flame-feeding and careful amalgamation. Down the line, giants hopped over the hedge, blaring against this new power wrought upon them. Priests dodged their blows, but as their concentration abated, so too did their fire. Yet for the whole, most finished their incantations, and at the proper time, they swept their arms in choreography, and their conflagrations met where the others’ had extinguished and made the wall whole.

  Orders rushed over comms, and for a dozen seconds, the flame held the demons back. Their cries flushed into the air and blackened the world with their heinous song. Fire set the trees ablaze, and so the demons unwillingly advanced. The first push fell to form a bridge, then others walked over the burned only for a Karlian to smite them in their duress.

  A whisper washed over them, and M’ke
th in his basso drawl issued his horde orders, wrote into their minds an imperative—“Push through, no matter the cost.”

  “Prepare for wall drop in three, two”—the instruction passed through comms, and the single Priest who now controlled the wall of flame lowered one piece, a sliver off to the east, where the demons rushed through.

  Russ raised his hammer and hailed the Light, bracing himself against its power. Where it met him, a ripple made through the air and merged with a channel of Ley from his ring.

  Hell unleashed, and the Grand Master met his first combat. Grenn fought at his back, and though the young Karlian moved with his heavy tactic, the effect he achieved brought him to the same place as Russ: a pile of ash that spun in a breeze of dashes and swings. Russ blasted a kobold with Light, and the next demon’s chest collapsed against a swing from his hammer. He took another in the follow-through. His armor sensed his intended dodge and leaned him to his left, then he jammed his right hand against Uniquity’s shaft to take a rat from the air mid-leap, crashing its face into its body. A lizard sprung toward him, its fangs bared in attack, its hand-like front legs aimed at Russ’s face. He leaned backwards, dodged it, but not quickly enough for the faux-reptile to lash at him with its tail on the overpass and catch his helmet. His neck whipped backwards, and he lost his balance.

  His armor corrected for him, and a beam of Ley-Light incinerated the lizard before it touched ground. Nowhere else in Russ’s life had he felt so at home in the last twenty years. He’d told himself that with Lillie, he’d live a life fulfilled in unmitigated felicity, but what Jeom had told him—that once he’d gotten a taste for it, he’d not be able to sit through normality again—had proven true on the morning of his third battle. Without question, he could live a good life doing this: blasting the creatures of the nether, exploring the new energies the gods had given them. Gods damn him if it couldn’t be so.

  Still, Russ watched it happen: when one demon fell, another stepped in to take its place; where they took one from the air, another flew into its stead. Half a step further than he’d already taken, his back pressed against his squire’s.

  “We’re surrounded,” the young Karlian said. He raised a shield of Light against a glob of Fel magic, then he actuated the blades on his arm. They flew away from him in an arc laced with Light, lashing through the beasts that stood closest. Near the end of their momentum, they returned to him, maiming in their second pass, and folded back into his arm. “That’s not gonna be enough.” Yet he sent them away again.

  Russ deflected half a dozen swipes at him. A claw caught on his knee. He stepped forward and twisted the demon’s hand off at the wrist under his foot. His helmet counted the number of enemies that surrounded them—several dozen. He searched for an opening, any way out, and saw none. Then he looked skyward, where sparse gargoyles and bats flitted across the soft blue, delivering payloads of hellish energy upon the Order. “Grenn, the sky.”

  Grenn upturned his gaze, Russ yelled, “Mark!” then the Grand Master threw his hammer toward the heavens. When he blinked, he’d followed it, demons clawing at his feet and legs. At the apex of Uniquity’s pull, he wheeled around. His squire drove his own hammer into the ground and blasted the horde backwards as Russ shielded himself with a cone of Light-energy and dove. The demon’s who’d surrounded them crumpled under his plunge, and a blast of Ley shot from his ring, fusing with the holy burst. Lava-like globs of Ley-Light froze the demons in place, and the two Karlians swung, their maces hitting nothing but ash.

  “Gods damn,” Grenn said in a small respite. “This new stuff isn’t bullshit.”

  Russ agreed. “Wish I had about ten o’ these, though.” Liri’s ring had melded onto his middle finger. The magic within had loosened its coil.

  The nearest fight, a dozen meters away, seemed well-handled as a Priest and Karlian stepped around each other almost like a waltz: the latter set up the demons in practiced motions for the Priest to blast in the face or gut, scorch off their wings, or obliterate them entirely. She erected pillars of dirt just to set them ablaze and blast them apart as glass bombs; she grew trees through demons’ bodies only to raze them to burned mulch at the next demon’s feet. Her yellow hair fluttered behind her as though she danced through a hurricane.

  The air shimmered, the stone vibrated in his pocket, and Russ’s armor showed a warning he’d not seen before. Combat Rating: Indeterminable. Requires further analysis. She moved as a shadow, a banshee of the night, and phased through black mist to mete death unto those too slow to make away. Too late did the Grand Master shout, “Look out!”

  D’niqa phased from the nether behind the Priest. Her Karlian saw and screamed “No!” when the hell-bitch grabbed the blonde’s head and lifted her off the ground. The Priest didn’t scream; she spoke against the demon, conjuring as though she’d prepared for this, but her voice cut off when D’niqa throttled her. So simple, and over in a moment. The blonde’s evocation unfolded from her hands, and the bitch dropped her, then made away.

  Her presence became a rallying cry: all around them, the Fel beasts swarmed. They’d overrun the front line, and the flames had burned out in places under their sheer piles. In others, the fire had caught on the trees themselves, which shook and waved in their panic, fleeing too slowly to abate their own ruin. Karlian and Priest fought, outnumbered at every encounter—when one demon fell, another stepped into its place in the chaotic dance, and even more flanked them and plunged from the air. They leapt over one another to get a better shot at the army of Light, and if they found purchase with tooth or claw or foul magic, they held on and took as much life with them as they could.

  Russ aimed his ring at a new mark, an ugly orckin who led a small charging host. As he’d suspected, the ring’s magic finally gave out midway through his channel, and his show at Priestly power became only Light. The demons pushed easily against him, their leader commanding them in the Fel tongue.

  It’s finished, Russ thought as the thing spoke, and reality jolted through him in a pang of regret and myriad other emotions, all of which fought for time when he had none to give.

  As answer to a prayer he hadn’t said, a portal opened in midair a quarter-mile away. Russ’s visor zoomed in on it. A Leynar, his robes billowing as he dropped, leapt through and flew toward the nearest Karlian, a woman in blood-colored armor who defended herself alone. A demon’s severed head gnawed on her axe’s blade. She looked up, and almost like they’d planned it, the Leynar bombarded the demons around her with Ley energy as she channeled Light. Their magics fused and blanketed the demons, obliterating them in a small crater of risen dust.

  More fell through in coordination and spiraled outward from their center to the nearest groups. A band of them landed directly below and began setting up a pearlescent barrier.

  The king had asked of them, and the Leynar had answered—never late.

  A lizard slashed at Russ’s calf, and he caught its head under his boot. A satisfying squelch splashed into the soil when he twisted his leg. He redoubled his shield and waited for aid.

  Out of turn, a Leynar came straight for him, her scant robe quavering against her body as she fell. She landed with a soft step, and from her, a halo of blue energy radiated and easily sawed into the demons who had pressed against Russ’s and Grenn’s holy magic.

  Kendra invoked, and her body moved in slow motion while her mouth worked the liaise of her spell. The air scintillated, and she arrested a new rank of demons where they stood. Russ pushed against the weight of collected bodies, and they fell away, their husks broken to soot.

  Russell double-took his old friend. “Good o’ you to show up.”

  “Consider it a favor,” she said, glaring at him. She nodded toward a point behind Russ, at the trees. “That didn’t take long.”

  “Retool yourselves,” M’keth said.

  From the charred forest, colossal giants over fifty feet tall shook the trees’ tops and emerged from the umbrage. Magma had set around their legs as black rock, adding
to the doom of their heavy steps. They swung hands the size of small houses and demolished anything that got in their way.

  “Come, squire!” Barius yelled off to their left. He pointed at a giant. “To glory!” The girl with him followed. Her steel sung through the air as she swung blood and filth from her blades.

  “Gods damn it,” Kendra said, annoyed. “Of course this wouldn’t be that easy. You good for a conduit?”

  Russ nodded. “Hell yeah.” We might just win the day. Cautioned excitement coursed through him at the idea.

  Kendra channeled into him, and as she did, he called upon the Light. Their power melded—more than either of them could have hoped for separately. He leapt and rocketed toward a beast, whose fist became a cyclone when it flailed in perfect prediction of Russ’s path. He dodged and stepped on air, trying to flank it, but it twisted, following him with its good eye.

  “Hurgh,” it grunted and chopped with ungodly speed. The Grand Master stepped out of reach and used the momentum to rocket toward the giant’s face. Uniquity made contact and blasted Ley-Light against its cheek. The hulk flinched away, but for it, the beast roared louder and tossed the globbed mess away in a catapulting arc.

  Russ ducked, but the colossus grabbed him and with depraved strength squeezed his armor. An alarm sounded inside his helmet, and a warning flashed in deficiency for a part in his lower right leg, one that would no doubt span across the whole if the demon squeezed much longer. His suit diverted power, and Russ kicked. An ugly noise came from his throat for the effort, against which the demon laughed, then dropped its fist over him.

  The Grand Master flinched, but the hit never came, and when Russ next saw, the demon’s eyes had rolled into its head. Grenn stood on its right shoulder, his hammer embedded into the giant’s skull. The body swayed, and they fell.