The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War)

by Brian J Moses

  “What’s next? Is Faldergash going to teach you how to build gnomish things? Or were you planning on having the gnome teach you how to fight?” Marc said teasingly.

  “Actually, I was going to ask Garnet to teach me,” she said with a ‘so there’ look on her face.

  “What an unwholesome thought,” Flasch said, pitching his voice deliberately so Alicia could hear him. Garnet couldn’t reach his head to smack him, so he settled for jabbing the smaller man in the ribs.

  “Why? He wields that unwholesomely huge sword,” Marc said, ignoring Flasch’s comment. “You’d do better to ask Danner, he’s the best of us with the size sword you’d want.”

  The conversation in the buggy went silent, and all they could hear was the low hum of the motor.

  Shut up, you idiot, Danner groaned silently. Why did Marc have to say something like that? It was too much, too soon.

  “But I guess Garnet would be a better teacher,” Marc said lamely, more to end the silence than anything else.

  “Maybe,” Alicia said. Her voice was flat. Danner winced.

  As Alicia steered them through the streets, Danner somehow felt the city had lost much of its luster. The streets seemed grayer somehow and less full of life than he remembered. At first he thought he was just depressed about Trebor’s situation, but eventually realized that even the people seemed to move as though they were all worried about something. Danner looked up at the sky to make sure it wasn’t about to fall on them, and he was just the last to know about it.

  “What’s going on around here?” Michael asked. “I’ve never seen this place look so glum, not even after the paladins crossed.”

  “That’s old news now. They’re all worried about the rumors about Merishank,” Alicia answered over her shoulder.

  “What rumors?” Garnet rumbled. His shoulders were hunched in to make room for Trebor and Michael, and he looked decidedly uncomfortable.

  “I forgot you guys probably don’t hear much in there,” Alicia said. “There’s word of an army building in Merishank, and this time they’re not building in the east. Either they’ve given up on the mountains and they’re going to try and go around them, or else they’re marching north. The rumors all say north, and this city is pretty much the first thing they’ll come to.”

  “But Nocka is inviolate,” Marc protested. “We have the Barrier here. No one would dare attack Nocka in case the Barrier is weakened or destroyed and the demons return.”

  Flasch reached forward and smacked Marc upside the head.

  “Oh yeah,” Marc murmured, his words almost lost under the whirring of the engine.

  Danner nodded to himself. ‘Oh yeah’ is right, Marc, he thought. There’s still two demons out there who will be doing their best to destroy that Barrier.

  “It can’t be coincidence,” Danner said aloud. “We can pretty much bet that if that army moves north, they’re coming here, and we can be sure there’s something evil in charge of it.”

  “One of The Three,” Garnet said needlessly.

  Absorbed in his own thoughts, Trebor was nonetheless paying enough attention to hear what was being said and to worry about it. He closed his eyes and concentrated, then sent out a mental plea for help.

  - 4 -

  When they arrived at Faldergash’s house, they unloaded and piled inside, then surrounded the table loaded high with food the gnome had prepared for them. Apparently his superfire-cooker was working perfectly; the meat was beautifully cooked to a juicy medium-rare, and Danner had his best meal in a week.

  While they ate, they discussed the potential threat of an attack by Merishank. Faldergash and Gabruella, the gnome who actually owned the house, filled them in on whatever rumors and information they had gleaned. The two gnomes were, after all, spies of a sort, sent by the Dale gnomes – a race thought to be extinct after a genocidal war by the jealous dwarves hundreds of years ago – to observe the mainland. Despite their best information, in the end all they had was speculation. No one seemed to know for sure how long Merishank had been girding for war – or rather, preparing for this particular attack, since the xenophobic nation seemed to be in a perpetual state of military readiness.

  Eventually the conversation turned to Trebor’s predicament.

  “I don’t see why they’d kick you out,” Michael said. “There aren’t any denarae paladins or trainees, and I should think they would keep you if only to make an attempt at equality. This is the Prism we’re talking about, after all.”

  “Good in theory, poor in practice,” Danner said after swallowing a mouthful of steak. “If you want real equality, you can’t accept or deny someone based on their race. If Trebor was an absolutely horrible trainee – sorry, Treb, just a for-instance – and they kept or accepted him just because of his race, it would cheapen everyone else’s hard work. I hate to agree with him, but Morningham had it right. The only fair way to evaluate this is based on his character and training.

  “Basing it off race either way is equally unjust.”

  After dinner, they all dispersed throughout the house to relax for the night. Garnet and Michael sat brooding over a game of castles, while Flasch looked eagerly on and periodically repeated his challenge to play the winner of their game. Trebor went to bed early, and Marc curled up by the fire with a thick book in his hands. Faldergash and Gabruella went into the kitchen to do dishes, which left Danner to his own devices.

  He stepped outside and shivered slightly. It was late autumn, and the nights were turning from chilly to just plain cold. Danner reached inside and grabbed a blanket from a nearby chair, then walked out to sit on the steps. He was still confused and didn’t know what to think about…

  Alicia. She was sitting on the steps where Danner was heading. The creak of his feet on the boards of the porch had already revealed his presence, so he could either walk past her, turn around and go back inside, or else sit down and pretend everything was okay. Of the three choices, the third one made him the most nervous, but the other two would be rude.

  “Oh, what the Hell,” he murmured grumpily to himself.

  Danner took the last few feet to the steps as calmly as he could, then sat down as far away from Alicia as possible without falling off the steps. He avoided seeming rude by leaning back against one of the support poles for the roof, so his body was half-turned toward her.

  She glanced over at him, then looked away toward whatever she’d been staring at before he appeared. She was wearing a long-sleeved tunic, but Danner didn’t think it was thick enough to ward off the oncoming chill of the night. Unfortunately, the last time he’d tried to give her his jacket to warm up, she’d slapped him for it. That was the last time he’d seen her before she showed up in Nocka to accuse him of raping her.

  “What’s going on inside?” she asked softly.

  Danner was so surprised she’d spoken so calmly to him that at first he was speechless. Finally he managed, “Oh, the usual. Marc’s got a book, Flasch is looking to show people how clever he is, and Faldergash is probably bickering with Gabruella in the kitchen.” Danner smiled.

  “And Danner goes off to be by himself and brood,” Alicia said. Danner’s smile faded.

  “Well, I like to think I’ve got a lot to worry about, what with the world on the brink of war with Hell and all,” Danner said with forced lightness. “One of my best friends may get kicked out of our training, my uncle’s off hunting demons, a hostile country may be on the verge of invading, and oh yeah, my mo…” Danner stopped, suddenly remembering that they hadn’t told Alicia about Danner’s possible heritage. She didn’t know about the incident with the demon, at least not all the details. She knew Danner had killed it, but they’d glossed over the part about him sprouting wings.

  Fortunately, Alicia was too preoccupied to notice his slip. After only a moment’s silence, she said, “And you still feel uncomfortable being around your friend’s sister.”

  Damn, he thought. How did she manage to upset his thoughts so much by saying so litt
le?

  “Well, a little, yeah,” he admitted, knowing it would be better to say it outright than try to dance around the issue. “With good reason, I think.”

  Alicia’s mouth drooped into a wry smile.

  “I guess I haven’t made it especially easy on you, have I?”

  “It’s not your fault, Alicia,” Danner said softly. “I can only imagine how you must feel, seeing me and remembering what happened. I just wish there was some way past this awkwardness that I think we both feel.”

  There, he’d said it. Now if only she’d talk to him about it.

  She was silent. Just when Danner was about to say something else, either to coax her to speak or else to say it was alright for her not to, she took a deep breath and Danner snapped his jaw shut.

  “It feels strange,” she said at last, “because my memory is telling me one thing. I know what I saw, and I saw you. I saw your face leering over me, and that’s not an easy thing to get out of my mind. But I know the truth now, and I know it wasn’t you, it was the demon who r… who raped me,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “One of the things that fueled my anger was the unshakable feeling that you never would have done something like that, even though I barely knew you. I couldn’t shake that surety, and I hated you for making me so sure even though I thought I knew otherwise.”

  Danner looked at her face and saw a sparkle of moonlight on her cheek where a tear slid slowly down from her eye.

  “Part of me sees you and wants to scream, and the rest of me is telling it that no, it wasn’t you,” she said, then sniffed softly. “It gets me so tangled up I don’t know what to do or say, because I’m afraid the wrong thing will come out.”

  She fell silent again.

  “You’re saying it to me now, and I don’t hear anything wrong coming out,” Danner said gently.

  “I’m not looking at you,” she said. Danner could barely hear her, she was so quiet.

  “Then look at me, Alicia,” Danner said, and he leaned forward off the post. They were just over an arm’s length apart now. Alicia turned to look at Danner. On an impulse, Danner reached forward and, without breaking eye contact, took her hand in his. Her fingers were cold, but she didn’t resist.

  Then her fingers twined about his and they sat quietly in the night, holding hands, both reluctant to look away. Finally Danner blinked, and they both looked down at their hands.

  They fit pretty well together, he thought absently.

  She shivered slightly, and her hand slipped from his as she wrapped her arms around herself. Danner smiled.

  “I’m giving you fair warning, I’m about to put this blanket over your shoulder,” he said. “You’re not going to smack me, are you?”

  “Try it and find out,” she said, her voice slightly challenging.

  Danner shrugged and draped one arm over her shoulder, covering her with half the blanket he’d brought. He hesitated, then left his arm where it was. Alicia’s left arm stole around his waist, pulling him alongside her. When Danner looked down, he saw their free hands had somehow already drifted together and were twined about each other, fingers interlocked.

  In silence, they sat and watched the stars glimmering in the sky.

  Chapter 6

  Only light can banish darkness. Believing in light or disbelieving in the darkness will shed no illumination, nor allow us to see any more clearly.

  - King Deirion El’Eleisha,

  private journals (603 AM)

  - 1 -

  On Niday, a few days after their meeting and immediate parting, Hoil’s ship pulled into the port at El’antor’ma. Even from a distance, the city took Birch’s breath away. Up close, it was dazzling to the mind.

  The elves hadn’t so much built their city as they had crafted it out of the living earth. Some homes were carved into miniature hills of sparkling pink or white granite, and every available surface was sculpted into various shapes and designs. One doorway was surmounted by a strand of stone-white ivy leaves that looked so delicate Birch was surprised they didn’t twitch in the wind. At first, Birch thought each of the stone buildings was multi-storied, but after a moment’s study, he realized there were no ground-floor entrances. Either the elves used the space where the ground floor would be as a cellar, or else it went unused entirely.

  When Birch asked Maran, he found that the latter was true.

  “Elves build upwards, Birch,” Maran said in his soft voice. “The ground is for walking on, not for living on. Most of my people believe that to live on the ground is a curse from God given only to the lesser races.”

  Birch quirked an eyebrow.

  “A racial conceit,” Maran admitted blandly and without embarrassment. “As a whole, your race believes itself superior to the non-humans, mine believes itself superior to the non-elves. It seems they may not be so unlike after all, yes?” Maran leaned closer to Birch and murmured, “I once called Hoil a demi-elf, and I’m not sure he got the joke.”

  Birch snorted and resumed his study of the elven city.

  Those elves who didn’t live in the stone-carved homes had also followed the racial tendency Maran had mentioned; they built upward… into the trees. There were no buildings here as a human would think of them. Instead, the elves used the trunks of the trees as their support beams and the branches as their walls, floors, and ceilings.

  The trees here were unlike any Birch had ever seen. The branches seemed unnaturally thickly foliaged, and there were whole layers of the forest where the branches grew at a uniform height, creating a largely solid ground on which the light-footed elves could walk with ease.

  “You see there, and there, the solid walls between those trees?” Maran asked, pointing up into the forest. “Those are the walls of homes. The branches are woven together carefully to create a solid wall, and the size of the home is limited only by how many trees the owner wishes to weave together without running into a neighbor or closing off a walkway. And of course, they can’t build directly over another home, lest they be cast in perpetual shadow.”

  “It’s a forest, Maran,” Hoil objected. “The canopy casts everything in shadow.”

  The elf shook his head. “There is a difference between shade provided by nature and a shadow cast by a fellow man. Light and life are central to elven identity, perhaps to a fault.”

  “These tree houses you mentioned,” Nuse said, frowning. “Don’t you have to chop off a lot of branches to do that?”

  Maran blinked, then shook his head.

  “No, Blue paladin, we do not chop off anything,” he said softly. “The branches woven together are grown straight out of the tree, one atop the other. The floor is thickened so it not only seems solid, it is a solid mass of wood.”

  He glanced at their uncomprehending faces and sighed. Danner had understood this immediately. Maran had forgotten how wonderful it was teaching his quick-witted to’vala.[13] Of course, Danner also had some knowledge of elven “magic” and had seen some of Maran’s Weaving firsthand. Not that he knew exactly what he was seeing, Maran had been careful about that.

  “Here,” Maran said to Nuse, “hold out your hands into fists. Now, this fist is a tree trunk and this fist is a tree trunk. Clear?”

  Nuse nodded.

  “Now, say these trees are twenty feet apart. Branches, in this case your fingers, are grown out from the tree and interwoven, like so,” Maran said, pulling Nuse’s fingers apart and interlocking them one atop the other, so there were no gaps between his fingers. “Imagine those branches interweaving so tightly there is no space at all, and you see how we build our walls. They grow to form one solid whole.”

  “But how do you do that?” Hoil asked.

  “Elven magic,” Maran answered. “The magic of light and nature.”

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” Nuse said, a bit dubiously. “That heretical absurdity was stamped out centuries ago.”

  “Well, we certainly don’t build these walls by just asking the trees nicely,” Maran said, his soft voi
ce laced with sarcasm. “One might consider your praying to God and healing wounds to be magic.”

  “But that is a blessing from God and a holy miracle,” Perklet said, speaking for the first time. “No one claims we’re doing magic.”

  “That’s because you’re not, though the difference is semantic,” Maran said. “What elves do is what you might call magic, though we use the term Weaving. Weaving of any sort is a difficult task, and only a small percentage of elves have the innate talent and the training necessary. Minor Woodweavers make and maintain homes, and the guild keeps its numbers high enough that making homes is relatively easy, depending on what you want. Lightweaving… that’s something else entirely.”

  “So who does the stone work?” Nuse asked. “Or are all elves just naturally gifted sculptors?”

  Maran was silent a moment before answering.

  “The four sects of the elven nation are based on the four branches of Weaving. The Stoneweavers of the Li sect are the lowest of the Weavers, no matter their skill,” Maran said. “They are as numerous as minor Woodweavers of the Si sect, but they are a lower class, as befits those who work with lowly stone. The Lightweavers of El are the most valued of Weavers, for theirs is the skill of luminescence and beauty. Their training is most difficult and highly structured to prevent them from becoming Shadowweavers.”

  “Shadow…” Birch began.

  “The Do sect,” Maran answered, pronouncing the word like doe. “Weavers of illusion and deception. They have no social class, for they are outcast.” He wasn’t looking at them, but was instead staring into the shadows of the forest, his face an emotionless mask. “Understand that I tell you this at great peril. Do not mention Shadowweavers to anyone if you value your life, most especially to anyone in my family or in the palace at all. Shadowweavers, and to a lesser extent the entire Do sect, are taboo among my people, and their existence is not something most elves care to contemplate, much less admit. They would rather fool themselves to believe the darkness doesn’t exist at all, as though to deny it verbal utterance or credence could make it go away entirely.