The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War)

by Brian J Moses

  Danner and Trebor had left nearly an hour ago, and Marc was just now arriving at the chapterhouse of the Prismatic Order. His concern for his friends was outweighed by the need to see his sister to safety; and besides, Danner and Trebor could take care of themselves. But with someone after Alicia as a means to get to Danner, she was in more danger than she could handle and would need the protection of those still at the chapterhouse. A minimal staff of paladins remained in the complex, including the Prismatic Council. Also, there were a few remaining trainees who had yet to achieve the honor of becoming paladins.

  Marc knew there were at least four young men who still wore the off-white cloaks that signified their failure to achieve full membership. Every trainee had put on such a cloak at the end of their official training (the few that hadn’t received a cloak when Marc had received his had been granted their own by the time Marc had returned from fighting the Merishank army), and only a handful had not had their cloaks change to one of the six primary colors of the Facet. Those few had stayed behind, and Marc had heard that some of them had at last become full paladins; at least one of them had quit instead of sticking it out. Now, with the war at hand, the remaining trainees stayed in the hope that they might become full paladins in time to be of use. Certainly, as full-fledged warriors of God, they would be a greater benefit than as just another sword on the wall.

  A Red paladin at the gate challenged Marc, but let him through when he saw his orange cloak.

  “She’s here to be placed under the protection of the Prism,” Marc said when the Red asked him. “She’s my sister, and she has need of our help.”

  “Understood, brother,” the other paladin said. A number of paladins had brought their families to live in the confines of the chapterhouse for the duration of the war. Already, many of those families had formed support groups to comfort the widows and orphans of the paladins who had died on the Barrier. They lived in daily fear that their father, brother, son, or husband would return to the chapterhouse on the daily wagons.

  The siblings walked through the first courtyard toward Marc’s old barracks, where he intended to seek out the remaining trainees to help protect Alicia. Under normal circumstances, Marc might have officially approached the Prismatic Council, but their immediate history of betrayal and worthlessness made Marc unwilling to trust his sister in their care. He much preferred the help of people who had been trained and touched by the hand of Gerard Morningham. There was also every likelihood that the dybbuk was controlling one of the members of the Council directly.

  Marc knocked on the door to the barracks and stepped into the room. Three young men rose to greet him, but Marc only remembered the name of one of them right away.

  “Jorgins,” he said, shaking the other’s hand. “I have a favor to ask of you.”

  “Anything, sir.”

  Marc smiled. “We both suffered through the same training together, Jeremy. You can call me ‘sir’ when I’m a member of the Prismatic Council, but not before.”

  Jorgins smiled.

  “What do you need, Marc?” Jorgins asked. Marc was pleased to note that Jorgins had lost most of the stammer and nervousness that had so marked his training.

  “Is this all of you that’s left?” Marc asked.

  “Yes,” Jorgins replied. “Riken and Jerome actually just had their cloaks turn yesterday, at the exact same time. Riken’s now a Yellow, and Jerome is a Blue. Billy and Maki and me are the last three from our training group. We’re getting a little discouraged by still not having made it, even now, but because there’s still three of us, we’re working together to better ourselves. We’re determined to make it.”

  “And you will, I’m sure,” Marc said. “Now, about this favor. This is my sister Alicia, who’s also Danner’s girlfriend.” Marc made sure to mention his friend, because Danner had been well-liked by all three of these during their training. Not that he doubted they would help him, but still he thought it a good idea to bring up the relationship.

  “Pleased to meet you,” one of the trainees said, bowing slightly. “I’m Maki, and this is Billy. Any friend of Marc and Danner’s.”

  “I need your help to look after her,” Marc said plainly. “There’s some people who are after her as a way to get to Danner, and they’ve already used her once to force Danner’s presence from where he was needed. I need your help to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

  “Have you asked the Council for help?” Billy asked.

  “The Council and I aren’t on the best of terms right now,” Marc said evasively. “I’d rather trust my old training mates.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Billy said, surprising Marc. “We’ve seen something big going on in the Council.”

  “How so?”

  “There’s two of them that seem to be controlling everything,” the trainee replied. “It’s subtle, but we’ve caught some back-corner conversations that have led us to believe these two are using blackmail and other means to force most of the Council to go along with their wishes.”

  Marc stared at him in disbelief. That a paladin would use such measures was difficult to believe, but obviously Billy had good reason to suspect what he did. Marc asked them what they’d overheard.

  “There’s a Yellow and a Blue,” Maki said. “They’re the ones.”

  Alicia gasped, and Marc looked at her in concern.

  “It was a Yellow paladin who told me to come with him, and I saw a Blue paladin at some point, I’m sure,” she said. “Maybe they’re the same ones.”

  “I wish Trebor hadn’t gone with Danner,” Marc said, then cursed. “I could really use him right now. Damn. I should have thought of that before.”

  He saw the three trainees looking at him curiously and said, “Never mind.”

  “When do you think…”

  Jorgins was cut off as a hoarse scream echoed through the courtyard beneath the nearest window. There was a loud rumble of stone grinding on stone, and the scream cut off with a suddenness that left the air ringing in silent alarm. They all ran to the window and looked down.

  In the courtyard a sputtering torch lay discarded on the ground, casting a small circle of light around the body of the Red paladin who had admitted Marc and Alicia only a few minutes before. His arms had been torn from his body and lay beside his bloody torso, and one leg was severed and nowhere to be seen. The other leg dangled lifelessly into a gaping hole in the ground, and Marc was reminded of the tunneling demons that had so decimated Shadow Company a few days ago.

  “Stay here and look after Alicia,” Marc said, his voice firm. “I’m going to go see what’s happening out there. Do you have your weapons at hand?”

  “Yes, sir,” they replied in unison, and immediately they fetched swords from their bunks.

  “Good.” Marc turned to Alicia. “I’ll be back soon, sis,” he said. “Don’t let anybody in here except me. I’ll knock twice, then once, then twice more. I don’t care who they say they are, or what they tell you, nobody else comes in here. Understand?”

  They all nodded.

  Marc turned and left the room. As he was pulling the door shut behind him, he heard Alicia say, “Do you have an extra sword?”

  - 2 -

  Birch landed on the ground as a crowd of paladins and other people was gathering around the crumpled body of Danner, who still glowed with the presence of his wings. Birch yelled for them to clear a path for him, and when some failed to move, he physically lifted them out of his way with his free hand. Selti was still curled up in the crook of Birch’s left arm, whimpering in pain.

  Finally, Birch knelt at his nephew’s side and looked for a wound. Danner had told him he couldn’t be harmed by any weapons, so Birch was at a loss. He looked up and recognized a familiar face in the crowd.

  “Perky,” he shouted. “I need your help. Give him room! Make way!” Birch shouted to the few people who were in the Green paladin’s path. Perklet came forward and knelt beside Danner. His eyes were wide at seeing Danner up clos
e, his wings still aglow.

  “He shouldn’t be able to be hurt,” Birch said, “but something definitely hit him and made him crash and drop me.”

  “Help me turn him,” Perklet said. “Carefully.”

  Birch set Selti on the ground and supported Danner’s shoulders as they rolled him, and when they shifted aside his cloak, finally they saw a crossbow bolt embedded in Danner’s chest below his right shoulder. The skin around the wound was already festering badly, and a large trail of blood streaked the back of Danner’s leathers.

  “How…” Birch asked, but Perklet was reaching for the bolt and didn’t answer. The bolt was slick with blood and slipped from the Green paladin’s fingers almost the second it was free, and the metal tip fell against Danner’s uncovered hand. It started to smoke, and the unconscious paladin’s hand immediately turned red and irritated until Perklet snatched the broken weapon up and threw it a safe distance away.

  Birch reached down, expecting to be similarly affected, but he picked up the bolt without feeling anything out of the ordinary besides a slight tingle in his fingers. He turned the missile over in his hand, and on the tip he saw a design carved into the metal head. There were three lines intersecting in a perfectly proportioned triangle, but all three corners overlapped slightly so that at each vertex of the shape, the two ends of the lines stuck out from the main body of the triangle to form a small V shape.

  “The Cthonis,” Birch whispered. “No wonder it felled Danner so quickly. With his immortal heritage, the unholy symbol might even have killed him outright if he wasn’t strong enough.”

  Birch stared at his nephew in concern, then looked up at Perklet.

  “We have to get him back into his wholly mortal form,” Birch said with certainty. “It’s his immortal side being active that’s keeping him in jeopardy.”

  “How can we change him back?” the Green paladin asked helplessly.

  “Heal him as best you can, and maybe that will bring him ‘round,” Birch replied.

  Perklet nodded, then placed his hands on Danner, creating a circle around the wound with his thumbs and forefingers. In a low voice, he prayed for healing, asking for divine assistance and picturing the uninjured flesh in his mind. After a few breathless seconds, Birch saw some of the angry festering fade from the injury. Still, the wound resisted Perklet’s attempts to heal it, and after a few moments the Green paladin broke off, sweat standing out on his brow.

  “That’s all I can do for him now,” Perklet said. “Let me see to your dakkan while you try and revive him.”

  Birch passed Selti over to the other paladin, who immediately set to work healing the vicious cut in the dakkan’s wing. Birch leaned over his nephew.

  “Danner. Danner, it’s Uncle Birch. Can you hear me?” Danner groaned in response. “Danner, you’re hurt, and we’re trying to help you, but I need you to turn off your wings. Dekint them, Danner. Can you do that?”

  Birch watched in silence, then Danner’s wings flickered and faded away. Birch looked up and saw Perky setting Selti to the side. The gray drann was asleep, and his wing was whole, but there was a wide scar in the membrane of his wing where the cut had been.

  “I couldn’t prevent the scar, no matter what,” Perklet said. “There must be something about the weapon that caused it.”

  “Danner has reverted,” Birch said, drawing the Green’s attention to his nephew.

  “Good. Please give me room,” Perklet said in a businesslike manner. Birch backed away as Perklet again knelt over Danner’s prone form. He hovered over him for a few minutes, then when he leaned back, the wound was gone. In its place was a small, round scar.

  “Same problem,” the Green muttered. His voice sounded exhausted.

  Birch showed him the bolt and the unholy marking on the tip.

  “It’s a cursed weapon,” Birch said. “Not just the Cthonis; it was actually cursed by a demon at some point.”

  “But they’re not even using them,” Perklet objected. “Why would they have bothered to mark…”

  A sudden uproar caused both men to look up, and finally they became aware that there was no longer a crowd of people around them. Everyone was standing atop the battlements of the Barrier or gathered before the nearest gate. Birch looked around and only then realized they hadn’t landed in the city, but in one of the courtyards. The orange Ash’Ailant was only a dozen feet away, with a half-dozen paladins - one from each Facet - encircling it protectively.

  “Perky, get Danner and Selti out of here, please,” Birch asked quickly. The Green paladin nodded.

  Birch left his dakkan and his nephew in Perklet’s care and raced to the nearest set of stairs. He bounded up the stone steps four at a time until he reached the top of the Barrier, where he ran into a thick press of human defenders and a handful of paladins of different Facets. The paladins helped open a path for Birch until he was far enough forward to see over the heads of those in front of him to the plains beyond.

  “Lord God, protect us all,” Birch whispered.

  On the wide plain before the Barrier, Birch saw four humanoid forms towering over the teeming mass of Hell’s army. Each creature was easily more than eighty feet tall, and their bodies were more or less proportional to a human’s. At first glance, their flesh also looked human, but it appeared to have bizarre grooves and contours. It was only a careful study that showed the creature’s skin was not a continuous entity, but rather it was made from the bodies of hundreds of damned souls, all melted together to form one conglomerate whole. The fingers were composed of two bodies together back-to-front with their arms raised overhead and melted together so that the two heads, which were partially melded as one, formed the fingertip of each digit. The face had no real distinctive features, except two empty eye-sockets set in a deep mass of melted flesh.

  “Abominations,” Birch said, recognizing the creatures from some inner memory belonging to Kaelus.

  Men on the walls were firing arrows at the abominations as quickly as they could load their weapons, and the ballistae were firing their larger missiles as well. But none of the weapons seemed to have any effect on the abominations, and even the ballista bolts just bounced off the enormous monstrosities. Through Kaelus, Birch knew there was a demon somewhere inside the abomination, and the damned souls had been melted onto his unholy flesh, so the whole conglomeration was itself merely an extension of the demon’s skin.

  Birch glanced down at the cursed crossbow bolt still in his hand. He stared speculatively at the unholy symbol etched on the barbed tip, then he looked up in sudden inspiration.

  “You won’t be able to harm them like that,” Birch yelled to a nearby ballista crew. He pushed people out of his way, ignoring their protests, until he was at the ballista, which was being reloaded.

  “Let me borrow your dagger,” he told one of the men.

  “Why?”

  “Now!” Birch barked at him.

  He took the man’s knife and leaned over the ballista bolt. Quickly, he scratched a Tricrus onto the metal head of the weapon. For good measure, he also whispered a prayer to bless the weapon.

  “Fire at the nearest abomination,” Birch ordered them. The crew adjusted the weapon’s aim to compensate for its approach since their last shot.

  “Fire!” the crew chief bellowed, and the massive bolt leapt from the weapon with a clap of thunder. The missile soared through the air and struck the abomination in the chest. Unlike the previous shots, the bolt sank into the twisted flesh and nearly disappeared into the massive bulk. The abomination reeled in pain, but there was no outcry; the abomination had no mouth.

  “Hit it again,” Birch ordered, already scratching the holy symbol onto every ballista bolt he could find, muttering blessings as he went. “Only use these bolts I’ve marked,” he said. He looked over his shoulder and called to a few paladins he could see. “Brothers, go to the other ballistae and mark each bolt with the holy symbol, then bless the missile. It’s the only way to stop those things.”

&
nbsp; The abominations were already nearing the wall of the Barrier, and Birch despaired that they would have enough time to stop the massive conglomerations of damned flesh.

  - 3 -

  Janice peeked out through the curtains of her home fearfully, using the light of the moon overhead to see out into the street. She’d been locked inside her basement for nearly a week, living off the large store of supplies she’d stocked before the demons had suddenly appeared and assaulted Nocka. Some of her neighbors and friends had been living with her, and their supplies were all stockpiled below in the basement as well. Hal and his mother Ginger were out scrounging for more food, just in case the crisis lasted beyond what they had the means to sustain, and Anne was asleep in the basement.

  They never all slept at the same time, in case something should happen and take them unawares. It was a horrible way to live, always dreading every noise that drifted down from the world above. Their basement really was like another world, since it was carved into the rock by skilled hands and in no way resembled the rest of her home. It was also the only place any of them felt safe, which is what truly made it a world apart from everything else.

  Janice twitched the curtains to the side, allowing her to see further down the street, and finally she saw Hal and Ginger returning. Hal was barely ten years old and still looked small next to his mother as they moved quickly from building to building, stopping every block to look around in fear. Their concern was as much for demonic fiends as it was for the more mundane type of danger. Looters and a few more violent criminals were taking advantage of the absence of authority on the streets, which gave them free reign amongst houses populated primarily by untrained or otherwise defenseless men, women, and children. They hadn’t seen any of the thugs in a day, but the nights were still rife with the screams of their victims. Janice hadn’t heard any sounds of violence or terror tonight, which was as strange as it was welcomed.