Garnet landed and was already surrounded by his officers and the commanders of the other groups who had volunteered to fight with them. Siran was foremost among these, silent and inscrutable as he calmly leaned on his twin-bladed halven and regarded Garnet with eyes devoid of emotion.
“We’ve got problems,” Garnet said without preamble. “I…”
He stopped as a loud shout arose from somewhere deep in the city. Garnet knew automatically that something terrible had just happened, and a feeling of grief and loss swept over him with a force that nearly staggered him. The others around him were similarly affected, but when Garnet asked the denarae, even they couldn’t say what it had been. Whatever had happened, it was too far away for any of them to reach with kything.
Putting the strange experience behind him, Garnet continued grimly.
“Six of the Ash’Ailant have fallen,” Garnet said. “The seventh won’t last long the way things are going. The white Stone is in the center-most courtyard, and it’s being assaulted by childris demons. They’re big damn bugs that move with the speed of lightning, and a handful of them just emptied a courtyard and destroyed one of the Stones in only a few minutes. I don’t think even we can stand against them, but I want ideas.”
“Where are they?” Siran asked quietly.
Garnet turned to look at the elf commander in surprise.
“They’re moving from the yellow courtyard up either wall,” Garnet replied. What did the elf think he was going to do? “They’ll be inside the white courtyard in a few minutes, and those climbing the other wall will probably circle around and join them soon after.”
“Very well,” Siran said, then he turned on his heel and started to walk away.
“Siran, you can’t go!” Garnet cried.
The grim-faced elf stopped, then turned very slowly to face Garnet. His eyes were dull and devoid of emotion, as though he were dead already.
“I go where I choose,” Siran said flatly. “I have joined you because I was needed. Now I am needed elsewhere. I wish you luck and life. May the sun not set upon you this day,” Siran said, and he kissed his fingertips and gestured toward Garnet with respect. Then he turned and was gone. The Elan’Vital melted away more quickly and silently than Shadow Company ever had, leaving a confused Garnet to stare after the vanished Siran.
- 2 -
Danner opened his still-burning eyes and saw Trebor’s headless corpse on the ground before him. Red blood stained his armor and newly gained cloak a wet, sickly black, and Danner remembered with a shudder how very near his own cloak had come to turning entirely black, permanently. Blood stained a nearby pile of snow, slightly melted where the steaming, crimson liquid had splashed. That blood was Trebor’s.
It was hard to think of Trebor as dead, even faced with the evidence less than an arm’s reach away. The concept seemed too unthinkable, too impossible for Danner to accept, and yet his best friend lay slain, and it was Danner’s fault. His impetuosity had prevented them from properly planning and implementing their attack and had Danner kept his head, he would have stayed close to his unit and friend to protect them. But instead, Danner’s indulgent rage had caused him to ignore reason and rush headlong into the battle without bothering to consider the consequences.
Trebor’s death was Danner’s fault, and he hated himself for it.
The people who had so nearly fallen victim to the demons’ bloodlust were now sobbing in relief, and several of them laughed out of sheer joy to be alive. They smiled through tears and hugged each other as their fear was replaced by relief.
Danner felt like shouting at them.
What are you so happy about? Danner screamed accusingly in his mind. How dare they feel happy! What cause was there for joy and smiling when Trebor lay lifeless on the streets? How could these people be so bold as to feel relief and laugh when someone as great and beautiful as Trebor would never again feel anything except the cold fingers of death around his corpse?
Danner’s fingers clenched into fists, and he came near to losing himself again. He felt his anger welling up within him, and his eyes flared. He started to turn his head upward to glare at the rejoicing people, but then his gaze fell on Trebor’s head, which was staring at Danner with hurt and sympathy etched in the lines of his face. For a brief time, Trebor had been a paladin of the virtue of love, and Danner knew he would be betraying everything his friend had embodied if he gave in to his anger yet again. Immediately, Danner’s rage cooled, and he felt only sorrow and remorse. Recognizing his own danger, Danner allowed his wings to fade into nothingness, and his eyes ceased to burn.
“I’m sorry, Trebor,” he whispered as tears, no longer burning their cool flame, coursed down his cheeks. “Oh, God, how I’m sorry.”
- 3 -
Siran stalked the edges of the Barrier on silent feet, his elven warriors fanned out behind him and ready to attack at the first sign of the enemy. He knew what the humans behind him were thinking, that Siran was leading his soldiers on a suicide run, and in truth, Siran agreed with them. That’s what every battle was, a step into suicide. The Elan’Vital entered battle with the acceptance they were already dead, and left battle as though they had just wakened to a new dawn of life. They did not seek the twilight, but neither would they turn away from the darkness it when it was time, for they were already dead.
They carried death with them at every moment. They studied it in all forms. They honed their weapons with it. They breathed it, ate it, slept it, lived it. Became it. Death was a constant companion, and through complete devotion they accepted it as part of their true self.
Resolute acceptance of death. Such was the Way of the warrior.
Humans had no understanding of such a concept, and neither did other elves or demi-humans. It was only the warrior – a classification that transcended race and time – who understood his place in the world as the giver and taker of death. Only a true warrior who understood the Way would ever find the immortality of his soul that was to be found through death, even in life.
To be sure, other lots in the world followed their own Way, and there was a true self to be found on the other side of all such paths, a true experience of divine peace, but only the Way of the warrior lived through death.
Each of the elves following Siran knew this in the depths of his soul, and it was the following and acceptance of that Way that made the Elan’Vital the elite soldiers of the elven military. Theirs was the task of guarding the royal family. During a war, the Elan’Vital always led the way. They were the first to fight and the last to flee. That was why the new king had sent men from their ranks to face the demonic threat.
The Way of the warrior.
As they drew closer to the Barrier, Siran reflected on the denarae troops left behind. Amongst all the soldiers he had seen since coming to the mainland, those of this Shadow Company were the most akin to true warriors. They were already on the path to follow the warrior’s Way, though they did not know it themselves. Perhaps, at the conclusion of the infernal chaos they all faced, Siran might spend time with them. He had much to teach them of fighting, and he saw much to learn from them. They would each gain strength from the learning and be better warriors for the shared experience.
Siran put the thought in the back of his mind to be considered for a future day, when and if such a day came.
The elven commander mounted the steps of the inner wall of the Barrier swiftly but cautiously, and when his head crested the top of the wall, he quickly scanned the area for the insectoid demons. Siran found them immediately.
A dozen childris were no more than fifty yards away, and they were swiftly carving their way through the defenders on the wall. Maimed and bloody corpses lay scattered haphazardly across the wall in the wake of the demons’ passing. The childris were all facing the other direction, and Siran spared the time for a mirthless smile that flashed and was gone in the space of a blink.
He turned and gave hand signals to his men, who stood waiting on the steps below him with
upturned faces. They were as eager to fight as they were aware of the death into which they had already entered. Only victory would see a new dawn break for them. They were warriors.
Then, with a command that hissed through Siran’s teeth like a snake’s curse, the elves rushed up the stairs and sprinted across the distance to the demons. They made no outcry, and their steps were the whisper of a leaf blowing in the wind. When they struck, it was quick, quiet, and deadly.
Their weapons had all been marked with the holy symbol and blessed by paladins – Siran had seen to that as soon as the effectiveness of that mark had been proven against the abominations. Their blades carved into childris carapaces reluctantly, but with enough force to strike deeply so the demons cried out in agony. The mantis creatures did not cry out with a voice, but with a keening cry that pierced Siran’s mind and made him want to drop his halven and clutch his head in pain.
Grimly, he held onto the haft, then spun the blade. The childris’s neck was narrow and was easily cut, and the piercing noise ended as the demon’s head toppled to the ground.
Other elves fared with less success than their commander, for the childris were quick to respond to the new threat and, as Garnet had said, they were unbelievably fast. Elves of the Elan’Vital were used to being among the fastest fighters ever trained, and their blades sang a deadly song as they spun and cut through the air. And yet as fast as they were, most could not match the speed of the childris attacks. Elves lost arms to attacks they never saw or had the chance to block, and only a few were able to withstand the near-invisible attacks from the blade-like claws.
Siran ducked and slashed smoothly, settling into a flow as though he was back in a practice room in his barracks facing a dozen opponents. The childris moved so quickly at times it seemed they were standing still - they stood in once place and almost vanished, only to reappear a few inches or feet away. But a careful observer could see the instant they reappeared, stone-still as though they’d been standing in that place forever. Siran quickly learned to anticipate their shifting movements and attacked not where they were, but where they would be. Siran cut through their legs, which were thinner and more vulnerable than the thicker shells of their torsos and thoraxes and more easily accessible than the weak-point of their necks, which were protected by the two slashing sword limbs.
As the seconds progressed, Siran moved faster and faster as his attacks matched the motions of his enemies. He blocked their blows at times without thinking, simply because he felt the timing of the attack and knew when to parry and when it was safe to slash. In the second he wondered about the spears he’d seen some carrying, Siran saw one of the childris already in motion to throw the missile at him. Siran battered the shaft out of the air with a slap from his own blade, then slid beneath a childris and swept its feet out from under it with one circular swipe.
In the same spin, Siran’s feet repositioned beneath him and he stood up smoothly, his twin blades singing a song of death as he bore down on another childris. Again, he turned in anticipation of an attack, but this time it did not come as he expected. Siran blocked one swipe of a sharpened limb, but was not expecting the spear that flew from across the courtyard and caught him in the belly.
The three-foot shaft pierced his body and slid halfway through, grinding against Siran’s inner organs as it lodged in his flesh. Siran glanced down at the weapon with an expression of surprise and disgust.
Is this to be my final twilight? he wondered. Perhaps. But Siran would not calmly meet oblivion without bringing further death upon his foes.
I will not die with my goal unfulfilled.
Siran wrenched the spear from his belly and dropped it to the courtyard below him. He gripped the shaft of his halven with bloody hands and actually smiled as he spun anew into the fray. Having already accepted his death, a grievous wound meant little to him beyond the irritation of hampering his movements. As long as Siran was still capable of fighting, he would do so.
I will not live with my goal unfulfilled.
The Way of the warrior.
- 4 -
The gates shuddered.
Sergeant Farnes Derard watched the scene below him with a growing sense of terror mingled with the certainty that he would soon die. Strangely, he didn’t feel afraid of dying, only regretful of all the things he hadn’t done.
“I should have married her when I had the chance,” he said softly to himself as he looked into the face of his impending doom.
On the ground before the Barrier, a massive battering ram was pounding against the central gate with brutal force. The siege machine was like no other Farnes had seen before. It was made entirely of black steel, polished to a mirror-like shine that showed the distorted reflections of clouds on the ebony surface. Farnes couldn’t see the wheels beneath it, but he knew they must be large and powerful to support such a great weight.
The central column of the battering ram was a solid four feet across, and it angled down at the foremost edge almost to a point. To each side, massive shields had been constructed to protect the drolkul demons powering the massive engine of war. The metal shields wrapped entirely around the four-limbed demons, protecting them from all angles so no arrow or gnomish explosive could reach the monsters within. Only a few narrow slits marred the otherwise complete surface of the shields, allowing the demons within to see their course. Farnes wondered how the demons had even gotten inside the shields, but then he remembered how adept they were at tunneling and decided they must have entered the protected chambers from underneath. There were ten such shields, five on each side, spaced evenly along the thirty-foot length of the ram.
With the strength and power of the drolkuls driving the battering ram, Farnes knew there was little hope of the gate withstanding the attack for long. They could not harm the demons running it, nor could they light the metal on fire as they could wooden siege engines. There seemed no stopping it.
One of the officers ordered caltrops to be thrown in the path of the ram, but they had no apparent effect on the demons, and the barrage continued. Of course they had no effect, Farnes realized, since only paladins or weapons marked with their holy symbol would truly harm the unholy monsters.
Farnes glanced at his own sword, reassured by the three lines scratched into the surface. Yes, he would probably die soon, but somehow seeing the Tricrus gave him comfort in that thought.
The gates shuddered once more, and Farnes heard a horrible splintering sound as the parts of the gates made from wood broke and shattered under the ram’s assault. A minute later, the ram made one final charge that carried it through the gate and into the courtyard beyond. In its wake, Farnes expected to see a rush of demons swarm the defenders within.
Instead, eight warriors in shining armor rushed through the gate. At first Farnes thought they were paladins, but then he saw the black cloaks they wore, and then nothing could comfort him as he was swept under a wave of despair.
- 5 -
The battering ram burst into the courtyard and narrowly missed the white Ash’Ailant in the center. Humans and demi-humans were thrown to the side or else crushed beneath the massive bulk of the black siege engine, and a long streak of blood formed a red carpet for the advance of the eight Black paladins.
Their armor shone in the dim light from the overcast sky, and their ebony swords defied light as they swept in lethal arcs and left trails of blood sweeping in the air after them. Men, gnomes, dwarves, and elves died before those merciless blades, slain without hesitation or remorse as they fell before the evil onslaught.
All this, Birch watched without moving. His eyes blazed fiercely as he stood atop the rear wall of the white courtyard. He had remained motionless as the yellow Stone was destroyed a few hundred feet away, and he stood in silence as Siran and the elves battled the childris. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he was aware of having followed Kaelus’s consciousness to prevent a horrible transformation within Danner, but even that had been done without his stirring so much as to blink.
Then the foremost of the Black paladins raised his visor and stared directly at Birch. Malith raised his sword in a mocking salute, then clapped his visor back down and cut a dwarf in half from shoulder to hip.
Whatever impulse that had held Birch in check abruptly vanished, and he took two running steps and leapt from the wall of the Barrier. Selti leapt from his shoulder and began a midair transformation to his natural, dragon-like shape. Birch glided over the heads of other defenders - who were struggling to deal with the black battering ram that had halted in their midst - and landed a few feet from the last remaining Ash’Ailant.
Birch drew his sword grimly and was aware of Selti soaring overhead to land on the forward battlements of the Barrier. The gray dakkan peered down at the Black paladins and prepared to launch himself into their midst.
Malith whirled, sensing Birch’s presence, and stopped as though stunned to see him there. There were no words exchanged between them. There was no need. The two men rushed each other and attacked in a furious clash of weapons.
Birch had more strength than his opponent, thanks to the presence of Kaelus within him. He had the barest advantage in speed and size over Malith, but he knew these would count him in little stead against a warrior of Malith’s cunning and skill. Birch had a sudden flashback to one day during their training when Malith had toyed with him for nearly a half hour before finishing him off.
He was determined that such would not be the case now.
In his own thoughts, Malith wondered what had changed in Birch. He was just as fast and skilled as he’d always been, and the latter was a poor comparison to Malith’s own abilities. He had slain Gerard, who had been his only real rival, and he was confident he would soon slay Birch, but the Gray paladin was immensely strong, far more powerful than he should have been. A bizarre possibility dawned on Malith, and he wondered for a moment how such a thing could even be, even as he felt in his heart that it was so.
Birch’s eyes. His strength. The sheer force of will Malith felt from him. These were not the things of a mortal, but rather the signs of an immortal presence, and a powerful one at that. Malith no longer wondered where Kaelus had been hiding. He knew, and that knowledge made him afraid. He knew he could beat Birch, but could Malith overcome the power of Kaelus, a demon second in power only to Mephistopheles himself?
The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) Page 57