Aurel was as kind and happy as always. The lumbering giant asked Kate how she was feeling and what she thought of the mission, if they would succeed and how many demons they would kill on the way back home. Kate mostly smiled and let the man talk. His acid-burned arm was healing, part of it covered with thick scabs but the edges of the damaged area puckering slightly with tender, new skin. He seemed to have full mobility, for which she was glad. It still looked like a mess, but functionally, it didn’t seem the worse for wear.
Benedict’s arm seemed to be doing better, too, but he lacked full strength and range of motion. When she asked, he simply said, “It’s nothing. I’ve seen worse.” She wasn’t sure of that, but she appreciated that he was in good spirits and on the mend.
Jurdan, on the other hand, was not. His normal boisterous personality was dampened quite a bit. He smiled at Kate when she walked up to him, his mask hanging from his belt, but she could see in his eyes the pain he was trying to hide. He looked pale, also. In a word, he looked horrible.
“Good morning, Kate,” he said, false joviality plain in his tone.
“How are you doing, Jurdan? That poison is no small matter. When we get back to Gateskeep, the first thing we’ll do is go to the chirurgeon so he can fix you back up.”
Jurdan’s face fell.
“What is it?” Kate said.
“Kate, I don’t think I’m going to make it back home. If I can be honest with you, the poison is winning. I can hardly keep up. I think it would be better if you and the others left me. I’m slowing the team down, jeopardizing the mission.”
“Nonsense,” she snapped, but then realized how she sounded. She cleared her throat. “No, Jurdan. We will not leave you behind. Just a little while and we’ll be back in our own world, and you can be healed. Don’t you dare give up on me.”
“But I—”
“No. I am in command of this team, and I am telling you right now, Jurdan Vora. We will all go back through the gate together. If we have to take turns carrying you, then that is what we’ll do. Is that clear?”
“Yes ma’am,” the blond man said.
“Very good. You let me know if the pace gets too rough and we can figure something out.” She headed toward Peiros at the front of the loose column.
“Thank you,” Jurdan said, almost too soft for Kate to hear. Almost.
She felt a slight tugging at her mouth and found that she was smiling. It wasn’t long before it slipped off her face, though.
Kate joined Peiros at the front of the group. She was content to simply walk beside him without saying anything. His eyes, as always, moved constantly, scanning the surroundings as if something would jump out of thin air at them.
Then again, that had happened to them earlier. She was glad he was with them. They would have been lost a dozen times without him to guide them.
He gave her a sidelong glance, curiosity in his pale hazel eyes. Then he moved his gaze to scan the landscape again.
“One thing troubles me,” she finally said.
“What is that, Kate?”
“They knew we were coming.”
“That is what the demon said,” Peiros agreed.
“How would they know we were in Hell?”
“Perhaps it was a good guess. Many of the more powerful demons have lived for thousands of years. This demon lord, Thozrixith, he must be very old and very intelligent to have survived in such a place of power.”
“Maybe,” Kate said. “That’s not the sense I got from the incubus, though. It seemed as if he knew, as if he had been told. I don’t like it.”
Peiros paused in his terrain scans long enough to meet Kate’s eyes. “I agree with you. I do not think it was a guess, and I do not like what it means if the demon knew for a fact we would be here. But there is nothing we can do about it presently. It is a matter for when we get back. For now, we have…other problems.” He jerked his head toward Jurdan, who seemed barely able to put one foot in front of the other.
“I know,” she said. She raised her chin defiantly. “We will not leave him.”
“No, we will not. The Black do not do such things, even if it is practical to do so.”
“Good. I’d not like to have to command the team to—what is that?”
Peiros whipped his head around to look where Kate was facing, off to the left of where they were heading.
There, barely visible on the horizon, was a structure. A big structure.
26
The others, attuned to each other from their time spent in Hell, seemed to see it at the same time as Kate. They drew their weapons, spread out, and crouched low. Once they had gone several yards, all of them became completely motionless.
Kate’s reaction was just a breath later. The building in front of them looked to be utilitarian, not military. It was hard to tell from such a distance, but it didn’t seem to bear the earmarks of a fortress, such as restricted entry, high walls with means for those inside to do damage to foes, or towers that faced outward.
In fact, as she scanned the structure, she got the sense that—
“It is a gaol,” Peiros said. “Do you see how it is designed not to keep others out, but to keep them in? The towers are for monitoring those inside. The spikes on the walls, they face toward the center.”
Kate hadn’t seen the spikes clearly, but now that Peiros mentioned it, she could pick them out.
“What kinds of things would demons put in a prison?” Kate asked.
“I do not know. Perhaps those who could be useful to us? Or perhaps not.”
Kate chewed her bottom lip. She was curious about the prison, but she wasn’t sure if they should stop to investigate. She told them they would try to inflict damage and to kill as many demons as they could find, but this? She wasn’t sure it was worth the time it would take.
Peiros continued. “I do not know which way to go to reach the gate. If there are patrols nearby, we may be able to capture a demon to interrogate.”
Kate still wasn’t sure. She looked around, and the rest of the team was watching her.
“We’ll go toward the gaol to see if they have patrols,” she said. “I don’t think we’ll be breaking into a demon prison, though. I said we would kill demons, not take on an entire guard force.”
They began moving, Peiros leading. They tried to remain inconspicuous, but with nothing to hide behind, it would only take someone glancing out toward the endless plain to see them. Fortunately, the tower windows were mostly turned inward. She had seen no sign yet of any movement. If there was any time for the disappearing trick the terrain played to work in their favor, now was it.
As they slunk toward the massive stone structure, the land changed slightly. It was still the unending plain they had been traveling on, but the few plants appeared diseased—more than normal.
Even the ground itself seemed to be full of malefaction, pockets of pus occasionally bursting much like the fire when they first began traveling in Hell.
Kate decided she liked spurts of fire more than the foul-smelling mist the pustules emitted.
“Is that stuff poison?” Kate asked.
Peiros shrugged. “I have not seen this before. In Hell, though, it is prudent to treat everything as if it can kill you.”
“Point taken.” Kate did her best to spot the pus glands buried in the soil and stay clear of them in case they burst.
She was mostly successful.
It only got worse as they neared the prison. There was no doubt about two things: it was indeed a massive gaol; and the land’s decay was worse the closer they got to it. The stone of the structure seemed to be melting in some places, and in others, it seemed to be disintegrating into dust from age.
“What kind of place is this?” Kate asked, but no one answered. The entire team was focused on looking everywhere for signs they had been seen. “It’s like the structure is rotting everything around it.”
Despite the weight of a thousand unseen eyes bearing down on them, they made it to the fro
nt gate of the place.
It was the strangest opening Kate had ever seen. The crumbling walls on either side were still substantial enough that the only way to get through was by a small space, just enough for Aurel and one other person to go through shoulder-to-shoulder. A small corridor stretched on for more than a dozen yards.
There was no door.
Kate scanned the surface, looking for arrow slits and murder holes. She saw none.
“Hmmm,” Jurdan said eloquently.
“It has to be a trap,” Benedict said.
Visimar sneered at the other man, but didn’t say anything.
“Runes,” Kate said.
“What?” Aurel said.
“Runes. There are runes on the top and sides of the corridor, scattered throughout its length.”
“Hmmm,” Jurdan said again.
Kate cocked her head at him. He must be feeling very weak not to utter even one word.
“We don’t have to go in,” Visimar said.
“Says the coward,” Benedict chimed.
Kate thought the men might come to blows right then, so she stepped in. “We don’t, that’s true. There doesn’t seem to be anyone here, so it may not even be worth exploring. But what if it is?”
“I’ll go,” Jurdan said, surprising Kate so much she almost jumped. “I’m the most expendable. If it’s a killing magic, it’ll only take a few days from my life span.”
“Jurdan, you don’t—”
Peiros shook his head at her, but didn’t say anything. Jurdan had already started to walk down the tunnel. In Peiros’s look, Kate saw if he wants to go out with a purpose, let him be.
Jurdan walked with better posture than Kate had seen him use since his poisoning. He nearly strutted, no doubt taking pride in the fact he could be useful though his body was betraying him. Placing one foot in front of the other, he traveled the length of the corridor.
Nothing happened.
When Jurdan reached the end, he turned back to the others, shrugged, and then leaned against the wall to wait for them. It seemed as if he had used most of the last of his strength to go the short distance.
With no apparent adverse effects, the remaining team members crowded the tunnel to traverse the distance. Kate and Peiros were first, followed closely by Aurel, with Visimar and Benedict almost brushing their shoulders on the walls so they could keep a space between them.
When they reached the center of the entry hall, the calm was broken. A bright red flare sprang up around the five, and a concussive force pressed on them from above their heads.
The force of the blow knocked all but Aurel down, and even he was driven to his knees. Jurdan was, of course, too far away to be affected. He stood with his eyes wide and his mouth agape.
Kate did a mental inventory of her body to make sure nothing felt amiss. There was no pain or evidence of injury, though she was more tired than she had been a moment before. She climbed slowly to her feet and found that a warmth had blossomed between her breasts, as if a warming stone was touching her skin there.
She readjusted her breastplate, but the warmth remained. Only as an afterthought did she pull on the cord around her neck to withdraw her firestone. It pulsed with power, the light and heat waxing and waning. Its flickering light slowed and finally ceased, and then it looked and felt as it always had before.
“What the Hell was that?” Benedict asked. He and Peiros were holding their firestones as Kate was.
“I think your firestones reacted to something,” Jurdan said. “Some type of green light shone on you from above, and the red light radiated upward from you to meet it. That boom was the two powers coming together. I think your stones just combined their power to protect you from whatever that green light was.”
This was definitely something new. Kate had never heard of the stones acting together or combining their power like that. She would have to ask Molara about it when she got back to Gateskeep.
“I have never heard of such a thing,” Peiros said.
“I don’t know, but that’s what it looked like from here,” Jurdan said. “Is anyone injured?”
No one was. The five joined Jurdan at the end of the hall. They would have to solve the mystery later.
As a group this time, they headed out into the courtyard beyond the entrance tunnel. The gate was open, and nothing stirred anywhere they looked.
“It’s eerie, isn’t it?” Kate asked. “It’s like the entire place is abandoned. What do you make of it?”
“It is a strange thing, no doubt,” Peiros said.
“I think there’s probably nothing here worth taking or killing,” Benedict spat. “We’re wasting our time when we could be out killing demons.”
As if it was the cue the prison had been waiting for, Benedict barely finished what he was saying before a door in the blocky central building opened and several ugly demon faces appeared.
Both groups froze, surprised at the confrontation.
The humans regained their composure first.
“Kill them before they can sound an alarm,” Jurdan cried, drawing and loosing the arrow he had nocked. He withdrew another from his quiver and fired it before his sentence ended. One took a demon in its black eye and the other impaled the throat of the one farthest away from them.
Benedict and Visimar charged the remaining three, Aurel a step behind. One of Peiros’s crescents whizzed by the men and lodged itself in another of the demons’ faces.
At the same time the two remaining demons unfroze and turned to run back the way they had come, Visimar and Benedict reached them. Visimar’s blade found its mark in a monster’s neck, and its deformed head left its body. Benedict’s took a moment longer to die with a long dagger in its eye. Kate appreciated the man’s efficiency, even with the use of only one arm.
Kate, Aurel, and Peiros reached the site of the short battle together. The bodies hadn’t even all fallen to the ground yet. Peiros poked his head through the door, scanned the room on the other side quickly, and came back to where the others were cleaning and retrieving their weapons. Jurdan made it to them a moment later.
“Did they make enough noise to have warned the rest of the forces here?” Kate asked.
“No telling,” Benedict said.
“We’ll know in a moment,” Jurdan added.
They paused. There was nowhere else to go, so if they were to be rushed, the doorway would make a serviceable choke point. Kate hoped it didn’t come to that.
The seconds clicked by with no further sound. It seemed like they had gotten lucky.
And then the air split with the sound of stomping feet and demon screeches.
Benedict summed up exactly how Kate felt about it.
“Shit!”
27
Kate and Aurel formed up at the front of the line. Kate’s shield was the only one in use among them because of Benedict’s injury, and Aurel, well, he was massive and needed no shield. To Kate’s right and just behind her was Benedict, his good right arm wielding the sword and his barely functional left gripping a knife. Behind and slightly to the right of him was Peiros with his crescents, and Visimar was on the left behind Aurel. Jurdan stayed back, angled so he could fire arrows into the demons when they charged. It was the best they could do in a pinch.
They didn’t have to wait long. Dark, twisted bodies appeared in the doorway, caught sight of the humans, and mindlessly charged them.
Kate wished she had at least one other shield bearer in the group, but the Black were not the Red. They rarely fought in large formations, and so their weapons were varied and individual. She and Aurel would have to take the brunt of the charging enemies, her with her shield and Aurel with his massive sword.
A few of the demons hesitated ever-so-slightly when they faced the masked visages of their enemies, but they didn’t wait long. They slavered, bared their stained and rotted teeth, and sprinted in with abandon.
Kate caught the first three on her shield and, to the demons’ wide-eyed dismay, stopped t
hem in their tracks. Her feet slid almost two feet back, but her shield did not dip and her arm did not buckle. Before the demons had reacted, two of them were writhing on the ground with slashes through their eyes or throats from Kate’s sword.
Two more charged at Aurel, a deadly mistake on their part. His huge sword swung in an arc and cut both charging demons in half at the waist in a spray of blood. The parts continued on, the trunk of one of the demons striking Visimar’s legs and threatening to trip him up. He kept his feet, though, and deepened his stance, holding his double swords in front of him.
All the while, arrows flew with such precision that one ruffled Kate’s hair as it sped to kill a demon in front of her.
Try as they might to keep the mass of demons contained at the front, Kate and Aurel were only two people after all, and some of the monsters slipped around them and went for the others.
Each one that passed died, if not by the second rank, then by the third. Occasionally, a particularly slippery demon would get around either Visimar or Peiros and go after Jurdan, but he’d put an arrow in its eye and it would drop among the other demon corpses accumulating on the stone floor in front of him.
Within moments, Peiros’s crescents cut down the last demon. Jurdan dropped to a knee, holding his bow stave to keep himself upright. The man looked even worse than he did before, as if he had used up all the precious energy he had in his body.
It probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Jurdan,” she said. “You either stay here and wait or trail us at a reasonable distance. Engage only if absolutely necessary. No use using up our only archer for no good reason.”
The man swiped a lock of his blond hair out of his fatigued face and nodded.
“Peiros, if you could…” she said, and the man from Salornum ghosted through the door into the hallway beyond.
As he was scouting the area, Kate considered her team. Aurel and Visimar seemed not to have suffered any injury yet. Benedict didn’t show any new wounds from the battle they just concluded, but his left arm drooped at his side. The fire in his brown eyes sparkled as bright as always, though. He raised his chin at her as their gazes met. All in all, the squad seemed as capable of combat as they had been a half an hour before.
Order of the Fire Box Set Page 35