Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (40 page)

“You miss her,
don’t you?” Kala asked, peering intently at him.

Brican looked up,
startled, then nodded.

“Garnet’s
brother and sister said she got away safely, and I’ve even seen it in their
minds, but,” he trailed off.

“She was in
danger, and you were here,” Kala said, “and you’re worried about your unborn
children.” Brican nodded.

They were silent
for a moment with only the sound of Trames’s humming to intrude. Kala
hesitated, then asked as nonchalantly as she could, “How is he, by the way?”

“Garnet?” Brican
asked, immediately picking up her thought. He had to hide a sudden smile at her
studied disinterest.

“I haven’t seen
him since we came back from Medina,” she said lightly, “and I was just curious
how he was taking things. Not just what happened, but having Gerard back, and
back in command, no less. I gather he’s gotten used to not really answering to
anyone except the Prismatic Council. I imagine it must be hard for him.”

Brican shrugged.

“You have to
understand Garnet,” he said. “He never wanted to take command of Shadow
Company. If he’d had his way, Gerard might have lived forever. Losing him the
way we did
when
we did forced things on Garnet rather abruptly.”

“He wasn’t sure
he was ready, was he?” Kala asked.

Brican shook his
head. “And he’s been fighting against the memory of a man he practically
reveres as a saint. Hell, we all do. You didn’t see what happened that day,”
Brican said, a hint of awe in his voice. Kala was well-aware of Brican’s
lingering feelings towards humans, but even after coming to know Brican as well
as she had, still she was amazed at his reaction to the first human to break
through that barrier. “Gerard became something more than just a man for a brief
moment before he died. I swear he
glowed
with some sort of power and
strength I’ve never seen before.” Brican shook his head. “We lost a lot when we
lost Gerard that day.”

Kala frowned.
“But it’s Garnet who’s been in command since that day, and you’ve been nothing
but complimentary toward him and his leadership.”

Brican nodded.

“So again, I ask
you, how is he coping with having Gerard back in command?”

Rather than
respond verbally, Brican kythed his answer into her thoughts as he stood and
calmly walked away.

“He’s torn,
and if he doesn’t come to terms with it soon, it could tear Shadow Company
apart.”

- 3 -

Danner watched
Gerard intently as his face pulsed and seethed with anger. A lingering anxiety
from his training days made Danner feel relieved he wasn’t the focus of the
dead man’s fury.

“What was that
Sin-accursed woman thinking?” Gerard bellowed as he stared at the ground. Mikal
had provided a topographical map scaled perfectly down and made from what
passed for the ground in Heaven. The Seraph dipped his hands into the cloudy
white substance and immediately a perfect map appeared of any area he wished to
see.

There were two
such realistic maps, one which was permanently set to show the entire landscape
of Heaven where the armies of Hell intruded, and another which Gerard used to
more closely inspect a given strategic area.

“When you’re
dealing with a battlefield of potentially infinite size,” Gerard had said aloud
to no one in particular, “you have to have perspective. Up close and eagle-eye
both, or else you’ll lose something.”

Garnet was
standing across the larger map from Gerard, likewise peering intently at the
miniaturized terrain.

“She did a good
job creating deathtraps,” Garnet agreed with his mentor’s observation, “but she
made them for our side, not theirs.”

Gerard nodded,
furious.

“See here and
here,” he said, pointing, “she’s diverted the course of the Philion and the
Alethion and widened the rivers, funneling the demons to choke points. Great in
theory with a smaller force facing a larger, but if that’s
all
you’re
doing, it also tells the enemy exactly where you’re going to be and you
have
to stay there. Against a conventional army, it forces your enemy to concentrate
his army where you choose to negate his numbers.”

“But here,
Mephistopheles has an all-but infinite army,” Garnet said, “and instead of
choking his army to our advantage, it’s pinning us down and leaving us
vulnerable. No matter how strongly we defend a single point, it’ll only be a
matter of time before it’s overwhelmed by sheer press of numbers, and there’s
an infinite amount of Heaven they can use to circumvent the places she chose.”

“Exactly,”
Gerard agreed, sparing a brief look of approval for his one-time student. “The
rivers are really only a strong deterrent. If we were to actually stop this
army at any one point, if sufficiently frustrated they could very well bypass
the rivers and strike that site from behind.”

Garnet added, “It’s
a question of how much trouble it’s worth to eradicate a single point of
defense.”

As the two men
continued to pore over the map and discuss strategy, Flasch shifted closer to
Danner and leaned over toward him.

“It’s sort of creepy,
isn’t it?” Flasch murmured. “It’s like they share a brain.”

“
That
’s
what’s creepy to you?” Danner murmured back. “Our commander and best friend
discussing strategy with the soul of a dead man – who we both saw die by the
way – trying to defend Heaven itself from an invasion of Hellish demons, and
you’re worried about how alike they think?”

“Good point,”
Flasch replied. “The demons sort of freak me out, too.”

On the other
side of Danner, Trebor and Brican both snorted in amusement as they overheard the
conversation through denarae kything.

“Flasch
hasn’t changed, has he?”
Trebor kythed into Danner’s mind.

“Would you
really want him to?”
Danner replied, winking at his friend.

“No.”
Trebor paused, and his mental voice abruptly lost all humor.
“You have,
though, Danner. You’ve carried the guilt of my death around for a while now,
and I can feel how it’s affected you.”

Danner shook his
head slightly, a subconscious motion as he replied mentally.

“Seeing you
here has helped a little bit, but that’s not something you shake off in a day,
Treb,”
Danner thought.
“No matter how you look at it, I
was
responsible. I lost my head and charged in recklessly, and I wasn’t there at
your side when I damn well should have been. I may have come to terms with your
death, but not with my role in it.”

Trebor had no
sensible reply to that.

After a few
moments of listening to Gerard and Garnet continue their strategic byplay,
Trebor kythed a mental nudge to Danner.

“How’s your
immortal heritage doing these days?”
he asked, and both men were quietly
grateful for the change of topic.

“Stronger
than ever,”
Danner replied,
“and that still sort of scares me. It
continues to evolve and grow, and it seems the more I do with it, the more I realize
I’m barely scratching the surface of what I might be. When I’m not actively
engaged with it, I worry that it’s taking over my humanity.”

“And when you
are engaged?”
Trebor asked when Danner didn’t continue.
“When your wings
are asolved?”

Danner’s sigh
was echoed in his thoughts.

“It’s like
I’m bathing in pure power, and everything else sort of disappears,”
Danner
said.
“I know the others have been worried about my being addicted to it,
but I don’t think it’s that. I don’t feel the need to embrace the power when
I’m normal, but the second I asolve my wings, when I’m filled with all that
strength, it’s almost impossible to think like anything else – it becomes part
of my thoughts, my body, my actions. It’s all I can do sometimes not to push
through a wall or tear down a building just because I
can
.”

“What does
Alicia think about it?”
Trebor asked.
“I heard she was pregnant, by the
way. Congratulations, I think.”

“Thanks,”
Danner replied dryly.
“I don’t think she really understands this problem. I
don’t think anybody does fully, except maybe my uncle. It’s not the sort of
thing anyone can truly understand unless they’ve gone through it, and so far
there’s just the two of us. You know it’s funny, he and I have never really
talked about it to compare our experiences.”

“Should I
bother to ask why?”

Danner snorted.
“Well,
I can only guess it’s because of how damn busy we’ve both been since the war in
Lokka ended. We’ve all been working our asses off trying to rebuild and retrain
Shadow Company, and Birch has been neck-deep in meetings trying to react to the
war we finished and prepare for the one we’re entering now. He’s even been
trying to record his journey into Hell.”

“Busy
people,”
Brican interjected into the conversation.
“Sorry to interrupt,
you two, but you might want to pay attention now.”

“…and that’s
where you come in,” Gerard was saying to Garnet. “Shadow Company is specially
trained and more capable than any others here for this sort of thing. I’ll be
counting on you to work with the angels and to help develop tactics to use for
a new style of warfare.”

Garnet nodded.

“Mikal,” Gerard
continued, “how capable is Uriel at command?” he asked, ignoring Uriel’s
presence only a few yards away. The violet-winged Seraph arched an eyebrow in
amusement.

“His Archangels
have been the most successful force in Heaven since the invention of war,”
Mikal said in a heavy tone. “During the Great Schism he was the best field
commander we had.”

“Good,” Gerard
said with a decisive nod. “Uriel, I want you to work with Shadow Company. Work
on tactics with Garnet. Adapt his methods for use by angels, and work with him
to put your experience and his battle ingenuity to good use. I don’t expect
you’ll be working long with each other in the grand scheme, so do what you can
as fast as you can.”

“Yes, sir,”
Uriel said with no trace of mockery in his voice despite a gleam in his eye.

“You boys,”
Gerard said, turning to Danner and the other Shadow Company officers, “get to your
platoons and get them moving.” Unnoticed behind Gerard, Garnet tensed slightly
but remained silent and unmoving as Gerard continued. “I want you on your way
to the front lines an hour after first wake tomorrow.”

They all looked
at Garnet, who returned their gaze with a flat stare.

“Well?” Gerard
demanded when they made no reply.

“Yes, sir,” they
said and immediately filed out of the tent. Trebor left with them.

An important rule of command, from the book of Gerard:
As a leader, you have a responsibility to your men that is at least as great as
theirs to you. When a soldier approaches you with a question or a problem,
don’t dismiss him out of hand, or soon enough he’ll do the same to you.

       
- Garnet
jo’Garet,

“The Warrior Mythos” (1030 AM)

- 1 -

Garnet watched
the platoon maneuvers with a sharp eye, noting footwork, combat carriage, unit
integrity… everything. Everything had to be perfect. He saw a denarae break
formation for a brief moment and he snapped a thought that made the demi-human
jump back into place a second before they crossed the imaginary line Garnet had
drawn in the ground.

Uriel and a few
of his Archangels hovered overhead observing. Half of the Seraph’s elite unit
was still under Camael at another location, but Uriel had recalled these for
cross-training with Shadow Company.

“Call the
halt,”
Garnet commanded mentally. The order was relayed at the speed of
thought, and within two steps the two platoons weaving around each other
snapped to a halt. A second later, they broke ranks and relaxed for the first
time in hours. Garnet watched the scene with taut shoulders and was thinking
furiously about just how long a break he could afford to give them before
throwing them back into the drill.

“Garnet, can
we talk?”
Brican kythed to him.

“How
important is it?”
Garnet asked.

“Enough.”

Garnet weighed
his desire to move on with training against his own weariness. In the two weeks
since they’d left Medina – and Garnet had to remind himself that only a week
had passed at home – he had grown increasingly exhausted no matter how much
sleep he got. He thought perhaps he could sympathize with how Danner had been
feeling in the days before Mikal’s appearance in their midst. Fortunately for
him, Danner seemed to be sleeping just fine now. Garnet envied him.

Weariness
temporarily won out over determination, and he was on the verge of calling the
platoons to rest when he heard a scuffing sound behind him. Garnet turned and
saw Siran standing quietly. The fact that Siran had made a noise at all told
Garnet the scuffing sound had been deliberate to let him know the elf was
there. Siran wore his typical, loose-fitting, black attire, and carried his
ever-present halven in his right hand.

“Can it wait
a minute, Brican?”
Garnet asked, looking back at his platoons and seeking
out the denarae platoon leader in particular with his eyes.
“Siran’s here.”

“It can wait
for the moment.”

“Good.”
Garnet
sighed.
“Go ahead and stand-down the platoons. We’re done for now. Get some
food.”

“Yes, sir.”

Garnet turned back
to Siran.

“Yes?” he asked
wearily. “What’s on your mind, El’Siran?”

“I would speak
with you of command,” the elven commander replied in his typically formal and
quiet voice.