Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (49 page)

“Hoil?” the
angel asked.

“Rogael,” Hoil
said with something approaching genuine pleasure. Rogael was an Erelim and a
member of Uriel’s infamous Archangels, and as such was quite the rogue – a
kindred spirit for Hoil. Since coming to Heaven, Rogael had been one of the few
immortals Hoil had met and kept company. The Archangel had a fondness for
mortal games of chance, and Hoil had never been one to turn down an opportunity
for such entertainment.

“What happened
to you, my human friend?” Rogael asked with a broad smile. “Is your mortality
finally catching up with you? I must say, I thought you’d have a few more years
left before your body gave out on you.”

“Nonsense,” Hoil
said with a forced smile. “I thought I saw a gold coin on the floor and stopped
to check it out.”

Rogael grinned
at him and winked, not believing a word Hoil said. He stepped forward and
helped Hoil get to his feet. When he was steady, Hoil released the angel’s hand
and nodded his head in thanks.

“We seem to have
a bit of time on our hands,” Rogael said with a gleam in his eye. His maroon wings
twitched in anticipation, one of his worst tells. “How’s about giving me a
chance to win back that bow I lost to you yesterday? You can’t even use it.”

 “Some
other time,” Hoil said, shaking his head. “Soon, though, I promise. I plan on
giving that bow to Birch, but I can use it as a stake first. I want to get my
hands on a few of those swords you all wield.”

Rogael chuckled
good-naturedly.

Hoil hesitated,
then asked, “Rogael, you’ve been a member of the Archangels since the Great
Schism, yes?”

“All of us
have,” the Power confirmed. “Very few angels have
genesed
[24]
since the first few centuries after the
war, and our ranks were almost intact at the end. Uriel’s a good commander.”

“So I’ve seen,”
Hoil said.

“We’ve always
been a bit of a rogue unit,” the angel continued before Hoil could say anything
else. “That’s why we work so well with Uriel, I guess. He’s really the only
commander we follow, and we’ve been known to disobey him on occasion if we all
feel strongly enough about it. It irritates him almost as much as it pleases
him to see us so independent.”

“Wonderful,”
Hoil said, cutting him off before Rogael could open his mouth again. “Now,
since you’ve been around a long time, you’d know just about every angel in Heaven,
correct?”

“Of course,”
Rogael said, affecting an air of having just been insulted.

That’s what
they all say, but there’s still too many to know,
Hoil thought privately.
Certainly none of the angels he’d spoken to yet had been able to help him.

“Then maybe you
can help me find someone,” Hoil said. Rogael dropped his pose and looked at
him, his expression open and helpful.

Hoil took a deep
breath and let it out slowly as he spoke.

“I’m looking for
my wife,” he said. “She died soon after my son’s birth, and I’ve been without
her radiant beauty ever since. She’s the only reason I came here, to see her
again, but I’ve looked all over and wandered through every unit I can find,
hoping to see her, and I’ve even questioned a few hundred angels and dead people
who I thought might be able to help me. I assume she would have come back here,
but I haven’t heard from her. She must have heard of our presence here by now,
and she couldn’t ignore coming to see her husband and son, could she?” By the
end of his final question, Hoil’s voice had taken on an almost plaintive
quality.

Rogael nodded in
sympathy, then stopped as his brow wrinkled in confusion.

“You asked if I
knew the angels here,” Rogael said. “Why would that help you find the soul of
your mortal wife?”

“My son is
Danner,” Hoil reminded him, “the half-angel. We believe his mother was an angel
by the name of…” Hoil stopped, daring himself to say her name again.

“Her name was
Alanna,” he said finally. He looked up pleadingly into Rogael’s eyes. “Do you
know where I might find her?”

Rogael’s
expression turned from sympathetic perplexity to guarded silence at the mention
of Hoil’s wife’s name. Hoil let the silence stretch out between them as he
studied the immortal’s face. Either angels were as easy to read as mortals, or
else Rogael had just spent too much time around the dead and had picked up
their mannerisms, because Hoil read him as easily as he did any man alive.

“Tell me,” Hoil
said, his voice tight.

“I… I cannot,”
Rogael said finally, looking away. “If it is answers you seek, for this you
must ask Uriel, my friend. I’m sorry.”

Hoil stared at
him a moment longer then decided he would get nothing by pressing the issue.

 “Uriel,
huh?” Hoil said grimly. “Well, let’s just see what he has to say then.”

He brushed past
Rogael, who slipped aside after the barest of contact between their shoulders.
It was enough for the angel to read the hurt and fear buried beneath a growing
layer of anger. He stared after Hoil’s retreating figure and let out a
mortal-like sigh.

“I’m truly
sorry, my friend,” Rogael whispered. When Hoil was gone from sight, Rogael left
in search of his fellow Archangels in the hopes of lightening the sudden weight
that had settled across his shoulders.

- 2 -

 Jayen
reigned in his dakkan sharply to avoid a collision with the dakkan in front of
him. Behind him, he heard other paladins halting their mounts as well.

“What’s the
delay?” he shouted as his dakkan paced a slow circle beneath him. Jayen
stretched upward in his saddle in an attempt to see further ahead.

“Sin-cursed
demons,” someone muttered, and Jayen wagered he was right. Whatever the
problem, there would be a way to blame the demons, he was sure. They seemed to
be behind everything that went wrong anyway.

The response was
passed back down the line.

“There’s an
angel laying in our path. Possibly dead.”

Demons for sure,
then.

Without waiting
for orders, the paladins formed in a loose circle around the body of the downed
angel. Their weapons were drawn and they stared grimly outward, ready for an
attack. Two Green paladins were already kneeling next to the crumpled form,
examining his wounds.

“Can’t be dead
or it would have disappeared,” one of the Greens muttered to himself.

Jayen glanced
uneasily at a grizzled old Red next to him.

“A trap?” he
asked nervously.

“Easy,
youngster,” the Red growled. “Control your fear. Even Yellows are supposed to
show courage.”

Jayen forced a
slight laugh.

“I’d feel a lot
more courageous if I knew this wasn’t a trap,” he replied, which earned him a
headshake from the older paladin.

Jayen glanced
over his shoulder at the two Greens and their charge. The angel was indeed
still alive, but was too weak to do more than moan in agony. As far away as he
was, Jayen could still see horrible burns covering the angel’s body with
blackened flesh as well as several gashes where some demon’s claws had ripped
into the poor angel’s body. Half of the immortal’s perfectly beautiful face was
now a ruin of torn, burned flesh, and only one of the angel’s eyes turned in
its socket to regard his rescuers. One of his wings was nearly severed from his
back, and the other was twisted halfway down at an impossible angle.

“Not a demon in
sight,” a paladin called down from an airborne dakkan.

One of the
Greens shook his head helplessly while the other tried to get the angel’s
attention.

“Can you hear
me?” he asked insistently. “When did this happen? Can you tell us anything
about who did this to you?”

The angel tried
to move his lips, but only unintelligible groans escaped. The few words he
managed to form were in a language none of them understood.

“Tokul,” the
angel croaked. “Tokul!” He flailed his wings uselessly and one of his hands
slid limply to the ground. The angel’s remaining eye swiveled as he twisted his
head to look down at the hand. Summoning whatever reserves of strength he still
possessed, the angel pushed his hand into the soft, cloud-like ground of Heaven
until it was buried to the wrist.

Before he could
complete the warning, Jayen’s dakkan reared back in alarm and let out a
piercing shriek. The other dakkans followed suit, and it was all Jayen could do
not to cover his ears to block the painful sound.

“Here now,
Elleran, stop that,” Jayen shouted, thumping him in the side with the flat of
his blade. He turned his dakkan around just as the cloudy ground beneath him
was rent asunder. A clawed hand stretched out and ripped down Elleran’s belly,
tearing through the armor-like scales like they were paper and spilling the
dakkan’s entrails out onto the pristine, white ground.

All around
Jayen, demons and damned souls were pouring forth from the ground and slashing
into the paladin ranks from all sides. As Elleran collapsed out from under him,
Jayen leapt clear and landed back-to-back with a Blue paladin whose mount was also
crippled.

“Ambush!”
someone roared needlessly.

Directly beneath
the wounded angel, a large section of the ground gave way. The two Greens
disappeared amidst a flood of winged creatures that leapt into the sky and
immediately assaulted the six paladins flying overhead. In seconds, they had
slain one rider and his mount and were sorely pressing the remaining paladins.

Jayen fought
with a feeling of rising despair and terror as men he’d known most of his life
were ripped to pieces around him. He felt pressure leave his back and turned
only to see a blue cloak vanish under a swarm of leathery flesh and bloody
claws.

The ground
beneath him trembled, and Jayen leapt aside just as another clawed hand punched
through the surface and grabbed at his ankle. He slashed down with his sword
and severed the seeking limb, which was quickly followed by the rest of the
demon, now bellowing in pain and clutching the stump on its arm.

Jayen risked a
quick glance into the ground and nearly lost control of his stomach. Eyes, mouths,
ears, arms, legs… Everything melded together in a gross distortion of mortal
flesh, made worse by the great holes ripped through it by hungry demons’ claws.

Too slow to
guard against all avenues of attack, Jayen dodged one set of slashing claws
only to be caught across the arm by another. He spun and nearly dropped his
shield, then a heavy fist caught him in the base of his spine and he collapsed
to his knees.

A desperate cry
of triumph drew Jayen’s attention skyward, and he saw a Red paladin riding on a
green dakkan. The pair broke free of a cluster of flying monsters, wheeled
about, and quickly escaped from the hopeless fray.

“At least
someone got away to warn them,” Jayen muttered, no longer feeling the pain
being inflicted on his body. Through some twist of cruel fate, Jayen was one of
the last few paladins alive, and the demons halted their mindless rampage to
savor their remaining victims.

For hours, Jayen
prayed silently even as he screamed in pain, begging for release. When the end
finally came, even Jayen could no longer discern whether his pleas of “Let me
die!” were directed toward his captors or the God he’d sworn to follow.

- 3 -

Perklet sighed
as he stepped back from the last of the wounded near him. Scattered about the crowded
room, a dozen other Green paladins worked their prayers of healing to mend the
wounds of their fallen brethren. Paladins of all six Facets lay in various
states of health, some still grievously wounded, others newly healed and
sleeping to complete their recovery.

The worst of the
wounded were treated by angels, whose remarkable healing powers could bring a
man back from the edge of death. Perklet had passed a half-dozen men on to the
angels in the next room after deciding the wounded paladins were beyond his
abilities. Five had survived and walked out of the room wondering at their good
fortune. The sixth was carried out of the room and his body was flown back to
the Iridescent Gates to be buried in the mortal world at a later time.

A door opened
and Perklet looked up, wearily expecting to see fresh load of injured being
carried in. Instead, the Seraph Uriel entered the room and surveyed the ranks
of the wounded with a grim stare. He shifted his attention to the Green
paladins tending them and finally settled on Perklet.

“Perklet Perkal,
correct?” the angel asked as he crossed the room.

“Perky to most,”
Perklet said with a tired nod. He missed the fleeting smile that touched the
angel’s face.

“I would like to
ask you a few questions about the healing you paladins perform,” Uriel said,
“if you don’t mind.”

Perklet scanned
the men nearest him and saw that all had been cared for, and the other Greens
had the rest of the room well in-hand. He nodded and followed the Seraph into
an adjoining room.

Uriel stopped
abruptly in front of Perklet, and only an outthrust wing prevented the Green
paladin from wearily plowing into the angel. Hoil was already seated at the
only table in the room, and he stared up at Uriel with haunted eyes.

“Alanna
de’Valderat,” Hoil said in a firm voice. “Tell me what happened to my wife.
I’ve asked several angels since this morning, and the only ones who seem to
know her name are all Archangels, and they button up the second I say it. No
one will say a word, except everything keeps coming back to you, Uriel. You
know something about her, and I figure she was one of yours. Please, tell me.
Why hasn’t my wife come to see me?”

Perklet stared
at Birch’s brother with rapt attention. He’d wondered why the man had come with
them into Heaven, and here was his answer. Danner’s mother, Hoil’s wife, had
supposedly died giving birth to her son. During the war, they had reasoned that
she must have been an immortal angel, thus bequeathing Danner his remarkable
abilities.