Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (66 page)

Azazel puzzled
through the human’s words, but he couldn’t decipher what the mortal creature
was talking about.

The fire-eyed
mortal looked at him speculatively a moment, then he turned to Uriel. “What was
it you said before, Uriel? I’ll hold him, you kick him where it hurts?”

The Red paladin
laughed wickedly.

A green-winged
Dominion landed beside Uriel, and an enormous Red paladin strode up to stand
next to the Gray paladin. They quickly fanned out and encircled Azazel,
preventing any last-minute escape attempts.
As if I could now
, Azazel
thought bitterly and with mounting panic.

Uriel drew his
flaming sword in one hand and grounded the gleaming war spear he held in the
other. He raised the crystalline sword high with both hands and stared at
Azazel without the slightest hope of mercy.

 “Receive
thy doom, demon,” the Seraph intoned as the hated sword descended toward the
demon prince.

Azazel screamed
in denial.

His scream
echoed on and on long after he should have felt the piercing agony of Uriel’s
sword, and Azazel choked in surprise as he opened his eyes and saw he was alone
on an empty plain in Heaven. Moreover, the plain was white and untainted by
demonic presence, so he was far away from the army itself.

The arrow still
throbbed in Azazel’s leg, and he spared a moment of agony to remove the
heavenly missile. It was only after the glowing blue shaft was gone that he
realized he couldn’t have translocated himself, not with the arrow still lodged
in his leg. The demon prince stood slowly and looked around him.

Behind him,
unnoticed until then, stood an impossibility. Black trees grew in a thick grove
with brilliant, verdant leaves gleaming in the accursed, ever-present light of
Heaven. Green grass –
living
grass – crunched softly beneath his feet.
Azazel cringed back from the light and hurried toward the promise of shade,
ignoring for a moment that no true life existed in either immortal plane.

As he passed the
boundaries of the woods, Azazel remembered hearing rumors of living trees
spotted somewhere on the infinite plains of Hell, but no one had ever been able
to locate the supposed plant life, not even Mephistopheles himself. Arthryx had
theorized they were the result of a powerful angel or host of angels being
destroyed on the grounds of Hell during the split of the Great Schism, but
since none of them could be located, it was impossible to test his ideas. Could
this be something similar?

The shadows
closed around Azazel like a blanket of Hellish fire, wrapping him in glorious
power and infernal comfort. He felt almost like he was back in his palace in
Dis, so familiar did the sensation feel as he practically swam in the sense of
Hell.

“Welcome,
brother Azazel,” a deep voice intoned.

Azazel spun,
looking for the source of the voice. There was something hauntingly familiar
about it – a voice he hadn’t heard since the days of the Great Schism. It rang
hollowly, like the remnant of a mortal’s scream echoing through steel halls,
but he recognized it just the same.

Impossible!
He thought.

“You know who I
am?” the voice asked. “You recognize me, fellow prince of Hell?”

“Gramuel?” he
asked in wonder.

“I am he, or
what remains of his
āyus
,” the former demon prince replied. Azazel
withheld a grimace at the formal tone of the deceased demon’s voice. Gramuel
had always been stiff and overly decorous for a demon. “Listen now and obey the
one whom I serve, the one who has saved you from oblivion. Behold a vision of
Him.”

A dark-robed
figure stepped out of the shadows and approached Azazel. The apparition was
vaguely transparent, and the demon prince could see trees through the hazy
form. Was this a manifestation of Mephistopheles come somehow to commune with
him? Had the demon king rescued Azazel from certain death at the point of
Uriel’s sword? There was no sense of presence, this truly was nothing more than
a projection, a perception imposed on his senses. Nothing real.

“Who are you?”
Azazel asked brazenly even as he stepped back uncertainly.

In answer, the
robed figure reached up and lifted the cowl from its face, and Azazel fell to
his knees in terror as awareness flooded his entire being.

“My God,” he
whispered in rapturous fear.

Gramuel laughed
hollowly. “Yes…..”

- 3 -

Uriel lunged
with his sword, but it was too late. Azazel had vanished in an instant, a
translocation so clean and immediate it should not have been possible with an
angelic arrow stuck in his flesh. Still, the demon prince was gone and had
escaped the executioner’s sword by a hairsbreadth.

Gerard swore,
but Uriel expected that. Birch stared in a composed silence, but that too Uriel
expected. He was coming to know these mortals and their reactions quite well, a
fact of which he was rather proud. Until the beginning of the war, Uriel had
had little-to-no contact with mortals since the early days following the
Epiphany. Too many of the mortals treated the angels with gross subservience,
and after a few centuries, the angels came to expect it from the “lesser”
beings. This was, he now knew, the beginnings of the subtle influence being
exerted by Maya.

Uriel had given
up in disgust and avoided mortals altogether unless they proved worthy of his
time. The Orange paladin, Vander Wayland, for example, had proven very useful
to him in the days and weeks immediately prior to the war. Uriel had vowed that
at his first opportunity, he would make an attempt to locate the paladin inside
Medina, and he would keep trying until he found where Maya had secreted the
dead scholar. His time since then, however, had been accursedly lacking in such
opportunity.

Briefly, Birch
told them the fate of Perklet Perkal, whom Uriel regarded as one of the most
benign and loving mortals he’d ever had the privilege to meet.

“I’m sorry to
see him die, but at least he is not lost to us altogether,” Uriel said. “He’ll
be back among the blessed dead.”

“No,” Birch
said, shaking his head, “he won’t be. I promise you.”

Birch explained
how Perklet had somehow transcended the death they all expected and had moved
on to the same fate Kaelus had bequeathed on the damned souls before his
capture. He even told them of Perklet’s miraculous healing of the demon
Meresin, who’d escaped only moments before their rescue. The Gray paladin had
very few answers for them, and all were left in a state of wonder at Perklet’s
death.

“Martyrdom,”
Birch whispered softly, but only Uriel heard him.

“We’ll take his
body back to the Iridescent Gates to be buried in the mortal realm with the
others,” Uriel promised. “I’ll carry him myself.”

“Carry him easy
when you go,” Gerard said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle. “Heal his
flesh, Uriel, if you would, please. It seems a disgrace to bury him as he is.”

“I will.”

Uriel paused.

“You sound as if
you’re not coming back with me,” the Seraph said tentatively.

Gerard shook his
head.

“We’re not,” he
said emphatically. “I talked it out with Mikal beforehand, and we’re taking
this group of paladins and denarae into the enemy’s heart to make a stab at the
demon king himself.”

“We’ll go with
you,” Doriel offered immediately, but Uriel shook his head.

“You’re just
taking the mortals, yes?” he asked. “Angels would be too easily located in
Hell, and you’d get swarmed immediately by every demon left on the infernal
plane.”

“Exactly,”
Gerard said.

“I know you’re
just a mortal, but are you insane, too?” Doriel asked incredulously. Uriel
frowned a moment, then realized the Dominion had a rapport of sorts with
Gerard, and it was intended as a joke. Doriel was like that.

“So I’ve been
told many times,” Gerard replied, “but insane or not, we’re going in. The
entire army of Hell is behind us now, and there’s nothing to stop us from
crossing over.”

“Crossing over
to an infinite plane full of demons and damned souls who didn’t get to go play
with the rest of their buddies,” Garnet said wryly. “Oh, no danger there,
Gerard.”

“Birch,” the
scar-faced Red paladin said, ignoring Garnet, “I’m counting on you to lead us
in. I don’t give a damn whatever personal demons you might still have about
going back into Hell. Kaelus needs you, and we need you to guide us.”

“I wouldn’t have
it any other way,” Birch replied grimly. Whatever fears he’d once had about the
fate he was fast approaching had been washed away in the wake of Perklet’s
noble sacrifice. “The demons I have left are all the kind that need to be
faced, and I intend to kill one of them before I’m through. There’s a reckoning
to be had between Mephistopheles and me, and I intend to collect my due.”

- 4 -

Mikal walked
slowly through the angelstone hallway, his wings furled closely about his body
and his thoughts churning beneath an impassive face. The finest strategists who
had ever lived and died in the mortal world (those who had come to Heaven,
anyway) had been working for months on plans that would have some lasting
impact on the hordes of demons that continued to destroy his home, and to a man
they had failed to come up with anything significant enough to turn the tide of
the war. Many tactics had been tried, but few proved to have any noticeable
effect and none was worth repeating more than once or twice.

The grander
plans Kaelus and Gerard Morningham had crafted had been long shots at best, and
the loss of Kaelus left a particular taste of ash in their ultimate failure. It
seemed at every turn, they were destined to lose, and Mikal was forced to watch
more and more of Heaven turn a sickly gray under the taint of demonic
influence.

Despair gathered
around him and pressed close, threatening to crush him.

A low murmur
from somewhere ahead drew his attention, and Mikal latched onto the noise like
a drowning mortal would a protruding tree root. He continued down the hallway
until it opened into balcony overlooking a large hall. Standing at the edge of
the balcony was a welcome sight.

“Foriel,” Mikal
said with relief. “I had hoped you were still alive and well.”

The Seraph at
the railing turned and smiled faintly at Mikal. Six wings of pale yellow were
wrapped tightly about the angel’s body, clinging like a second set of armor.

“Mikal,” the
other angel said by way of greeting. “Surely you don’t think I’d pass without
asking your permission.”

“Which I will
never grant,” Mikal said. “There are too few Seraphim to lose even you.”

“Then I suppose
we’ll have to win this war,” Foriel said with a shrug. “I was getting tired of
losing anyway.”

The Seraph
turned away from Mikal and looked down into the hall toward the source of the
continuing murmur of sound. Mikal stepped forward and stood next to Foriel, then
looked down to see what so engrossed him.

The room below
was filled with paladins going about their daily tasks of cleaning their armor,
sharpening their swords, and generally preparing for the next battle. Green
paladins wandered the room offering healing prayers for those incapable of
healing themselves, while a number of Violet paladins made the rounds praying
with their brothers for more mundane things. Victory. Life. Safety of loved
ones.

“Why do they do
that?” Foriel asked, gesturing with one hand toward a circle of paladins
kneeling with joined hands and bowed heads.

“Join together?”

“Pray.”

Mikal was
silent.

“Most mortals
who die and come here pray when they first arrive,” Foriel said. “I see them,
but I’ve never asked them about it. After a few years or even months, they
eventually stop, so it never seemed worth it. But now, with living people here,
I’m curious.”

“I’ve wondered
myself,” Mikal admitted, “but the concept is strange. At first I thought prayer
must be something like our sense of the Almighty, but from what I know, they
rarely achieve any sort of surety, no true sense of God’s will. It seems so
limited.”

“But it seems
they
all
do it,” Foriel noted. “Surely, if it were useless, it would
have died out centuries ago.”

“You haven’t
died out, and I have it on the best authority you consider yourself to be
useless,” Mikal noted wryly.

“That was before
the war,” Foriel said with a shrug. “I’m a fighter, Mikal, thanks to you, and
for eons I’ve had nothing to look forward to besides endless days of staring at
clouds and the souls of dead men. As long as there are demons to fight, I have
a purpose, but when this is over, things go back to normal and we all become
fantastically boring again.”

Mikal had no
ready response for that. He’d been trying to break Foriel out of his apathy
practically since they day the other angel had been created, an ongoing failure
stretching back almost to the dawn of the Great Schism. Mikal felt some
responsibility for Foriel’s dim outlook – he’d genesed the angel shortly after
Raphael’s death, and he’d always felt his gloomy perspective at the time had
imprinted on the newly created angel. Foriel had gained strength quickly during
the war and had ascended through the angelic Choirs faster than any other angel
Mikal’s memory. Since then however…

“Does it help,
do you think?” Foriel asked suddenly, still focused on the circle of paladins.

“Praying?”

“Joining
together like that,” Foriel said, and Mikal felt a very real temptation to push
the Seraph over the balcony.

“Some of them
pray alone, others seem to like having just one man holding their hands, but a
lot seem to prefer these larger circles,” Foriel pointed out. “I can’t decide
if it’s for comfort or out of a feeling that having more of them pray the same
thing will have a bigger effect.”