Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (81 page)

Seated atop a
dais with nine steps, on a throne of black-steel that seemed to be all sharp
spikes, was Mephistopheles. The King of Hell.

Birch had seen
the demon king many times before and in many different guises, but he heard
Danner gasp in surprise. For centuries, mortal artists had portrayed the demon
king as a hideous parody of human flesh, complete with horns, a forked tail,
rows of dagger-like teeth, and crimson skin. Some showed him with bat’s wings,
others with goat’s feet and dark hair covering his body.

This incarnation
was nothing like those fanciful images. Mephistopheles looked like a human with
flesh of polished obsidian. He gleamed in the Hellfire lights, completely
naked, although devoid of human genitalia. The demon had no hair, but he also
had no horns, wings, tails, or any other fantastic inhuman extremities.

“This is just
one of Mephistopheles’s manifestations,” Birch said in a low voice of forced
calm to Danner. “The King of Hell can look like almost anything he wishes.”

Hovering almost
unnoticed beside the overwhelming presence of the King of Hell was a cloud of
demonic smoke Birch recognized as Daella. She was the second-most-powerful of
all demons, with the possible exception of Kaelus, who was now seemingly
helpless before them all. The black smoke coalesced occasionally into a
human-like form that was basically feminine in appearance, but she rarely
assumed a shape that was truly corporeal, and trying to describe her mercurial
semblance was an exercise in futility. Birch had seen her preferred
warrior-like body on many occasions, since she typically utilized it when
tempting or torturing her victims, but every time she assumed a physical shape
it seemed there was some difference from her previous incarnations, as though
she sought to endlessly refine her appearance in search of some elusive ideal,
or perhaps she just couldn’t make up her mind what to look like. The only constant
seemed to be a pair of emerald eyes that gleamed with an unholy light from
amidst the cloud or from whatever corporeal body she assumed.

 “Welcome
back, O Holy Warrior of God,” Mephistopheles said in the immortal language, and
the air itself rippled with the power and malice contained in his voice. Danner
shrank back in spite of himself, then straightened when he noticed Birch hadn’t
flinched. He also noticed, however, that Birch was looking slightly away from
Mephistopheles, as though refusing to meet his eyes. It was a subtle thing, but
Danner had been around his uncle and his cursed eyes long enough to notice it.
The demon king’s own attention was so focused on Birch, it didn’t even seem
like he was aware of Danner at all.

“Truly, you must
be strong of will and faith to come back here of all places,” the obsidian
demon said, gesturing to his throne room. He smiled possessively at Birch, and
Danner did see that the demon’s gleaming white teeth were needle-sharp. “I am
pleased you returned. We had unfinished business, and I plan to make good my
promise to break you, mortal. With strength such as yours, I anticipate
decades
of pleasure – at least until you die, then you’ll be mine for eternity. Perhaps
I’ll even convert the Hall of the Throne to a new, personal torture chamber
just for you,” Mephistopheles mused. “Once I sit on both the thrones of Heaven
and
Hell, there will be nothing to stop me from ruling all of Creation until the
end of time.”

Birch shivered
as the immortal’s words conjured images of such startling vividness, the Gray
paladin was almost surprised his flesh was not already on fire. He crushed the
images and the memories they evoked and started forward, his steps resolute as
he approached the shackled demon in the center of the room. Mephistopheles
didn’t yet know Birch’s power, and if he underestimated Birch, he might be able
to free Kaelus; the powerful demon could aid them in overthrowing the demon
king.

“You are the
only thing standing in the way of our victory,” Birch said grimly to
Mephistopheles, automatically replying in the demon’s own immortal language. He
deliberately did not even look in Kaelus’s direction, nor towards Daella. “Once
I destroy you…”

“Halt,”
Mephistopheles commanded and languidly raised a gleaming, black hand. The force
of his command rippled across the room, and Birch’s gray cloak whipped to the
side as though caught in a momentary gale.

Birch heard a
grunt of strain behind him and knew Danner had been immobilized. He stared at
Mephistopheles’s ebony hand in concentration, unwilling to meet the demon
king’s eyes.

“Years of
resistance, an inexplicable escape, and now this noble attempt to free the
traitor Kaelus,” Mephistopheles laughed – a hideous rasping sound, “and in an
instant it is all over.”

Birch felt his
own body stiffen, but he forced his legs to keep moving as he fought the demon
king’s power. He took a step, then another.

How did
Trames make it work standing before Maya?
Birch wondered desperately.
He
was free from her power from the outset.
Somehow he’d expected this
confrontation to be less one-sided, that God would grant him the power to
resist and overcome the demon king. Was he truly so weak? So helpless before
his enemy? Did he dare reveal his new demonic heritage to challenge Mephistopheles?
He wondered if the demon had even realized Birch was conversing with him in the
immortal tongue.

Birch took
another step.

The smoky shape
beside Mephistopheles hissed in alarm.

“Master,” Daella
warned unnecessarily. Her emerald eyes gleamed and shifted nervously between
Birch and Danner. Her gaze paused on the Blue paladin and focused intently, as
though trying to see through his skin.

“You resist?”
the demon king said with evident surprise. His eyes narrowed dangerously.
“You’re stronger than I thought, mortal, stronger than you were before. I shall
enjoy forcing you to tell me how. If the explanation is amusing enough, it
might even distract me from the pleasure of searing and consuming your flesh,”
he said, and hatred washed over Birch in accompaniment to the demon’s words.
“It is one among many things I wish to hear your screams tell me. I would know
how you escaped and how it was Kaelus came to be with you. I would also have
you tell me the name of the traitor whose power I felt outside, and how it is I
briefly felt an angelic presence outside my own palace. How you disappeared
from the demons I set hunting you, and how you came to arrive here unscathed.

“Oh, mortal, so
many, many things I will enjoy hearing as I taste your fear-soaked flesh, and
you will ever regret thinking your pitiful faith could be pitted against the
King of Hell.”

Mephistopheles’s
voice seethed, and the pools of Hellfire throughout the throne room flared in
response to his barely concealed wrath. If there was one thing the demon king
truly despised, it was the thought of another’s strength contesting or
thwarting his will. Birch and Kaelus were the only beings – mortal or immortal
– to ever escape his clutches. One had been recaptured, but Birch had returned
of his own volition, not bound and helpless, and Mephistopheles hated the Gray
paladin with unmatched passion because of it.

The King of Hell
clenched his fist, and now Birch found he could not move at all. He was frozen
between one step and the next, his feet spread but balanced on the floor. The
Gray paladin glared at the ground, gritted his teeth, and nearly burst
something in his head as he forced his leg to move an inch.

Has the time
come?
he wondered.
Do I reveal it now?

A familiar voice
sounded in his mind, telling him to wait. He couldn’t place the source, and the
familiarity eluded him. He
knew
that voice from somewhere in his past,
and until that instant he swore he could have put a name to it.

“And now,
mortal,” Mephistopheles said in rich, powerful tones that throbbed with malice,
“to begin your torture, you will kneel before me.”

“Never,” Birch
ground out between his clenched jaws.

The demon king
only laughed.

“You will kneel
before me and call me master, a betrayal of everything you have ever been and
of the stubborn strength you once showed,” Mephistopheles taunted him. “I did
not dominate or force you before, because I thought I might have use for you.
Now, on the brink of victory, it pleases me to break that last spine of
resistance you held out against me.

“And believe me,
mortal,” the ebony demon hissed, “this moment is all the sweeter because of
your former resistance and escape. You
will
be mine, like that fool who
calls himself my general is now mine, and you will come to curse yourself and
your God.”

Mephistopheles
made a beckoning motion, and to Birch’s horror he felt his body respond. Now he
fought with every ounce of his will
not
to move his legs, but the demon
king’s will was clamped around his body in a web of power, forcing him into
motion.

Unable to stop
himself, Birch took a step forward.

- 4 -

Flasch grunted
as he dropped to the ground, flattening himself as a foot-wide sword blade
whooshed by overhead. He rolled forward and launched himself between the
daemelan’s legs, barely avoiding the gigantic, pounding hooves as he appeared
on the other side of the demon. He spun and hamstrung the daemelan with his
sword, barely pausing as he raced away. The daemelan collapsed with a
satisfactory scream of agony and rolled on one side, unable to regain its footing.

The Violet
paladin shifted his path to avoid an oncoming demon, then scowled when he saw a
group of denarae being forced into a cluster by a pair of daemelans.

“Break up!”
he thought as loudly as he could at them.
“Scatter, now!”

As one of the
demons rushed forward, the denarae ducked out of the way and ran in every
direction, confusing the lumbering demons.

They’re fast
and powerful, but they’re stupid,
Flasch thought to himself. Multiple
targets tended to confuse the daemelans, which preferred their victims to be
clustered in a group so they could be pulverized en masse. Flasch gave orders
for denarae to group no larger than pairs and to keep on the move to avoid the
demons.

“We’ve got to
hold out until the others can come and get us,”
he told his platoon, doing
his best to exude confidence in his mental voice. Privately he muttered, “Come
on, guys, come and get us. We’re not going to last long like this.”

He murmured a
quick – but fervent – prayer to God for deliverance, then ducked between the
legs of an oncoming daemelan and split open the demon’s underbelly with his
sword. The daemelans were powerful enough that even the denarae weapons, which
had been blessed and etched with the holy symbol, were only able to inflict
minimal wounds against the four-footed demons. Only Flasch’s blade proved truly
effective, but there was only one of him and at least twenty daemelans. The
other thirty or so were still busy assaulting the palace gates, trying to force
their way in to attack the denarae and paladins trapped within.

Imps and
gremlins circled above, watching the battle ensuing below. They stayed well
clear of the rampaging daemelans and waited patiently for their chance to pick
through the remains once their larger cousins were through with the mortals.
Flasch didn’t relish the thought of being carrion for the demons circling
overhead any more than he liked the idea of being crushed to a pulp or split in
half by the daemelans.

A loud commotion
at the gate drew his attention, and he saw a large force of paladins throw back
the daemelans long enough to create a corridor for others to get through. Marc
and Guilian led their platoons and two platoons of paladins out into the open,
and they immediately came to reinforce Flasch.

“Pass the
word, Guilian,”
Flasch thought to the denarae platoon leader,
“split up
and keep moving around these hellions. It confuses them. Use the denarae to
distract them, but it takes a paladin to put them down.”

“Acknowledged.”

Flasch glanced around
and passed orders, guiding the movements of his platoon even as he ducked and
wove his way through a mass of daemelans. He saw one of the four-footed
monsters crush a Blue paladin who got too close, then the demon turned on an
Orange whose back was turned as he faced another demon. Flasch raced forward,
cut the demon’s hind legs out from under it, then leapt onto its back and
decapitated it.

A daemelan
rushed up next to him and tried to skewer him on a black lance, but Flasch
dodged the slow attack and leapt from the fallen daemelan’s shoulders onto the
other’s back. He paused for only a second – long enough to spin and stab the
demon through the throat – then he launched himself off the daemelan’s back in
the same motion with which he’d mounted it.

He tried to
twist to keep his feet underneath him, but Flasch struck the ground and felt
the air leave his lungs with a painful rush. He struggled to his feet and
prayed fervently that there weren’t any demons nearby.

Several yards
away, Trebor watched in amazement as the acrobatic Violet paladin decapitated
the first daemelan, then neatly killed the other with split-second reactions.
As Flasch struck the ground, Trebor kythed to him,
“Are you insanely stupid,
or are you really that good?”
he teased.

Brican broke in.
“He’s got to be that good, Trebor, or else he’s just damn lucky. People are
rarely stupid on purpose.”

“Except maybe
Flasch,”
Trebor amended with a mental chuckle.

“Laugh when
we’re done,”
Flasch said with uncharacteristic gravity. Trebor could feel
the pain in his friend’s mental voice. He lost Flasch for a moment in the swirl
of battle, then briefly caught sight of him again moving to engage an
unsuspecting daemelan. A squad of denarae crossed between them then, blocking
Trebor’s view of his friend again.