The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (79 page)

Malith charged forward, intending to put Garnet off-balance
with an unexpected attack.

“If he’s coming on
strong, join with his motion. Use it for yourself and crush him.”

Malith’s sword swept down, then reversed direction, trying
to confuse Garnet. The Red paladin matched the motions of his body to the
attack in perfect timing and stepped inside the swings, spinning so his back
was to Malith. In the same motion, before the Black paladin could react, Garnet
grabbed one of Malith’s hands, bent at the waist, and threw Malith over his
shoulder. Even as the Black paladin struck the ground, Garnet’s sword swung
around and swept down. Sparks flew as the tip of his blade carved a deep gouge
in the stone.

Malith’s black, bottomless eyes stared lifelessly, wide in
shock and disbelief. His head was still positioned beside his shoulders, but it
was turned at ninety degrees and no longer connected to the rest of his body.
His mouth was opened in the beginning stages of a scream, the last sound he
would never utter.

“For you, Gerard.”

- 2 -

Michael watched in amazement as Garnet systematically
destroyed Malith. He’d seen some of the duels between Garnet and Gerard during
his friend’s training, but nothing he’d seen could have prepared him for the
sheer ferocity. No, that wasn’t right, because Garnet fought with perfect
control and a command of himself Michael had never before seen.

The outcome was obvious to anyone who saw the duel, and when
Garnet hurled Malith to the ground and decapitated him, Michael couldn’t help
but scream in exuberance. Gerard was avenged.

Michael’s elation was short-lived, however, as he turned his
attention to the ground where Birch lay slain, and then immediately to the
white
Ash’Ailant
. Three childris were charging toward the pillar of
glittering white rock, cutting down everyone in their path. Michael sent a
mental command to his entire platoon to shift their attack and move toward the
Stone, but he knew they would never get there in time. The childris were just
too damn fast!

Then one of the insectoid demons stopped and reared back
with a mind-piercing shriek. A blood-drenched elf was straddling the monster
like a horse, and his twin-bladed weapon spun in an invisible blur, tearing the
childris in two at the joint between its torso and thorax. The childris
screeched a second longer before its head was cut free, but by the time the
severed head struck the ground, the elf was already gone.

It was several long seconds before Michael was able to
recognize the elf, and he realized with a shock that it was Siran. The elf
captain was obviously mortally wounded, but he continued to attack as if his
trauma was of no importance. He leapt agilely to the back of the next nearest
childris and landed nimbly on his feet. With an acrobatic flip only slightly
hampered by his injuries, Siran sprang over the childris’s head, his weapon
flashing. The second childris’s head was split in two from crown to chin, and
Siran landed on the back of the last childris just as it reached the white
Stone.

“He’s going to make it!” Michael cried hopefully.

But whatever energy had buoyed the elven warrior suddenly
betrayed him, and he lost his grip on his weapon. The two blades of the
halven
rattled on the courtyard loudly, and for a moment
Michael’s world slowed to a crawl and went silent as metal rang on stone.
Michael opened his mouth to shout, and the childris reared back and brought
both of its sword-like arms crashing down on the white pillar of
angelstone
.

And then the rest of the world did go silent. All fighting
ceased in an instant, and every eye turned toward the
Ash’Ailant
. A loud
crack split the dead silence, and a thin black line marred the pure, smooth
surface of the white Stone. Before the childris could even rear back to attack
again, the Stone abruptly split down the center and collapsed into two halves.

Siran was thrown from the childris’s back and lay helpless
on the ground, his energy depleted. The childris spun and reared back to strike
the fallen elf, then inexplicably stopped.

A red glow filled the courtyard, and Michael finally
identified the source. It was Birch’s body.

A red mist seeped from his eyes and nose, and once more the
demonic form of Kaelus manifested before them. His eyes burned now with a
radiant crimson fire more piercing and brilliant than his already blood-colored
flesh. For a moment, it seemed as though he might have completely appeared in a
corporeal form, so solid and real did he seem, but then Michael realized he
could still see the ground through the demon’s body, however indistinctly.

Kaelus stared down at Birch’s body for a long moment of
silence. After the crack of the Stone, no one had dared make a sound except for
the childris throwing Siran free. Not even the wind blew.

Then Kaelus leaned down and touched Birch’s heart, and a
drop of pure red fire fell from his eyes into the wound where Malith’s sword
had pierced his chest. A shaft of crimson light shot up from the wound and
broke into the clouds, then vanished a second later. Kaelus straightened and
suddenly started to waver. His shape became less distinct, and he faded from
view to be replaced by a red mist, which hovered over Birch’s body.

Birch’s back arched upward as though in shock, and he gasped
in a deep breath. The red mist of Kaelus rushed into his lungs and disappeared.

Michael watched in awe as Birch got slowly to his feet. No
one came near him. No one said a word. He paused long enough to lift his sword
from the ground, then he looked around him.

The ground trembled violently, but still there was no noise.
No stones fell from their place, no pebbles stirred in motion, and not a single
blade of grass twitched, yet the very foundations of the world shook as a
nameless force and power aligned itself with the world. Or perhaps it was not
nameless, for Michael knew exactly what was coming.

Hell.

They had failed, and now Hell would align entirely with
Lokka, and there would be no stopping the demons then. There would be no
Merging. No strip of land to hold them to, no Barrier of stone or power to hold
it in check. Hell was infinitely large, and no corner of the world would escape
its presence.

Michael had the impression of endless plains overlapping the
scene before him. Dry, cracked earth superimposed itself over the stones of the
courtyard, and a white, stone temple slid by his vision. The columns had been
toppled long ago and its holy symbols defaced, and it was barely recognizable
as having once been a magnificent structure.

And then it was gone. In its place was a deep ravine, and
then a mountain. A river of flame flowed beneath Michael’s feet, and he felt a
moment’s shock when he realized he
wasn’t
being incinerated by the heat
he suddenly felt. A river of thick, black water followed soon after, and then
another river that seemed more white mist than actual water.

Michael realized he had just seen the Dena-
Fol
, the Dena-
Kan
, and the
Dena-Tel, the three rivers of Hell: Fury, Pain, and Despair.

A moment later, the walls of some massive city sprang up in the
midst of those already a part of the Barrier, and Michael knew he was seeing
Dis, the only known city in Hell. He saw hordes of demons and crowds of damned
souls who still had their original, mortal appearance. The damned were toiling
under the watchful eye of the demons, hauling what looked to be metallic ore
from a the black entrance of a deep mine. Then they, too, disappeared and were
replaced by another endless plain.

The overlapping landscape passed by more quickly, and
Michael could no longer identify the individual land features before they were
replaced by another, and then another. He saw another stretch of each of the
three rivers, and then suddenly it was over. No more images appeared to mar the
scene, and he was left staring at a courtyard filled only with mortals.

All the demons and damned souls who had been fighting a
timeless moment before were now gone with no trace left behind. The humans and
demi-humans left were all staring about in terrified bewilderment. The noon sun
broke through the winter clouds, bringing light if not warmth to the scene
below.

They were still alive. There was no one left to fight.

Impossibly, it seemed as though they might have won.
Certainly, there did not seem to be any indication that Hell was still in
alignment with their world, and the lack of demons hinted that they’d all been
swept away with the passing of the immortal plane.

But a gut feeling of discomfiture gnawed at Michael’s heart,
and he knew that instead of something having miraculously saved them, something
had gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Only eternity is permanent, and that has yet to be proven.

- Violet Paladin Timothy
Weatherstone
,

“Time: Fact or Theory?” (70 AM)

- 1 -

In some ways, many were considering it a victory. No one
seemed to know the reasons why they had been spared, why Hell had not
manifested itself on their world and delivered them into the hands of anguish
and torment, but they viewed it as a good sign and so celebrated their
survival.

It was a pyrrhic victory at best. The brief, sweet taste of
success turned to ashes in the mouths of the survivors, who realized the
terrible cost the battle had taken upon them. Thousands upon thousands lay
dead, their souls gone on to soar in Heaven or be scoured in Hell. The city was
a shambles: between the rampaging demons, the inevitable looters, and other
random destruction, there was no quarter of the city that had gone unscathed.
Too many soldiers returned to their homes to find families slaughtered in their
beds, victims of the tunneling demons. Too many of those who survived in the
city would never have their loved ones return to them from the Barrier.

The paladins of the Prism returned to their chapterhouse and
took stock of their own terrible losses. More than half of the paladins were
still on the walls of the Barrier or in the courtyards below, standing the
silent vigil of the dead. With their losses, and the original losses of the
misbegotten paladin excursion into Hell in the months before the assault, the
Prismatic Order was down to less than a third of its numbers of a year before.
The devastation of the Order was a terrible blow to the holy warriors, who
nevertheless took the fate of their comrades in stride. They had all fallen for
a cause, to protect the world, and for a time it seemed their deaths might have
meant something.

But for a select group, whose loss was more bitter than that
of their brethren, they soon learned the truth of their struggle.

- 2 -

The news of Trebor’s death hit Garnet and the other members
of Shadow Company like a lead weight dropped into their souls. There were no
platitudes of “He died well.” No one suggested he had “moved on to a better
place.” Trebor’s friends and kin mourned his loss with a bitter taste; he had
finally held his dream in his hands, and died with it still fresh upon his
shoulders. Trebor had been made a paladin only hours before his death, and
their sole consolation was the thought that for those brief, shining moments,
he
had
in fact realized his dream.

But the completeness they had felt in having him as a
brother paladin now made his loss ache that much worse in their hearts. They
cremated the shell of his body and buried his ashes in one of the gardens in
the Prism’s chapterhouse. It was the least they could do for him.

The surviving members of Shadow Company stood around his
gravesite in silence. Denarae funerals were not supposed to be a time of
mourning or of grief, but then this denarae had been unlike any other. They all
recognized there was something special about Trebor, a determination to realize
his dream at any cost and a faith that had held up his spirits when his dream
had been ripped from his grasp.

And something more; something even more powerful than either
of these formidable traits; something that had enabled him to look beyond the
blindness of his world and accept his fellow men. The trait that had marked his
ascension to the Prism.

“Trebor had love,” Michael said softly into the silence. “He
was born into a world surrounded by humans and their hate, and somehow he looked
beyond that and loved those who hated him most. A man cannot heal what he does
not accept and love, and rare is the paladin of any race who could heal better
than our friend.”

The Yellow paladin glanced at Trebor’s cousin, Brican, whose
animosity toward humans was well-known and had not lessened one bit since
joining Shadow Company. He accepted the humans in Shadow Company because he
knew them, but his grudge against the rest of the human race was still firmly
in place. Brican saw Michael’s stare and did not flinch as he returned the
paladin’s gaze.

“Trebor forgave,” Flasch said next. “God Himself only knows
the extent of the injuries and insults he received or overheard from the
thoughts of those around him, but Trebor forgave people their petty hatreds.
Knowing him as we did, I don’t think there’s anything in this world he would
not have forgiven someone, particularly one of his friends.”

Flasch stared hard at an oblivious Danner, whose eyes were
locked on the overturned earth where Trebor’s ashes now rested.

“Trebor would never hold even the slightest grudge against
those he loved,” the Violet paladin said gently.

One by one, many of the other members of Shadow Company
spoke up and lauded their friend and comrade. A few spoke of their childhood together,
most had only known him since joining the company. The only notable silence
came from Danner, who was widely regarded as Trebor’s best friend, even above
Flasch and the others.