Piercing the Darkness (84 page)

IN THE MOUNTAINS
above the Summit Institute, the signal reached Tal’s ears loud and clear.

“Done!” he cried, leaping to his feet. “They’ve set the fire in Bacon’s Corner!”

“Better late than never,” Guilo said with a shrug.

“It will reach Summit soon enough,” said Tal, drawing his sword. “Prepare to attack!”

AMETHYST WAS GETTING
close to the big white house, the home of LifeCircle. The roar of Heaven’s wings thundered in her ears. She whimpered, she cried, she fled before them.
My masters in LifeCircle! They will save me!

SANTINELLI SMILED
a bitter smile as he looked long and hard at Mr. Khull, still brandishing the knife. “I believe you’re right, Mr. Khull. I do see myself.” He looked at Sally. “Power is power, whether it be wielded through legal decisions or . . . from the edge of a knife. And as for our gentle followers . . .” He looked upward, thinking of the hundreds of peace-seeking conferees now gathered from around the globe. “We
are
equal. We are devils, all.”

He stepped back and took his place by the wall, out of the way. Goring and Steele joined him. He crossed his arms and with chin jutted out resolutely, said, “Teach us, Mr. Khull. We will learn.”

Destroyer clicked his talons, and the spirits of Broken Birch moved the five Satanists like puppets.

Khull smiled with diabolical pleasure and nodded to his men. Two of them immediately looped a chain over a beam and affixed a hook to it. The other two released Sally from the chair and yanked her to her feet.

The Strongman, Destroyer, and all their wicked lords and commanders gathered, moving in close, ready for the triumph.

Sally knew there was no more time. “The rosters are in Ashton!”

“Too late,” said Goring. “Please proceed,
gentlemen
!”

They bound her hands in front of her.

“The rosters are in Ashton!”

Where?
growled the Strongman.

“
Where
in Ashton?” demanded Santinelli.

“I sent them to a Post Office box!”

Santinelli put up his hand. Khull looked disappointed, but he motioned for his men to stop.

Santinelli stepped forward. “What Post Office box?”

Sally really did try, but . . . “I . . . I can’t remember the number.”

“Proceed, gentlemen.”

They grabbed her arms and started lifting her.

“I planned all those letters!”

Santinelli held up his hand again, and Khull’s men set her down. Santinelli exchanged encouraged glances with Goring and Steele. “My, how the revelations are beginning to flow!”

Destroyer didn’t like the subject matter. He nudged Steele.

“She’s lying,” said Steele.

“I remember the mail room, Mr. Steele!” Sally cried with a trembling voice.

Steele only leered at her. He didn’t know what she was talking about.

“I used to work in the mail room at the Omega Center, remember?”

Steele didn’t leer this time. He remembered.

Sally spilled it out rapidly, desperately. “You told me how to intercept mail you didn’t want the staff to read. You said it wasn’t wrong because it protected our purposes. You said your people did it all the time! Remember that, Mr. Steele?”

Goring and Santinelli looked at Steele. He was silent because he did remember it.

The Strongman suddenly grabbed Destroyer around the neck, but he didn’t start squeezing. Not yet. He was waiting to hear the rest.

“Go on,” said Santinelli.

“It was the only way to find you. I figured whoever tried to kill me would have to keep anyone from finding out I was still alive, so they’d have to intercept my letters; and I knew from the papers that you were using the postmaster in Bacon’s Corner for your lawsuit, so that’s where I sent them, and . . .”

“And you addressed them all to the defendant in the lawsuit, Tom Harris . . .”

“I knew you couldn’t let
him
see the letters.”

Santinelli smiled. He was impressed. “So your letters were to be a trail to the peole ultimately responsible for your . . . alleged death!”

“Professor Lynch knew about my concern for Tom Harris, and Khull knew exactly where to find me, and you all knew without my telling you that I’d embraced Christianity. That was confirmation enough that you’d stolen my letters, but of course . . . now you’ve shown them to me. You have them. Every one of them.”

Destroyer tried to force a leering, cocky smile as he choked and gargled out, “So what?”

Goring stepped in. “Marvelous! Yes, the letters are all here, and so are you. Now you have the satisfaction of knowing who your would-be killers are. But you recall, of course, that no one else has seen those letters, and the world has lost all track of you!”

“That’s why I made copies.”

There was a strange delay, as if that sentence took a few seconds to reach their ears and register in their minds. They all looked at her dumbly.

She drew a breath and went for broke. “The copies are in the Post Office box too, along with the rosters and James Bardine’s ring, the one
I took from the finger of that woman who tried to kill me. The ring you took from my neck is the one I got years ago from Owen Bennett. You can doublecheck his code name, Gawaine, on the inside of the ring if you like.”

Santinelli came close, and he was even shaking a little. “What Post Office box, Ms. Roe?”

“It’s empty by now anyway. I sent a letter to a lady who works at the
Ashton Clarion
, and I enclosed the key.”

NOW THE STRONGMAN
applied the pressure, and Destroyer had to struggle for breath. “I never heard of any such letter! What do
you
know about it?”

Destroyer tried to answer. “I sent the twelve captains to Ashton to look into it—”

The Strongman began shaking him, making Destroyer’s eyes look like horizontal, yellow blurs. “Where are those twelve?”

“They . . . they . . .”

“Wasn’t the intercepting of those letters
your
idea?”

Suddenly Destroyer thought he was reliving his first feelings of doom; he was hearing the sound of a trumpet again, just like before. But this time it was louder. It was reverberating all around them. It was so loud he couldn’t be imagining it.

He wasn’t. The Strongman heard it too, and let out a growl that shook the room.

Then they heard a resounding shout from so many voices it sounded like waves of the ocean. “For the saints of God, and for the Lamb!”

The Strongman roared again and threw Destroyer to the floor. “The enemy! We are discovered!”

The hundreds of demons in the room—the Strongman’s aides, the bloodstained murderers of Broken Birch, the lofty and conceited deceivers controlling Santinelli, Goring, and Steele—flew into a panic, reaching for their swords, jostling each other, shouting and shrieking.

The floor and walls began to shake with the rumble of heavenly wings descending from above like a violent storm.

IT WAS EXHILARATING,
thrilling, reviving, rewarding—everything an angelic warrior was made for!

The Host of Heaven had waited so long and had built up such fervor that when the signal finally came, they broke over the crests of the mountains on every side like a violent, shimmering ocean wave and showered down like hail upon the dark cloud of demons in the valley, scattering them like dust before the wind, routing, battling, swinging, and pushing down, down, down toward the Summit Institute.

Tal, at the crest of the wave, dove like a hawk, his wings straight back, his sword a needle of light at the end of his outstretched arm. His war cry could be heard above all the tumult, and his sword was the first to strike.

They flew into the heart of the black cloud, like piercing a black, boiling thunderhead. The swords of spirits clashed, wings slapped and fluttered, red smoke fogged the air. Tal kicked, cut, spun like a scythe, and fought his way downward, downward. He could hear the roar of Guilo, the Strength of Many, just above and to the left, batting at demons and mowing them down, flipping them sideways to meet other blades, kicking and grabbing what hides he could find, cutting a widening swath, gutting the cloud at its core.

THE STRONGMAN SLAPPED
his demon lords about the room to bring them to their senses. “Are you commanders or not? To your posts! Defend us!”

The demons scattered to their posts, leaving the room almost empty except for the demons of Broken Birch.

The Strongman glared at Destroyer. “The woman has lit a fire that will consume us. There is nothing more we need from her. Finish her before
we
are finished!”

Destroyer shot a glance at Khull’s demons.