Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) (70 page)

James stared at
Hoil a long moment, judging the man’s state of mind. He was still sane, if only
barely, just depressed and wallowing in his own despair.

“Well then,
Hoil,” James said, “if you’ve got nothing better to do, you’re going to help us
look for Vander.”

“That Orange
buddy of yours?” Hoil asked. “Isn’t he dead?”

“That’s the one,”
Nuse said. “He’s been imprisoned by Maya somewhere in this city, and we’re
going to look for him.”

“He’s in the
library,” Hoil said dispiritedly.

James blinked in
surprise.

“He’s what?”

“He said he’s in
the library,” Nuse said helpfully. James glared at him, then turned to Hoil.

“How do you
know?” he asked.

“I got lost and
wandered in there, and I saw two Cherubs guarding one of the doors,” Hoil
replied. “I asked, and they rather helpfully told me they were guarding someone
for the Metatron. That’s what that angel bitch Maya calls herself, so when you
said your friend was imprisoned by her…” Hoil shrugged. “I could probably find
my way back there given a bit of time.”

James stared at
him a moment longer in surprise, then he laughed.

“Well then,
Hoil, you’ve just volunteered to guide us to the library,” he said, and stooped
to slip one shoulder under Hoil’s armpit. “Come on then.”

“Why should I
bother to help you?” Hoil demanded. “Just leave me alone. You know where he is
now.”

“I know he’s in
the library, but I don’t know where that is,” James replied cheerfully. “As my
friend here recently pointed out, this is a bloody large city, and we need your
help. I plan on our side winning this war, and I don’t relish having to tell
Danner that I left his father alone wandering the streets of Medina.”

James grunted as
he pulled the still-struggling Hoil along.

“Plus, you’re
going to be a grandfather soon, right?” the Yellow paladin asked. “What kind of
example are you setting for the new little tyke? Nuse, do you want to tell
Danner’s kids their grandfather is a spiritless laggard?”

“I’d rather
not,” Nuse replied with a perfectly straight face.

“There, see?”
James said. “Get your feet under you and get your ass moving, Hoil. We wouldn’t
want to disappoint your future grandchildren, now would we?”

Surprisingly
enough, Hoil straightened and began to walk on his own after that.

Growing up on the streets gave me a new insight into
the sacrifices of being a paladin. I would rather own nothing and appreciate
everything, than own everything and appreciate nothing.

- Nuse Rojena,

“The Urchin” (1003 AM)

- 1 -

After two weeks
of uneventful traveling, they finally reached what Birch said was their first
stop. They were near where the Merging had stood, but no one even suggested
traveling to test if it was still standing and functional. The road ahead was
too long to consider taking any detours. According to the timepiece Danner had
with him, the mortal world had just reached a new month, Brakmanth, and nearly
a month and a half had passed at home since they’d crossed the Binding.

The first
waypoint on their path was, for Michael at least, more than a little
disappointing. The building looked like an old temple of some sort, or at the very
least the house of someone with very grandiose taste. Whatever beauty it had
once possessed was long-since ruined, however. Tall pillars made from gleaming
white angelstone had been toppled to the ground, and inscriptions of the
Tricrus
had been gouged out, defaced by
Cthonis
symbols, and otherwise destroyed
by sharp demonic claws eons ago. The building itself had collapsed and there
were few walls still standing.

Siran directed
his elves to scout the area, and they reported back a moment later that it was
clear.

“This was the
first thing I saw other than empty wasteland,” Birch explained to them as they
gazed on the ruined structure. “It only took me a week or so to get here.”

“Where to next
then, uncle?” Danner asked.

“Those
mountains,” Birch replied, pointing into the distance. “It took me nearly a
year to reach them, and at the time I could have sworn the damn things kept
moving further away every time I stopped to rest. This time around, I should be
able to get us there in a few days.”

“Then let’s get
moving,” Gerard said. “No sense yammering about like old ladies.”

It took them
nearly a full week to reach the edge of the mountains, and still they had yet
to see a single demon or damned soul.

“That, at least,
is no surprise,” Birch said. “It was the same before. It’s an infinite plane of
existence, so there’s a lot of room to get lost here. I don’t know how long our
luck will hold, but enjoy it while it lasts. Once the demon king knows we’re
here, you can bet he’ll send everything he can to destroy us before we ever get
a glimpse of Dis, much less Abaddon itself.”

Michael looked
around and spotted Marc leaning against Danner’s buggy nearby. They had stopped
to give the living members of their expedition a chance to rest, so most of
them were setting up tents or sitting in groups talking in low voices. Michael
walked a few steps and casually leaned next to the Orange paladin.

“Remind me,” he
whispered to Marc, “what’s Abaddon?”

“The deepest pit
of Hell,” Marc whispered back, “where Mephistopheles’s palace lies. Think of a
target. Abaddon is a deep bowl in the bull’s-eye, and it’s surrounded by a
wide, empty plain a couple miles in diameter. Around that plain is a ring of
high cliffs, then another broad plain, then the city of Dis, which is of course
laid out in a wide circle. It’s enormous.”

Michael
listened, surprised.

“How do you know
all this?” he asked softly. “I’d be willing to bet that description isn’t in
any text I’ve ever seen or heard of.”

“It’s not,” Marc
replied. “I’ve been reading through some of Birch’s memoirs he gave me to
review. For such an intelligent guy, his punctuation and word choice are
seriously lacking at times. I’ve been helping him with some editing. Not a bad
quick-sketch artist either, but he could never sell on the streets.”

Michael snorted
in amusement. “Anything else important in there we should know about?” he
asked.

Marc shrugged.
“Probably a lot, but nothing comes to mind just now. I’ll let you know if I
think of anything.”

“Please do.”

Marc winked at
Michael, then wandered off to talk to Guilian.

Michael’s
platoon was already setting up to rest for the night – although calling it
“night” was somewhat misleading. It was much dimmer and more foreboding than in
Heaven, but like the holy plane, the light was constant and never faded. The
molten sky overhead rumbled and roiled in the windless sky, but always the
light filtered through to the desiccated landscape.

The Yellow
paladin wandered around, bored, until he came across Birch sitting with his
back propped against Selti’s flank. The dakkan was in his runner form and had
settled down for a nap. Birch had a thick booklet balanced on one leg, and he
was writing on a mostly blank page with a charcoal stick.

“Am I
interrupting?” Michael asked politely.

“Not really,”
the Gray paladin replied. “I was just noting a few thoughts I had during the
day. This place brings back a lot of memories, and while I’d almost like to
forget all of them, your friend Marc convinced me to write them down instead.”

“We were just
talking about that, actually,” Michael told him. “I’ll have to read that
someday.”

Birch finished
writing another sentence, frowned, then shrugged and closed the book. He set it
down as Michael walked closer.

“What were you
writing, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Birch smiled with
weary eyes. “I was writing down some of the tortures I remembered.”

Michael nearly
tripped over the empty ground.

“None of the
more exotic ones this time,” Birch continued, “just some of the daily things
they did to me, most of them a complete waste of time. There are only so many
times your fingers can be broken before it becomes almost boring having to heal
them back a few minutes later. Painful of course, but sort of routine after a
few months of daily repetition.”

Michael gave him
a nervous sort of smile. Birch gestured for him to sit nearby, so Michael
dropped to one knee and turned his other foot underneath him to sit on. He only
wore the breastplate from his armor – the rest was carefully stowed in his pack
– but he preferred not to sit directly on the dusty ground.

“This may be
none of my business,” Michael said, “but I’ve wondered – what was the worst
thing they ever did to you? Your worst memory from here, I mean. I imagine
there’s a lot to choose from, but…” he trailed off uncertainly.

Birch shook his
head. “I don’t mind you asking at all, and I can tell you
exactly
what
my worst experience was. I was held for six years, three months, and eight days
after they finally captured me. Nearly every day they had me, I was tortured either
physically or psychologically. After a few months, the demons would delight in
teasing me that I could end my torment by renouncing God and the Prism and
worshipping the King of Hell.”

Michael thought
of Malith.

“Six years,
three months, and two days after I was captured, I caught myself blaming God
for my predicament, and I very nearly cursed His name,” Birch said softly. He
looked up at Michael, but stayed silent.

Finally, Michael
asked, “But you didn’t, did you?” Birch shook his head. “So why then…”

“Why is that my
worst memory?” Birch asked. “Because it terrified me that they’d been able to
push me that close to giving in. If they did it once, they could do it again,
and if they could do that, they just might be able to break me. It was only a
matter of time, and in Hell, that’s about the only thing you have. Less than a
week later, as I hung broken and bleeding, I made my deal with Satan and
escaped.”

Michael was
silent for a long moment, then finally, in a soft voice, he said, “A lesson in
faith.”

“Or
desperation,” Birch said without looking at him. “Take your pick.”

- 2 -

Three weeks
later, they still had seen neither hide nor claw of a single demon or damned
soul. The incessant dullness of their journey began to wear on many of them,
and tempers flared on more than on occasion, even between the normally
close-knit denarae in Shadow Company. Flasch wondered how anyone could endure a
journey like this without companionship, and guessed most White paladins who
crossed ended up talking to their dakkans most of the way.

He gently
fingered the green and violet scarf tied around his waist and thought of
Anolla. Did he love her? Maybe. Or rather, he loved her, he just was not
necessarily
in
love with her. Flasch remembered an old girlfriend making
that distinction years ago, and he’d called it trite semantics. Now he wasn’t
so sure. He really thought he might be
in love
, and if not, he was at
least well on his way.

The flimsy scarf
was only partially visible – Flasch’s armor covered the rest. He wore most of
the non-constrictive pieces from his full suit: the greaves, the breast- and
back-plates, even a pair of bracers. Flasch disliked the full platemail attire,
however, especially the pieces that governed his joints. The former thief
couldn’t stand having his arms and legs hampered in any way, and a layer of
thick steel tended to do just that. He was lean and muscular, but not really
built to carry full armor like Garnet and some of the others were.

A short distance
ahead, Flasch noticed everyone beginning to slow to a halt.

“Nap time
already?” he mused. “But it’s still light outside.”

Flasch smiled
half-heartedly. With no one nearby to hear his quips, they just weren’t as much
fun. He trotted forward until he reached the spot where everyone had stopped.
Birch was kneeling on the ground, running his fingers through the dust, and
several others were standing around him watching silently. The Elan’Vital
spread out and kept a careful eye on their immediate vicinity, while Shadow
Company scouted further afield.

“What’s up?”
Flasch asked, catching Brican’s eye.

“Birch said
this was where his first dakkan mount Sultana died,”
the denarae answered.
“This
is where Selti was born.”

Flasch looked
around and saw the gray dakkan in his drann shape, standing across from Birch.
The little beast’s tail was whipping back and forth in agitation, and every few
seconds, he shifted uncomfortably and crooned in distress.

“Is that
what’s wrong with him?”
Flasch asked.

“How should I
know?”
Brican kythed with a touch of sarcasm.
“I can’t kythe in dakkan
minds, you know.”

“Well work on
that, would you?”

Brican turned
away and didn’t bother to reply. Flasch grinned at his back.

Danner joined
their group and stood behind his uncle. He stood motionless for a moment, then
his head jerked up as though hearing something. He looked around with a
perplexed expression, unable to locate whatever it was he had heard.

“Danner, are you
all right?” Brican asked.

“There’s
something else here,” he said softly, “a presence of some sort.” He looked down
at Birch. “Uncle?”

“I feel it,
too,” Birch replied. “It’s familiar and yet…”

Just then, Selti
leapt into the air and let loose an ear-piercing screech. Instinctively,
everyone covered their ears and watched the gray drann swoop toward Birch.
Flasch wondered if the little reptile was going to attack, but at the last
second, Selti flared his wings and landed on Birch’s hastily outthrust arm.