Eye of the Storm (39 page)

My eyes water in the sudden, piercing brightness. The stones around me are so pale they're almost white, and they look like saw blades in their jagged forms. My fingers blend into them. Blinking and letting tears drop down my cheeks, I heave again. Nothing comes out. Whatever sun shines above, it is white and cold and far away. Its incandescence makes purple spots in my vision.
 

There. I see the shimmer of the hells-hole, seeing it from the back side for the first time in my existence.
 

And there, on the other side of it, flat on the grass with the unmistakable shape of my brother and the unmissable yellow-orange of his hair holding her head in his lap, is Mira.
 

She didn't make it through.
 

Anguished, I struggle. My feet somehow push my weight upward, feeling like they and my legs are made of putty. Two steps toward the hells-hole almost make me hurl. I can see them, distorted by the shimmer of magic or space-time or whatever the fuck it is. The shades. Gryfflet, wiping bright blood from his nose.
 

And beyond them, a small army of Mediators descending on them, swords drawn.
 

The portal snaps closed.
 

I scream, and the sound is pure rage and terror.
 

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Hell.

This is hell.
 

I haven't seen a demon yet, but what I've just seen through that portal will be enough torment.
 

A cold wind hits me, and it's only then I realize that I'm naked.
 

As my eyes slowly adjust to the bright whiteness of the sun above me, I see my hands for the first time.
 

My skin is covered with web-like welts. They blanket me. They cross one another and spread out over my hands, my arms, my torso, my legs. My knees have bits of gravel pushed into the skin from where I knelt. The welts are raised, with what feels like hair-thin cuts at their peaks.

I'm naked.

My clothes.

The vial.

The ground at my feet is covered in stone and gravel. I fall to my knees again, not caring about the rocks that jab into my skin. Something glints in the gravel, and I scoop up a handful of it, tossing the rocks aside. Metal teeth in a string. It's a zipper. My zipper. There's not a hint of leather or cotton or polyester attached to it. My earrings are still in my ears, the usual silver studs I wear and never change or even think about. The bottom studs are crystal, and the crystal still seems to be in the metal prongs.
 

There. I leap forward and snatch the glimmer that reflects off the small round vial. The glass made it. The chain is broken, but otherwise exists. It looks like metal and glass made it through. And me.
 

But not Mira.
 

I don't know why.
 

My entire body aches, the welts burning against my skin.
 

The vial from Gryfflet is hard against my palm, warmed now to the heat of my body. I feel it with my fingers and grip it tight, the desire to drop it on the ground and smash it now, to go right back and help the ones I love nearly overwhelming me.
 

My stomach still churns. I can breathe here, as Gryfflet and Asher assured me, but the air feels thinner and colder, and it stinks of stone and sulfur. With the sun beaming down, I don't know what to expect. It seems the demons can walk in their own sun from what I already know, but if so, why aren't they here?

My swords somehow got tossed to the side. The scabbards and belts are gone, and the leather that cased the hilts, but the metal still looks keen enough.
 

My wits slowly gather. I shiver. I'm standing on a hilltop, surrounded by large boulders. Not the round, familiar type of boulders that litter riverbeds and gullies in my world. These are sharp, harsh chunks of rock.
 

Now that I can see better, my mind starts to process the world around me. Some of the rocks have drips of slime on them, long dried, but still visible. On one is a smear of caked green blood.
 

And now that I'm paying attention, I can see the patterns in the gravel that form a path.
 

It leads downward into a valley, just like Luna said it would.

The crevice is barely wide enough for maybe three humans to stand shoulder to shoulder, and from the smears on the edges, the hellkin who have come this way left something of themselves behind. I try to keep as much of a buffer between me and the drying goo as I can.
 

I listen as I walk, trying to catch any sounds that could alert me to the presence of demons. My ears keep popping. There doesn't seem to be any plant life here. No fauna or flora. Do the critters flee hellkin even here, or have the demons simply destroyed every living thing on this planet?

When I breathe, I taste the sulfur and vaguely metallic flavor of the air. It tastes foreign and wrong.

As I walk, I formulate a plan. I'll walk until sundown. If I haven't found anything by then, I'll go home and at least I will have tried.
 

I hate being here. Every step I take is a reminder that this is what they want to make our home into. A wasteland. Something devoured. Like bones sucked clean of marrow.

I walk for over an hour. The path and crevice widen into a valley, and the rocks rise up on either side of me until they're the height of skyscrapers. Being hemmed in does not fill me with confidence. I keep the glass vial in my palm against the hilt of my sword. I don't know if I'm strong enough to smash borosilicate glass with my bare hand and some metal, but if I end up surrounded by demons who decide I've lived long enough, at least I'll be able to find out in a hurry.

After another hour and a half, the canyon walls around me begin to recede. I wonder what formed them, if long ago a river flowed here and something bled this planet dry. When I finally emerge from the arms of stone surrounding me, a city spreads out ahead.
 

A city. In hell.
 

It's unmistakable. The height of the stones behind me that I compared to skyscrapers before was nothing. The walls of the crevice shrink away from the edifices that fill my view, vaulting skyward. They're all made of the same grey-white stone, and they soar to pinnacles high enough that the sparse clouds I barely noticed before almost brush against their uppermost reaches. The smaller buildings are no less astounding; even from a distance I can see the grace of their architecture. The city spreads out, wide and massive and imposing.
 

It takes me minutes of gawking to realize that it's a ruin.

I have nothing with me to document this, only my memory.
 

How long has this city laid empty? The towers have not crumbled. It's probably still over a mile from me or more, down a long slope. It occurs to me that my bare feet, which are growing colder and colder in the harsh white sunlight, have been treading on mostly flat ground. I look more closely. Could I be walking on an ancient road?

Far in the distance, I see a scrub of blue on the horizon, but I can't tell what it is. It could be some sort of plant or tree, or it could be just a different kind of rock. Around me, there are still giant stones and no sign of hellkin now. The path is well-wide enough to allow demons to pass twenty abreast at this point.
 

I have no way of knowing which direction is which. The sun is high, and even if I knew, east or north — nothing would have meaning here. Not without a goal of where to go. There's nothing around me to eat or drink, and even though I had a protein bar in the pocket of my leathers, it's long gone now. My stomach rumbles. The bile is long settled, but hunger has become a real issue. As has thirst. I see no sign anywhere that water stuck around after cutting out that canyon in this wasteland.
 

Standing on the crest of the slope, I notice movement to my left. At least half a mile away, but distinct. It's a horde, moving off in the opposite direction from where I stand. There's a line of dark grey, some bulbous, shuddering movement of a line of hellkin, with pink smudges that must be jeelings. Their glow is harder to see here, in this light. I don't know where they're going, but I'm glad they're not coming my way. I move toward them, setting my swords carefully on the ground, taking the vial's chain between my teeth, and climbing up on a smaller rock to get a better view.
 

My toes are battered by walking. Somewhere along the way, I cut one foot, because it's got smears of dried blood that have now worn partly away. The welts all over my body have faded a little. The wind has died, but my skin feels tight and cold. When I look out over the moving horde of hellkin, my fingers grip the rock tighter.
 

They're marching in formation.
 

That single sight confirms everything Gryfflet and I hypothesized — and confirms that the Summit has been grotesquely stupid.
 

Never in my life have I seen demons hold ranks. As they march, coming into better view as they round a corner from a cluster of ruins, I can see now. The jeelings march one per regiment, as it seems. The slummoths make up the bulk of the horde, but each regiment is flanked by harkasts. Interspersed between the solid block formations of slummoths and harkasts, rakath and markats come in double lines. At the rear, I see golgoths, their hulking shapes unmistakable. I don't see any frahlig demons or blitzes, but that doesn't mean they're not around.
 

They're organized, from what I can see, by species and rank. We've always assumed them to be virtually mindless, but nothing mindless could orchestrate the kinds of attacks on our cities we've seen before.
 

A scrape of rock is my only warning. I turn and find myself at eye level with an eleven-foot jeeling.
 

It takes an immediate step back.

I scramble down from the rock, a flash of pain lighting one toe. I ignore the pain and reach for my swords.

The jeeling watches me.

If it wanted me dead, I'd be dead already.
 

The thing is almost twice my height, and it peers down at me, glowing softly pink.

Picking up my swords poses no problem, and I grip them as carefully as I can.

The jeeling turns and starts to walk away, down the slope toward the city. After a moment, it pauses and looks over one massive spiked shoulder.

It wants me to go with it.
 

A frenetic laugh threatens to burst out of my larynx. I stop it on a burble and swallow the tiny bit of spit that kicked up in my mouth. Gripping the vial securely between my palm and the hilt of my sword, I proceed after the demon.
 

The jeeling heads right toward the city. The path curves, and dotting the slope are more rocks that reveal themselves to be over ten feet tall. I want to kick myself; that's how the jeeling snuck up on me. Or walked, as it were. Distance and depth perception change in a world where everything is monochrome, it seems.
 

The information I have already is good, but not enough. I could stop here and smash my vial and go back with the knowledge that the demons have full on ranks and procedure and that they are seemingly capable of fetching a person without resorting to violence. I've killed enough of their kind that I would have expected any demon that got within biting distance of me would tear off a chunk, even if I'm supposed to be kept breathing.

This can't be a parley — they're winning.
 

For a moment I see the flash through the portal again, of Mira on the ground with her head in Evis's lap. Of Gryfflet wiping blood from his nose just as a wave of Mediators aims itself toward my family. My heart flips, and I shudder.
 

I can't think about that now. I have to trust that they'll fight — whatever it happens to be that they're fighting. I only hope to any god that might listen that the Mediators find demons to whet their blades on instead of my loved ones.