The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (54 page)

“…what I mean,” Flasch was saying somewhat heatedly,
obviously nettled. “It is, after all, part of the calling we’re all supposed to
feel to some extent, and more specifically to my own reflection. Piety and
faith aren’t all there is to being a Violet,” he said. “It’s also the
evangelical Facet, and I tell you, I think I’m making progress with her.”

“With who?” Danner asked.

“Huh? Oh, hi, Alicia,” Flasch said, toning his voice down
slightly as he saw her standing next to Danner.

“It’s her job to make you think she’s into you, Flasch,”
Marc pointed out. “Obviously I know there are exceptions, I just feel it
necessary to remind you.”

“Who are you talking about?” Alicia asked, repeating
Danner’s question for him. Their hands were intertwined.

“A girl named Deeta who works at Aunt Delia’s,” Flasch
replied. “Danner introduced us all the other night.” Flasch turned back toward
the others. “Now, we were talking and…”

Danner lost the thread of the conversation as he saw Alicia
stiffen and turn her head very slowly to glare at Danner. Her hand hardened and
withdrew from his like she’d been stung. Her eyes were hurt.

“You went to that place to see Deeta?” she asked.

“What? No,” Danner said, stammering slightly in confusion.
Why was she upset? “We all went there together last night, as a group, to relax
after all the fighting before we came here. It’s Marc’s favorite place, you
know. And she was working there.”

“And?” Alicia asked, her voice steely.

“And what?”

Alicia glowered at him, then abruptly spun and stalked off
up the stairs toward her room. Danner stared after her a moment, trying to
decide how he should react. The problem was, he didn’t even know what he’d done
wrong.
 
He didn’t know why she was upset,
so it was hard to know what he should do. He
did
know, however, that
doing nothing would only make things worse, so he resolved to go talk to her.
Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and stooped to look down into the common
room.

“Garnet, do me a favor and whack Flasch upside the head,
please,” Danner said grumpily. When Garnet acquiesced, Flasch guarded his head
with his hands to prevent a second slap and frowned up at Danner.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” Danner said and continued up the
stairs.

“And you,” Flasch said, turning to Garnet. “Why’d you do
that without knowing why? How do you know I deserved it?”

“I figured there has to be
something
you’ve done I
haven’t smacked you for,” Garnet said blandly, “so I wasn’t hurting anything by
following through.”

Upstairs, Danner knocked on Alicia’s door and called her
name, but she didn’t respond. He tried the handle only to find it locked.
Danner sighed. He pulled a pair of thin wires from a kit he always had with
him, and three seconds later he’d picked the lock and opened the door.

“I didn’t say you could come in,” Alicia said as she turned
to see him closing the door behind him. Her voice was hard and her eyes were
red with tears.

“You didn’t say I couldn’t come in either,” Danner replied,
deciding if he was going to be in trouble, he at least didn’t have to put up
with her being moody unless absolutely necessary. If she was going to be mad at
him, this time he’d know what he’d done.

“You didn’t say anything, in fact, so I took the liberty of
granting myself permission,” Danner said.

“Well, leave,” she told him. “I don’t want to talk to you
right now.”

“Right now’s all we’ve got for a while,” Danner said. “Maybe
forever, for all I know. I’m in the middle of a war right now, and the last
thing I want preying on my mind is why the woman I love isn’t talking to me.”

There. He’d said it out in the open, hoping that a clear
statement of his feelings would soften her a little and make her talk to him.
He was wrong, at least about the softening part.

“The woman you love?” Alicia said. “For now at least, as
long as I’m right in front of you. But the minute I’m not here, you go running
to that club and into the arms of some blonde strumpet. Did you tell her you
loved her, too? Did you lay with her?”

“Alicia, what in the name of Sin, San, and Satan’s teeth are
you talking about?”

“Deeta,” she said, all but spitting the name.

“How is it I’m in trouble for seeing someone who happens to
know me at the club?” Danner asked. “Your brother goes there, and you don’t
mind. You know I’ve been there. I didn’t try to hide it. But I also told you I
haven’t explored the primary, um, attractions there.”

“And you expect me to believe that? When they just said
you’d been with her?” Alicia said, her voice nearly a yell.

Danner sighed.

“Yes, I guess I really do expect you to believe me,” he said
sadly. “I thought you trusted me, just as I trust you. I’ve never lied to you,
and I don’t believe you’ve ever lied to me. A relationship can only be built on
trust, and if you no longer trust me, I’m kind of afraid of where that leaves
us.”

Maybe it was the tone of his voice, or the slump in his
shoulders, but Alicia suddenly dropped her antagonism and crossed the room to
sit on the edge of the bed nearest him. She motioned and he sat nearby, about
an arm’s length from her.

“You really haven’t done anything?” she asked softly.

“I swear on my oath as a paladin,” he said earnestly. “We
went to the club to relax, and while Trebor, Flasch, and I were talking, Deeta
suddenly showed up and threw herself in my lap.” Alicia’s eyes hardened, so
Danner hurried on. “She asked about Moreen, then about you, and I told her you
and I were together. Then she got up, and she and Flasch went off to a corner
somewhere. I didn’t even see her again after that. Now Flasch and she have
apparently been spending time together the last nights, but I don’t know what’s
going on between them.”

Danner fell silent. Alicia reached a hand out and placed it
on his own.

“I’m sorry, Danner,” she said. “It’s just, we haven’t talked
since we… since that night, and I didn’t know where you were or what you were
doing, or what you thought afterward. And I guess I’m still haunted by Deeta’s
overwhelming success with men and her advances toward you in Demar, and… Oh, I
don’t know,” she said. “I guess I was just hurt and not thinking very clearly.”

“Alicia,” he said, and she looked up into his eyes. “Alicia,
I love you. I love you as surely as anything I’ve ever known, and more than
anything I’ve ever experienced or felt before. You’re the most wonderful,
amazing thing in my life, and sometimes I feel like I barely know anything
about you, because we never get the chance to talk to each other anymore. I
don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling, and God knows I can’t read your
mind like Trebor can. Please don’t ever shut me out again,” he said.

“I need to know what you’re thinking and feeling, too.
You’re a part of me now, and even if I
could
change that, I wouldn’t,”
Danner said. “I love you, and I want to go on loving you, and I want you to
love me.”

“I do love you, Danner,” Alicia said fervently. “I’m sorry.
I’ve just been all twisted up thinking about us, and about…
us
,” she
said with emphasis, and Danner knew she was once more referring to their
intimacy. “Everything I feel tells me we haven’t done anything wrong, but
somewhere in there I still doubt, and…”

Danner nodded.

“I know, I have the same questions,” he assured her. “I
wasn’t sure how to talk to you about it, so I avoided it a couple days when I
should have come to find you and let you know how I was feeling. I
could
claim the war as a distraction,” he said wryly, and she laughed, “but honestly,
I was scared I wouldn’t know how to handle things if they started to heat up
again between us before I had a chance to talk to you.”

“It’s not my fault you’re irresistible,” she said coyly.

“Me?” he snorted. “It’s all I can do not to strip you down
right now and have my way with you,” he said, only half-joking. Then he reached
up a tender hand and touched her cheek softly.

“But seriously. I love you, Alicia, I just think we need to
spend some time with each other figuring things out,” Danner said. “I don’t
want to rush right back into things where there might not be a way back without
one or both of us getting hurt.”

Alicia looked down.

“And if we run out of time?” she asked, her voice barely
more than a whisper. “What happens if I lose you?”

Danner was silent.

“I’ll try not to let that happen,” he said. “I want to be
with you too much to let myself get killed.”

“Promise me you’ll live and come back to me,” she said
suddenly. “When this war is over, promise me you’ll come back and be with me. I
don’t want to spend my life staring into a fire, waiting. Promise you’ll come
back and love me.”

“I promise.”

When the dwarves embarked on their genocidal “Cleansing War” against
the Dale gnomes, the other races of the world did little or nothing to halt the
unwarranted massacres. Dwarven hands may have held the blade, but blood stains
the hands of all peoples for their inaction.

- Orange Paladin
Gelt
Rockhand
,

“A History of Dwarven Warfare” (901 AM)

- 1 -

Malith paced the ground before the Merging with even,
unhurried steps. He was thoughtful, but not anxious. Thinking, but not worried.

The denarae unit. They were a nuisance. Not only had they
destroyed one of Malith’s most potent tools, but in killing the last of The
Three they had also turned the Merishank army into a valuable resource, rather
than the crippling liability they were intended to have been. Since
spearheading the defense of the Barrier, the denarae held where all others
would have been crushed and apparently were responsible for obliterating
thousands of Malith’s troops in a fiery holocaust the likes of which he’d never
seen. Malith had resorted to using threats and making painful examples of the
damned to get the mutated souls to pit themselves against the ash-colored unit.
Already some of the demons had begun whispering amongst themselves that perhaps
Malith’s leadership was not as potent as they’d been led to believe, and
perhaps new leadership might be in order. Mephistopheles sometimes allowed such
forceful usurpations of power, and the demon king’s continued favoritism toward
Malith was the only thing preventing a forceful change of authority.

Malith knew he could send wave after wave of damned souls
after the denarae and eventually grind them into dust, but he was unwilling to
waste that many of his troops. The damned would have their uses, and Malith was
unwilling to fall into the trap of needlessly throwing away resources like
chasing a bad hand in
Dividha
. He needed more information about them.

The black-cloaked human spun and singled out a demon adept
at mental communication. The small creature barely came up to Malith’s waist,
and it trembled slightly as it approached him. Malith had obliterated the last
such demon he used; it had given him the unfortunate news that the last of The
Three had been destroyed.

“Get me the dybbuk,” Malith ordered. A few moments later,
the demon timidly stretched out a claw and signaled it had reached the spirit.

“What does the general command?” the demon said, speaking in
the sibilant voice of the dybbuk.

“The unit of denarae,” Malith said. “The ones you wanted
dead. I should have asked for more details before. Tell me about them now.”

“They are Shadow Company,” the dybbuk’s voice said. “They
are made up of a group of several hundred volunteer denarae who arrived months
ago in response to an unknown summons. The Council authorized…”

“I don’t want to know their personal lives,” Malith said
acidly. “I want to know how they operate. What is their current strength? How
have they deployed? What are their capabilities, aside from their accursed
ability to sneak into my camp, incinerate thousands of troops, and disappear
without a trace? Who commands them? Tell me battlefield specifics, creature,
not a biography.”

The dybbuk hissed in agitation, obviously trying to sort
through everything Malith had demanded and answer where it could. Malith was
quite capable, though not willing unless it proved necessary, of having the
dybbuk killed in an instant, even at such a distance. It was a necessary
precaution, for dybbuks were inherently cowardly. Their rare and almost
parasitic nature resulted in strong instincts for self-preservation and hiding,
and if discovered and cornered, they would say or do anything to protect their
existence.

“They are led by a group of paladins, mostly young ones
fresh out of training, and their only experience until now has been against the
Merishank army when it was still under the demon Ran,” the dybbuk said at last.
Malith frowned, and the dybbuk hurried on as though sensing the delicacy of
that subject. “There is little I can tell you that you do not already know,
mighty general. Their superb fighting skills and unparalleled abilities at
infiltration were their main strengths against Merishank, combined with the
tactics of their commander, a Red paladin named Gerard…”

“Morningham,” Malith said suddenly, finishing for the
dybbuk. “Gerard Morningham is the commander of this Shadow Company?”

“Yes, general.”

Malith fell silent, wrapping his thoughts around him like a
second cloak. The dybbuk waited in silence, unwilling to interrupt, lest it
anger Malith. Finally Malith turned back to the demon who served as the
telepathic conduit for their conversation.

“Tell me about the other officers,” he said firmly. “These
new recruits. Gerard trained them, yes? Are they the only other paladins with
the unit?”