The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War) (77 page)

Trebor’s death was Danner’s fault, and he hated himself for
it.

The people who had so nearly fallen victim to the demons’
bloodlust were now sobbing in relief, and several of them laughed out of sheer
joy to be alive. They smiled through tears and hugged each other as their fear
was replaced by relief.

Danner felt like shouting at them.

What are you so happy about?
Danner screamed
accusingly in his mind. How dare they feel happy! What cause was there for joy
and smiling when Trebor lay lifeless on the streets? How could these people be so
bold as to feel relief and laugh when someone as great and beautiful as Trebor
would never again feel anything except the cold fingers of death around his
corpse?

Danner’s fingers clenched into fists, and he came near to
losing himself again. He felt his anger welling up within him, and his eyes
flared. He started to turn his head upward to glare at the rejoicing people,
but then his gaze fell on Trebor’s head, which was staring at Danner with hurt
and sympathy etched in the lines of his face. For a brief time, Trebor had been
a paladin of the virtue of love, and Danner knew he would be betraying
everything his friend had embodied if he gave in to his anger yet again.
Immediately, Danner’s rage cooled, and he felt only sorrow and remorse.
Recognizing his own danger, Danner allowed his wings to fade into nothingness,
and his eyes ceased to burn.

“I’m sorry, Trebor,” he whispered as tears, no longer
burning their cool flame, coursed down his cheeks. “Oh, God, how I’m sorry.”

- 3 -

Siran stalked the edges of the Barrier on silent feet, his
elven warriors fanned out behind him and ready to attack at the first sign of
the enemy. He knew what the humans behind him were thinking, that Siran was
leading his soldiers on a suicide run, and in truth, Siran agreed with them.
That’s what every battle was, a step into suicide. The Elan’Vital entered
battle with the acceptance they were already dead, and left battle as though
they had just wakened to a new dawn of life. They did not seek the twilight,
but neither would they turn away from the darkness it when it was time, for
they were already dead.

They carried death with them at every moment. They studied
it in all forms. They honed their weapons with it. They breathed it, ate it,
slept it, lived it. Became it. Death was a constant companion, and through
complete devotion they accepted it as part of their true self.

Resolute acceptance of death. Such was the Way of the
warrior.

Humans had no understanding of such a concept, and neither
did other elves or demi-humans. It was only the warrior – a classification that
transcended race and time – who understood his place in the world as the giver
and taker of death. Only a true warrior who understood the Way would ever find
the immortality of his soul that was to be found through death, even in life.

To be sure, other lots in the world followed their own Way,
and there was a true self to be found on the other side of all such paths, a
true experience of divine peace, but only the Way of the warrior lived through
death.

Each of the elves following Siran knew this in the depths of
his soul, and it was the following and acceptance of that Way that made the
Elan’Vital the elite soldiers of the elven military. Theirs was the task of
guarding the royal family. During a war, the Elan’Vital always led the way.
They were the first to fight and the last to flee. That was why the new king
had sent men from their ranks to face the demonic threat.

The Way of the warrior.

As they drew closer to the Barrier, Siran reflected on the denarae
troops left behind. Amongst all the soldiers he had seen since coming to the
mainland, those of this Shadow Company were the most akin to true warriors.
They were already on the path to follow the warrior’s Way, though they did not
know it themselves. Perhaps, at the conclusion of the infernal chaos they all
faced, Siran might spend time with them. He had much to teach them of fighting,
and he saw much to learn from them. They would each gain strength from the
learning and be better warriors for the shared experience.

Siran put the thought in the back of his mind to be
considered for a future day, when and if such a day came.

The elven commander mounted the steps of the inner wall of
the Barrier swiftly but cautiously, and when his head crested the top of the
wall, he quickly scanned the area for the insectoid demons. Siran found them
immediately.

A dozen childris were no more than fifty yards away, and
they were swiftly carving their way through the defenders on the wall. Maimed
and bloody corpses lay scattered haphazardly across the wall in the wake of the
demons’ passing. The childris were all facing the other direction, and Siran
spared the time for a mirthless smile that flashed and was gone in the space of
a blink.

He turned and gave hand signals to his men, who stood
waiting on the steps below him with upturned faces. They were as eager to fight
as they were aware of the death into which they had already entered. Only
victory would see a new dawn break for them. They were warriors.

Then, with a command that hissed through Siran’s teeth like
a snake’s curse, the elves rushed up the stairs and sprinted across the
distance to the demons. They made no outcry, and their steps were the whisper
of a leaf blowing in the wind. When they struck, it was quick, quiet, and
deadly.

Their weapons had all been marked with the holy symbol and
blessed by paladins – Siran had seen to that as soon as the effectiveness of
that mark had been proven against the abominations. Their blades carved into
childris carapaces reluctantly, but with enough force to strike deeply so the
demons cried out in agony. The mantis creatures did not cry out with a voice,
but with a keening cry that pierced Siran’s mind and made him want to drop his
halven
and clutch his head in pain.

Grimly, he held onto the haft, then spun the blade. The
childris’s neck was narrow and was easily cut, and the piercing noise ended as
the demon’s head toppled to the ground.

Other elves fared with less success than their commander,
for the childris were quick to respond to the new threat and, as Garnet had
said, they were unbelievably fast. Elves of the Elan’Vital were used to being
among the fastest fighters ever trained, and their blades sang a deadly song as
they spun and cut through the air. And yet as fast as they were, most could not
match the speed of the childris attacks. Elves lost arms to attacks they never
saw or had the chance to block, and only a few were able to withstand the
near-invisible attacks from the blade-like claws.

Siran ducked and slashed smoothly, settling into a flow as
though he was back in a practice room in his barracks facing a dozen opponents.
The childris moved so quickly at times it seemed they were standing still
-
they stood in once place and almost
vanished, only to reappear a few inches or feet away. But a careful observer
could see the instant they reappeared, stone-still as though they’d been
standing in that place forever. Siran quickly learned to anticipate their
shifting movements and attacked not where they were, but where they
would be
.
Siran cut through their legs, which were thinner and more vulnerable than the
thicker shells of their torsos and thoraxes and more easily accessible than the
weak-point of their necks, which were protected by the two slashing sword
limbs.

As the seconds progressed, Siran moved faster and faster as
his attacks matched the motions of his enemies. He blocked their blows at times
without thinking, simply because he felt the timing of the attack and knew when
to parry and when it was safe to slash. In the second he wondered about the
spears he’d seen some carrying, Siran saw one of the childris already in motion
to throw the missile at him. Siran battered the shaft out of the air with a
slap from his own blade, then slid beneath a childris and swept its feet out
from under it with one circular swipe.

In the same spin, Siran’s feet repositioned beneath him and
he stood up smoothly, his twin blades singing a song of death as he bore down
on another childris. Again, he turned in anticipation of an attack, but this
time it did not come as he expected. Siran blocked one swipe of a sharpened
limb, but was not expecting the spear that flew from across the courtyard and
caught him in the belly.

The three-foot shaft pierced his body and slid halfway
through, grinding against Siran’s inner organs as it lodged in his flesh. Siran
glanced down at the weapon with an expression of surprise and disgust.

Is this to be my final twilight?
he wondered.
Perhaps. But Siran would not calmly meet oblivion without bringing further
death upon his foes.

I will not die with my
goal unfulfilled.

Siran wrenched the spear from his belly and dropped it to
the courtyard below him. He gripped the shaft of his
halven
with bloody hands and actually smiled as he spun anew into the fray. Having
already accepted his death, a grievous wound meant little to him beyond the
irritation of hampering his movements. As long as Siran was still capable of
fighting, he would do so.

I will not live with
my goal unfulfilled.

The Way of the warrior.

- 4 -

The gates shuddered.

Sergeant
Farnes
Derard
watched the scene below him with a growing sense of
terror mingled with the certainty that he would soon die. Strangely, he didn’t
feel afraid of dying, only regretful of all the things he hadn’t done.

“I should have married her when I had the chance,” he said
softly to himself as he looked into the face of his impending doom.

On the ground before the Barrier, a massive battering ram
was pounding against the central gate with brutal force. The siege machine was
like no other
Farnes
had seen before. It was made
entirely of black steel, polished to a mirror-like shine that showed the
distorted reflections of clouds on the ebony surface.
Farnes
couldn’t see the wheels beneath it, but he knew they must be large and powerful
to support such a great weight.

The central column of the battering ram was a solid four
feet across, and it angled down at the foremost edge almost to a point. To each
side, massive shields had been constructed to protect the drolkul demons powering
the massive engine of war. The metal shields wrapped entirely around the
four-limbed demons, protecting them from all angles so no arrow or gnomish
explosive could reach the monsters within. Only a few narrow slits marred the
otherwise complete surface of the shields, allowing the demons within to see
their course.
Farnes
wondered how the demons had even
gotten inside the shields, but then he remembered how adept they were at
tunneling and decided they must have entered the protected chambers from underneath.
There were ten such shields, five on each side, spaced evenly along the
thirty-foot length of the ram.

With the strength and power of the drolkuls driving the
battering ram,
Farnes
knew there was little hope of
the gate withstanding the attack for long. They could not harm the demons
running it, nor could they light the metal on fire as they could wooden siege
engines. There seemed no stopping it.

One of the officers ordered caltrops to be thrown in the
path of the ram, but they had no apparent effect on the demons, and the barrage
continued. Of course they had no effect,
Farnes
realized, since only paladins or weapons marked with their holy symbol would
truly harm the unholy monsters.

Farnes
glanced at his own sword,
reassured by the three lines scratched into the surface. Yes, he would probably
die soon, but somehow seeing the
Tricrus
gave him comfort in that
thought.

The gates shuddered once more, and
Farnes
heard a horrible splintering sound as the parts of the gates made from wood
broke and shattered under the ram’s assault. A minute later, the ram made one
final charge that carried it through the gate and into the courtyard beyond. In
its wake,
Farnes
expected to see a rush of demons
swarm the defenders within.

Instead, eight warriors in shining armor rushed through the
gate. At first
Farnes
thought they were paladins, but
then he saw the black cloaks they wore, and then nothing could comfort him as
he was swept under a wave of despair.

- 5 -

The battering ram burst into the courtyard and narrowly
missed the white
Ash’Ailant
in the center. Humans and demi-humans were
thrown to the side or else crushed beneath the massive bulk of the black siege
engine, and a long streak of blood formed a red carpet for the advance of the
eight Black paladins.

Their armor shone in the dim light from the overcast sky,
and their ebony swords defied light as they swept in lethal arcs and left
trails of blood sweeping in the air after them. Men, gnomes, dwarves, and elves
died before those merciless blades, slain without hesitation or remorse as they
fell before the evil onslaught.

All this, Birch watched without moving. His eyes blazed
fiercely as he stood atop the rear wall of the white courtyard. He had remained
motionless as the yellow Stone was destroyed a few hundred feet away, and he
stood in silence as Siran and the elves battled the childris. Somewhere in the
back of his mind, he was aware of having followed Kaelus’s consciousness to
prevent a horrible transformation within Danner, but even that had been done
without his stirring so much as to blink.

Then the foremost of the Black paladins raised his visor and
stared directly at Birch. Malith raised his sword in a mocking salute, then
clapped his visor back down and cut a dwarf in half from shoulder to hip.