Hero of Fire

by P. E. Padilla

  The monsters surrounding them advanced. There were as many enemies as humans. This did not look like an easy fight.

  The beasts stalked on four legs, all of which ended in long claws. Not the retractable kind hunting cats had, but hard, sharp claws that clicked when the creatures stepped on rock. Apparently they no longer avoided doing so since the humans already knew they were there.

  The monsters’ bodies were shaped like a wolf’s, with sharp scales covering the entire thing and a line of spikes from the tops of their heads down their spines. A long, powerful tail twitched behind each of them, also scaled and armored, with a sharp point that looked to be a formidable weapon by the way the monsters controlled them.

  Maybe the worst part was the thick, muscled neck and blockish head that split into a wide maw with dozens of sharp, gleaming teeth. The closest of them trained its fire-red eyes on Kate and screeched a horrible sound.

  “Zaggash,” Peiros said. “Be careful of the spikes, the whipping tail, and of course, the teeth. They are all poison.”

  There was no time for more words. The beasts all leaped at once.

  Kate had been expecting stupid brutes, animals that reacted on instinct and were not capable of strategic thought.

  She was wrong.

  Fully half the creatures came at Jurdan while the other half tried to get through to Benedict, who stood right next to the archer. They not only knew Benedict was weak, but were intelligent enough to try to eliminate the humans one at a time.

  Kate intercepted one of the monsters before it could get to Jurdan. She slammed it with her shield, deflecting its leap so that it passed wide of its intended target. Peiros immediately attacked it with his crescent weapons.

  Though the others shifted to try to help Jurdan, they were experienced enough not to open the circle to any zaggash that might try to flank them. For the moment, the brunt of the attack was on Jurdan and his two closest companions.

  If the creatures had attacked anyone else in the circle, Jurdan could have provided support with his bow. Were the zaggash so intelligent that they targeted the one member of the team who could have provided sustained ranged support?

  As the thought went through Kate’s mind, a flash of steel zipped through the air right beside her, resolving itself into a throwing knife that embedded itself in the eye of a zaggash that was about to get past her and to Jurdan.

  She nodded to Benedict and cast out all the extraneous thoughts of the moment before. She had a battle to wage. She could think about the deeper meaning of the enemies’ actions at a later time.

  One of the zaggash twisted as it went by her, changing direction faster than should have been possible. One moment Kate faced its scaled flank and the next, she barely got her shield up in time to stop the mouthful of teeth that would have torn into her.

  She squatted and angled her shield to keep the mouth away, then straightened her body, thrusting her sword and pushing with her legs at the same time. The effect was that she nearly launched the creature that outweighed her by at least two to one and drove her sword completely through its body.

  The dead zaggash crashed into another of its fellows, tripping it up.

  Jurdan was being pressed by three of the four remaining monsters, too many for his single sword and lack of a shield. Peiros dodged and twisted, evading the other creature, carving chunks out of it with his weapons, but he was no help to the team’s archer.

  As Kate charged in, shield leading, one of the beasts scored a solid swipe of its claws on Jurdan’s torso, tearing a furrow across the chain mail. He lost his balance, and another of the creatures took the opportunity to whip its tail around and slash Jurdan’s neck, just under his death mask. The force of it ripped the mask off his face.

  Jurdan bellowed in rage, lopping off the end of the tail that struck him, spinning, and savagely slashing the zaggash that had raked him, nearly taking off one of its front legs.

  Then Kate was there. She used the momentum of her charge, leaped in the air to avoid another swishing tail, tucked into a tight ball, and then extended just as she had turned a complete flip, her sword leading.

  She fully intended for the Courtenay Crush to live up to its name. With the power of her jump and the rotation of her flip, she generated enough force that when her sword struck the zaggash’s thick neck, it cleaved all the way through.

  She ended on her knees, the head of the beast on one side of her and the body on the other.

  Peiros had killed the creature he was fighting, so that left only two, both desperately trying to take down Jurdan. One of them was minus a tail, and the other couldn’t use its front leg, but they refused to give up. Blood streamed down Jurdan’s neck and his chest, and he looked to be tiring, but he was still a dervish with his straight sword. He batted away the swipes of the creatures, trying to find an opening.

  He didn’t need to.

  He had held on long enough for help to arrive. Aurel, obviously confident that they were no longer in danger of being flanked, rushed in and swung his huge two-handed sword. The zaggash that was his target, still focusing on Jurdan, didn’t even try to dodge. The sword cut deeply into its rear flank, and both its legs collapsed. Aurel followed up by driving the point of his sword into the crippled beast’s head. It twitched once and then lay still.

  Kate, Peiros, and Jurdan all attacked the final zaggash at the same time. Peiros drew both crescents across the creature’s throat as it tried to bite Jurdan while the archer himself, and Kate, thrust their blades into its torso. It gurgled blood and dropped to the ground.

  As soon as the last beast was down, Jurdan slumped to the ground, holding his side. He had lost a lot of blood.

  “Hurry,” Peiros said. “We must bind up his wounds before he loses more blood. He is already weakening from it.”

  The man from Salornum cleaned the wound the best he could with the available cloth, a small blanket he had in his pack. He applied a thick liquid to a small piece he had cut from it and wiped it on the wound.

  “It will help to prevent the wound from sickening his limbs,” Peiros told Kate when she watched with interest.

  “Fire,” Jurdan said. “It feels like my whole chest is on fire. Damn thing poisoned me.”

  “But I thought the firestones prevented us from being poisoned by the demons?” Kate said.

  “It’s true, mostly,” Visimar answered. “But very powerful poisons can actually overwhelm the firestones. It can’t happen within the range of the large firestones back at Gateskeep, of course, but for our personal ones, when we’re in Hell, I’ve heard it happening once or twice.”

  “What does demon beast poison do?” she asked.

  “The same as all poisons,” Visimar said. “They kill.”

  22

  “That’s it,” Kate said. “We’re going back now. We need to get back to Gateskeep.”

  To continue would be folly. Benedict’s injuries were bad enough, but he was healing slowly, not getting worse. Jurdan, on the other hand, was fighting the zaggash poison. The longer they stayed in Hell, the worse he would get. Eventually, the poison would kill him.

  Despite what she had argued before going through the gate, she was not willing to sacrifice one of her men, especially one who had been so friendly a person to a new Black recruit. She wasn’t going to do it.

  “Kate,” Jurdan said, “we have to continue.” She was shaking her head violently, but he caught her up in his eyes. “The poison won’t kill me for a while. We have time. This mission is too important to abandon. There is only us. If we don’t complete it, the whole Order, the whole world, may die.

  “If we go back, I might get treatment for the poison, and I might live. But for how long? If the demons’ plans succeed, we’ll all die. Here or on the other side of the gate, I’d rather not die, but if I have to, I want it to mean something.”

  Kate glared at him. “No, Jurdan. You have to live. We’ll get you better, and then we’ll wait for the demons to open the gate again and we’ll t
ry again.”

  “You know that won’t work, Kate. When they open the gate again, it will be because they have completed their plans. It will be too late for us. We need to do this now.

  “I’ll help to the best of my ability, but if I falter, you have to leave me behind. The mission, that’s the important thing. You said so yourself.”

  “No, I was wrong,” Kate said. “Don’t give up, Jurdan, please.”

  Jurdan laughed, but it cut off abruptly and his eyes squinted in pain. “I’m not giving up. I’ll fight for every second I have. I am simply being practical. If I can, by my sacrifice, help save the world, I think that’s a pretty good bargain. How many people have the opportunity to do that, even among the Black?

  “Are you saying I can’t be a hero? Begging your pardon, but no one can tell me I can’t be a hero. Don’t you try, Kate.”

  His smile, genuine though shadowed by underlying pain, broke her heart.

  “Kate, it is the right thing,” Peiros said.

  Aurel nodded at her, as did Visimar. Benedict had his eyes locked on her, watching to see what she would do. She raised an eyebrow at him, and he shrugged and gave her a thumbs up.

  It seemed that it was unanimous.

  “I…” she started.

  “You don’t need to say anything, Kate,” Jurdan said. “Not right now. Let’s get going. We have a demon lord to track down, and I’m not getting any younger. Prettier, yes, but younger, not so much.”

  Her laugh was more an explosive exhalation, but it felt good. Much better than going along with a decision that would cost her friend his life.

  “We have a time limit now,” she said. “Let’s get this thing done.”

  They gathered up their gear and headed out, Peiros in the lead.

  As they traveled, Kate tried to figure out how long they had been in Hell. She tried to count how many times they had stopped and slept, but couldn’t remember. For that matter, she didn’t even know how Peiros knew when to tell them to stop. Time seemed to be meaningless in the place.

  And that was the least of her worries.

  “How do you do it?” she asked Peiros.

  “Do what?” he responded, eyes scanning the horizon as he spoke. Kate had gone up to the point position where he was picking their path. Actually, that was not the correct term because as far as they could see, it was barren rock with no cover whatsoever. Any path would do. He was merely picking the direction in which to travel.

  “How do you know when to stop us and how long we’ve been in here? For that matter, how long have we been here?”

  “Four days.”

  “See,” she said. “That. How do you know that?”

  “Do you want an explanation you can understand or an accurate one?”

  “Both.”

  “Very well. The easy way is to count the number of meals you have eaten from your rations, or subtract what you have left from what you started with. That will tell you how long we have been in Hell.”

  She frowned at him, mostly because his simple explanation had never occurred to her. “But that’s not how you judge time here.”

  “No. All I can say is that after you have spent much time here, as I have, perhaps time will make sense. There is no sunrise or sunset, but the air is different at different times of the day. Truly, I do not really know how I can know it. I just do. Does that help you?”

  “No, not really,” she said.

  “Let us finish this mission and then, when the need comes to enter Hell again, perhaps you will go. Perhaps you will gain this sense as well, or maybe it is something peculiar to me and a few others. Jurdan has not yet attained this skill, but Koren Merklen could tell at any moment in the day exactly what time it was.”

  “Koren Merklen,” Kate said reverently. “I have heard so many tales of his heroic acts.”

  Peiros nodded. “They are all true, and many others besides. We lost a great hero when he disappeared months ago. And a great man. He was my mentor in all things involving sorties into Hell. He is sorely missed. I have no doubt that if he were still alive, he would be with us now.”

  Kate held the silence for a moment. The nearly imperceptible sound of six pairs of feet was the only thing to break the tomb-like stillness in the air.

  “What happened?” she asked. “You said earlier he was gone, disappeared on a mission, but that’s all I’ve heard.”

  “It is about as much as we know,” he answered. “He was on a mission so classified, no one knows the details but the captain himself. He left with our brother Gery Thurnsen and never returned. It was three and a half months ago. He was the best, but even he could not survive in Hell for that long. There were short search missions, but none found a trace of the man.

  “It is unfortunate. If there was ever a time for Koren, now is it.”

  Kate agreed. She would’ve liked to have met him, the greatest of the present-day Black by many accounts.

  Peiros threw his hand up suddenly and then dropped to the ground, lying flat and motionless. It took Kate a moment to remember her training and then she, too, dropped. Her face was inches from Peiros’s.

  “I am picking up thoughts. Demons are near.”

  Peiros crooked his finger to catch Kate’s attention and then he straightened it out as if he was pointing. The direction of the demons.

  She didn’t know the protocol for situations like this. She twisted her neck to look for the others. They had all dropped exactly where they were when Peiros did. Benedict was slowly taking his sword out of the scabbard. Peiros already had one of his khruk out, obviously thinking ahead when he hit the ground so that he already had his weapon to hand.

  There was no way Kate could get her sword out without too much movement. She cursed silently and resolved to wait. Once the demons found them, the others would engage, giving her time to draw her weapon. She filed the whole thing away in her mind so she would know better what to do next time.

  If they survived the current encounter.

  They waited a long time, so long that Kate became impatient. Surely the demons had moved away. She could not see them in any direction, and with the terrain the way it was—miles of flat land with no obstructions—she would have if they were close.

  She let out a breath like a sigh and Peiros put his hand out violently with the palm parallel to the ground, like he was chopping something. The sign for freeze.

  She froze, or rather, she continued to be frozen. She hadn’t moved, only let out a breath.

  Then there were four demons right in front of them, within a half dozen feet. If it wasn’t for Peiros’s sign, Kate would have jumped at the sudden appearance. How did they do that?

  The four in front of her were regular grunt demons, the kind she faced all the time at the gate. They hadn’t seen any of her team yet, so she examined them for anything that stuck out.

  They looked different from each other, of course, but they were all reddish-skinned with different shaped horns coming from the tops or sides of their heads. All four were approximately man-sized, maybe a bit taller. The team could take them out easily. In fact, she could handle all four herself.

  But what if they weren’t alone? What if they were part of a larger force that was just about to appear like they had?

  The demons passed out of her field of vision. Since she couldn’t move her head without being seen, she had to accept waiting blindly.

  She looked to Peiros for direction. He didn’t move any part of his body, but he flared his eyes briefly at her and then narrowed them. He shifted his gaze over her for a second and then met her eyes once more.

  Then, he winked.

  Kate blinked. Did he just wink at her? What was that supposed to—

  Scuffling behind her made her want to turn and look, but she couldn’t do it without being seen. Then what sounded like a butcher cutting a chunk of meat off the flank of some animal. When another noise, a crash, came, she did chance a look.

  Visimar, Jurdan, and Benedict were before he
r, as if they were lounging around. Two demons were dead at their feet, one lay off to the side with no visible injuries, and one was being restrained by Aurel. The big man had put something that looked like a bit in the demon’s mouth so it couldn’t make any sound.

  Peiros go to his feet and went over to the rest of the team.

  “Is that one dead or unconscious?” He pointed to the one on the ground that wasn’t leaking green fluid everywhere.

  “Out cold,” Jurdan said. “I slammed my pommel into the back of its head. The blow could have killed it, but I don’t think it did.”

  “Good,” Peiros said. “I will have a talk with them, one at a time. Keep the unconscious one over there while I question this one.”

  Aurel brought the demon he held over to Peiros while the others dragged the knocked out demon twenty feet away and then stood over it to make sure it didn’t escape or sound an alarm when it woke.

  Kate felt like a spectator. The men all knew what to do without so much as a word between them. It was like they were communicating via telepathy. Telepathy!

  She opened her mouth to say something, but Peiros put his hand up. “It is fine, Kate. The demon is out of range of any others. It cannot communicate to get help. It could talk with the other one, over there, but that one is unconscious. The others will make sure it stays that way until I am done with this one.”

  Again, Peiros had thought of everything. Why did Captain Achard give her this command? She was a child compared to these veterans.

  Loud screeches and grunts broke the silence. Kate’s head jerked around as she sought the sound’s source, hand on her hilt.

  It was Peiros. He stared the restrained demon straight in the eye and…what? Talked demon language to it? He had said he could understand the demons’ tongue, but she hadn’t thought that meant he could speak it, too. She wondered if he could send his thoughts to them as well. She would have to ask him later.

  The demon bucked and twisted against Aurel’s arms, to no avail. After trying to escape for a solid minute, during which time Peiros continued to chitter at it, it finally relaxed, defeated. Its solid black eyes, so devoid of any kind of light, stared back at the man with hatred.