Diana

by Chloe Garner

  And he’d nailed the approach.

  The scouts had reported him, but the stir that bubbled around him was nowhere near as big as it would have been if they’d had another hour to anticipate him.

  “You here to make a deal?” a demon he knew asked. “I’ve got some great stuff going on, if you want a piece of it.”

  Carter ignored him. Most of the demons that would approach him in the street were grubby and unconnected. The ones who were worth talking to would, like Carter, sit high up - or low down - in a retreat and wait for the interesting things to come to them.

  He made his way through the small section of hellcity between the outer ring of buildings and the one that he wanted, and he knocked on the door, waiting only a moment for the guard to answer it.

  “I’m here for Mha’Shing,” Carter said. The guard turned his head and said something to someone Carter couldn’t see, then he opened the door.

  “Is he expecting you?” the demon asked. Power demon, well-compensated for his role, but unaware of anything interesting going on in the real world of demon politics.

  “No,” Carter said. “But we both know that doesn’t matter.”

  The demon grunted and started the long escort down through the embedded space inside the tower where Mha’Shing’s cult had lived for longer than anyone could remember.

  Cults rose and fell quickly, but there were a few, a very select few, that had stood, or re-risen, over the long years. Mha’Shing wasn’t so much a political demon as a pragmatic one, and he tended to align with the more powerful sects, simply so that he didn’t have to provide his own protection.

  And when you considered the skillset he brought to the guildhouse, every sect in hellcity was willing to bid whatever he wanted to get him to shift alliances.

  Mha’Shing - Swordmaker.

  Carter heard the sound of metal on metal a few minutes before they reached Swordmaker’s workshop, and he dismissed the guard.

  “I can make it from here,” he said.

  “I’m not supposed to let…”

  “Do you want to insult me, here inside your own guild house?” Carter asked. “Really?”

  There was a moment of indecision, and then the demon left. Carter nodded, satisfied, and went on down through the twisting hallways to the flame-licked room where Swordmaker was working.

  The demon looked up at him, his stony face no longer capable of communicating fine emotions, but recognition and a certain lust for commerce showing in his eyes.

  “Carter,” he said. “I hadn’t heard you were coming.”

  “Made other plans with Tolemny, but they fell through,” Carter said. “So I came to the best.”

  Swordmaker made a throaty noise of disapproval at the mention of Tolemny, and Carter rubbed his hand across his face, trying not to be visibly amused.

  Playing one blacksmith against another was an old game, around here, and Swordmaker had few enough rivals this side that bringing up one from the other side was almost like cheating.

  “Been a long time since someone has walked a sword out of here,” Swordmaker said.

  “I thought it was time,” Carter said. “And I’m bored with the ones I have to pick from, on the earth plane.”

  Swordmaker rubbed his chin with two fingers, then nodded.

  “Look around, then,” he said.

  Carter looked over his shoulder once, just checking the doorway and the hallway outside, then approached the racks of swords along three walls of the workshop.

  Swordmaker was a master craftsman, and he put a lot of time and energy into each sword he made, but he had more time than the human mind could comprehend, and he was nothing if not prolific.

  Swords sat in pegged rows, six, seven, eight deep off the wall in two tiers, upper and lower. Carter started fingering through them, just looking at the artistry and the skill they demonstrated without really looking for one to jump out at him.

  He started drawing one and another as he went, laying them out on Swordmaker’s expansive worktable and returning to the wall. He heard murmuring out in the hallway and he cast a look at Swordmaker, who went storming out into the hallway to disperse the crowd there.

  A sword purchase, especially the details of the contract, was incredibly secret.

  “I’m looking for a new sect,” Swordmaker muttered as he came back in. “No respect here.”

  Carter nodded.

  “You’re late to that decision,” he said, drawing another blade and appreciating it before he lay it next to the others.

  The diversity of metals Swordmaker had access to was impressive, and his talent with using them in harmony with each other was unsurpassed.

  He was the best.

  They were powerful. Even now, on the hellplane where they’d be handicapped by the magic limitations and modifications, he could feel the latent power in them with his palms when he held them.

  He came to one whose handle was the neck and head of a dragon, its guard the creature’s wings.

  “This one,” he said, lifting it. It wasn’t a live thing, the way it would be on the earth plane, correctly ordained an epic blade, but the depth and nuance to the magic on it was astonishing. Like the crystal at the gypsy’s shop, but in the other direction.

  “Demons have been asking to buy that one for millennia,” Swordmaker said. “Its price will be dear, if I sell it.”

  “Why make it, if not to sell it?” Carter asked, handing it into Swordmaker’s waiting hands.

  Swordmaker held it up in the orange light, his grip on the blade that of an owner: firm but light, complete control.

  “It will sell,” Swordmaker said. “But not until I find the right person to carry it. It’s called Kha’Shing.”

  Carter frowned. It was almost unheard of for a sword to have a name before a human ordained it.

  It would be his right to name his own sword. That was how this worked.

  “Show me your hands,” Swordmaker said. Carter considered for just an instant before presenting both arms palm-up.

  “The sleeves,” Swordmaker said.

  Carter took a second to take off his jacket and then unbutton his cuffs to roll up his sleeves. He presented them to Swordmaker again.

  The demon looked up and down Carter’s arms for a moment, then lay the naked blade across his forearms, squatting to look at it, edgewise.

  He stood and shook his head.

  “Choose another.”

  “I want that one,” Carter said. Swordmaker didn’t even answer. Carter thought about pushing harder, but had never known Swordmaker to yield from a firm statement like that. He glowered after the sword, then went back to the table to look at the ones he’d picked out.

  “Have you looked above the forge?” Swordmaker asked. Carter frowned and went to the fourth wall of the workshop, up above the fire where Swordmaker worked.

  He found a long, plain sword there, handle not overwrought, yellowed tungsten blade oxidized in a color you didn’t get on the earth plane. He put his hand out over it, just feeling the energy of it. So many epic swords had something to prove. They were showing off, a sense of flair that Carter found, now, looking at the plain tungsten, to be gaudy and insecure.

  He took his time, finally coming to rest his hand on the handle without closing his fingers.

  It wasn’t a live creature yet. But he could feel the personality there, a simple, proud power that didn’t wobble at all as he probed it.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Thought you’d like that one,” Swordmaker said. “It doesn’t do anything fancy, but everything about it is perfect. Magic is broad. Insignia on the last fold, perfect center of the blade. Handle has a gold core with platinum relief inside of tungsten alloy.”

  He closed his hand, feeling the heft of the sword. It was heavy, but well-balanced, the kind of sword you had to be in shape to use. It would be slower than some of the other epic blades out there, but the balance would help, a
nd the power… oh, the power was tangible.

  “Tell me,” he said again.

  “It’s going to cost you,” Swordmaker said. “But I’d be proud to have you carry it.”

  Carter went to sit down on a rugged stool next to the workbench, laying the sword across the table between them as Swordmaker settled on the other side.

  “I know the market,” Carter said.

  “I know you do,” Swordmaker answered. “But that is the only sword of its kind. There is no market.”

  Carter straightened his sleeves back out, buttoning them and resting his elbows on the table in front of him, his chin on folded fingers.

  “Twenty-three,” Swordmaker said.

  Samantha was going to kill him, if Swordmaker didn’t.

  The thing about hell was that new things took on value, things that you wouldn’t have expected, sometimes. There was no water in hell. There was no life in hell. Mix that in with some of the more esoteric qualities of free will, and human blood, drawn hellside, turned into the highest-value object in the economy. Most demons never even smelled it, not to mention saw or possessed it. It was the only object external to their own bodies where demons could store power, which had self-evident value when the cost of crossing to the earth plane was proportionate to the power of the demon doing the crossing. Six ounces of blood was a get out of jail free card to all but the most powerful of demons in a very literal way.

  A human could walk away from sixteen ounces of blood, right around a pint, and not really miss it. Much more than that, and they started getting weak, delirious, and unbalanced. Thirty-two was pass-out point.

  “You going to walk it out to me?” Carter asked, knowing the answer.

  “No.”

  “Then twenty-three just isn’t going to happen,” Carter said.

  “It will,” Swordmaker said. “That sword is the best piece of equipment you’re ever going to lay your hands on, save Kha’Shing, and it’s all yours. No history, no brand, no fingerprints. You make it into whatever you want it to be. You and this sword,” he said, spreading his hands across it without touching it, “will be each other’s legacy.”

  “Unless I get killed on the way out,” Carter said. Swordmaker shrugged with a blink that might have been humor.

  “Did it before,” he said. Carter glowered.

  “Twenty,” he said.

  “Twenty-two,” Swordmaker countered. “You bring all of the supplies for measuring and I will verify them.”

  That part was at least fair. A demon was never, ever above using faulty weights if you gave him the opportunity, but Carter would have to carry everything in with him, even if he left it here when he was done.

  Water.

  There was a protocol for bringing in water for this trip, but he didn’t like it.

  He’d figure that out later.

  “You can’t handle it here,” Swordmaker said.

  “I know that,” Carter snapped. “What are you angling for?”

  A smile.

  The damned demon smiled at him.

  “I’ll drop it to twenty-one and a half if you bring her.”

  “What do you know?” Carter asked. A crispened finger waggled at him.

  “I would never tell you that,” Swordmaker said.

  “What’s your interest?” Carter asked.

  “My own,” Swordmaker said. “Do you trust her to get out or not?”

  With a hellsgate open? She could get lost and wander around for a day and it wouldn’t bother him a bit. Be good for her, in point of fact. He’d have to come get her, but that wasn’t hard. He just didn’t like Swordmaker setting terms like this, without Carter understanding the motivation there.

  “I can’t make the promise,” Carter said. “Consider it contingent.”

  Swordmaker gave him what was probably a thoughtful frown and nodded.

  “Agreed,” he said. “Do we have an agreement on the topline price?”

  Carter drew a breath.

  He had the stuff. He did. But he would have to get out of hell carrying a sword and walking around in his own human body with every demon in hell on full alert that he was here.

  There was nothing he could do to disguise it. The mechanics of crossing were simply obvious to everyone here.

  Time on both sides of the barrier would be locked together.

  The humans in the range of visible features around hellcity would begin moving at their normal speed, rather than the glacial rate of evolution they normally had. The rate of power flow into hellcity would spike, because people and their naughty freewill would be acting thousands of times faster than normal, and, when everyone figured out what was going on and rushed outside to watch the mountains dance - a mythical event that happened so rarely sometimes the demons denied it was a real thing - Carter, the biggest figure on the range, would be missing.

  It was that simple and that cutthroat.

  They would know he’d opened a gate and they would know he’d crossed. They wouldn’t have an exact bearing on him, because the range would start spinning as well as dancing, but the astrologers, the ranger watchers with their meticulous five-points mapping and shape-watching, they would have his last known bearing. So they’d head that way.

  And he’d be walking across hell with every demon in the place fully aware he was coming, and that his heart was pumping real, live human blood.

  He’d expected that Swordmaker wouldn’t come to deliver the sword, because getting back to hellcity carrying twenty-odd ounces of blood was like wearing a ‘beat me up’ sign, no matter how reliable he thought his body guards were. And Swordmaker was an artist with making swords, and a decent handler with them, but he wasn’t about to take on hell for this.

  Not when he could make Carter walk that blood in, himself.

  And the trip in, that wasn’t what worried him.

  It was the trip out.

  They’d know he’d come, and they’d rapidly track down his exit point, so they’d have hours to setup ambushes all along the most likely routes, even if he were willing to risk an indirect one to lower the chance of getting caught.

  And he’d be running twenty-one and a half ounces light on blood.

  More, he couldn’t pull the possession trick, here. Here, he was just a body. No demonic possession inside of him to make all the muscles work when they were past their real utility.

  In point of fact, he wasn’t absolutely certain what would happen when he crossed. As far as he knew, no possessed body had ever gone across to the hell plane through a gate.

  He might just spontaneously de-exist.

  Was that possible?

  According to Samantha’s theology, no, but he wasn’t sure it was anywhere near as simple as she thought.

  Hell complicated everything.

  Everything.

  Even considering that, he was listening to the argument in his head from a factual perspective that he was going to do this.

  Tiber had broken Regent. He hadn’t been attached to the sword, but it was insulting, all the same, and Carter didn’t want to ever let something like that happen again. From a more subtle perspective, Carter was the most powerful man who had ever walked the planet. By a lot. He should have a sword that matched that stature, and Swordmaker had read him like a book. He wanted a sword that would both fit and form his legacy.

  He didn’t have an awful lot more going for him, these days.

  “Done,” he said. “Let’s work out the rest of it.”

  He took the long walk back out, having nailed down all of the details about when and where Swordmaker would come out to form the other side of the hellsgate, and stood next to the image of himself on the earth plane for a moment. He always paused here to look at himself, to make sure there wasn’t anything he was missing, and to appreciate that all he had to do was think himself back across. How many decades had he sat here, wishing he could get back into that body and having no path to doing it?

>   He jumped.

  “… absolutely forbid you to do this,” Samantha was saying. He hadn’t noticed she’d been talking, when he left.

  “What did you say to me?” he asked, turning. “You don’t forbid or permit anything. I will strip Lahn from you and lock you in your room until you are weak, and only then let you out and nurse you back to health, just so I can lock you in again.”

  That was a good start. Sure. He needed a favor. Why not open with threats?

  Samantha jutted her chin out at him.

  “Find her. I dare you.”

  Damn. Well, that had happened faster than he expected. She’d bonded to the sword a lot harder than he’d expected. He was a little bit proud.

  “I’m crossing,” he said. “Leave the blood there.”

  “Who’s opening from the other side?” she asked.

  “Demon I know,” he said. “Go upstairs and pack a bag.”

  “What?” she asked. “You’re kicking me out?”

  “You keep trying to tell me what I may and what I may not do, and yeah, I just might. In the meantime…” he jerked up. He didn’t know how to put this. “You’re porting water for me.”

  She looked over at the demons as they set down the tub and glitched out.

  “You’re… What in the world are you talking about?” she asked.

  “I’ve got stuff to do,” he said. “I’m serious. As much water as you can carry, and then anything you ever wished you’d had with you on a hell trek.”

  “Other than Lahn?”

  “You haven’t been hellside since I gave you Lahn?” he asked. She shook her head. He nodded, already somewhere else, mentally.

  “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”

  “Carter, you just had your guts spilled out by…”

  “Not listening,” he said, walking away. He needed to find a balance and his weight set. And the cloth he intended to use to carry the sword out. And a blood draw kit. He was going to have to make that part up. He didn’t know anything about how to draw blood in hell, because no one remembered the last guy who had done it.

  This was going to be epic.