The Devil's Deuce (The Barrier War)

by Brian J Moses

  Malith’s handiwork was nothing short of slaughter. He slid through the fray like a maelstrom, every touch from his ebony blade bringing doom and destruction. The warriors at his side were nearly as terrible, and they cut a wide path of carnage through the train of paladins. The leaders of the holy assault were cut down without ever seeing their attackers. The next dozen men at least had time to turn before their bodies were hacked to pieces.

  When Malith at last stopped to view the destruction, the battle was all but finished. He and his twelve hand-picked warriors had carved through the entire length of the paladins like a scouring wave of black death. The last paladin went down screaming as a press of demons surrounded him. Two childris spears still protruded from his chest and leg when a drolkul lifted the hapless human in its arms and dismembered him.

  Howls of victory and inhuman bloodlust went up throughout the Hellish army, and Malith smiled at the victorious carnage.

  “That will sate them for a decade, should it take that long,” he said to the warrior at his side, “but it will not satisfy me. I will report to the master and find out how The Three have fared. If all is going as planned, we may be able to assault Nocka ahead of schedule.”

  “Have you any orders for us, sir?” the dark warrior asked.

  “Let them do as they wish with the bodies, but send the armor to be melted down and reforged for our use,” Malith ordered. “The swords are blessed and will be useless to us; destroy them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Malith took one final look at the destruction he’d wrought and smiled in satisfaction. The mortal world would soon know terror like never before, and that was only the beginning. He turned away and held one gauntleted hand over his heart.

  Then, in a wink of thought, he was gone.

  Chapter 1

  Learn the rules well so you know how to break them correctly.

  - Danner de’Valderat,

  “The Family de’Valderat” (1030 AM)

  - 1 -

  Danner de’Valderat stepped to the edge of the roof and peered down to the streets nearly a hundred feet below. Overhead, San shone in full brilliance – the Harvest Moon dominated the slowly lightening sky, whilst Sin was a barely visible sliver in the air. In the dim pre-dawn light, a light mist crept slowly through the cobbled streets like a silent sentry on patrol. The mist engulfed the few people walking at so early an hour, then released them and passed on, apparently satisfied at their presence. A dozen people, then two dozen passed on the quiet street while Danner watched, until finally he found the man he sought.

  Yellow cloak, check, he thought to himself.

  Danner’s eyesight, already sharper than most, adjusted to a point beyond human capabilities and brought the man’s face into focus. The cloak identified him as a paladin, but it was not that which identified him as Danner’s quarry. There were any number of paladins of the Yellow Facet roaming the city. Nocka was home to the main chapterhouse of the Prismatic Order, so paladins of all Facets were a common sight here. Even White paladins were more likely to be encountered here than anywhere else in the world.

  Rather than relying on his memory, Danner pulled out a sketch on a folded piece of paper and compared the face on it to that of the man below.

  Face, check, he confirmed. This is our guy.

  He leaned back from the edge, lest the other man somehow sense his own presence. Too many men had the innate sixth sense to know when they were being watched, and he couldn’t afford to put the man on his guard. For nearly two weeks, Danner and his friends had been tracking down paladins who had been corrupted by the presence of a demon in the midst of the holy warriors’ chapterhouse. True, Danner and his five friends were only trainees in the Prismatic Order of paladins, but Fate or chance had placed them in a unique position, and they felt it was their duty to fulfill the role for which none of them had wished.

  Two weeks before, Danner had fought and destroyed one of The Three: Min, Ral, or San, they still weren’t entirely sure which. Danner was privately and inexplicably convinced it was Min, but in the end, it made little difference. The unholy trio were identical in every respect and even shared a sort of communal mind that made them dangerously powerful – and terribly effective as spies in the mortal realm. They had crossed over the Merging, the invisible barrier between the mortal world of Lokka and the immortal plane of Hell, and immediately set about on tasks that were still a mystery to the few who knew of their presence.

  Danner’s uncle, Birch, had been sent with six other paladins to hunt The Three, little knowing that one of the demons had been masquerading as a paladin on the Prismatic Council and had no doubt sent the group into a trap.[6] Danner still had no word on his uncle’s fate, or if he had accomplished even part of his misbegotten quest.

  Thinking about Birch brought Danner’s mind to his father, a man as different from his paladin brother as two men could be and still love each other as family. Hoil was a sort of master thief in Marash, the city where Danner had grown up. Hoil and Birch were both large, dark-haired men, broad in frame and heavy in muscle, but both men had a speed to their movements that was almost superhuman. Danner had inherited his father’s dark hair and his speed, both with his fleetness and sureness of foot and his lightning-quick reflexes, but he’d gotten none of his father’s size. Danner was of below-average height and had a light frame that people said was indicative of his mother.

  Danner had never met his mother, except in the early moments of life when they’d first pulled him from her body. He’d been told she held him only once before internal complications had claimed her life. He had no memory of her and no mental picture that didn’t come from paintings his father had commissioned.

  His mother. A woman who might very well have been an immortal – an angel come down to earth – who fell in love with Danner’s father and begot Danner as a son. So far it was the only explanation for his unique abilities.

  “Danner, are you awake?”

  The sudden voice inside Danner’s head jolted him back from his musings, and he cursed mildly as he realized the paladin was almost out of sight.

  “Sort of,” he thought back, knowing Trebor would hear his thoughts. Trebor Dok could read minds and even project his own thoughts into other people’s, a trait that was rare in his people, but not unheard of. Trebor was a denarae, and his was perhaps the most despised race in the world because of their mental abilities, what they called kything.[7] They were physically identical to humans in every way except skin tone; their flesh ranged from charcoal gray to a light ashen color. At one point in history, denarae and humans had been close, until men began to fear the mind-reading abilities of their inhuman cousins, and so they had turned on the denarae. Since then, the gray-skinned demi-humans had hidden their talents from others until no one remembered their existence. Now people hated denarae simply because they were supposed to. It was institutionalized bigotry.

  “Thanks for the history lesson, Danner, but can we get back to the problem at hand? Did you find him?” Trebor kythed to him. It was Danner’s job to identify the men they were observing, using his keen eyes to spot them from a greater distance than the others could. Since his…transformation…in the mountains, Danner had rapidly developed several abilities that he was still struggling to understand and master.

  “Yes. He’s just passing Eighth Avenue. He’s a Yellow, but I couldn’t tell much more than that. Have Michael pick him up for confirmation, then he’s all yours,” Danner said mentally.

  “Will do.”

  His part finished for now, Danner hurried to the side of the building in the direction the Yellow paladin had gone and leapt from the roof. His pale-blue cloak fluttered behind him as Danner slowly glided to the nearest roof that was a dozen feet or so below him. The cloak was one he’d borrowed from the storage locker in one of the training quads, and it was identical in function to the cloaks worn by full paladins. If the wearer so desired, the cloak would slow his descent to a gentle glide, a necessity for warrio
rs who typically rode on the backs of the great winged dakkans. The draconic mounts carried the paladins both on the ground and in the air, and a fall from an airborne dakkan would mean a certain death were it not for the cloaks.

  The vibrant cloaks were unlike any others made by men, and they had become a singular symbol of the Prismatic Order. No one had ever successfully duplicated one – conventional wisdom held it was impossible due to their blessed nature, and any attempts at forgery were viewed as heretical and dealt with severely. The blessed cloaks were reserved solely for full-fledged paladins, but they kept thousands of lesser-quality ones on-hand for training purposes, such as those Danner and his friends were using.

  They were all wearing them illicitly, which was grounds for serious punishment by their trainers – if they were caught by the wrong people, of course. Danner and Flasch were both well-accomplished thieves, and breaking into the storage room to remove and replace a half-dozen cloaks was child’s play to them.

  Danner hurried across the roof and leapt to the next roof, then he asked Trebor for directions. When he received his reply, he turned in a new direction and abruptly stopped. The next building he had to get to was twenty feet higher than the one he was on and had no ladder on this face.

  “Well, I suppose I could use the practice,” he muttered to himself. Danner closed his eyes and forced himself to relax. After a moment, a slight tingling ripped through the back of his shoulders, then it was instantly replaced by a cool feeling of relief that spread rapidly to his whole body. When he opened his eyes, Danner saw a blue nimbus out the corner of each eye.

  Sprouting from Danner’s back as though he wore no clothing at all were two glowing, blue wings. A thick tendril of bright blue light emerged from around each shoulder blade, fanning out like long, snake-like fingers. Trailing downward from each tendril were lighter, nearly invisible, auras that resembled feathers. When his friends looked at them, they told him they couldn’t quite seem to focus on the lighter glow, and that it shifted from looking feather-like to nothing more than a blur in their eyes.

  To Danner, though, each feather stood out in stark detail. This was his mysterious legacy that could only have come from his mother, or so they now believed. The few paladins who knew about Danner’s condition thought perhaps he was half-immortal, though the exact manner and nature of his conception was still beyond them. Since the unveiling of his wings the day he’d destroyed the demon two weeks before, Danner had taken a few opportunities to familiarize himself with the concept of flying under his own power. He never used them where anyone else might see, because he didn’t want to seem like some sort of freak or abomination. For the first time, Danner felt like he knew some of the discomfort his uncle experienced since returning from Hell.

  Danner pumped his wings a few times, then slowly lifted himself from the ground. This was the trickiest part for him, getting airborne. It was so easy to lose his concentration and overbalance himself; then Danner would end up listing and even crash into something if he didn’t correct himself quickly enough. He was getting the hang of it, and this time he was able to fly forward without losing his balance. Once he was actually in the air, his control improved dramatically. As soon as his feet touched down on the other roof, Danner stilled his wings and allowed them to disappear; the glowing apparitions faded and flickered briefly at the edge of his vision, then winked out of existence entirely.

  Using his wings still felt strange, because it came so naturally to him. It was like a newborn child learning to crawl: the baby doesn’t question that his arms and legs move, he just wants to move in a certain direction and eventually his limbs comply. Control and mastery would come in time, but for now Danner was content with his progress at crawling, as it were, and would learn to walk and run later.

  The next few rooftops passed without incident, and Danner at last found himself gliding toward the roof where Garnet, Marc, and Flasch were crouched in waiting. Flasch whirled at Danner’s light footstep, and Garnet spun a heartbeat later and laid a hand on his sword hilt. They both relaxed when they saw it was him, and Danner smiled slightly. Marc looked up from a piece of paper he was writing on, nodded by way of greeting, then frowned back at his page, already lost in thought again.

  Garnet jo’Garet was a giant of a man, at least a half-head taller than any of them except Michael (who topped out at nearly seven feet), and his body was just as massively proportioned. He was the spitting image of his father, Garet jo’Meerkit, the Red paladin who accompanied Danner’s uncle on his quest. By contrast, Flasch jo’Keer was a small, tightly muscled wisp of a man, but he was nearly as fast as Danner. Marc Tanus was of average height and build, with olive skin and straight, dark hair. He bore a strong resemblance to his twin sister Alicia, the barmaid who caused Danner no end of emotional turmoil.

  They were all dressed in thick, dark-tinted clothes to ward off the night’s chill, and despite their mission, none had donned armor for the evening’s activities. If it came to needing armor, they were in trouble already.

  “What’s up, Danner?” Flasch asked.

  “I should be asking you that,” he replied. “I’ve been on the move, so Trebor didn’t distract me by filling me in. Did Michael pick him up?”

  “Yeah, he saw him, he verified your ID and passed confirmation on to Trebor,” Garnet said quietly. “Trebor’s peeking around in his head right now.”

  Danner nodded, then settled down to wait.

  - 2 -

  A short while later, Michael Semnriak glided down from the building across the street and landed by their side. Michael was a tall, charismatic young man who smiled easily. He was also a good judge of character and helped keep things running smoothly between them and the other trainees. Several of their peers were jealous of the success of their group, and Michael did a superb job of keeping that jealousy in check by making sure the other trainees knew they could always come to them for help and advice. He did it in such a way that none were offended, something Danner knew he never could have done.

  Theirs was a well-balanced group, which accounted largely for their success in overcoming every obstacle and excelling in their training.

  “Any word from Trebor?” Michael whispered.

  “None,” Marc replied. “Now shush.”

  Danner glanced at Marc and saw that his face was buried in a book, with one free hand busy making notes on a scrap of paper off to one side. As far as Danner could tell, his friend wasn’t even looking at the words he was writing. More and more of late, Marc had shown increasing interest in looking through books on history and religion. He said he was looking for something that might help them, but Danner privately thought Marc just enjoyed knowing things. His occasional tendency to spout out useless trivia notwithstanding, he’d spent most of his life absorbing knowledge from books and was eager to share what he’d learned. It wasn’t so much bragging or lording it over his friends, as much as it was a desire to be useful.

  Marc had only an average hand with a blade, he wasn’t fast like Danner and Flasch, he didn’t have Trebor’s mental abilities or his apparent talent with healing, and he couldn’t deal with people the way Michael could. In some of the adventure books Danner had read as a child, that would either leave Marc to be the leader of the group or else the most expendable person who would then die and prove the seriousness of a situation. But this wasn’t a book, it was real life, and Marc had a serious need to prove himself to the rest of the group. So he did it in the only way he could: he read, and he studied, and he learned in the hopes of finding things that would help them.

  “Oh, Danner,” Marc said, finally looking up, “I found some information on that little project you gave me.”

  “Do tell.”

  “I’ve only found one mention of an immortal assuming a completely mortal guise, though it had to have been more common,” Marc told him quietly. “I mean we know there were quite a few immortals during the original Merging War, and surely some of them…”

  “Marc, focus,�
�� Danner reminded him.

  “Right. Anyway, the description was translated from another immortal, so they included the words he used,” his friend went on, finally getting closer to his point. “When the immortal displayed his wings, it was called asolving, and when he hid them again, it was dekinting.”

  “I still like turning on and off,” Flasch said helpfully.

  “I’m not a switch on some gnome’s contraption,” Danner said with a trace of irritation. He looked back at Marc. “Thanks. At least I know what to call it now.”

  Marc smiled and poked Flasch with the back side of his writing stick.

  “I’ve got everything I need from this one,” Trebor’s voice said inside Danner’s head. The look on the others’ faces told Danner they had received the same message. “He’s relatively unimportant, so we’re safe in taking him in.”

  “Good,” Danner replied. “Pick an intersection we can reach, then wait for us there.”

  Danner waited until Trebor had relayed a destination and set of directions, then he and the others were off. Following Trebor’s directions was complicated, because he couldn’t tell what buildings or obstacles they might encounter. He could only tell where they were and how far away relative to his own position, and even that was unspecific. Fortunately there was only one building too tall for them to either jump to or easily circumvent, and it had a ladder on the side for them to use. A few blocks later, they reached Trebor and settled down behind the lip of the roof to plan.

  Trebor’s skin almost seemed to glow in the dark night. The chemicals he rubbed into his flesh to turn it from gray to white left him abnormally pale and, because it was an unnatural coloring, he was unable to tan. Rather than face odd explanations, he usually preferred to stay in the shade whenever possible, and he answered the occasional question with the plausible statement that it was just a strange skin condition.