Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3)

by Brian J Moses

  Garnet closed his eyes in despair and slumped in his seat. The chair creaked alarmingly beneath him as Garnet shifted to cover his face with one expansive hand.

  “Thanks, Brican,” he thought finally. “Don’t tell the others just yet, please. Let’s just keep this between you and me. I think they’re having a hard enough time being normal around him as it is, and this wouldn’t help matters.”

  “Your call, Garnet,” Brican acceded.

  “Now get back to your wife before she decides you’re neglecting her because she’s fat and unattractive,” Garnet added. “Women worry about that sort of thing, I’m told.”

  “You have no idea,” Brican replied with a mental chuckle.

  Garnet sighed and dipped a chunk of bread in his stew as he pored over his thoughts. He tried not to brood too much over it, knowing that some of the denarae around him might pick up his thoughts even if they weren’t intentionally trying to read his mind. Living in a company of mind-readers had its drawbacks, no matter how overwhelming the advantages were.

  A few tables away, Danner and Alicia rose from their meal and walked off hand-in-hand to the upstairs suite they shared. Garnet watched them until they turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

  A moment later Moreen reappeared, and it suddenly seemed as though she had aged ten years in as many minutes. Garnet quickly stood and offered her an arm, which she took gratefully as he guided her to a seat. He motioned for one of the women to bring her something to drink. Moreen noticed his request and murmured, “Wine.” Garnet sat down across from her and stared at her in expectant concern.

  “We just lost the baby of one of the housemaids,” Moreen said in a hollow voice. “She showed no signs of complications, and the midwife assured me everything would be fine, but when… when the baby came out,” Moreen sucked in a deep breath, her voice quavering slightly. “When the baby came out, he cried once and…”

  Quiet tears formed in her eyes and ran down her cheeks.

  “He… cried out once and just.. suddenly stopped… breathing,” she said brokenly. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “And there was nothing we could do. He was gone before anyone knew what was happening.”

  Garnet reached out one hand and Moreen clasped it tightly with one hand and wiped the tears from her face with the other. As others in the common room became aware of the recent tragedy, a crowd of women suddenly developed around Moreen, offering her comfort. Other women were already leaving to be with the mother of the child.

  Garnet let himself be quietly excluded from the group around Moreen. The mood in the room had quickly shifted from a quiet gladness of homecoming to a somber pall of mourning, and he regretted the unfortunate timing of such a sad event almost as much as he mourned the death of the newborn.

  “This isn’t how a homecoming should be,” he whispered to himself.

  Chapter 4

  I have been accused of being a hero. I can think of no greater honor to myself, nor unfortunate insult to the rest of mankind.

  - Birch de’Valderat,

  “Memoirs” (1013 AM)

  - 1 -

  The next morning, Garnet woke to find a summons from the Prismatic Council waiting for him. The message on his bedside table stated he should come at his earliest convenience, which Garnet translated, “As soon as you wake up.”

  Garnet quickly performed his morning toilet and scrubbed the worst of the dust and dirt from his face in a basin of cold water. Last night he’d been suddenly overwhelmed by exhaustion the moment he entered his room, and he’d barely had the energy to strip his grimy traveling clothes from his body before collapsing in bed.

  Feeling refreshed, if not entirely clean, Garnet started downstairs for a quick breakfast. On the way, he checked in with the Shadow Company denarae on duty, who was responsible for knowing who was awake and present at all times in the inn and for relaying any important messages from the camp outside Nocka. Word that Garnet was awake had already reached the kitchen, and the breakfast crew had a bowl of oatmeal and a steaming cup of cahve waiting for him by the time he reached the ground floor.

  The heaviness that had overtaken the common room the previous night had receded with the coming of a new day.

  “Who’s awake?” Garnet asked the duty man as he blew on his oatmeal to cool it down to a tolerable temperature.

  “Red is in the camp, just finished a shift. Yellow, violet, and green captains are all awake, sir, and blue is just starting to stir. Oh, orange has just checked in as awake, sir,” the denarae reported, then added, “and hungry.”

  “Let Guilian sleep, but ask the rest to come down and join me,” Garnet ordered. “I’ve been summoned to the Prismatic Council, and I’d like to take a couple of them along with me.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  A few minutes later, Garnet was joined by Brican, Flasch, Marc, and a sleepy-eyed Danner. Michael appeared directly from the kitchen, helping the morning waitress – who couldn’t have been more than a dozen years old – to carry the load of food and drinks. The young denarae girl blushed at his help and hurried back to the kitchens as soon as the food was safely delivered.

  “A little young to be hanging around here, isn’t she?” Marc asked.

  “Viela? Her older brother Durin is in Flasch’s platoon,” Brican said, “and her father is one of the smiths helping around the camp. Seemed like this was the best place for her.”

  Marc nodded and promptly began spooning oatmeal down his throat as though he hadn’t eaten in days. Danner blinked to clear the sleepiness from his eyes and nearly upended the bowl of sugar he was trying to carefully pour onto his breakfast.

  “Anybody have problems with the stew from dinner last night?” Danner asked sleepily.

  They all silently shook their heads. After an expectant pause, Flasch poked Danner with a spoon and asked, “Why?”

  “Huh? Oh, nothing much,” Danner said, still blinking sleep from his eyes as he tried to focus on the sugar in his hands. “I just seem to remember Alicia getting up a little while ago and being a bit ill. She didn’t look as well as usual, and she said it must have been something she ate.”

  “Maybe she had something before we got here,” Flasch suggested.

  “Maybe someone gave her some of Flasch’s cooking,” Brican murmured behind his hand to Marc, who snorted and sprayed half-chewed oatmeal back into his bowl. Marc stared forlornly at his breakfast then – as the others watched with pained expressions – shrugged and resumed eating.

  “Well, since we’re all here and so wide-eyed and eager,” Garnet said with a slight smile.

  “What’s up?” Michael said, sipping his cahve. He shuddered and snatched the sugar from Danner’s hand as he hurried to pour a few spoonfuls in his drink.

  “Summons from the Council,” Garnet said by way of explanation. “Michael, Marc, Brican, Danner, I want you four to come with me. I need you two to look into some things for me while I see what the Council wants, and Danner, you’re on translation duty in the library with Marc.”

  Danner and Michael nodded. Marc mumbled something to the effect of “Sure thing” through a mouthful of oatmeal. Brican, who also was busy chewing his food, instead kythed Garnet a mental affirmative.

  “Flasch,” Garnet continued, “I’d like you to keep an eye on things here. Guilian’s sleeping off a shift, so while he’s out, set up duty rosters for picking up around the camp and check with the supply team to see if they need any foodstuffs. I overheard someone say we’re a little light on meat, so one of you look into that, please.”

  “You got it,” Flasch replied. “I hear there’s a whole herd of little kids who need to work on their hunting skills. Two birds, one stone.”

  “Oh, and apparently Moreen and Alicia need help moving a few things around here,” he added. “It shouldn’t be too bad, so pick a few men and go volunteer your services.”

  “And please ask someone to take a look at the heater in my room,” Marc said after swallowing a mouthful of
food. “It’s the middle of Spring, but I damn near roasted in my sheets last night.”

  Marc ignored a few sniggers that followed his complaint, even though he distinctly heard Janice’s name mentioned somewhere in a low voice. Instead, since his oatmeal was now gone, he was eyeing Garnet’s practically untouched bowl. Garnet wordlessly slid the bowl toward him.

  “Also, you and Guilian work up a new training roster for each platoon,” Garnet added. “I’d like to get in some more work with ranged weapons. We got that load of bows and crossbows in just before we left, so we can go ahead and start putting them to good use. Marc, your platoon will be next.”

  Marc looked up from Garnet’s bowl of oatmeal and nodded.

  “Your little pet project?” Danner asked.

  “We’re close to perfecting it,” Garnet said, “and hopefully now with fresh supplies we can get it down without further injury.”

  “You’re one to talk,” Flasch grumbled. “You stand in the back the whole time.”

  Garnet waited for everyone to finish their breakfast, reveling in the moment of silence between them. For a few minutes, the tension of the past few days simply didn’t exist. Danner made a show of trying to reclaim the sugar from Michael, who defended it valiantly with his spoon until Brican suddenly joined in with a surprise attack and snatched the bowl of sweetener from under his nose.

  This is what it’s all about, Garnet thought to himself as they all laughed. This is how it should be. Right here. This is what’s important.

  - 2 -

  “You said you have their welfare high in your priorities. You told me you have looked after them since the beginning – before that even. You have told me many things, but you have never explained any of them to me. How have you been a benefit to them?”

  “Everything in their world that lives, my dear Kaelus, everything that EXISTS, does so because of their God and because of Me. We looked toward the world We both knew would be created in the Great Schism, and We saw something that had never before been conceived of since the dawn of time. We saw the potential for what is now called Life, but it required both Our forces working together, or rather working against each other, to fulfill that potential.

  “Finally, when Heaven and Hell divided, Creation happened.

  “Some of the stuff of the world was not fit for life and was left as stone. Some of it was not fit for intelligence and was left plant-like. Some was not fit for sentience and was left animal. But a very few of those… those primordial bits… a very few of them were fit for intelligent life, and they became men and elves, dwarves and gnomes. They are the natural races of that world.

  “But from the most powerful and learned of men to the lowest speck of pond scum that is only alive by the barest stretch of the definition, it was two hands, God’s and Mine, that made their world what it is. God made the living things able to grow, and I made the life cycle whereupon living things consume lesser forms of life. He gave sentients creativity, I gave them competition. He brought them the ability to procreate and bring life to another sentient being, I brought the necessity of death to make them struggle to learn and accomplish something in a limited span of time. He brought them sex, but I brought them passion and ecstasy. While he merely wanted them to have life, I wanted them to live that life. I wanted the sentient species of the world to fulfill their potential and realize the unique power of their souls.”

  “Why?”

  “So I can make that power My own…”

  - 3 -

  Birch raised his head from the table and rubbed his eyes, blinking past the weariness that had settled in every muscle of his body.

  “I must have dozed off,” he muttered, irritated with his own lack of discipline.

  The gnomish lamp on the desk next to him still beamed with a steady, yellow light; a dozen candles would have burned out in the time since he had started working, but still the chemical lamp blazed steadily with light. The lamp was certainly going to outlast Birch himself, who felt like he could fall over again at any moment and sleep for a week.

  Still, he had more work to do, and Birch would only afford himself a few hours of rest before he returned to the pages before him.

  Birch had promised one of his nephew’s friends, Marc Tanus, that he would record as much of his journey through Hell as he could remember, as well as everything he had gleaned through his contact with the demon Kaelus. He was also keeping a separate set of memoirs for things that might be too dangerous to become common knowledge, or that might get him branded a heretic. Not everything in the past decade of his life could truly be considered in keeping with the teachings of the Prism – if they knew the whole truth, many would no doubt try to have him expelled from the Order.

  Among the more revealing, if disturbing, memories he’d uncovered were those from Kaelus involving conversations with Satan. The demon had been incarcerated in Hell since the Great Schism, but he often was visited by the true master of Hell, Satan Himself, who would discourse with the shackled Kaelus for hours or years on end. The memories were often hazy and purely vocal – Kaelus had few visual memories during his incarceration, and none involving Satan – but Birch went to great lengths to document every word he could glean from the demon’s mind. The potential insight they might give was impossible to overestimate, and Birch periodically had to remind himself that nothing Satan said could be taken at face value. The master of evil, counterpart to the divine God, had gone to great lengths to hide His existence from every demonic immortal being, and such a master of deceit was surely playing His own game with every word He spoke.

  Of course, Birch had had his own conversations with Satan, many of which he was still struggling to remember himself. They were jumbled amidst the worst of Birch’s memories from Hell, and he often wondered just how much of them he really wanted to recall.

  Of the twenty years Birch had been in Hell, six of them had been spent under the worst tortures ever devised by man or demon; thankfully, Birch still only had hazy memories of those agonizing years. The other fourteen years, however, were spent traversing the endless, lifeless landscape of the immortal plane. Time passed differently there, so Birch had only aged the ten years that had passed in the mortal realm. As far as anyone knew, Birch was the only mortal to ever return from Hell; at least until the Black Viscia had emerged, leading the unholy horde during the Barrier War. The corrupted, apostate paladins were a literal black mark against the ideals of the Prismatic Order.

  Birch felt something scratching against his leg, and he looked down but saw nothing. Before he could look up again, something gray and hairy crashed onto his desk and nearly upended the ink well. Birch hastily retrieved the tottering bottle of ink and glowered darkly at the gray rat grinning at him from atop the paper on which he’d just been writing.

  “Selti,” Birch said in exasperation, “if you’ve smeared that ink I’m going to shave your furry hide and make a hairpiece for Nuse.”

  Selti hissed at him in disbelief, but carefully stepped off the inked paper. Birch saw only a few small smudges that weren’t worth getting upset about, so he contented himself with a stern frown at his small companion.

  “Back to your drann shape,” Birch ordered, “and behave yourself.”

  Selti had the grace to look ashamed of himself, and the sight of a rat looking so downcast nearly made Birch laugh despite his irritation.

  “Come on now.”

  The gray hair retracted and solidified, then hardened into reptilian scales as the rat grew to the size of a housecat. His tail lengthened and was covered with its own scales, and two leathery wings quickly took shape and spread over half of Birch’s desk. Selti lowered his wings and looked up at his paladin hopefully.

  “Better,” Birch said, and reached forward to scratch the creature under his left eye. “I’m very impressed with your new abilities, of course, but if you could be a little less of a nuisance about them, I’d appreciate it. Sometimes I wish you were as well-behaved as your mother was.”

&
nbsp; Birch sighed.

  Selti’s behavior had grown more and more erratic lately, and Birch was sure it had something to do with his sudden ability to change his shape at will. As a dakkan, Selti naturally had the ability to change from a dragon-like shape to a wingless “runner” about the size of a horse, which was more suited for ground transport. Additionally, dakkans could shape-shift into one other animal shape. Studies of wild dakkans showed they usually chose some sort of predatory animal, such as hawks or faerers. Many chose the shape of a drann, cat-sized creatures that resembled the natural, dragon-like shape of dakkans, and scholars speculated that the change felt more comfortable for them.

  The drann shape was also popular among domesticated dakkans, which the paladins exclusively had used as their mounts for centuries. The other most-common shape was that of a horse, since it tended to blend in better when a paladin was traveling amongst the general populace.

  In the months since Birch had returned from Hell, Selti had been his mount, following in the footsteps of his dam, Sultana, who had given her life to protect Birch in Hell. Birch had left her corpse, not knowing that Selti was nearly ready to be born. On his journey back out of Hell, Birch had found the scrawny dakkan starving without any hope of sustenance on the lifeless plains of Hell. He found another baby dakkan lying next to Sultana’s corpse, but it was stillborn.

  Whether because of the unique circumstances of his birth or from some other reason, Selti had always been different from other dakkans. He seemed more intelligent, for starters, but even more important, he had always been able to transform into two shapes – both a drann shape and a horse – which no other dakkan had been known to do. Birch kept Selti’s unique ability a secret, having decided it made no real difference and would only raise questions he couldn’t answer.