Knowing strikes to the claws, and even to the eye, were not going to win the fight, Kate stepped back to gain some distance from the remaining demons. The one she struck in the eye wiped green blood from its socket but was still moving around to surround her. The others were already in place.
All four jumped at her at the same time. Her world consisted of nothing but claws and teeth coming at her. She dove at the ground, rolled under one demon’s high attack, and came up onto her feet. Without pausing, she hooked the half rake head that still remained and pulled one of the demons back toward her by its throat. As it moved, she swung the rake around and used both hands to smash the shaft into its head. The combination of the strength of her strike and the momentum of the beast shattered its skull and flung it away.
Two down.
The others circled her more warily. Charity, thankfully, did not engage Kate, but was still kneeling, waiting for her life to be ended by demon fangs. That fate was too good for the bitch, Kate thought.
Not waiting for the next attack, Kate lunged at one of the demons with the head of the rake. It brought its claws up to bat the weapon away, but the attack was no longer where the demon thought it was. Kate rotated, swirled the rake around in a tight arc, and punched the short tines into the creature’s skull. There was a sound like when she had punctured a melon with an arrow in archery practice. She pulled as hard as she could and tore the top half of the demon’s skull out. It dropped in front of her, and she stomped down on what was left of its brain as she moved into position to fight the other two.
One of the two remaining demons was unnaturally fast. It grabbed the rake when Kate swung at it and held on tight. The other demon was positioning itself to slash at Kate from behind. Yanking on her weapon did no good. It was like it was cast in stone.
Kate made a snap decision and rotated counter-clockwise, toward the demon. When she had gathered enough momentum, she struck at the shaft of her weapon with the heel of her palm, thrusting and rotating with her hips as Dante had taught her. The shaft snapped.
Continuing her spin while bringing her newly shortened pole up to block the attacks from the demon behind her, she moved around the demon still holding her rake head and thrust the jagged, broken end of the pole. It skewered the demon through the upper back, forcing its way all the way through and tearing out of the front of the monster.
She had studied demon anatomy a little in the books at the fortress library when no one was talking to her and knew she had hit vital organs. She put her foot on the demon’s back and pulled her weapon back out. The demon slumped to the ground, already dead.
The final demon frantically called to her in her mind, trying to get her to stop, to cooperate. It issued feeble commands to get her to drop her guard and let it kill her. Frankly, Kate found the attempt pathetic. It was obvious from the tension of the thoughts that the thing was terrified. She could almost taste it, a bitter tang in her mind that made her want to spit.
“Not today.” She charged.
It was no match for her skills. She struck it repeatedly, battering its guard down and opening wounds from the blunt trauma she dished out. She finally tired of the punishment and batted its arms aside, spun inside its guard, and punched the jagged end of the staff through its throat. She locked her eyes on its own and watched as they glazed over and the life went out of them. She kicked its body off the weapon and turned toward Charity.
“I can’t make you suffer enough for what you’ve done,” she said as she stepped slowly toward the woman. “But I’ll try.”
Charity was a little more lucid without the influence of the demons, and in her eyes was a fear of death Kate had never seen in a person. It didn’t matter. This woman had to die.
Kate raised what was left of her makeshift staff to strike when the door burst open and eight guards rushed in, armored and holding swords and shields. Two of them grabbed Charity and blocked Kate from getting to her.
Her energy gone, Kate dropped to her knees, holding herself up with the battered weapon she had used to kill five demons.
15
Kate received a few minor scratches during the battle with the demons, but none were serious enough to prevent her from watching what happened the next day.
There was a short service for Sampson and Jasper. Their families would receive a year of their pay from the Order, and their bodies would be transported so the families could bury them or set them on a pyre, whichever was the family custom.
Charity was another matter.
“You have been found guilty of consorting with demons and working toward killing Order soldiers and recruits,” Gillet Derksen, the commander of Faerdham Fortress, said the next day to Charity in front of everyone assembled in the great audience hall. “As such, you are sentenced to death by execution, to be carried out immediately. Furthermore, your remains will be thrown into the wilderness to be eaten by carrion creatures, and the only mention of you in the rolls of the Order will be with the mark of a traitor.”
Charity was a mess. She was grimy with demon excrement, and her eyes were red with bags under them. She stood, shaking, a guard on either side of her with their blades bared.
“It wasn’t me,” she said. “The demons, they worked on my mind until I didn’t know what I was doing. They controlled me, made my body do it.”
“That may be,” the commander said, “but it does not matter. If your mind is weak enough that it can be controlled, you will only betray your comrades again once you get to the wall. There is no place for you here. There is no place for you anywhere. You are tainted and guilty of the deaths of two Order recruits. Your sentence will be carried out immediately.” He motioned for the guards to take her away. A soldier with a great axe followed them.
“Arronax Sparks,” the commander shouted, and another guard pushed the man into the center of the chamber. He looked so small in the middle of the grand hall, as if he was a child being called before his parents for stealing sweets.
Arronax didn’t speak, but stood there, looking at the ground, shoulders hunched. He wouldn’t meet the commander’s eyes, and his gaze avoided Kate entirely.
“You are guilty of abandoning your squad in the face of danger. Furthermore, you locked the door behind you, trapping them with the demons.”
“I went to get help,” the minor noble said, looking up toward the commander. “I didn’t want to risk the demons getting out. Sacrificing one or two is better than letting the demon go on a rampage and killing many more.”
The commander glared at Arronax until he dropped his eyes to his feet again. “That is a fine story that you made up while waiting to see what would happen to you. The fact is, you are a coward and thought only of your own safety. If it weren’t for the skills exhibited by your squad mate here, your entire squad would have died.”
Arronax didn’t say anything. He must have realized it would only make things worse.
“The captain”—the commander gestured toward Captain Bant—“suggests execution for you as well, but I disagree. If you had stayed to fight, your two squad mates would have still died. If Kate had not been so competent, your help may have been more important. As it is, you are not guilty of causing anyone else’s death, only of cowardice. As such, you are being expelled. Without the customary clothing and coin. I hope you saved some of your money from your trip to town. You will need it to get home.
“Get out of my fortress. Now. If you are seen within twenty miles of here after sundown, you will be executed on the spot. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. Yes, sir.”
“Very well. That concludes our business. I believe we have recruits to train, do we not?”
The officers saluted the commander and went their own ways. Even the commander simply stepped down from his table and walked out the door as all those assembled filed out of the audience room. Kate was left in the chamber alone. It occurred to her that it was symbolic of her life.
She was alone. Again.
Since only
she and Wilfred were left of their original squad, it was disbanded and they were reassigned to other squads. It happened often, with people leaving the fortress all the time.
She didn’t bother trying to get to know her new squad. They had passed out of the part of training that focused on the shield wall competitions, and now they were training individually in combat and other necessary skills. She was fine without communicating with the others.
As she continued her training, she noticed a strange thing happening. Whereas before the demon duty, the other recruits either treated her as if she were invisible, or they insulted her, people didn’t say things to her or about her anymore. At least, they were not saying insulting things.
Instead, as she made her way through the fortress, some of the recruits watched her every step, whispering to their companions. She heard snatches of words or phrases. “Killed.” “Demons.” “Rake handle.” They were talking about her and her battle with the demons. She even saw what could only be described as awe in some eyes. She had apparently traded infamy for celebrity.
It didn’t really matter, though. She was past caring if she fit in with the other recruits. There was only one thing on her mind. She wanted to finish her training, be the top in the class, and get her assignment to go and battle demons with real weapons. If all the gossipers thought she could do damage with a rake, they should wait and see what she could do with a sword and shield.
Then again, she did show them what she could do. The second half of training pitted the recruits against each other with shields and wooden swords. As their training progressed, some shone through as more skilled than others. But no one shone as brightly as Kate.
First she battled with the others one-on-one. When it was clear she was unbeatable, Phileas sent two against her, then three, and then four. By the end of their training, she was routinely trouncing five of the most skilled recruits at a time.
And it wasn’t just combat. Kate was smart and talented, and she had trained for years to have the mind of a soldier. She was a fair hand at stealth, learned and implemented tactics and even strategy that the others didn’t seem to grasp, and she added to her store of knowledge of first aid and field medicine.
If Phileas and the trainers were looking for something to determine where she would best be placed in the Order when she graduated, she made their choice difficult. She excelled at everything.
She didn’t think of herself as being too special, though. Her skills had been honed through years of training with Dante, during which she spent countless hours, sweat, tears, and even occasionally blood. She wasn’t some prodigy; she had come by her competence honestly with hard and relentless work.
Part of their training she had not known about was the collection of a small amount of blood from each of them two weeks before graduation. Some of them asked the neecs who were taking the blood why it was necessary, but no answer was given. Kate thought she might know but kept her opinion to herself. Who would she tell anyway? She had no friends.
The time of the summer solstice came, the time for graduation. Kate looked around the courtyard, now devoid of snow. When had it gone away? She had been so busy she hadn’t noticed.
One thing she did notice was that there were far fewer recruits sitting in the benches provided for them. Of the original one hundred twenty-three recruits in her class, only sixty-three remained. Most who were gone had willingly rung the bell and left, but some were expelled. Or died. It was only Sampson, Jasper, and Charity who fit into that last category, but thinking of it hit her harder than when she thought about all those who quit or were sent away.
The ceremony was short. The Order didn’t put much stock in ritual. The commander gave a brief speech, and then each recruit was called up to receive his or her assignment.
It was easy to see from the audience which duty each of the graduates received. By far, the most common was battle duty, signified by the red cloaks. There were some blue cloaks handed out for support duty—Wilfred got one of those—and three people got a grey cloak and grey robes of administrative workers. Those would probably wear the robes, and the cloaks would hang from a hook for their entire career. The greys didn’t get out much.
When Kate was called up, she got a surprise. Along with the red cloak, Phileas handed her a necklace with a red stone set firmly in a silver clasp.
“This is a firestone,” he explained. “Every recruit receives one upon their graduation. It will help protect you as the larger stones, even when you’re not close to them. It is also magically coded to you so that if you die and are eaten, we will know what happened. The demons won’t eat the stones—they are anathema to them—so they’ll remain wherever you fell.”
She thought about it for a moment. Besides it being morbid, something occurred to her. “The blood. You took my blood a couple of weeks back. It was for this, to code it to me.” It was something like she had suspected, though not exactly this.
“You always were the smartest one in the class,” Phileas said in a whisper. “But if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll slap your arse with the flat of my blade until you can’t sit down for a month.” He winked at her and then changed the half-smile he was wearing to his normal scowl.
“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”
“No need to thank me. Killing scores of demons will be thanks enough.”
The next day, all the newly minted solders of the Order, dressed in their new cloaks and—at least for those of the Red—carrying their shields and real steel blades, marched out the gate of Faerdham Fortress, Phileas Darknoll in all his orange and bearded glory at their head.
The swords the others received were similar to hers but were inferior, of course. Hers was the finest forged steel a duke’s money could buy, but it also differed in other ways. Whereas the normal Order issue swords were simple, straight, two-edged blades with wide handguards and a hilt long enough for two hands to fit comfortably, Kate’s was an ornately shaped weapon, the edges sweeping from a triangular top section down the body of the blade, only to widen again toward the hilt. There, it swept out into two sharp crescents made for catching and tearing either weapons or limbs. The handguard was wide enough to be used as a weapon itself, and the hilt was fully a foot and a half long, tapering toward the end and capped by a solid steel ball for a pommel. The hilt was one solid piece of metal, round and covered tightly with leather, tied up with leather cord. The weight of it balanced the long blade so perfectly that one could put a finger under the cool blue stones set in the center of the crossguard, and the weapon would balance there easily. It was good to be wearing the familiar blade again.
Kate glanced back at the square towers and the high walls of the fortress. It looked as impressive in the summer sun as it did in the winter gloom, even after all this time. She couldn’t really say she was going to miss it, but she couldn’t help but to think of the short period of time when she had friends. Just before one of them betrayed her to demons and another abandoned her in his cowardice.
Swiveling her head forward, she marched with the others, chin raised and thoughts of what was at the end of the march dancing in her mind.
16
It took them two and a half days to reach their destination, farther up into the mountains. It was still temperate, being summer, but the air cooled as they climbed. Winter would be worse than at the fortress.
Kate had expected Gateskeep to be in the form of a fortress, like Faerdham, but what she saw when they reached their destination was a fortified city. The walls were at least forty feet tall and made of thick stone cubes, ten feet on each side. She wondered how they had been placed. Being so far from anything else, it seemed logical that they had to be self-sufficient, but Kate had never considered it before.
Through the open gate—guarded by both stationary and roving soldiers—the city itself was visible. At its center was what looked like a castle. It differed from the design of the fortress, with circular towers and slender spires. At least, they were slend
er compared to the squat structures of Faerdham Fortress. They were still beefier than the ones she was used to back home in Kalytras. The king’s castle wasn’t meant to be a primary fortification. This one looked like it was.
Before reaching the walls, a dark shape in the corner of her eye caught Kate’s attention. She stopped in her tracks, causing a soldier behind her to stumble into her.
She didn’t respond. What she was seeing took all her attention.
The gate.
The plateau on which the town and castle were situated was relatively flat for several miles. It was the ideal place for a battlefield. The one part that was not at the same level was a flat-topped hill a mile or so from the fortifications. It was only maybe a quarter mile across, but on the far side, defying the sunlight with its darkness, stood doors of the gate to Hell.
They were closed. Thankfully.
When the others around her directed their eyes to where Kate was staring, they also stopped, many of them with mouths slack and open.
The gate had to be at least fifty feet tall and more than half that wide, though its exact size was hard to judge from the distance. The two doors met in the middle, and the top was a sharp, ornamented arch. Runes and depictions of figures played across the surface, large enough that Kate could tell what they were from such a distance, though she didn’t know what language they represented.
There was a glow coming off the structure, even in the daylight, though to Kate it seemed almost like a reverse glow, an umbra somehow dark and glowing at the same time. A chill ran from her lower back up her shoulders and exploded into her arms.
This was what she came here to fight. What kind of creatures could make such a thing? The simple design of it, its evident power, made the grand structure of Gateskeep pale in comparison.
Order of the Fire Box Set Page 12
