Order of the Fire Box Set

by P. E. Padilla

  “How long have we been here?” Benedict asked sometime later. It drew Kate’s attention, something that was lagging as they continued on.

  “It has been a little over two days,” Peiros said. Kate wondered how he knew.

  “Two days?” Benedict exclaimed. “It seems more like four or five. Are you sure? We’ve been traveling for a long time.”

  “I am sure,” Peiros said. “It is understandable. This place seems never ending, even more so now than when I have been here before. Our missions were always close to the gate. I am unfamiliar with this territory. I am, however, accustomed to reckoning time here. A little over two days.”

  Jurdan and Peiros shared a concerned look. Kate wondered what it meant. Were they in more trouble than she thought? She’d have to ask one or both of them later. For now, she would hold her peace. There were three others who had never been to Hell, and she didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily.

  Instead, she changed the subject. “Aurel, how is your arm doing? May I look at it?”

  “Of course, Pretty Kate. It is painful, but I am accustomed to pain. I am of the Black. Pain is my brother.”

  “Then you have a strange family,” she joked, but moved closer to see his injury. She unwrapped it for him and inspected the wound. It seemed to be healing. It was still gruesome, a serious burn, but she didn’t see any sign of infection. She had learned a little about field medicine from Dante and more when she had served with the Blue.

  “You see?” Aurel said, nearly all his teeth showing. “I will be good as new, as soon as we kill that demon lord and leave this place.”

  “I do see,” she said. “No problems with movement?”

  “Some motions are painful, but pain—”

  “—is your brother, yes,” Kate finished for him. Though she didn’t think it possible, his smile widened.

  Peiros stopped them a few hours later, though it wasn’t evident to Kate why he felt it was time to do so. She wondered if she would ever get that sense of this place.

  They all rolled out their bedrolls and settled in to get some sleep. All except Benedict, who had first watch. Kate had the dreaded middle watch, the one that split the unlucky recipient’s sleep in half, making it more difficult to get adequate rest. She probably could have claimed a better time as the leader, but that was not the way she did things.

  It would have been akin to her using her nobility to manipulate people and conditions to her favor. Many nobles did that, felt it was right to do so. She was not one of them. So, she lay down and went to sleep quickly.

  The last thing she remembered was Benedict drawing his weapon, setting his shield close by, and sitting down on a bump in the ground, something that looked like a boulder that had been covered over by dust.

  20

  The entire world shrieked, threatening to rupture Kate’s ears.

  She jumped up from her sleeping spot, drawing her sword in the process, and jerked her head back and forth, looking for the cause of the sound. She saw it within a few seconds.

  Benedict was jumping around screaming at the top of his lungs and shaking his left arm violently. As she watched, he seemed to come to himself, take a deep breath, and halt his erratic movement. He reached over and grabbed hold of a stick or something like it on his arm. He gave a mighty yank, and Kate heard the tearing noise even from a dozen feet away.

  The stick started wriggling in Benedict’s hand. It was alive.

  Kate watched as Benedict’s screams of pain turned into shouts of rage. He threw the wiggling thing he had torn from his arm and, quick as lightning, drew one of his throwing knives with the same hand and threw. The blade went through the middle of the thing, pinning it to the ground. When Kate looked up from the impaled creature, she was surprised to find that Benedict had his sword in his right hand. She was impressed at the man’s speed.

  She didn’t have time to gawk, though. More of the long, sinuous shapes were burrowing up from the ground and trying to climb up Benedict’s legs. Motion off to the side warned Kate that the things were coming up in other places, too. One was surfacing very close to her own feet.

  The creature was fast, but not nearly as fast as Kate’s sword. She thrust the point of her blade into it, pinning it to the ground much like Benedict’s throwing knife had with the other one. It flopped violently, tearing the hole her sword made even deeper, but finally settled down when its injuries overcame it.

  Kate took a closer look. The thing’s body was long and slender, probably about a foot and a half in length and a bit thinner than her wrist. It looked like a branch from one of misshapen trees they had seen scattered in a few places earlier that day. Its skin or hide even shared the same texture as the vegetation did, rough and striated.

  These creatures, though, had four legs that each ended in a single, long curved claw. They scuttled like insects on their four hard appendages, making a tck sound as they moved over hard dirt or rock.

  They also had spikes along their spines, and one end of their bodies split into a wide mouth full of sharp-looking teeth. There were no eyes visible. Perhaps most disturbing was that the creatures’ short tails ended in another long spike or stinger.

  The ugly thing made Kate shiver.

  “Szitrith,” Jurdan said, somehow appearing next to her. “Nasty creatures, though not nearly as deadly as some other of the denizens of Hell. I think that lump Ben was sitting on is a nest. Bad luck for us.”

  “What do we need to do?” Kate asked, feeling stupid for doing so.

  “Nothing else. We’ve already killed them all, or at least the ones that didn’t run away. We’ll need to move on from here, once we check and make sure Ben is not too injured. Every edge of the szitrith is sharp, but at long as none buried its stinger in him, he should be okay.”

  Kate replayed in her mind the sight and sound of Benedict tearing the thing from his arm and some of his flesh going with it. She had a bad feeling about it.

  “What if one did sting him?” she asked as they both walked toward the injured man. Her head continued on a swivel, making sure one of the beasts wouldn’t sneak up on them.

  “That would be…” Jurdan faltered as he reached Benedict and saw the condition of his arm, “very bad.” He looked Benedict in the eye and addressed him. “Damn, Ben, did it sink its stinger into you?”

  Benedict’s eyes were glazed. He turned his head sluggishly to look at Jurdan, blinked a few times, and made a real effort to focus his eyes on the other man. “Yeah. It punched its tail into me before I snatched it off my arm. Some of my flesh went with it when I ripped it off.”

  “Oh no,” Jurdan said. “What do you feel right now? Tell me exactly. How does your arm feel, your chest, your head?”

  Benedict blinked at him again and groaned softly. “Arm is on fire, chest feels like someone is squeezing it, have a headache that feels like someone tore the top of my skull off.”

  “Damn, damn, damn,” Jurdan said. “Peiros! Peiros, get over here. The szitrith stung him. Deep.”

  Peiros came running over. He thumbed open Benedict’s lids and looked into his eyes. He shared a look with Jurdan. It made Kate hold her breath.

  “Koren told me about a time when the rookie he was with got stung,” Jurdan said. “He tested the venom and it was acidic. Eats the limb from the inside out.”

  “What are you talking about?” Benedict said. He seemed in his own little world of pain, not totally coherent.

  “He cut the man’s leg off to stop it from working its way up through the bones. He was able to bring the man back to Gateskeep, but he had to be discharged, obviously. A Black brother can’t do his job with one leg. He survived, though.”

  Both Jurdan and Peiros looked at Benedict. Kate did likewise. The man seemed to become a little more coherent when he heard what they said.

  “You’re not cutting my arm off,” Benedict said. “Kill me instead. If I don’t have the Black, I’d rather not live.”

  “There is…perhaps another way,” Peir
os said haltingly. “The poison, it is acidic?”

  “That’s what Koren said,” Jurdan responded.

  Kate had something to add. “I read about it in the library, that many creatures in Hell had acidic poison.”

  Peiros ran ten feet to where his pack lay. He grabbed it and came back, digging through it as he went. Finding a small vial and an empty jar, he used a flat piece of metal to scoop some of the dirt at his feet into the jar and poured a few drops of the liquid in the vial into it. The previously colorless mixture immediately turned a royal blue color.

  “The soil, it is caustic,” Peiros said. “We could perhaps try to render the poison less harmful.”

  “Yes,” Benedict said, his eyes a little clearer. He was obviously focusing his entire attention on the conversation. “Whatever it takes. Just don’t cut off my arm.”

  “I can make a tincture from the soil and…” he bit his lower lip as he pondered it. “…and we can inject it into the wound. It will hurt. Very much. It may not save the arm. It may make things worse. I believe, too, that it will cause heat within you, possibly doing serious damage to your insides.”

  “Do it,” Benedict said. “Do it now. I can feel it moving up my arm, like molten lava under my skin.”

  Peiros looked at Kate. She was confused for a moment until it finally hit her. He was asking her permission. She was the leader of the team.

  “Are you sure, Benedict?” she asked.

  “Yes, absolutely sure. Do it.”

  Kate nodded, not trusting her voice.

  Peiros pulled out another vial and a flask. “The alcohol will help to make it a thinner solution,” he said as he scooped dirt into the empty jar, poured in the liquid from the vial with a practiced hand, added a bit of the alcohol from the flask, and then swirled in some water from his water skin. When it was mixed into a dark, muddy compound, he took out a piece of cloth, put it over the jar, and poured the liquid through the cloth and into another jar. The liquid was still dark, but it didn’t seem to have any large particles in it.

  Peiros reached into his pack one more time and took out a bone cylinder with a sharp, tapered end. He pulled out a small straight stick with a flat piece of bone at the end and poured the liquid into the cylinder, then carefully placed the stick back inside. Kate realized it was a small plunger. When she spied the tiny cap on the sharp end of the cylinder, she understood what would happen next.

  Benedict couldn’t look at what Peiros was doing. He paled, like he was about to pass out.

  “I am afraid this will hurt, my friend,” Peiros said.

  “Do it,” Benedict repeated.

  Peiros removed the cap, jabbed the sharp end of the bone cylinder into the open wound on Benedict’s arm, and pressed down on the plunger until it reached the end of the stick.

  Benedict screamed again, even more loudly and violently than before.

  Then he passed out.

  Jurdan caught the man before he fell and laid him gently on the ground. He and Peiros busied themselves with cleaning the wound and bandaging it up.

  “Now,” Jurdan said. “We wait until he wakes up. We’ll know within a day or so if what we did helps or if it will kill him. At this point, unless we were to cut the arm off now, it is up to fate. He will live or he won’t. There’s nothing I can think of to do but to keep him comfortable and make sure he eats and drinks. If it doesn’t get worse in the next day or two, I think he’ll make it.”

  The next day’s travel was slower than the previous days. Benedict stumbled along, stubbornly setting one foot in front of the other and shambling in the direction Peiros led them. He weaved and wobbled, but never did he utter a complaint.

  Kate wondered at the man. The pain he was in must be incredible. Two different foreign liquids were inside his arm, one trying to eat the bones and flesh from the inside out and one trying to eat the other liquid. She couldn’t imagine what he was going through.

  He had insisted on putting his mask back on for the day’s travel, bluntly stating that if he was to die, he would do it with his death mask in place. When she was able to catch a glimpse of his eyes during the day, they were glassy with pain, but there was a look of concentration in there as well. He wasn’t incoherent, just fighting pain most men could not.

  Twice during their march, Kate caught Visimar glancing over at Benedict with what could only be concern and regret in his eyes. When he realized Kate had seen him, he looked away, the scowl he usually wore for his former friend in place once again. It gave her an idea.

  “Benedict,” she said, decreasing her previous pace a little to fall into step with him, “how are you doing?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice hoarse from the previous night’s screams. “It hurts like all Hell, but I’ve been in worse pain.”

  She didn’t think so, but she didn’t challenge him on it. “Is there anything I can do for you? Do you need to stop to rest?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else?” she pressed. “Food, water, anything?”

  He stopped and turned his masked face to her. It really was a horrid thing. It looked like a desiccated corpse’s face, or an ugly demon imp, the skin wrinkled and withered, but twisted with a too-wide grin showing not only all its teeth, but much of its blood-red gums. With Benedict’s intense eyes visible through the holes, it made Kate shiver.

  “I mean no disrespect to your position as leader of this team,” he said, “but we of the Black are not used to, and do not desire, coddling. I appreciate you trying to help, but for now, what I need is distraction, not conversation about how much pain the damn creature’s poison is causing me.”

  Kate shifted her eyes to the ground. “I’m sorry, Benedict. I was just trying to help.”

  “I know you were,” he said raspily. “That’s why I told you so nicely instead of cursing you from here to the gate.”

  She couldn’t see his mouth under the mask, but the way his eyes changed, she had no doubt he was wearing that unnerving smile of his. At least the mask covered it.

  “If you would like to talk about anything else to help distract me from the pain, I would welcome it,” he told her. It almost sounded like an offer of truth.

  “Very well.” She paused, as if thinking of what to say. The first thing that came to mind went straight to her mouth and out before she could stop or call it back. “Visimar told me about your past. Why the two of you are so aggressive toward each other.”

  Benedict staggered a step as if she had struck him. “You don’t know anything about that situation. He knows nothing about that situation.” The way his neck tightened up and his head froze in position, she knew he was gritting his teeth.

  She had already opened the bottle. She might as well continue to pour out the medicine.

  “Can you tell me what happened, then?”

  He swiveled his head slightly, like he was checking around them, then his eyes settled back on her.

  “Yes. Yes, it would be good to finally tell someone what happened. If I die, it is probably something Visimar and his family should know.”

  He drew in a big breath, but grunted in the middle of it. He rotated his shoulder and flexed his left arm as much as the bandages would allow.

  “It’s not too long a tale,” he said, “so I’ll tell it complete, from start to end. That seems the easiest way.

  “No doubt he told you we were best friends and that I was to marry his sister Aleria. He probably also told you he took the trial to enter the Black and I stayed home because I was sick and that I would take the next set of trials.”

  He waited for her nod and then continued. “It wasn’t too long after Vis left that Aleria took a liking to Holan Drek. He was a goat’s ass if ever I saw one. Before she took a shine to him, I felt like breaking his jaw, but even more so after she began sneaking away to spend time with him.

  “I wasn’t sure what was going on, just that she seemed to not care for me anymore. When I found out that she had been sneaking out to meet him, all h
er strange actions became clear. Still, we had been friends for years before we became more intimate, and that friendship still mattered to me.

  “I kept her secret from everyone else. We acted as if we would still be married. I wished every day that Vis had been there so I could have talked to him. He would have known what to do. But he wasn’t. He was still training with the Order.

  “One day, Aleria came to me, bouncing with excitement, but also trembling with fear. She was with child, she said. It broke my heart because I knew who the father was.

  “She said she was going to go to Holan and tell him straight out. She thought he would be happy, though she worried what others would think. I told her not to go.

  “I knew his type. He occasionally treated her poorly, though the most he did was to push her or slap her once in a while. If he had done more, I would have killed him. But he was a volatile man, especially when he’d had drink. It was not the kind of news he would want to hear. It was the afternoon, a time when he usually had already drained a few ales and maybe a whiskey or two.

  “She argued with me, said he would be happy and then they would be together, a family. The more I tried to talk her out of it, the angrier and louder she got. She finally screamed at me and burst out of the room. She ran up the hall, shouting that I didn’t know what was best for her and that she never wanted to see me again. Her parents heard that part.

  “I wanted to go after her. But if I chased her, her family would have gotten involved, and it would have become even worse. Instead, I slunk out of the house and went home.

  “When the family found her body, it was clear she had been beaten and strangled. Several bones were broken from the brutality of the attack. The local magistrate pieced together who had done it, but I didn’t need any time to figure it out. She had told the bastard she was going to have his child and he reacted badly. They probably argued, which enraged him, and he attacked her.