Chapter 334: The Demon of the Sword, Caliste (2)

Caliste raised his blade to meet the falling axe, and steel kissed steel with a clear, bright note that filled the cave and shivered along the walls. In that single touch, he learned what he needed. The axe was not merely heavy; it was a weight given will, a gravity housed in metal. If he tried to catch it, the sword would snap. So he did not catch it, and let it pass.

Caliste softened his arm and drew the blade back a hand’s span. The axe edge scraped along his sword with a harsh rasp and cut empty air. In the same breath, he turned his wrist, brought the blade across the hollow he had made, and sent the point for Ketal’s throat.

“Up we go,” Ketal said, his chin tilting as if he were greeting a friend, and he bent his neck just enough for the point to miss. The axe, which had fallen in an arc meant to cleave, lifted instead and cut upward as though the motion had been the plan all along.

Caliste did not give ground. He slipped a step deeper, rotated his hips, and let the axe climb past his shoulder. The floor shook. The axe carved a bright path through the air and struck nothing. Caliste slid through the gap his movement created and drove for Ketal’s heart.

The axe, still rising, stopped as if it had struck a hidden bar. Ketal changed the angle by a right angle, brought the haft across, and turned it into a cudgel. It came for Caliste’s temple with the kind of promise that would have crushed bone even if the point had landed clean a heartbeat later.

However, Caliste had already adjusted. He did not try to win a contest of force. He let his thrust become a slant, turned the blade, and caught the haft just off its center. The impact rang like a bell. Caliste slid backward three paces and settled into a low guard.

“Oh,” Ketal said, delighted. “That is very fine work.”

There was no sorcery in Caliste’s motion, no surge of demonic energy or smell of burned air. His answer was made of footwork and angle, of a wrist that understood weight and a shoulder that knew when to be a hinge and when to be stone. Miracles lived in the way the sword moved.

“So this is the Demon of the Sword,” Ketal murmured, honestly surprised. The respect in his voice was not feigned. Caliste’s eyes, which had remained calm even while a god bled at his feet, brightened at the acknowledgment.

“Your movement is excellent,” he said.

“It has to be,” Ketal answered, smiling. “If it were not, I would not have survived where I grew up.”

Caliste glanced once toward the entrance of the chamber, where the Tower Master and Helia were gathering themselves, then let the look fall away. He weighed the space, the man before him, and the two behind, and asked himself a simple question—whether he could slip past Ketal’s reach and finish the other two. The answer came without struggle. He could not. With Ketal here, the plan to kill the Saintess and the lich had lost its clean line.

His battle hunger dimmed by a hair. Ketal watched him and spoke without taking his eyes off the blade.

“Are you okay?” Ketal asked, meaning the lich and Helia.

“My limbs are back,” the Tower Master said, his voice dry as chalk. “I am not yet fully mended, but I live.”

“I am well enough,” Helia said, and then added after a breath, “You are very strong.”

She had always known that in words, but seeing Ketal hold a Demon Lord and drive him back was another kind of knowing. Even among the faithful, there was always a moment when belief met sight, and one had to pause—if only to catch their breath and reconcile the two.

With that measure before her, another thought entered. If Ketal could do this, then perhaps even the Sun God would have to respect his reach. The thought tasted like heresy, and still it would not leave.

“Then you are Ketal,” Caliste said. “One of Hell’s enemies. The one who killed Necrobix.”

“I see that Necrobix was your companion,” Ketal said. “Do you bear me a grudge?”

“Do not be foolish,” Caliste said. “I am not childish enough to blame the blade that cut what intruded. How did it die?”

“Content enough,” Ketal said. “That is my reading of it.”

“Then that is well,” Caliste said, his gaze deepening. “There is a beast inside you.”

“Do not speak to me, little one,” the Abomination inside Ketal replied, its voice like bone rattled in a box.

“What are you?” it asked in the next breath. “You are not in my memory.”

“In the war with the Oldest Ones,” Caliste said, “I was still an ordinary demon. Of course, you do not remember me.”

Caliste stepped without warning. The blade appeared where Ketal’s heart had been and then was not, because Ketal had moved to meet it, laughing under his breath. The axe and the sword clashed and separated, and in the small space between, their hands and feet wrote petty ambushes and answers to those ambushes a hundred times in a second. Caliste yielded a stride.

“I had thought you relied on the Abomination’s power,” Caliste said. “But, you are a warrior without it.”

Ketal was someone who could face him as an equal. Caliste wanted to fight—to see his sword prove what he believed about it, here and now, against a man who would neither break nor bore him. The heat rose within him, and he forced it down.

“Unfortunately,” Caliste said, “I am a Demon Lord of Hell. I do not move only for myself.”

He moved according to the plan. With a flick of his fingers, the floor opened beneath them.

“Oh,” Ketal said, sounding pleased.

“This is not good,” the Tower Master said, peering down. The hole had no bottom that an eye could name. It was a throat that went on and on, and it took them all as if it had been waiting with its mouth open.

“A trap?” Ketal said.

Creatures swarmed up and out of the pit, their shapes wrong in familiar ways, too many legs, too many joints, too many teeth where there should have been none. Tens of thousands filled the space at once, and the air turned crowded with hunger.

“Chain Lightning!” the Tower Master cried.

“Flame of Calioros!” Helia chanted.

Light climbed along the walls and ate the dark. Fire poured down the hole like a river that had found a new bed. In a heartbeat, the first wave of beasts became soot and then nothing. The next wave came while the ash was still falling. The beasts poured until they covered the mouth of the pit and blotted out the sky above.

“You mean to pin us at the bottom,” Ketal said. “That will not do.”

He closed his right hand. Myst gathered in the knuckles as if the air itself were a cord being wrapped into a fist.

“Open the way,” he said.

He punched downward. The pit roared as if something had struck its heart. The pressure crushed the air into a hard silence, and then the silence burst. Their bodies leapt as if hurled by unseen hands. The Tower Master and Helia cut the cloud of beasts aside, and the three of them tore through the plug and flew back into the open.

They stood once more beneath Hell’s sky. The trap had been escaped, but there was no time to breathe. The air shuddered before their feet could find steady ground, and the bombardment resumed, as though it had been waiting for them to rise back into its range.

“Shield of Another Plane!” the Tower Master said.

“Wall of Hephaite!” Helia chanted.

Two domes nested and locked. It was the sort of guard that makes common armies look like play, the kind that should have made the earth under their feet the safest place in the realm.

However, cracks raced across the shields like frost running over a window. Helia’s mouth tightened. This was not the clumsy violence of a rabble. The quality of the force was high enough to make her skin prickle. The greater problem was not the quality, but the quantity. The sky had been filled and filled again, until there was no red and no black, only the steady fall of ruin.

“Dozens of ranked demons,” the Tower Master said, teeth bare. “Striking together.”

The dome gave way with a crunch that sounded almost weary. They raised another shield, and the next barrage struck it immediately. At the same time, the ground split beneath a rushing tide as monsters and demons surged forward to meet them, a flood that swallowed the horizon.

Caliste stood at a comfortable distance and watched with the courtesy of a host who had set a table and wanted to see how guests would eat. A ranked demon approached him and bowed from the waist.

“Your work is complete, Lord Caliste,” he said.

“I am sorry to leave it to you,” Caliste answered, and for once sounded like a man denied a pleasure. “While you held the barbarian, I should have killed the others. I failed.”

“Not at all,” the demon replied. “Holding Ketal long enough to set the trap was everything. Leave the rest to us.”

“I would prefer to fight,” Caliste said.

“Please endure for a little while,” the demon answered. “Your power will be needed when the gods begin.”

“A pity,” Caliste said. “Very well.”

Power broke like surf. The massed host slammed into the new shields. The shields thinned and went white. Teeth and claws sounded against the air.

“There are so many!” Ketal shouted as he cut down the demons.

The field, the slopes, the air itself were packed until nothing but enemies occupied the eye. It was almost comical that the realm had held so still before.

“It was a trap from the start,” Helia said, biting her lip.

Hell had reached into the Mortal Realm and then fallen silent. The heavens had given no reply. The Mortal Realm had sent its scouts, and among them was likely Ketal. The demons had let them enter, step by step, until the path back was as long as the one ahead. They had used a god’s body as bait, letting the promise of divinity serve as the lure. Then they had set against him the one opponent who could hold Ketal’s focus and drawn the net closed. The demons would bury the two and spend the host on Ketal.

“That is a proper plan,” Ketal said, cheerfully.

A horned figure with twisted antlers laughed and brought twin axes down on the Tower Master’s shield, which shattered like sugar struck by a hammer.

“Crimson Beam!” the Tower Master, flicking two fingers.

Light drilled the demon’s shoulder and made him stagger back with a snarl.

“Rude,” the horned demon said, and the voice was like rust rubbed with a stone. “Three hundred years, Tower Master. What a pleasure to meet again.”

“Mevaus, Demon of Ferocity,” the Tower Master said, and set his feet.

He reached for a killing spell, saw the angle, and moved to take it.

“Not while I am looking,” a different demon sang, and darted in from the side.

The Tower Master withdrew a pace with a sigh that said the chore annoyed him.

“Chevius, Demon of Allure,” he said.

“Hahaha! It’s been a while, Tower Master!” Chevius said, laughing in a way that curled the air. “I will keep you this time.”

The Tower Master threw spells, Chevius danced, Mevaus returned with his axes, and a third demon slid into the gap the dance created.

“This does not end,” the Tower Master said, and there was no complaint in it, only precision.

It did not end for Helia either. She burned and cut and burned again, yet the field refilled. By her count, more than ten ranked demons were here, and hundreds more wore names. She could not hold the number of lesser things even in thought.

“You are strong,” Caliste said from his hill. “Even without Ketal, either of you would have found no opponents in Hell except those of us called Lords. But it is not demons as individuals who hunt you.”

He lifted a hand and let it fall.

“It is Hell.”

Every living thing in Hell moved with a single purpose—to break them. Strength, even Ketal’s, was a measure that could be spent. Muscles filled first with pain, then with emptiness. Breath no longer flowed as it should. The mind faltered by half a blink, and that half was the distance between life and death.

“There is no sense wrestling a beast head to head,” Caliste said, almost apologetic. “We will tire you out, then kill you.”

He looked back at Ketal.

“I would have liked to face you at your best,” he said. “But, I cannot put my will ahead of Hell’s plan. Disappear before Hell. Barbarian of the White Snowfield, champions of the Mortal Realm, be gone.”

The ground answered. Helia’s armor rang and shoved her back a yard. No demon alone could move her now, but numbers did not ask permission to be strong. The rush ate at her holy power. The Tower Master’s mana, which had looked like a sea whenever she had seen it before, started to look like a bay at low tide. It was a crisis. She and the Tower Master knew it, and both of their faces went still with the same care.

Helia looked right, and to her surprise, Ketal’s expression was loose, almost lazy.

“You,” she said, and the word carried a dozen other words inside it.

“What is it?” he asked her, genuinely curious.

“The situation is not good,” she said. “Do you have an answer?”

“No,” he said. “It is a bad moment.”

“Then why—” she said, finishing her sentence with her thought.

Why are you calm?

Ketal’s smile widened as if she had told him a joke he liked.

“We knew there would be a trap,” he said. “So did you.”

“That is true,” she said. “But—”

“Then why be surprised?”

Hell had refused to move. They had thrown a world at the Mortal Realm and then gone still, and during that stillness, they had set the terms. If one walked into Hell at such a time, one should expect teeth. Ketal had known all that and had come anyway. The reason was not complicated. He did not mind. In truth, he had wanted this.

He lifted his axe, and the light in his eyes was the light of a boy who had found a river that no one else had fished.

“I did not think the whole realm would run at us,” Ketal added, almost conversational. “But, it makes no difference.”

He showed his teeth. The joy in him was not tidy or small. It spilled out like heat from a kiln and made the closest demons pause without meaning to. The tide tripped over its own feet for a heartbeat.

“Come and enjoy it,” he said, laughing. “Demons!”

Ketal stepped forward, and the ground felt it.