Into The Abyss (Demons of Astlan) (80 page)

“Who’s the woman?”
  Tom asked; Antefalken shook his head, not knowing.

Tizzy piped up.  “Her name is Bess.  I keep trying to get her in the sack, but she plays hard to get.”  Tizzy was rubbing his first set of genitals; however not erotically, more like in pain.  “Last time she used acid to burn my nuts off; took forever to grow them back.”  Tizzy complained.

The other two demons shook their heads.  “Well, now we know who the three archdemons are.”  Antefalken stated.  Tom laughed, not really amused.

“That was one hell of a spell to get rid of Archdemons, Greater Demons and a thousand or more other demons.”  Antefalken shook his head.  I suppose if one has to have an Accursed Master, there’s no shame in having yours
, Tom.” 

Tom gave him a sardonic grin.  “Gee, thanks!”

Tom suddenly felt a rush of panic, he couldn’t figure out what was causing it until he realized it was coming from his link to Rupert.  He quickly arrowed in on it, following it down to Rupert.  “Oh shit!”  Tom exclaimed.

“What is it?”  The other two demons looked at him.  “It’s Rupert, the Rod
has got him again.”  Tom shook his head and took off towards Rupert, the other two following.

Tom flew towards Rupert as quickly as he could; he used his long-range vision and hearing along with the link to figure out what was happening. 

Rupert was on the ground rubbing his right wing where it had apparently been shot; taking him out of the sky and into a circle of Rod members; including the big guy in the glowing armor that must be Talarius.

“So Rupert Demon,” the knight asked.  “How many times am I going to have to kill you?”  Talarius drew his sword. 

Rupert stood up straighter and got into something like a fighting stance.  “At least this time I’ll be able to put up a fight.”  Rupert answered bravely.

“I don’t think it will be that much of a fight; I’ve taken your measure once before, demon.”  Talarius responded very seriously.

“Well then,” Tom’s voice boomed down from above as he came in for a landing between the knight and the boy demon.  “How about fighting an adult?  Man to man, rather than slaughtering children for sport?”

Talarius stepped back in surprise and shock as the giant twelve-foot tall demon landed.  The entire circle of priests stepped back giving them more room, the priests behind the front row getting shoved violently back.

“What lies are you spewing
, demon?”  Talarius asked Tom.

“First:  I thought you were a Holy man, sworn to goodness?  You sounded a bit smug and egotistical talking to
Rupert.  You know what they say: Pride goeth before the fall?  Vanity is the root of all evil?  And so on.”

Tom could see the knight’s eyes twitch within his helmet; he’d hit a nerve.  “Second, Rupert is just a child.  I don’t think it’s very honorable for a great and glorious knight to go around killing children for sport, do you?”

“That demon is no child; it’s a demon.”  Talarius told Tom sternly, “and removing evil from this world is not a sport; it’s a duty.  A solemn duty.”

Tom shook his head in exasperation
.  “What, you think demons don’t have children?  You’ve seen his human form.  That’s what he really looks like; that’s who he really is.  And you killed him, in your own tent, for no reason other than he’d been flying overhead the night before.”

“Lies, lies!  He came with you through a portal to take over the world!”  Verigas pushed his way forward to yell at Tom.

Tom shook his head in pity at the priest.  “Verigas, you were meddling where you shouldn’t have been.  I needed a doorway to get my human charges back to Astlan; you simply provided that gateway.  No one harmed you.  We even arranged for you to escape; if we meant you harm, you wouldn’t be here now.”

“Liar, all demons lie.  You seek to confuse us with your lies!”  Verigas shouted.

“You are as crazy as those damn wizards, blinded by your own paranoia and fear.  You can’t even see the truth when it’s presented to you because you are too wrapped up in silly superstitions and prejudices.”  Tom told him.

“Enough chatter demon!”  Talarius shouted; “You simply seek to delay us so that your compatriots can destroy us!”

“Destroy you?”  Tom waved his arms around.  “We, my compatriots as you call them and I aren’t the ones who were lying in ambush outside the city waiting for us to be driven out against our will where you could begin slaughtering us!” Tom raised his arms above his head in frustration.

“You have seriously got to be kidding me.
” Tom continued. “It is you who seek to destroy us; we are simply trying to get out of Freehold thanks to a spell cast by wizards; the only people getting killed are demons!  Look around!”  He waved his arms more vigorously

“Your words are ever so cunning; Greater Demons are ‘greater’ not just for their size but for their cunning and deceptiveness.”

“Dude,” Tom said, “and I say that in most laid back way I can; you are seriously tripping!  I don’t have to be cunning or deceptive; you guys are falling all over yourselves with your own paranoia and self-deceptions.”

“Why do you prevaricate?  Let’s have this out.” Talarius commanded, rather than asked.

Tom sighed.  “So you want to fight me?”  The knight tilted his head in agreement.  “Very well, here’s the deal.  We fight just you and me, no one else; if you win, you guys get to continue on with what you were doing before I arrived.  If I win, you and the Rod stop attacking the demons and let them go their own way in peace.  Agreed?”

Talarius’ eyes narrowed in calculation for a moment and then he finally nodded and said “Agreed.”

Tom nodded and gestured for everyone to step back.  The priests surrounding them did, as did the three demons behind him, Rupert, Tizzy and Antefalken.  Tom looked around the circle using his demon sight.  He wasn’t sure if he trusted these guys, but they were supposed to be goody-two-shoes, so they should keep their word.

Hmm, Tom had to blink; there were tons of links here.  Links of a style he hadn’t seen before.  It seemed like every person here, all the Rod members had one or more links to people dressed like priests and these priests had links to fancier dressed priests.  The fanciest dressed priests seemed to collect all the links from the lower priests and then had massive cords sort of going up to the sky and
fading out as they left the plane.  How very weird.  He could see that the giant cords to the sky seemed to be carrying mana; actually, there seemed to be two lanes, one going up one going down. 

Was this like a wizard link that Rupert had described
where wizards could share mana?  But if so, who were they sharing mana with?  Someone off plane apparently?  Gods?  Angels?  Holy shit!  That put a completely new spin on reality!  Oh fuck!  Were these gods real?  Priests did cast spells; everyone said they did; were they really miracles?

Slam! Slice!  “Agghhh” Tom roared as Talarius
’ sword ripped in to his side.  He’d gotten lost in thought staring at the priests and the knight had attacked.  That wasn’t very sporting!  Tom looked down at his side where there was a huge gash and blood oozing out.  He shook his head and flashed to flame and then reformed without the wound.  He heard a few gasps from the crowd.

He turned his attention back to the knight just as his sword came cleaving towards him.  Tom blocked it with his hand.  Shit!  He should have used his nails, that magic sword could cut him almost as well as a normal sword could cut human flesh.  He flashed his hand and reformed it.

The knight was winding up for another huge slash so Tom quickly spun and gave the knight a standing back kick in the gut as hard as he could.  Crap!  That hurt! It hurt worse than kicking the dragon or any other demon.

However, no matter how much it had hurt him, it had also knocked Talarius back and on his ass.  He should have gone back a lot further than that, but Tom would take what he could
get.  The knight jumped back up like a gymnast; almost as if he wasn’t covered head to toe in heavy metal. 

The knight advanced, this time with shield ready to deflect a kick.  Tom took a different fighting stance from his Tae-Kwon-Do
e. The knight’s left side was protected by the shield while the right hand had the sword.  As the knight moved in raising his arm as he charged to slash, Tom moved to the knight’s right side quickly and did a whirling back kick to the knights’ right flank, kiya-ing loudly and with all the force he could muster.

Talarius went flying forward
and to the left, off balance, taken by surprise.  His sword coincidentally slashed Tom’s forearm, which hurt, but Tom flashed it back whole quickly.  The knight regained his balance quickly; Tom could detect that he was breathing harder.

The knight moved in again, Tom whirled again, only to have the knight slide down low under his legs, twisting somehow and bring his very pointy
spiked boot right up into Tom’s balls.  What the fuck!  Tom howled in agony!  His tail, of its own accord slashed down like a razor raking with a nasty shriek across the knight’s armor.

As the razor sharp spade squealed across the armor, lightning coruscated over the surface of the armor, released from Tom’s tail spade.  Tom completed his action pulling away from the
knight and crouching, protecting his balls.  In doing so, his tail had to leave the knight; and the electricity stopped.

“That was rather a low blow, knight!”  Tom growled at Talarius.

“It pays to protect the family jewels, fiend!”  Talarius glared back at him.  Tom noticed that despite the loud noise, there wasn’t much of a mark on Talarius’ armor where his tail had tried to slice.

The knight moved in for another slice; Tom blocked with his arm and tried a forward kick.  The blade slammed tight into his forearm lodging in the bone.  Fuck!  Did that ever hurt!  His kick just bounced off the shield.  This was going to be tricky;
he didn’t want to roast the knight with fire, but he wasn’t sure he could beat him physically without a lot of pain.

He flashed to fire, releasing the sword and started a new spinning back kick between sword and shield while in fire mode and then solidified as his foot slid through the opening.  Wham!  The knight went flying backwards, shield and sword spreading wide.  Tom seized the moment, scrambling as best he could, and using his wings he pounced on the knight with hard open hand punch to the solar plexus, expecting his claws to gouge through the armor.

Again, that huge screeching noise as his claws slid and scraped along the armor!  What the fuck!  Tom thought? Those nails could carve solid stone!  The knight was struggling to curl together and evict Tom.  Tom, who’s left hand was back, brought it forward in an open hand thrust at the shoulder joint of the knight; a region only protected by chain mail.

This time his struck home, hard.  His nails didn’t quite pierce the chainmail, but the blunt force caused a cracking noise and a screech from Talarius.  Tom’s joy was short lived as suddenly he felt excruciating pain
in his right wing!  Tom twisted back; the knight had slashed the end of his wing off!  Tom yelled in anger and flashed to flame, not bothering to protect Talarius from the fire.

However, in the few seconds that it took to do that, Talarius dove through his flame form and regained his feet. 
Solid again, Tom started to rise only to feel a searing pain in his tail!  The son of a bitch had chopped it off!  It fell flat on the ground twitching.  Tom flashed to flame again and then back. 

He noticed that the priests around them were all chanting and there was a sort of glowing circle around the area of combat.  He hoped it was some sort of ward to protect the audience, but he wasn’t going to bet on it.

As he refocused on the knight, he saw the man remove his right hand from his left shoulder; there was a yellow glow around the shoulder joint as his hand pulled away.  The knight flexed his shoulder good as new.  Tom laughed to himself, a healing spell.  Well since he could heal himself with flame, he supposed it was only fair.

~

Exador, Ramses and Bess sat on their carpet watching the battle below, while eating the remainder of their breakfast, which Exador had been able to summon once they were outside the wards.  Apparently, the Council was allowing a few other things out of the city at the moment, aside from demons.

“Hmm, a very interesting match.”  Ramses observed.  “The
Type IV has a very interesting style of hand to hand combat; not sure how proficient he is in it—it looks rather sloppy, but the novelty of it will put the knight off guard.”

“Perhaps
, but this knight is powerful.  That armor of his is very nasty.”  Bess said.

Exador tilted his head back and forth; “Tiernon is definitely with him on this.  He has a ‘grace’ I could never quite acquire.
  He may have more than Sir Astemon.”

“How did you ever become
Vicar General of the Rod Tiernon?”  Ramses asked him.  “You are and were then a freaking demon.  Tiernon does not like demons.”

Exador smiled.  “Subterfuge, undercover work.   I’ve worked very hard on the Exador line.  Presenting a child that people see grow up, a man that runs the place and eventually an old man who dies.  Lots of mana and animus hiding as well.  Deep undercover.”

“Plus some serious mental discipline not to reveal yourself in prayers and rituals.  You’d think Tiernon’s higher priests and even Avatars might have noticed.”  Bess commented.

“Lots and lots of practice.
  Generations of it, so to speak.”  Exador smiled.  “In some ways, my crowning achievement.”

“You say
Talarius may have more grace than Astemon?  He certainly had enough grace to kill me.” Ramses asked.  “I’d say that doesn’t give very good odds for the IV down there.”

Exador laughed.  “
And eventually, I killed Astemon.  There are many factors that go into these things aside from how much Tiernon likes a person.  I didn’t have as much grace, but I also had a lot of other tricks up my sleeve that I could substitute for grace to get the job done.”  Exador chuckled.

“You cheated.”  Bess stated, amused.

Exador grinned.  “Isn’t that what we do?”

~

“Wing Arms Master?”  Heron turned from inspecting the desolation of the oncoming demon horde, to find young Traeflon, his personal sorcerer beside him.    “You might want to observe this.”  He held up a crystal ball. 

Heron looked down and his eyes widened.  Talarius was battling a Greater Demon hand to hand!  This was definitely something to watch.  “You’re recording this in the ball, yes?”