“Damn,” Balan muttered. “Forgot about that.”
Zeb grabbed his axe from where it leaned against a wall as his crossbow took too long to load to be useful at the moment. Tilda however snatched up her bow and drew a bead on Balan, while Heggenauer raised his shield and mace. Balan smirked at all three of them.
“You don’t really think any of that would work, do you?” Balan asked, but he lost his smile as a snikt! sounded behind him and Uriako Shikashe extended the white blade of the Breath of Winter, holding the tip of the curving sword just off Balan’s neck above his right shoulder.
“Huh,” Balan said, glancing sideways. “Yes, that might do it.”
“Balan, what have you done with John Deskata?” Nesha-tari demanded.
“Not a thing, Madame. He decided to leave completely of his own accord.”
“Where has he gone?” Tilda asked, still with her bow fully drawn back, the string hooked on her archer’s glove and her straight left arm trembling slightly.
“Not far,” Balan said.
“Enough dissembling,” Nesha-tari snapped, marching around the table and coming to stand quite near the devil. Tilda relaxed the pull on her bowstring before her arm gave, and Zeb knelt behind the table to load his crossbow as innocuously as possible.
Nesha-tari’s blue eyes flashed as she glared at the devil, standing near enough now to touch him but only raising one hand to jab a finger at his face. Zeb knew the woman was powerful, but the sight of her confronting the horned, hoofed, red-eyed Devil Lord with her hands empty of weapons, or lightning for that matter, was truly impressive. She growled as she spoke to Balan.
“You will tell the truth to me now, as your kind must. What is it you think to do here?”
Balan stared into Nesha-tari’s eyes, and a wistful smile played about his dark gray lips.
“There is no need for such a coarse tone, Madame. Nor indeed for you to involve yourself here at all.”
Balan looked at Nesha-tari with a solemn expression on his diabolic features, and spoke with complete sincerity.
“There is no reason what I do here need be of any concern to you, nor to your Blue Master, Akroya the Great.”
Nesha-tari’s lips pulled back, exposing her even teeth.
“How do you…”
“Because Danavod told me who you are,” Balan said with a shrug, then looked around at the others. “Even had she not, we would have learned all by now. You people talk entirely too much. Do you not know that the streets of this city have ears? Not to mention eyes. Beady little red ones.”
“Balan…” Nesha-tari snarled. The devil sighed.
“Call off your man, Nesha-tari, that we might speak in a more polite fashion.”
“He is stalling,” Tilda said, but Nesha-tari met Shikashe’s eyes over Balan’s shoulder, and the sword blade hovering just above it.
“Uriako Shikashe, stand down.”
The face mask of the samurai’s helmet was undone. He was seen to frown deeply.
“That is not a good idea, Madame.”
“It is an order. Are you in my service, or are you not?”
Shikashe let a hard breath out through his nose, then gave Balan’s neck a soft tap with the flat of his sword. Balan winced as though the blade was either very hot, or very cold. The samurai lowered his sword and took a step back, though he took a formal stance with both hands on the pommel, clearly ready to strike in an instant.
“That is moderately better,” Balan said, rubbing his neck.
“Speak, Balan,” Nesha-tari growled.
“Fine,” the devil said, and nodded toward Tilda. “She is right. I am stalling.”
The devil disappeared in a wink. Shikashe lunged, his sword flashing, but it passed through where Balan had stood and cut a slice clean through the top of the heavy oak table.
*
Deskata jerked Phin off his feet and strode down the ring of stairs, dragging the wizard along by a fistful of robes. The collar twisted tightly around Phin’s neck as he tried to get to his feet, but Deskata loped quickly across the flat circle of floor and started up the dais, banging Phin’s knees and then an elbow against the rising steps. Phin gasped for a breath and at the top was thrown on his side in front of the curving platinum posts. The silvery white metal seemed to glow spectrally against the black stone background.
Deskata set his tower shield aside on its rim, slid the satchel off his shoulder to hold it by the book within, and drew his ugly, fat-bladed short sword. He kept the weapon at his side with the blade pointed at the floor, but his eyes stabbed at the wizard.
“You will cast your spell or speak your words, now!” he roared, his voice suddenly thick with some accent that was not of the Empire. “Open this gate, that I may pass through to Miilark.”
Phin stared back at him. “Miilark?”
“You heard me.”
“I’ve never been to Miilark!”
A vein throbbed along Deskata’s jaw, and his fingers tightened on the hilt of his sword.
“I did not ask if you had been there, I told you to open this damned gate!”
Phin was on his side, but he rolled to his back to look up the long tower at the false sun suspended high above him. He laughed bitterly.
“Nine Gods, you people are all morons!” Phin yelled. “Do the Legions bar entry to anyone with enough brains to pour piss out of a boot?”
The ex-Centurion glared, but he made no move as Phin got shakily to his feet, and shook out his robes which had bunched up awkwardly as he’d been dragged to the center of the room. He pointed a finger at the satchel in Deskata’s hand.
“Who told you idiots that thing could open a gate?”
Deskata glared, and from the utter lack of light in the depths of his muddy brown eyes Phin did not doubt that the man would not hesitate to kill him. Phin just found it hard to care about that at the moment.
“A seer,” Deskata said.
“A seer! That’s really brilliant. Some Orstavian local, I expect? Was he wearing animal skins and rocking back and forth in a tent? Smoking herbs and drinking fermented toadstools? Nice choice. That is exactly who I would consult regarding an ancient work of thaumaturgy, written in Tullish!”
Deskata’s nostrils were wide and he took deep breaths through his nose, as his mouth was shut so tight his lips were going white. He had to pry them apart to speak.
“He said this gate, when opened, could lead anywhere in the world.”
“He wasn’t even close!”
Phin spun toward the posts and threw out his hands.
“When this thing worked, it connected to only one or maybe two specific places. And it hasn’t worked in fourteen centuries! All that is in that book in your hand are musings about why that might be so. Did the cataclysm that tore Vod’Adia out of the world sever the links? Did some safety measure shut it off, so that the rest of this world did not disappear along with the city? It is theory, Centurion. Wonderings and ruminations.”
Deskata shook the satchel with stiff, jerky motions.
“There are spells within this book!”
“Quite right. Three teleport incantations, written as models of how the gate might have worked, once again, fourteen centuries in the past. And before you say then teleport me to Miilark, know two things. One, a wizard teleports by envisioning a destination in his mind, one that has been studied intensely and committed to memory in its every detail. I can’t envision a place I’ve never been, now can I? And two, no spell of any kind can function across a magical barrier. Like, for example, the big gray misty one you may have noticed when you walked into this city! Do you think the Shugak would let magi come into this place if they could teleport away anytime they liked, without paying taxes on the way out?”
Deskata stared at the platinum horns, graceful in their lines and beautiful in their way, and utterly inanimate. Phin spread his hands at his sides, and shrugged. Deskata took a stiff step toward him, then dropped his shoulder
