“Safe until we rile the demons up and bring them back to us,” someone in the back said in a low voice.
“Is there anything else?” the sergeant asked, ignoring the comment from the back.
“No.” Simon thanked him and left, feeling confused. It didn’t make sense for Leah to leave. She was safe in the Templar Underground.
Her father’s out there, he reminded himself. Then just as quickly he told himself that Leah would realize that the chances of her father still being alive were incredibly small.
He tried to remember if she’d ever given him her father’s address. They’d talked about it. He could remember that. But he’d never written an address down. Nor could he remember if she’d ever told him. It was possible that he had forgotten she had.
Frustrated and impatient, conscious of the stares of Templar he passed in the corridor, Simon pulled his helmet on. It sealed and the HUD came online. He had four minutes to make his rendezvous with his team. He tried to focus, knowing that he was about to put his life on the line again.
Thirty-Seven
A mournful howl woke Warren from the cold dead blackness that cocooned him. He’d expected to wake up in the Cabalist infirmary. After all the pain Naomi had sent into his mind, he couldn’t imagine waking up anywhere else.
Instead, he found himself in a room made of burnt orange glass. Or maybe it was crystal. Warren wasn’t sure. He was sure he had never seen anything like it.
The material was translucent. The walls were thin enough that he had a sense of the world beyond them. Other buildings cascaded across a broken skyline, orderly, yet somehow jarring, as if something were missing.
The floor was evidently much thicker, because a few inches in, it turned ink-black. He knew he wasn’t at ground level because the view through the walls showed that he was quite some distance up.
Symbols adorned the walls. The light source was a ball filled with glowing spiders, each about as big as his fist. They crawled over each other and, though they never created any shadows, the light’s intensity wavered.
Warren was surprised to find he was standing, but he was. The golden light from the spider ball gleamed against the greenish black scales showing on his left arm. He turned, looking around the room and wondering what he was doing there.
Did Naomi send me here, or is this just a dream? For a moment, it crossed his mind that he might be dead and this was someplace beyond the life that he had known. But he rejected that. If he was dead, he was sure he would know.
“Welcome, Devourer,” a loud voice boomed.
Instinctively, Warren stepped back toward the nearest wall, wanting to limit an attacker’s choice of approach. The room remained empty and he didn’t know where the voice had come from. The burnt orange glass or crystal, or whatever it was, of the wall behind him felt warm to the touch.
“What would you have?” the voice asked.
Hesitant, but not feeling anyone else in the room, having no place to hide, Warren said, “I don’t understand.”
“I can explain. You have but to ask.”
“Ask what?” Warren listened but there was no telltale echo to let him know the voice was coming from any other room than the one he was in.
“Whatever you wish to know.”
“Why am I here?” Warren pushed himself free of the wall and stepped toward the back of the room. There, barely revealed in the light, was a rectangular shadow in the burnt orange that might be a doorway. As he neared it, he saw that it was a door that sat at an angle to him and was hard to see.
“You are here because you wish to be here.”
“No. I didn’t come here on my own. I didn’t know about this place, so there was no way I could wish to be here.”
“Merihim the Bringer of Pestilence opened your way to this place.”
Cautiously, Warren stepped through the door. It opened onto another room, this one as empty as the first. “Where am I?”
“This is the Hall of Weapons,” the voice said. Now it appeared to be coming from the center of the next room.
Warren considered the information. “Why would Merihim open this place to me?”
“So you may learn more about that which you must seek.”
“What am I supposed to seek?”
“The Hammer of Balekor.”
Confusion twisted tightly inside Warren, but he was intrigued as well. “What is that?”
“A magnificent weapon. It was lost to the human world hundreds of years ago.”
“What does it do?”
“It kills. It destroys. The hammer is one of the most powerful weapons ever created by Vegalok.”
“Who was Vegalok?”
“A smith of the Dark Forge,” the voice replied. “It was his strong right arm that smithed many of the personal weapons of the Dark Wills.”
Warren wanted to ask what the Dark Wills were, but he was afraid to. “Tell me more about the Hammer of Balekor.”
“What do you wish to know?”
That stumped Warren for a moment. He hadn’t expected to be asked that question. It stood to reason that if the voice knew how he came to be there, it would also know why.
“Tell me about the hammer’s history.”
“After Vegalok made it, he presented it to Passapar, the Bringer of Flashing Ruin.”
A demon, Warren thought. “Why was it made?”
“As a weapon of war.”
“Against whom?”
“Whomever Passapar wished to wage war on.”
“Where is Passapar?”
“Dead. Not yet resurrected.”
Not yet resurrected? The announcement chilled Warren. Even if the demons could be killed, they could be resurrected? He hadn’t guessed that. Fighting them was futile then.
“Where is the hammer?” Warren asked. He had to survive, and if Merihim had staked his survival on finding the hammer, Warren intended to find it.
“It was lost in the human world centuries ago,” the voice continued.
“If the hammer isn’t here, then why am I?”
“Because you came.”
Warren chose not to argue the point. He walked to the nearest wall and peered out at the jagged skyline
