CHAPTER 29: MIRIAM
The rest of Tiger Platoon was behind me, shouting at me to slow down, but my targets were ahead and I wasn't listening. I raced down one block, scrabbled to get around the corner without flipping, and lunged at a pair of demons a quarter of the way down the block.
They were both malazaheen, and they were standing in front of a balor-sized hole in the stone wall of a grocery store. The regular door was still there, a stolid slab of untouched loam-black wood, but the demons had decided it would be more fun to smash through the wall. Maybe the door was magically reinforced, maybe the demons just wanted the family inside to marinate in their fear as they listened to the walls they counted on for protection get shredded around them. Whatever it was, they had done it.
I howled and charged. I had used up all my Mystic Accelerations for the day but my own speed was more than enough to kill. Sergeant Carpenter lowered his trident into lance position but that didn't matter.
The malazaheen saw me coming and got out of the way. One leapt, turning in midair and landing on the side of the building three stories up where it stood sideways as comfortably as it had on the ground. The other bounded across the street, scythes upraised.
I ignored them both and hurled myself through the hole and into the store. Unable to corner fast enough, I slammed my ribs against the side as I went through but I ignored the pain and kept going.
The inside of the store was large, wood-floored with tables covered in nose-blasting bins of fruit down both sides and in the middle. Blue-green faeries were imprisoned on the walls for light. The aisles between the bins were wide enough for two humans, one balor, or one pissed-off dog. A family of five was at the far end of the store along with a trio of balor. The largest of the balor had grabbed the husband by one leg and was rhythmically beating him against the floor like a flail. Each hit squelched blood. The other two were flipping tables over one by one, moving slowly down the line as the mother and children crawled frantically away underneath. Dozens of watermelons, oranges, kiwi, and weirder things had been scattered everywhere.
I howled as I came, crushing tables and bins of fruit out of my way with every bound. The demon desecrating the corpse of what had probably been a good man and a good husband dropped the body and started to turn towards me but I was already on him. I snapped forward, getting my teeth in its skull before my chest impacted and threw its body forward. It flapped out in front of me and I trampled across it, ripping the head off in the process. I skidded on some spilled watermelon, lost my footing, and slid forward on my side, spinning out of control so that I hit the second balor feet-first instead of teeth-first as I would have preferred.
I took its legs out from under it, literally. Thick and muscular as its legs were, they broke like kindling when I slid into it; it dropped on top of me, howling and raking at me with its filthy claws. A moment later we slammed into the other balor and it went down on top of the first one. We spun, table legs and fruit bouncing off of us as everything went everywhere. We slammed into the wall, one of the balor providing me with a lovely cushion. I heard its bones break but I made a point of biting its throat out before I scrambled back around and went for the other one, the one with the broken legs. It howled and clawed at me again while trying to headbutt me with its horns.
We tore into each other, scrambling in the slick spill of fruit and vegetables as we snapped and bit and clawed. It gouged down my side and fended me off for a moment but as soon as I got my feet under me and regained my balance I simply threw myself on it, crushing it down under my weight so I could get my teeth in its skull and crush it to mulch.
I rolled up to my feet, black ichor dribbling from my jaws, and looked around. The demons were dead, the room was temporarily safe, and the family was huddled in the corner, the mother trying to shelter her three children behind her body while all of them stared at me in wide-eyed panic. The youngest child whimpered and hid his face; it hit me like a slap.
I tried to back away, hunching to look less scary, but I stumbled over a balor. I glared at the stupid lump of meat and gave it a glare and a kick. They were nice enough to dissolve when you bit their heads off but they took their own sweet time about getting started.
One of the children laughed. My ears perked up and I sent a happy doggy smile her way. I even did the head tilt that always made Cassie giggle when she was little.
The kids weren't whimpering or hiding anymore but they were still looking scared, and that wouldn't do. I flopped down on my back with my paws in the air and tipped my head back so that I could see the kids. I was bleeding freely from my sides and back and basically everywhere, so it probably wasn't as adorable and reassuring as usual, but I did my best. I let my tongue loll out and panted in that exaggerated way that humans think looks dumb and goofy; they aren't smart enough to realize that us dogs know perfectly well that the humans think we're dumb when we do it but we're okay with that because it makes them laugh and we like it when they laugh.
It worked. The mother uncurled from around the children and the children stopped crying. I chuffed happily at them and wiggled invitingly, ignoring the stabbing pains it caused. The humans actually smiled, so I knew we were moving in the right direction.
There was a noise at the front of the store. I rolled back to my feet and stood up, all my attention focused on the threat.
The smaller of the two malazaheen, the one that had last been seen standing on the wall, was blocking the light. It was still on the sidewalk looking in, but its head was ducked through the door, tilting and quivering as it considered us. Sergeant Carpenter was lying ten feet this side of the hole and slightly to one side, clutching his leg and gasping in pain. His thigh had an extra joint in it and I could see bone sticking out. Blood was spurting in a steady stream despite his best efforts to stop it. His shield was still strapped to his arm but the spike had broken off and his trident was in two pieces beside him.
The humans started panicking again when they saw the demon. I stalked towards the front of the store, head low and teeth bared, a low growl rumbling out of my chest.
The demon withdrew its head and skittered backwards, still in that same zigzagging gait that was so hard to track in a fight. It waved one scythe at me in a 'come at me' gesture.
I diverted slightly to brush against Sergeant Carpenter and pump five Spirit into him. That didn't do it so I pumped five more. It left me much smaller and weaker than I would have preferred but his injury was my fault; I must have slammed his leg on the wall when I came inside, snapping it like a twig. Fortunately, it was easy to fix: On the second transferrence the bone got sucked back into his leg and the bleeding stopped. His breathing shifted down from 'gasping' to 'panting'. Still, he wasn't in danger and he had uncurled so he clearly wasn't suffering as much anymore. I was just glad that he'd gotten the straps undone and flopped to the ground before I started rolling around with the demons. I had been so angry that I had completely forgotten he was on my back and would have crushed him without realizing it.
I stopped at the wall, staying just inside the hole. I remembered how fast and dangerous these things were, and this time there were two of them. I couldn't afford to go out there when I was at full strength, much less now. On the street, with free space around us, they could get at me from both sides, or one of them could keep me busy while the other one went in and killed the humans. In here, I only had to defend one front and they couldn't get to the humans without going through me.
The malazaheen froze, motionless as a statue carved from sickly white marble. It cocked its head, a sudden movement that started and stopped without warning. The worms that grew from its eye sockets pawed at the air, tasting or smelling or some other sense that I couldn't imagine, as it considered me.
It waved 'come out and fight' again, this time tentatively. I didn't respond.
It slammed all four scythes together in front of it, scissoring them in and out in a noisy display that sounded like very loud cymbals. I still didn't respond.
It lunged forward, zipping from side to side as it raced at me. I braced—
It stopped six feet from the hole, just out of convenient lunging distance. It stopped all at once, its momentum gone in an eyeblink. A moment later the head cocked to the left, then to the right.
I waited, growling softly. Behind me, I could hear Sergeant Carpenter getting to his feet with a scrape of metal on stone and the family moving around in the back.
{Don't worry—} I stopped as I realized that Murray wasn't here to speak for me. He must have dropped off when I was charging at the demons.
A shadow shifted slightly on the sidewalk in front of me, on the outside of the hole. Hellsport's perpetually overcast sky meant that the sunlight was tepid and washed out, shadows blurry and faint, but a careful study allowed me to recognize the shape: The second malazaheen was standing on the wall directly above the hole. If I stuck my head out it would be scythed off.
There was a pain in my ribs as Sergeant Carpenter spiked me and injected ten Spirit; I promptly floofed out to full size. The saddle had slipped when I shrank and the girth had slid down my body so the saddle was now hanging underneath my belly where it would get in the way if I needed to fight or move quickly.
The visible malazaheen and I stared at each other, each recognizing the standoff. I didn't think it could see the saddle to realize what an advantage it had but it might not have been willing to attempt forcing its way in regardless.
Something slammed into the wall to my right. I glanced over to see the tip of a malazaheen scythe sticking through the stone. It pulled out and then slammed back, penetrating deeper this time as it carved another hole that I wouldn't be able to defend and would allow it to flank me.
Sergeant Carpenter was beside me, unbuckling the saddle and dragging it out of the way without a word. From the corner of my eye I noted that it had gotten badly crunched when I was rolling over and over with the balors. The pommel and cantle were both cracked and smooshed down and the surface of the saddle had a big ripple in the leather. Sergeant Carpenter, unaware of my saddle-related thoughts, drew his sword, checked that his shield was strapped solidly to his arm, and went to stand in front of where the demon was carving its way through. My heart sank as I realized how futile the gesture was. The malazaheen would go through him effortlessly.
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Fortunately, my worries proved irrelevant. From out of sight to my right, Annette's voice shouted "In the name of Melos!" and a blast of flame washed over the malazaheen I was staring down; it shrieked and leaped away, headed back up the block to where the rest of Tiger Platoon must be waiting, but I could see that it had been badly injured. The other one stopped trying to cut through the wall and I heard skittering noises as it moved away.
I threw myself out the hole and turned right, shooting forward as fast as I could in long, low bounds that left my ears streaming out behind me. I wasn't fast enough; I could only watch in horror as the scene played out over the course of a few seconds.
The guardsmen were standing in front of Aerith and Annette, their tridents glowing bright yellow. Master Hethok stood to one side and slightly in front, the lizard's entire body covered in flames. They opened their mouth and breathed a white-hot lance of fire at the burned malazaheen, but the creature's zigzagging motion caused the attack to go wide. It leapt, scythes extended to pierce down on Master Hethok—
—and a glowing white wall appeared in front of it, angled so that the monster bounced off and sprawled to the side, landing directly in front of Private Garcia. Garcia promptly stabbed it in the throat with his trident while Chi and Funter got it in the chest and upper left shoulder. Funter was the rightmost of the guards; his thrust into the shoulder was weak because he was holding the trident with his left hand, wearing his shield on the right to cover against attacks that would have flanked the line. He had gone to one knee as he thrust, angling the shield up and over himself, and it was good that he had because the malazaheen managed to hit him at knee height with its lower left arm. Fortunately, it was the blade of the scythe that hit, not the point, and it didn't penetrate the tough wood of his shield. Garcia and Chi pulled their tridents out and stabbed again and again, ensuring the kill.
While this was happening, the second malazaheen had been zigzagging along the wall, keening a battle cry. Halfway to the humans, a glowing wall appeared inches in front of it, edge on and at neck height. The demon had its upper scythes leaning forward so it was the arms that hit first, not the throat, or the fight might have been over right there.
Granted, it ended a few seconds later when the malazaheen fell to the sidewalk in a sprawling heap and I smashed its head into paste. I also tore its arms off, just to be sure; these things had proven themselves irritatingly resilient. Also, I was pissed.
"You okay, boss?" Murray asked, flapping up to me now that the battle was done.
I smashed the malazaheen's corpse a few more times with my paw, solely to vent my feelings and not out of any concern that it was still alive.
"Boss?"
"I'm fine," I said. "There's four civilians in the store and they need healing. Let's go." I turned and grumbled back to the store, the others following silently.
Sergeant Carpenter met us halfway there, his sword sheathed so that he could carry the saddle slung over his shoulder. The mother and her kids walked in front of him. She was human, her black hair a ponytailed briar patch to her shoulders with years of ground-in exhaustion draped across her shoulders. On her hip she carried the youngest of the children, a boy who couldn't have been more than five or six. The younger of his sisters, probably a year older than her brother, walked alongside while clutching her mother's free hand. Her free arm was around her older sister's waist, and vice versa. All three kids would have been adorable little tallow-headed angels if they'd been clean and smiling instead of splattered in blood and pulped fruit, visibly dangling above a chasm of fear.
Aerith pushed his way forward and went down on one knee in front of the girls. "Hey there, little ones, my name is Aerith and I'm a healer." He looked up at the mother. "Don't worry, ma'am. I'm going to scan each of you to make sure there's no injuries and I'll fix you right up if there are. Okay?"
She nodded jerkily. He reached out and tapped the older girl on the head. "
"Wagh!" she yelped. She pushed her tongue around inside her mouth, her lips and cheeks getting distended in funny ways. "My teeth feel weird! And so does my tongue!"
Aerith smiled. "They're clean, that's all." He went through the routine with each of the other three. The mother and son needed a quick application of Healing Word to get rid of scrapes and abrasions but they were otherwise fine.
Everyone waited patiently until Aerith was done, at which point Master Hethok said "We need to get these fine people to a shelter. Dear lady, if any of the children would enjoy a ride, I imagine that these scaly old shoulders of mine could take the weight. It's cold out and I'm quite toasty."
I huffed an equivalent offer, although I didn't feel the need to have Murray translate it. Sometimes Dog was the appropriate language.
"Creator's breath," Annette said, clearly exasperated. "How about asking the poor woman her name? Honestly." She nodded to the mother. "I'm Annette Tremaine, a Priest Specialist with the City Guard. You met Athos and Sergeant Carpenter. The inconsiderate touchy guy over there is Aerith and these are Belker, Chi, Funter, Garcia, and Smith. And you would be?"
"Miriam," the woman said, her voice flattened by emotional exhaustion. "Miriam Dohnay." After a moment she remembered to say "These are Ruth, Rachel, and Isaac."
Annette smiled and waved. "Well, Miriam, let's get you lot over to one of the shelters, yeah?"
Miriam nodded. Isaac sucked his thumb, watching us with saucered eyes.
I stepped over to Sergeant Carpenter and turned to make it easy for him to put the saddle on me again. Once it was on and the girth was nice and tight I lay down in front of the four of them and tossed my head towards my back with an inviting woof. Miriam didn't react but Rachel, the oldest girl, climbed onto the saddle after only a moment's hesitation. Her grip on my fur pulled painfully but I didn't say anything. Little kids hurt you accidentally, that was a fact of dog life. It wasn't worth complaining about.
"Rachel..." Miriam started to say, before shaking her head and plopping Ruth up in front of her older sister. The saddle was big enough for both of them, but I suspected not comfortably. Especially not after the crunching it had taken. I stood up carefully, shifting a little bit to make sure that the girls weren't going to fall off in the normal course of events.
Speaking of which...
"I'm sorry I hurt you," Murray said for me to Sergeant Carpenter. I ducked my head and snooted him in embarrassed apology.
He rubbed my ears for a moment. "Don't worry about it," he said. "You slammed my leg into the wall as you went in, but you also fixed it and saved me from the demon. The thing would have killed me if you weren't there. I call it a mulligan."
I apologetically bumped him again.
"Hate to be a killjoy," Corporal Belker said. "Athos, you can't have civilians on you. You need to be able to fight." He handed his trident to Private Garcia and stepped forward to stand next to me so that he could turn around, offering his back to the girls. "C'mon, kids. I'll give one of you a piggyback ride."
The adventurous Rachel took him up on it with minimal hesitation. Ruth needed a nudge from her mother to climb onto Private Smith's back when the guardsman offered.
Belker bobbed in place, bouncing Rachel up and down in correct piggyback-giver fashion. "Hold on tight kid. Gack! Ahh! Too tight! Need air!" He waved his hands dramatically as though being choked. Rachel giggled in a way that made her mother smile a tiny bit. The girl shifted her arms a little away from Belker's neck, but still had her legs locked tight around his middle.
"Madam, would you care for a ride in turn? No? Ah, very well." Master Hethok shook their head sadly, then rippled a shrug down their body. "Does anyone know where the nearest shelter is? I am unfamiliar with this neighborhood."
"Should be one three blocks that way and one up," Annette said, pointing.
Sergeant Carpenter looked around, checking on each of us. "Everyone okay? Cool. Belker, I'm taking your trident." He retrieved the weapon and swung up onto my back with a leathery creak from the girth.
"No worries, sarge. Lead on."
We set out, the guardsmen casually widening out to walk in a loose square with Miriam, Belker, Smith, and Aerith in the center. Sergeant Carpenter and I were at the front, Annette beside us since she knew where we were going.
At the end of the block a thought occurred. "Murray," I said, "you mentioned that there were probably only three or four hazdahem attacking the city, right?"
"Yeah," he said, replying to his own Dog-to-Hellsport translation. "Why?"
"And a hazdahem is usually in charge of five hundred balor or two hundred and fifty malazaheen, right?"
"Usually, yeah. Dat's da theoretical numbah, anyway. I t'ink most companies are over- or understrength at any given time. And a balor company is going to have some auxiliaries—malazaheen as support, maybe oddah t'ings."
"Doesn't that mean that there aren't more than..." I hurried to do the math in my head. Five hundred balor per hazdahem times four hazdahem...five times four was twenty, add two zeroes... "About two thousand demons in the city, tops?"
"Yeah. Dey pro'ly summoned some elementals or animated shit ta serve as traptrippahs and distractions, but dat's about right."
"It's a big city," Sergeant Carpenter noted. "We've run into a fair number of demons so far. They must be concentrated in or fairly near this area."
"Imp, back at the Bastion you said they were looking for orichalcum, right?" Annette asked. "How did you know that?"
It didn't seem like a good idea to let people know that all of this was happening because of me and my friends. All I had wanted to do was get home! Was that so unreasonable?
"Hey, I might have some friends around here," I said, hoping to distract from the other topic. "We got attacked earlier and had to split up. I went to the Bastion and I'm not sure where they went."
"If they've got half a brain between them then there's a good chance they're in the shelter," Annette said.
They probably weren't. They were probably in Erathos's shield room, whatever and wherever that might be.
Unfortunately, our priest was annoyingly unwilling to be distracted. "Anyway, I still want to know how you knew that this was about orichalcum."
I thought furiously about how I could distract her again, and then a realization came over me: I didn't have to say everything I knew! "There were some City Council people there when we got attacked," I told her. "They said something about wanting to collect the orichalcum so that it could be given to Lord Gliv's herald." Hey, look! I was being sneaky!
"Huh," Belker said.
"What's a herald?" I asked.
"A herald is someone who speaks for a ruler," Sergeant Carpenter said from my back. "Usually a ruler, anyway. They go somewhere and bring the ruler's words."
"Like a messenger imp?" Murray snorted in disgust even as he relayed my words.
"Sort of," Annette replied. "Not exactly. A messenger imp just repeats your words. A herald understands the intent and can expand on it if the recipient asks questions. They often have some degree of authority to negotiate."
"Would Lord Gliv have a herald?"
"I mean...I suppose he could," Sergeant Carpenter said. "Why?"
"If he wants the orichalcum, could we make all of this stop if we gave it to him?"
"Probably," Sergeant Carpenter said.
Yay!
"But maybe not," he continued. "And he'd probably want more than just the metal. He'd want the people who created it or found it so that he can hopefully get more out of them."
Boo! I didn't want Lord Gliv to have me, or my friends.
Before I could think what to say next, a horde of small creatures scuttled around the corner just in front of us. They looked like human babies, except they had fangs in their mouths and a forest of tentacles instead of legs. There were at least thirty of them. We looked at them, they looked at us, and then they shrieked a battle cry and rushed us...
...only to be burned to ash by a massive gout of fire.
"Darkened water, Hethok! You have to wait until I invoke his name before you burn stuff or it doesn't count as an offering!"
"Then, dear lady, I suggest you invoke his name a bit faster."
o-o-o-o
We made it the rest of the way to the shelter and dropped off Miriam and her kids. The kids were sad to see us go; Rachel was enjoying her piggyback ride enough that she clung to Corporal Belker's back and demanded "One more block!" He peeled her off firmly and handed her back to her mother, much to Rachel's displeasure.
The shelter was an underground bunker large enough for five hundred people. There were four entrances, one on each side of the Fifth Avenue and Temple Way block. Each entrance was a staircase wide enough for ten people at a time. At the bottom was a corridor lined in runes and sigils that led to a pair of massive iron doors, enchanted to be virtually weightless so they could be closed quickly. Inside was a large open space with rows upon rows of cots, each with a pillow and a blanket. Shelves along the walls held crates of food and jugs of water. The place was stuffed full of fear-stink and swimming in hollow-eyed people, many of them splashed red from narrow escapes.
We stayed just long enough to verify that Marcus and the others weren't there and then we went back aboveground and resumed our progress towards the Magisterium.