Free Satan's Gambit (The Barrier War Book 3) by Brian J Moses Page A

him.
    Birch had
promised one of his nephew’s friends, Marc Tanus, that he would record as much
of his journey through Hell as he could remember, as well as everything he had
gleaned through his contact with the demon Kaelus. He was also keeping a
separate set of memoirs for things that might be too dangerous to become common
knowledge, or that might get him branded a heretic. Not everything in the past
decade of his life could truly be considered in keeping with the teachings of
the Prism – if they knew the whole truth, many would no doubt try to have him
expelled from the Order.
    Among the more
revealing, if disturbing, memories he’d uncovered were those from Kaelus
involving conversations with Satan. The demon had been incarcerated in Hell
since the Great Schism, but he often was visited by the true master of Hell,
Satan Himself, who would discourse with the shackled Kaelus for hours or years
on end. The memories were often hazy and purely vocal – Kaelus had few visual
memories during his incarceration, and none involving Satan – but Birch went to
great lengths to document every word he could glean from the demon’s mind. The
potential insight they might give was impossible to overestimate, and Birch
periodically had to remind himself that nothing Satan said could be taken at
face value. The master of evil, counterpart to the divine God, had gone to
great lengths to hide His existence from every demonic immortal being, and such
a master of deceit was surely playing His own game with every word He spoke.
    Of course, Birch
had had his own conversations with Satan, many of which he was still struggling
to remember himself. They were jumbled amidst the worst of Birch’s memories
from Hell, and he often wondered just how much of them he really wanted to
recall.
    Of the twenty
years Birch had been in Hell, six of them had been spent under the worst
tortures ever devised by man or demon; thankfully, Birch still only had hazy
memories of those agonizing years. The other fourteen years, however, were
spent traversing the endless, lifeless landscape of the immortal plane. Time
passed differently there, so Birch had only aged the ten years that had passed
in the mortal realm. As far as anyone knew, Birch was the only mortal to ever
return from Hell; at least until the Black Viscia had emerged, leading the
unholy horde during the Barrier War. The corrupted, apostate paladins were a
literal black mark against the ideals of the Prismatic Order.
    Birch felt
something scratching against his leg, and he looked down but saw nothing.
Before he could look up again, something gray and hairy crashed onto his desk
and nearly upended the ink well. Birch hastily retrieved the tottering bottle
of ink and glowered darkly at the gray rat grinning at him from atop the paper
on which he’d just been writing.
    “Selti,” Birch
said in exasperation, “if you’ve smeared that ink I’m going to shave your furry
hide and make a hairpiece for Nuse.”
    Selti hissed at
him in disbelief, but carefully stepped off the inked paper. Birch saw only a
few small smudges that weren’t worth getting upset about, so he contented
himself with a stern frown at his small companion.
    “Back to your
drann shape,” Birch ordered, “and behave yourself.”
    Selti had the
grace to look ashamed of himself, and the sight of a rat looking so downcast
nearly made Birch laugh despite his irritation.
    “Come on now.”
    The gray hair
retracted and solidified, then hardened into reptilian scales as the rat grew to
the size of a housecat. His tail lengthened and was covered with its own
scales, and two leathery wings quickly took shape and spread over half of
Birch’s desk. Selti lowered his wings and looked up at his paladin hopefully.
    “Better,” Birch
said, and reached forward to scratch the creature under his left eye. “I’m very
impressed with your new abilities, of course, but if you could be a little less
of a nuisance about them, I’d appreciate