The Boundaries of Friendship

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Greatsword and longsword both swept through their bearers’ foes. Beasts’ blood met steel, and holy power burned like acidic ice through their hot, foul souls.

Mik’s golden blade slid through the last of the pack of black devils as he called to his last companion, “Lanka, I see the tower!”

The warrior sent from the Ilmaterite temple looked up to see the object of their battle. She surged within with the hunger for the prey within sight. The demon wizard would pay for his bravado.

They were the two last survivors from the small army amassed to enter the gate opened to that desolate place on the fifth layer of the Nine Hells. The ashen hellsoil smoked with choking heat as fiend blood soaked its gray tones into a black mud. The captain of the Purple Dragons knelt to the ground. The officer of the Cormyrian army placed his dirty hands around his golden symbol; he prayed Torm would use all his godly haste to take his men to their holy reward. He did not weep.

Lanka’s eyes had not left the tower as the paladin prayed. Her chest writhed beneath her armor, her breath quick with desire. More deserved death was meant to be dealt.

“Hurry.”

He stood, bloody mud sticking to his knees. “This place needs prayer. My men deserved it.”

Lanka sneered. “Captain, souls find their god faster than any prayer. Hefizagincon awaits his destruction.”

The human smiled at his strange companion. She never forgot her purpose.

Mik had not had the comfort of a formal introduction to his comrade. The darkness of the tavern had not compared to the darkness the lone woman had surrounded herself in. Mik took his duties as peacekeeper of the bar with the sobriety he reserved for all matters of honor, although his mentor would not have approved of his tactic of offering shadowy characters a drink as a way to make known their intent.

She had refused the ale, asking only if there was an adventurers’ guild in that town. She was so candid as to give him her full name and her reasons for choosing a mercenary’s life. Revenge against a father was not an uncommon cause for such an existence, and Mik thought little of it aside from the shamful state of the world in which any child need go against their own father. On their first assignment together, Mik still had not known of the true nature of his companion and later silently agreed with her decision to keep such things unspoken. The fiendhunter was excellent but ruthless. Mercy was very much his contribution when she was present. No quarter, no clemency, no sympathy could she give. He believed at one time such a woman would make a fine friend, perhaps eternally given her fine face and devotion, if she could be tempered into ladyhood.

When she confided in him her secret behind her great abilities, he knew she was no lady. Lanka would always be considered by him a great warrior against evil, a dedicated adversary to the darkness, and perhaps there would be times when he could not imagine wanting any other being, save Torm himself, at his side. She had been raised to be woman of honor, and he believed completely in her desire to make her mother and her god proud.

But he knew the price she paid for her drive. It was without a doubt a cost no human should pay, and he knew no worse curse. Even should one offer his soul as payment to a fiend, as foul an act it was, he could by good works buy it back. But knowing her own soul bears the blackness of the foulest of all instincts, that yearning for wickedness only evil made flesh knows, Mik spent much time in prayer for Lanka’s torn soul. He had made an oath to her and Torm at her own insistence: she would not succumb and live.

~~

The first of many devil dukes found death cursing the name of Lanka Holloway. As Hefizagincon crumbled to the floor of its slate tower, its sinister laughter enraged her. Throwing down her sword, Lanka snapped her picks into her clawed hands. On her knees, she stabbed her heavy weapons into its dead flesh, spurting black ichors across her filth-coated mail. Each pounding strike hooked deep as she used the picks to tear that laugh out from its chest, to pull it out and tear it between her fingers.

Mik pulled the howling woman’s feet out from under her. The half-fiend dropped her weapons and began slashing at the dead monster with her own black claws as he pulled her away. He grabbed for her arm, turning her over, pinning her to the fouled floor. Mik called her name to her as he tried to steady her frenzy, holding her down at the wrists to avoid her talons. She shrieked the dead devil’s name, her wide, blue eyes blazing with unrepressed wrath.

She felt his wet hand strike her face.

“Lanka… it's dead…” he panted as he straddled her.

Still breathing hard, she returned his alarmed expression with solid, cold grit.

“We still must find the captives. Are you going to be alright?”

She maintained her stare, softening slightly as she said, “No.”

Looking down at her as she just returned from a place he never wished to know and often wished its inhabitants destroyed, he felt again something less than pity but more than sadness. He helped her up.

~~

They were no thieves with lock picks and crowbars. The door had to be broken down by force. Lanka sweat like a caged beast and took to the room she exposed with the gait of a maddened creature.

The devil’s tower offered everything one would expect from such a tainted mind. Its halls seemed endless, and behind each door lay a new foulness once unimagined. The dead devil’s audacity disgusted her, and she longed to again put her claws into it. She heard Mik making war with another door to win its compliance. Every door must be broken; every speck of wickedness must be irradiated.

In the room, creatures stood. The stink of fiend coated them; she could nearly see the devil’s putrid touch on each one. They stared blankly at her, standing and slouching like unkempt zombies left guarding a defiled tomb. Their eyes twitched as they stumbled forward, stretching their hands out toward her. Their grasping hands promised murder as they silently came to her.

They were many and she was only one. Their hands reached toward her, stubby, dull hands that clutched and pulled at her body. These ragged things would not have her.

One sword would not destroy them all. Only rage unbound could deny their murderous desire. She felt her soul burning, her own inner darkness pounding for freedom, and she let wild her cruel craving. They would wither and waste for their daring.

~~

Their skin crumbled under his timid touch, a tiny cloud of dust puffed away like a soul to its resting place. Their clothes remained unscathed, be they peasants’ rags or Purple Dragon guardsmen’s issue. Within those cloth and metal wrappings lay dry dust shaped still like the people each had been; not a soul remained within. Mik looked up to the forty-nine more shells like the one under his touch.

Lanka kept in the doorway, away from the ring of bodies where she had been standing. Her stony, pale face was still dewy.

Mik halted his action when he had heard Lanka’s wailing and hastened his steps when the hall filled with innumerable cries. Lanka’s body had been a stiff, tall figure emerging from the floor covered in crumpled bodies.

From his knees he asked, “What is this?”

The half-fiend looked down at the man, her eyes betraying nothing but the resolve of granite. Between her gritted, pointed teeth she answered, “They are the captives.”

His eyes dampened at the sight of the dusty husks of men and women he had battled so hard to liberate. “They’re dead.”

Her lip twitched, sneering against her will. “I know.”

The paladin stood and stepped carefully toward her. His gaze did not falter as his voice threatened to. “Did you do this?”

Lanka turned away from her friend, the man who held the first bond of friendship she had forged herself. Her fists tightened, puncturing again the scars where her claws always dug into her palms.

“Lanka.” Mik strode the last steps to stand behind her. He could smell some strange foulness that covered her armor. He placed his hand on her shoulder, the other on his sword hilt.

“Lanka, did you kill them?” His tone did not waver.

Blood dripped from her hands. She was silent.

Mik looked down as the blood dropped down onto the floor. Then he caught sight of the golden symbol on his chest, the faithful hand of Torm. He took his hand from her shoulder and cupped the sign of his god to his heart.

Mik sensed within his own soul the purity Torm required of his best. His inner sight streamed through all his own aspects, searching each action, every motive, and he reminded himself of the meaning of purity and the contents of an innocent heart. With his soul’s eye now honed to see darkness where none should be, Mik moved his holy sight to look upon his comrade.

“What is your order, Captain?” she asked grimly.

“Look to me,” he said.

Lanka turned to face him. Her stature conveyed no sense of fear. Her blue eyes seemed to search him equally for his own goodness. A bead of sweat streamed around the base of one of her horns and rested above her dusky eyebrow.

Mik swallowed and braced himself. “You must help me recover identifying possessions from each of the victims. The remains of all women and Purple Dragons must be recovered in the most respectable manner possible to ensure proper burial. Have the transportation scroll ready when those duties are finished. Do you accept these duties, mercenary?”

She was as impure as the day he met her, no more or less. Lanka was a worthy ally but an unworthy soul.

“Yes, Mik,” she replied soberly. “I do.” She had felt his eye pass over her, knew what he had seen. Something within her remained redeemable, some aspect of herself he could see but she was blind to. Despite her weakness today, she had not broken yet. When she did, she knew she wanted Mik to kill her, as her only friend had promised.