Edge of Destiny

by J. Robert King

  Her eyes shone like jade. “Talking to you.”

  Logan blinked. “No, I mean, why are you here?”

  She sighed. “You asked me to step into the light.”

  “See what I mean?” growled Rytlock.

  “Which is a bad idea since the smell of blood is drawing predators from miles around,” she continued, “and those pyres are like beacons to bring the ogres.”

  Rytlock huffed. “Bring the ogres? We just killed the ogres.”

  “Yes,” the silver-haired woman said. “You killed some of them.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you get here?”

  “I followed you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were moving. It’s impossible to follow someone who is standing still. If I hadn’t moved, I would have lost you. Thus, follow. You ask the strangest questions.”

  Logan flung his hands up in frustration.

  Rytlock stepped forward, Sohothin before him. “You saw what this sword can do. Give us your name.”

  “I’m Caithe. But what does my name have to do with what your sword can do?”

  Rytlock rolled his eyes. “It was a threat.”

  “I’m not the one in danger here,” Caithe said.

  “Is that a threat?” Rytlock asked, eyes growing wide.

  “Not a threat. A warning.”

  The charr laughed harshly. “You? Warning me?”

  “Yes.”

  “About what?”

  “Being killed.”

  “You think you can kill me?”

  “No.”

  Rytlock stared at her, waiting for elaboration. None came. Finally he asked, “So, who, then?”

  “Chief Kronon.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “The chief of the local tribes.”

  “What does he want with us?” asked Rytlock.

  “You killed his son, Chiefling Ygor.”

  “The one with the iron helm,” Logan said, snapping his fingers.

  Caithe continued placidly, “When Chief Kronon finds out, he and his hunters will track you down.”

  Rytlock stared at the dead ogres lying between the pyres. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  The sylvari clenched her teeth. “That’s exactly what I was telling you but was sidetracked by all those hows and whys and ridiculous commands to come into the light so that all three of us could stand here and be surrounded by devourers.”

  “Devourers!” Logan blurted, just before the first giant scorpion scuttled into view.

  It was a devourer, all right, its armor as thick as plates and its two tails curved in deadly arcs above its back. The creature ambled up just behind Caithe.

  “There’s a swarm,” she said in a lecturing voice, “which means we’ll all be fighting. Now, I’ve seen you two fight—too much power, too little care—which means you’ll win, but not before the ogres get here, which means we all lose.”

  Claws clicked the ground behind Logan. He spun to see another devourer creeping up on him.

  “I’ve got one, too,” Rytlock announced, raking his sword out before him. The darkness beyond shivered with scaly claws and venomous stingers. “Hate these things. They’re attracted by the smell of death. It’s their food.”

  “But the pyres,” Logan said. “We burned the dead!”

  “So they want their food cooked.”

  “Too many!” Logan hissed as a pair of devourers scuttled up to him. He swung his hammer, and their tails darted down to spurt venom into the air.

  Rytlock’s sword was even worse, drawing the great scorpions like a candle flame.

  “Put away your weapons,” the sylvari said easily. “Devourers have better weapons than you. You need to dictate the battle. Draw the monster in. Get it to strike, but when you want it to.”

  Whirling around, Caithe flung her arms toward the sky and set her feet wide apart, becoming a living X before the giant scorpion. It scudded forward, its scales shivering with anticipation. The two poisonous tails quivered, and drops of venom hung from their ends. The devourer snapped its pincers and clicked its feet, watching for an opening. Suddenly, both poisonous tails lunged toward Caithe.

  She flung her hands back from the stingers, which jetted poison. Then, with catlike reflexes, she grabbed the tops of the stingers.

  “What are you doing?” Logan shouted.

  The sylvari only smiled again as those muscular tails lifted her up over of the devourer’s snapping claws and carapaced back. Caithe raised a spike-heeled boot and brought it down on the base of the scorpion’s tails. Her heel punched through the thick armor and into the nerve core. The two great tails wilted, slumping to the ground.

  “Every creature’s got weak points,” Caithe said as she drew a knife from her belt and stabbed the beast’s brain. “Learn the weak points, and you can lockpick them. For these devourers, the weak point is where the two tails diverge.”

  A half dozen devourers swelled out of the darkness.

  The man and the charr traded annoyed looks and launched into battle.

  Logan brought his hammer down on the back of a devourer—except that the beast shied back, and the hammer rooted in the ground. Logan dropped it and pivoted to run, but the devourer surged up to trip him. Pincers grabbed his ankles and pitched him backward. Logan landed on the scorpion, back-to-back, his hands reaching up to catch the twin stingers before they could sink into his stomach. Gobs of venom slid down his arms as the muscular tails struggled to break his grip. The venom made his hands slick, and he was losing hold.

  “Weak points,” said a voice, and Logan looked up between the tails to see the smiling sylvari. She kicked her heel into the divergence of the spines. The tails slumped. Caithe leaned over Logan and jabbed between his legs to stab the scorpion’s brain. Smiling grimly, she helped Logan to his feet. “Try it my way.”

  With his hammer mired beneath a dead devourer, he had little choice. As another giant scorpion approached, Logan lifted his arms and spread his legs as Caithe had done. When the tails struck, he reared his hands back, caught hold of the tails, and rode them up to the weak point. A solid stomp wilted the stingers, and another crushed the brain of the beast.

  Caithe had already finished off half a dozen the same way—and Rytlock had burned two others to sooty husks. The last three devourers surrounded the charr, though.

  “Let’s give him a hand,” Caithe said.

  Logan dragged his hammer free and rushed to aid his onetime foe. He pounded the spine of one devourer, crushing it and wilting the deadly tails. Caithe meanwhile plunged her dagger into the back of another.

  But the final scorpion bounded at the charr, grabbing his legs and knocking him to the ground.

  Rytlock rammed his sword into a joint in the carapace. The scorpion’s eyes grew fire-bright, then cloudy white, then cracked like hard-boiled eggs. Smoke oozed from the shell in a hundred places.

  “Smells like thundershrimp,” Logan said.

  “Never had it,” Rytlock snorted, crawling on his elbows out of the grip of the thing’s dead pincers. Next moment, the creature burst into flame. Rising to his feet, Rytlock heaved a satisfied sigh. “Well, that’s three for me. How many for you, Logan?”

  Reluctantly the man said, “Two. But one was yours. You owe me.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I killed seven,” Caithe said. She went among the devourer bodies, slicing off the tails. When she finished, she cut off the stingers and leaned the tails against the pyre to cook. Kneeling, she dug a hole and positioned a stinger in it, point up.

  “What are you doing?” Logan asked.

  “Burying their stingers.”

  “Why?”

  “The ogres won’t be able to run as well on stung feet.” She nodded to the two warriors. “Well, lend a hand.”

  The man and the charr bent, digging as well. In a few minutes, the three had set their devourer-tail traps. Caithe smiled dazzlingly. “We nee
d to go. I can hear them.”

  “Hear who?”

  “The ogres.” She cupped a hand to her ear. The man and the charr listened. Beyond the crackle of sizzling fat and the chorus of distant locusts came the thunder of boots on ground. Occasionally, a cackle or yip announced that hyenas ran with the party. Then a deep-bellied horn sounded. “That would be Chief Kronon and his hunters.”

  “How does he know about the chiefling?” Logan wondered.

  “He doesn’t—yet. Let’s go.” Caithe snatched up one of the roasted scorpion tails, peeled off the charred scales, and took a bite of the white flesh within. “They’re delicious, but don’t eat the venom glands.” She set off at a light-footed run from the canyon.

  The man and the charr watched as she disappeared into the darkness. Rytlock growled, “Why should we trust her?”

  Logan shot him a disbelieving look. “Why should I trust you?” He snatched up his own scorpion tail and jogged after the sylvari.

  “Good point.” The charr grabbed two more tails and chased after his strange allies. “Thundershrimp, eh?”

  Chief Kronon’s feet pounded the ground, and his heart pounded his ribs. His scar-crossed chest pumped like an old bellows, and he ached—not with the running, but with every father’s fear: that his son had stirred up terrible trouble.

  “Ygor is rash,” Chief Kronon growled.

  Beside him, Warmarshal Rairon blew upon a great horn. The mournful cry pealed out across the mountains, but no answering cry came from Chiefling Ygor’s horn.

  Chief Kronon shook his head violently. His son was idealistic and rash and perhaps gone.

  Kronon had lived 240 years, enough time to bury many sons. The chief had been born the very year that the Great Destroyer, champion of the ancient dragon Primordus, had awakened. His great-great-grandsire had been born in the year that magic had come into the world. The greatest of his grandsires had been born before there were any humans.

  The ogre race was ancient, but Ygor was young. He cared only for “the hunts,” slaughtering humans and charr that strayed into ogre lands. “He is foolish and reckless and rash.”

  Chief Kronon led his hunters up a wooded slope and thrashed past a stand of trees. He and his retinue emerged on a rill and staggered to a halt.

  There, on the mountainside above, a canyon was lit by a pair of pyres. The ogres had smelled them from twenty miles away—burning human flesh and burning charr flesh. Only now, at the edge of dawn, did they see the light of them.

  “We don’t burn our dead,” the chief said to no one.

  “No, lord,” Warmarshal Rairon replied.

  “The winner of this battle is burning the dead.”

  “Yes, lord.”

  A groan escaped Chief Kronon’s lips, but when the warmarshal glanced his way, the chief only ran forward.

  He climbed a slope of scree and then a mossy hillside and a narrow trail through another thicket and at last reached the canyon.

  There, between the pyres, lay ogre bodies.

  Warmarshal Rairon charged into the clearing, past dismembered devourers and slain hyenas. When he approached the ogres, though, he shouted and fell to the ground. “Stay back! It’s trapped.”

  Chief Kronon halted, holding out his arms to keep the rest of the group back.

  The warmarshal reached to his foot, where the white stinger of a devourer was embedded. The venom gland still pumped. Rairon pried the stinger loose, then reached to his thigh and pulled out a second. “There are more stingers,” he gasped, “in a circle around the pile.”

  Kronon nodded grimly.

  Already, Rairon was stiffening. He looked up with cloudy eyes. “It has been an honor to serve you, my chief.”

  “You have served well.”

  The warmarshal went gray like a statue and toppled backward.

  “Clear them away.”

  The hunters tentatively moved forward, digging in the sands to remove the scorpion stingers. At last, they announced, “It is safe, lord,” and backed away. “Your son lies here.”

  Chief Kronon approached the spot, seeing Chiefling Ygor sprawled out, arms spread and hands open, never to close again.

  Falling to his knees, the chief murmured, “My son. My son. You will be avenged.”

  He reached down to the chiefling’s belt, which bore the horn he used in the hunt. Chief Kronon pulled the horn from its thong and set it to his lips and blew a long, mournful cry. Then he let his hands fall to his sides and roared into the sky, “You will be avenged!”

  Four miles away, Caithe, Logan, and Rytlock were running across a hanging valley when they heard the lonely horn.

  “I think he’s found the body,” Logan said.

  Then came an anguished roar.

  “He’s definitely found the body,” Rytlock added.

  Caithe still led the way, faster and more lithe than the other two. “Ogres can outrun all of us, and their hyenas can outrun them.”

  Rytlock laughed derisively. “Where’s the weak point on a hyena?”

  Caithe replied, “Unfortunately, it’s halfway down the throat.”

  “I’ll reach in and see if I can find it,” Rytlock replied.

  “Better to just keep running,” the sylvari said, her silver hair lashing her ears. Logan noticed now that it was not quite hair, but rather more like the fronds or leaves of a plant.

  “You knew the ogres were hunting us,” Rytlock said. “Why didn’t you stay away?”

  Even as she ran, leaping small cracks in the ground, Caithe shrugged. “You two were trying to kill each other. That’s what charr and men do. But then, you were trying to save each other. That’s not what they do. I was . . . intrigued.”

  Logan asked, “Are you still intrigued?”

  “More like baffled.” Just then, the voice of a hyena ripped the air, and more yipping followed. “They’ve seen us.”

  “Half a mile back,” Rytlock huffed, glancing over his shoulder. “We’ve got—what?—a minute?”

  “Just keep running.”

  The three did for the first forty seconds, rushing side by side across the grasslands while hyenas bounded after.

  “I wouldn’t be in this mess if it weren’t for you,” Rytlock snapped.

  “You wouldn’t be in this mess if you’d left Ascalon to us,” Logan replied.

  The hyenas were snapping at their heels.

  Rytlock drew Sohothin and backhanded two of the beasts right behind him. They squealed and fell away.

  Another peal from the ogre horn announced that the brutes had sighted their quarry. The ground shook with the footfalls of the ogres.

  Logan hoisted his war hammer. “We have to turn and fight. The hyenas will drag us down.”

  “No! Just keep running!” Caithe shouted.

  “What’s the point?” cried Rytlock. “You got some secret fortress hidden in your pocket?”

  “Yes!” Caithe said, suddenly dropping away into a narrow cleft in the ground.

  Eyes wide, Logan ran up on the same cleft and skidded to a halt in front of it. The steep crevice plunged away into unseeable depths, and the sylvari had vanished into it.

  “Look out!” Rytlock shouted, running a hyena through with his flaming sword.

  “Thanks,” Logan replied, pulping the head of another.

  As they fought the snarling beasts, both warriors backed toward the deep crevice.

  “You think she did that on purpose?” Logan asked, mowing down another hyena.

  “Of course!” Rytlock growled through clenched teeth. “She’s sylvari!”

  More hyenas converged out of the grasses, their fangs snarling.

  “I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt,” Logan said as he leaped into the gap, sliding away between walls of stone.

  Rytlock rolled his eyes and killed another hyena. “I’m not going to be outdone by a human and a twig.” He sheathed Sohothin and jumped down the crevice, too.

  HEADS OF THE MILITARY

  Eir stepped back from carving
another huge basalt head. It showed Snaff’s face—the quirky rumple of his brow mirrored below in a slight smirking lip, the wide and happy eyes, the long nose, and those ears like milkweed pods.

  “How do I look?” Snaff asked, posing nearby.

  Pacing across the stone chips that littered the floor of Snaff’s laboratory, Eir said, “You look good.”

  “Good?” Snaff said dejectedly. “Not dashing?”

  “I’ve never seen you dash. . . .”

  “How about brave?”

  “Sure,” Eir said as she brushed rock dust from her hands. “Brave.”

  Snaff waddled up beside her and stared at his likeness. A smile crept onto his face, and he said, “Brave.”

  “Well, that does it for the second head,” Eir said. “What about the body?”

  “Oh! Zojja’s been working hard on my design,” Snaff said enthusiastically. He grasped the norn’s hand and led her over to a short drafting table covered with sketches. All showed a spherical cage with a leather harness suspended within. “The cage is for protection, of course, like your rib cage, because inside it is where the driver will be suspended. These straps will hold the person secure within the center of the cage, with side straps to stabilize in case the golem falls over.”

  “Ouch,” Eir said.

  Snaff nodded. “Yes, and you see that there’s plenty of clearance for flailing arms and legs.”

  “Show me how far we are.”

  Snaff led Eir to the worktables that held the metal golems. From the belly of Big Zojja, a blinding light flashed, and acrid smoke whiffed into the air. The light ceased, and Zojja’s head popped from the opening, her hair slightly singed. She set smoking hands on the golem fuselage.

  “Have you been welding by hand again?” Snaff asked.

  “It’s fastest,” Zojja said dismissively. “But I’ve got to make sure my eyes are shut.”

  “How are the cockpits coming?” Snaff went on.

  “Nearly done. Both are welded to the frame. Then you can hang your rigs.”

  “Ingenious,” Eir marveled.

  Zojja huffed. “Only if you trust metal over magic.”

  “Eir,” Snaff interrupted, “I don’t think I’ve shown you the laurels. . . .”

  “Wait,” Eir said, staring at Zojja. “What did you say?”