The Last Warrior

by Susan Grant

  Xim grumbled as he followed the colonel through the deserted hallways, then down the stairs to the lower level. Beck paused there to light a torch.

  “Where are we going—to the dungeon?”

  “The old wing, actually.” Beck unlocked a heavy door, allowing Xim to walk through. “The stink of the pipes is so bad down here you can’t hardly smell them.”

  “Smell what?” Xim sniffed. The sour smell of the pipes was underlain with an unpleasant odor of musk. “What is that, animals making their nests down here?”

  “Gorr, My Liege. Four little Furs.”

  “Here? In the palace?” Xim jumped back, scouring the shadows for monsters. He didn’t even know what they looked like. “What the hell are we doing with them locked up so close to me? They’re deadly.”

  “But not invincible. They can be captured and caged like any other creature.”

  “Oh.” Xim was shaking. His mouth had gone completely dry. His bladder felt ready to empty. “They can’t get out?”

  Beck’s eye narrowed. “Do you think I’d risk your life in such a cavalier fashion? Any of our lives? Your family?”

  Xim felt foolish for overreacting. But Gorr—here—he was afraid. To his further terror, he could hear shuffling from the cell down the dim hallway, and a scrape like claws on rock. The cloying, musky scent had grown sharper. “How did you get them?”

  “I had reports of wild dogs attacking cattle. I sent out a patrol, and they found these four Furs. Spies, probably, thinking they could come in, have a look around, and get back to the Hinterlands without being noticed. Maybe they would have, but they were in pretty bad shape. Emaciated. Starving.” Beck tossed his head in the direction of the disturbing noises. “Don’t you want to see? It’s safe, as long as you don’t look directly at them. And they can shut it off, the charming, if they want to. If they’re not planning to attack.”

  “What is your plan?” Xim all but whispered, desperate to leave the dark, stinking dungeon.

  “Release one of them. Send it out to hunt down Tao. If it’s successful, if it brings back proof of the kill, we’ll release its packmates. If not, well, we were going to kill them anyway.” Beck raised his torch high. “Isn’t that right, my pups? We have an agreement, don’t we? I release your captain, and if he returns successful, the rest can go free.”

  Suddenly, a horrible snarling filled the stone corridor, the sound of something hitting the bars of the cell he couldn’t see. It speared Xim’s heart with mortal terror. “How do you know it’ll cooperate, if you let one out?”

  Out of sight, a rumbling, monotone voice answered, “If I say I will do, human, I will do.”

  Xim jumped backward, slamming into the wall. “They speak!”

  “The alphas can. We’ve shared this planet long enough for them to learn the language.”

  Xim swallowed hard, afraid to say anything now lest he be overheard. These creatures weren’t mindless. It made them even more terrifying.

  To his relief, Beck led him back to the stairs. “Will they cooperate? You heard it—yes.” His mouth spread into a grin. “If there’s anything I learned in my years in the Hinterlands fighting the Furs, it’s how loyal they are. The pack is everything. They’re bonded until death.” The colonel pulled a wadded-up piece of cloth from his coat pocket. As he shook it open, Xim saw it was a sleeve torn from one of Uhr-Tao’s uniform shirts. “From Uhr-Tao’s trunk. A Gorr’s sense of smell is infallible. They can scent prey from miles away. If General Tao is anywhere in the kingdom, our furry little friends will find him.” Beck pressed his lips together for a moment, regretful. “They hate Tao, these Furs do. He killed countless thousands of their kind. If they find him, they’ll shred him. He’ll be dead just as you wanted, only you won’t have the pleasure of seeing it accomplished. My Liege, all you have to do is say the word, and I’ll send out the assassin.”

  Beck held the torch high. To Xim it seemed the warrior’s eye could charm like a Gorr’s, because as he stared at him, waiting for his answer, he couldn’t summon the strength to look away.

  ELSABETH WOKE TO THE gritty sound of Tao’s boots on the dirt. She sat up, squinting in the dawn light, her hair in disarray as she hugged her blanket around her. He’d already rekindled the fire. It crackled under a small kettle.

  “Is that tea?” she said hopefully.

  “It will be. The water’s not yet boiling.” He crouched in front of her, smiling with his eyes, as if her appearance amused him. Unlike her, he wasn’t at all disheveled. He was washed, brushed, dressed and ready for the day.

  Just like a general.

  An adorable, sexy general.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” he said and leaned closer to kiss her smiling lips. Her body felt battered from yesterday’s long ride and then the lovemaking, yet with that single kiss, passion flared. She’d gladly forget about her aches and pains to stay abed with Tao.

  But the ghetto had been searched; they didn’t yet know the results. They had to return home.

  He ruffled her hair. “Get dressed. We move out after breakfast.” He returned to the fire, and she saw he’d left her clothing by the blanket, a neat, square pile, folded and ready, along with a damp cloth and a cake of soap for freshening up. Laughing softly at his efficiency, she reached for her camisole and proceeded to dress.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “TELL ME ONE, TAO. Just one story before we sleep.”

  Tao chuckled at Elsabeth’s request as he climbed into his bed behind the screen in her living room, dressed in pajama pants for modesty in the event of unexpected visitors. It was the end of another very long day, a reversal of the journey of the day before, culminating in an uneventful return to the ghetto through the spy deck, where they’d been met by Navi and the cart. “Only Markam and Beck came through the gates to search,” the boy had told them. “You should have seen Beck, how scared he was. Especially when Elder Farouk demanded to know what they were doing here.” Needless to say, the pair hadn’t stayed long in K-Town. Tao hoped it meant the suspicion that he was hiding amongst the Kurel had now passed.

  Still, there had been no communication from Markam. No flags of any color had arrived in the aviary. What did the silence mean? Tao was doing his damnedest to think of every possible ramification.

  A whiff of Elsabeth’s clean, lightly perfumed skin dragged him back from his thoughts. She’d walked up to the bed, her expression vexed. Her white nightgown was conservative and yet incredibly arousing—the white fabric reached to practically her neck, but it was charmingly, innocently and quite unintentionally, he was sure, almost transparent if the light hit right. As luck would have it, in that moment the light was hitting just right. He could see her slender form right through the garment, from the outline of her breasts to the curve of her waist and the sweet place between her thighs that made his loins ache in anticipation of making love to her again.

  “Tao.” She fell to the edge of the bed in a cloud of white cotton, her lips pursed. “It’s like you’re looking straight through me.”

  “Straight through your nightgown, actually.” Before she had the chance to blush too crimson, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her down to him. “Lucky for both of us you always wore a robe before.” He kissed the giggle from her lips then pulled her fully onto the narrow bed. “You asked for a story? I have mastered Ben’s Lost Dog.”

  He’d remembered the sounds of the various letters she’d taught him before their trek. The remainder they’d practiced after dinner—at his request. It had given him all the knowledge he’d needed to read the simple, one-syllable words in that inane book for babes. He wanted to move on to more adult fare, and see if he could actually unlock the secret to enjoying reading, as she had. But in the immediate moment he’d found another, definitely adult, pastime he liked far more.

  He smoothed a hand over her hip and thigh, reaching behind her knee to pull her leg over his, a better position to cup her perfectly rounded bottom. She was grinning, her eyes sparkling. “Tell me
about your relic from the Sea of Glass.” Her fingers skimmed along his shoulder and across his collarbone until they found his dangling amulet. “You never explained how it protects you. How do you know it’s good luck?”

  “Ah, an excellent question. However, not all my adventures were exciting in a good way. The very afternoon I tied it around my neck, I was standing on a ridgeline. My focus was carelessly on only the view through my spyglass. It was high summer in the Hinterlands, the suns were brutal. I felt a sudden burning below my collarbone. ‘A bee sting?’ I thought. I bent down to have a look and an arrow flew over my head so close I could feel the wind of it in my hair.”

  She tensed. “By the arks, Tao,” she breathed.

  “Yes, by the arks—almost literally. Had it not been for the amulet heating in the suns, I would have set sail for the heavens with Uhrth’s angels. I’d have taken that arrow right between the eyes. It’s protected me in countless other ways over the years.”

  She whispered, “No more of those stories tonight.”

  “No more, indeed.” He rolled her on top of him, her hair spilling forward, forming a fragrant curtain around their faces. “We have a better tale to tell tonight,” he said, and pulled her down to his mouth.

  As soon as they began to kiss, he knew their exhaustion wouldn’t hold them back from making love. Passion had rekindled too quickly. Together they reached for her billowing nightgown, flinging it to the floor, where his pants soon landed in a pile.

  He kissed every inch of her, loving the way she hungered for him so openly, eagerly, none of her actions artful or practiced, her reason for being with him simple: she didn’t want to be with anyone else. He knew it was so because he felt the same.

  When he rolled her beneath him to complete the act, he was still gentle, but not as careful as the first time, moving against her in just the right way, until her gasp of delight and the shudders inside her body told him she’d peaked. She clung to him until his own pleasure left him shaking with exhaustion and wonder.

  HOURS AFTER THEY’D dressed and gone back to bed, Tao woke in a sweat, his heart pounding, gripped by a sense of dread left behind from a nightmare he couldn’t seem to remember, a dream so vivid he could smell the musky odor of Gorr. From up in the aviary came the sounds of cooing pigeons and the hatch banging in the wind. That’s what had woken him. He needed to fix that damn door.

  Elsabeth protested his restlessness with a sleepy murmur. He rolled onto his back, drawing her into the protection of his arms, and shut his eyes.

  A whiff of a sickeningly familiar odor called him back from the edge of sleep. Alarm burst inside him. Gorr.

  Elsabeth woke to the press of Tao’s hand and the sound of her own smothered gasp.

  Be silent. There was no mistaking his intent. There was enough moonlight from outside for her to discern his face. His eyes were dangerous, his face beaded with sweat.

  Above their heads, a crash.

  Tao’s quick reflexes had them both off the bed and on the floor before she realized the crash had come from the roof.

  Squawking pigeons and feathers fell from the opening to the eaves and the aviary. Tao’s legs pumped in his effort to slide them backward on their rear ends to get distance between them and the bed, knocking over a table and footstool.

  “Tao—”

  “Gorr.”

  Terror came in a blinding rush of adrenaline. Gorr—here?

  He shoved the legs of the footstool into her hands. “Take it. Use it as a shield.” He yanked the crossbow off the wall above them. He’d barely gotten it loaded when something dark and heavy thudded onto the mattress, snarling.

  It was in the room.

  She sensed its power, a predatory menace. Her pulse throbbed in her throat. A sharp, gamy odor filled the air. Movement in the corner of her eye—a flash of fangs and a furred, muscular body like a forest dog but upright like a human. “Uhr-Tao,” it said. “I smell you.”

  A pair of glowing eyes, slits of pale gold, flicked in their direction. Utter malevolence. This being sought only to harm, its stare bottomless, endless. She was falling into those eyes. So beautiful…

  “Don’t look at it!” Tao shoved her head to the side.

  He lifted the crossbow and fired. In the small confines of the living area the arrow went wild and struck the wall. Tao had begun reloading the instant the arrow had left his weapon. Glass in a picture frame shattered as she heard the distinctive cocking of the crossbow mechanism. The creature leaped away agilely, snarling at Tao, or was it laughing? There was unexpected intelligence in that alien sound. Triumph. Hatred. It sprang again. Momentum carried its body toward her. She raised the stool, bracing for the impact.

  Tao fired again. A moist thwunk told her the arrow had hit flesh. A shrieking caterwaul left her ears ringing.

  The Gorr’s momentum carried it toward them. It skidded over the floor, crashing into the footstool, almost wrenching it from her hands. Its claws scrabbled on the wood planks, a hairbreadth from her folded legs. Musk clogged her nostrils. She lifted the stool and slammed it down, hitting its squirming body.

  It staggered away from her, then sprang across the room like a grassalope, leaving a black glistening trail. Blood.

  The Gorr’s breaths were wet, labored. Even in its agony, it hurled itself at the window with enough force to shatter the glass, leaping outside to the street.

  “No!” Tao’s shout was guttural, as if wrenched from someplace deep within. With his crossbow already reloaded, he shoved through the door in pursuit.

  “Tao!” Her scream echoed in the empty room. Glass splinters pierced her hands and knees as she pushed upright, shards of it tinkling to the floor as she shoved her arms through the sleeves of her robe and followed Tao out the door.

  The wounded Gorr was in the center of the street, howling, a terrible sound. Lights in windows up and down the street were turning on, heads appearing to see what had caused the commotion below.

  “Don’t look!” she cried to them. They’d be charmed by the creature’s eyes. What could it compel them to do, even in its dying moments? “Close your curtains!”

  But no one took her warnings seriously, it seemed, just as she hadn’t, after only hearing the tales of the power of a Gorr’s stare.

  Blood coated the Gorr’s fangs as Tao advanced on him, the crossbow coming up, his face slanted away to prevent a direct meeting of the eyes. The Gorr extended his skinny arms to the sides as if in welcome. Tao took aim, and the Gorr filled its broken lungs to let out one last ear-splitting howl. Then it sprang at Tao.

  An arrow pierced its neck, throwing the creature backward. Grim, Tao walked up to it and gave it a push with his toe to see if it was alive. The crossbow dangled from Tao’s hand. He was naked from the waist up, smeared with sweat and blood. With his chest heaving, his eyes dark with the tension of battle, he looked part beast himself as he slowly turned to her.

  We’re alive. Her heart slammed against her ribs as she swayed on her feet. Then Tao was with her, his firm arm under hers. “You’re bleeding,” he said tightly, prying her rigid fingers from the leg of the footstool she’d forgotten she carried out with her.

  “Just some broken glass…”

  “Just?” Angrily, Tao flung the stool away then crushed her to his chest. “Beth, if it had killed you, I’d have gone back to war.” His deep voice rumbled. He spoke into her hair. “I’d have left this very day, and I’d not have stopped until I’d found every last one of them.”

  Her knees felt almost too weak to support her, but he’d half lifted her to her toes. “I’m sorry—I couldn’t help it,” she said, her voice a shaky whisper. “I couldn’t look away.”

  “You’ll know for next time.”

  “Next time?”

  He cupped her face as he tipped his head to look into her eyes. “They always travel in packs.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  WORD OF THE GORR ATTACK raced through the ghetto like a torch touched to lamp oil. As the horizon silvered
with the coming dawn, a bell clanged from the tallest windmill, issuing a warning.

  “Keep calm.” Tao was directing the crowd gathering outside Elsabeth’s house. He’d grabbed the creature by its tail to drag it out of the street.

  The Gorr had been a mature alpha, judging by its size and ability to speak the language. They were usually robust and muscular, but this one was practically fur and bones, half starved to death. He made the sign of Uhrth over his chest, brushing his fingertips over the amulet and bringing them briefly to his lips. It had not been his night to die, thank Uhrth, nor Elsabeth’s. They owed the fact they were still alive to the Gorr’s weakened condition—and also that loose hatch door, waking him in time. Now the question remained—was it a lone alpha? Rare, but possible due to the Gorr being in retreat. If there was a larger attack looming, there’d not be time to properly prepare anyway, but in the immediate moment, quelling panic was paramount. Else he’d not be able to teach these generations of pacifists how to set up a proper defense.

  “Just a few cuts,” Elsabeth said bravely as she emerged from the clinic, where Chun had treated her wounds. She’d changed out of her stained and torn nightgown into a plain, blue wool dress, her tangled hair twisted into a bun at the base of her neck. “The blood made it look worse. What about you?” She tried to pull his arm back to see his blood-spattered skin. He’d donned a coat over his bare chest, a hasty concession in deference to Kurel modesty. “Go see Chun,” she said.

  “I’m fine,” he muttered, pulling free, the crossbow gripped tightly in one hand. He paused, seeing her dismayed expression. Didn’t she know that when a general said he was fine, no one doubted his word? No one had fretted for him on the battlefield. “I really am,” he assured her, gentler.

  She was as pale as he’d ever seen her. “It killed two pigeons. Blood and feathers everywhere. The rest are uninjured, but agitated.” She reminded him of a field captain reporting casualties—one who had suffered a great loss of troops.