by Mel Dunay
Come and get me, you freak, she thought.
Shaipinob leaped, and Rina swung the pike into position and braced. There was a snort the second before impact, as though the thing had realized what she had done, but it was too late for the Old One to change direction.
The thing slammed into the pike with incredible force, knocking it out of Rina’s grip. She rolled to one side, and found herself rolling down the rocky slope. She could not stop, and she was only dimly aware of what was going on above her.
The Old One was bellowing in pain, gibbering out a long diatribe in words Rina could barely recognize, while Paa shouted “Run!” to the other humans.
Something caught her neatly by the waist and neck as she tumbled-she was bruised where she made contact with it, but she realized it was trying to spread the force of the impact out, so that neither her back nor her neck broke from the impact.
A pair of long, broad hands held her, feverishly warm but somehow familiar in spite of that. She found herself stared into Vipin’s calm, implacable face, his skin glowing bronze and his eyes glowing gold.
“Are you all right? Can you crawl down from here?” He asked her.
“I think so,” She said.
She wanted to ask him what had taken so long, but something told her this was not the time to ask. He set her down without a word and crawled up the slope towards Shaipinob.
It was a fast crawl, much faster than a normal human could manage, but it was not like the way the Old One had charged her.
She could tell that more by the clatter of rocks that he made than by looking at him, because she could only manage brief glances back as she crawled down the hill towards the group led by her father, who was shouting openly at her to come towards him.
She had not managed to break or sprain anything in the fall, which was borderline miraculous all by itself. When she got to level ground, she sprinted towards them.
Only once she was back with the group did she get a chance to look back and check on Vipin. Shaipinob had finally managed to free itself from the pike but it was bleeding vigorously from what would be a lung wound on a human being.
Vipin barely came up to its chest, and was a fraction of its weight, but he moved with far more speed than the Old One, and unlike that night in Utiva’s yard, he was armed.
Rina could see something in his hands flash like it was made of steel, and every time it flashed there was another dark red spot on Shaipinob’s pelt. One of them looked like a heart wound, but she remembered what Vipin had told her once: you had to kill both the heart and the brain, separately.
At one point, Shaipinob lashed out with one of its fists, and Vipin dodged, but not quite fast enough. He caught a glancing blow on his shoulder, and fell backwards, limp.
The group of watchers gasped, and there was a scream stuck in Rina’s throat that couldn’t get out. She took a step towards the battle on the slopes, but her father put a hand on her shoulder.
“You can’t do anything about this right now,” He said, but she pushed his hand off angrily, snatched up the nearest machete, and ran towards the slopes.
Shaipinob raised its fist to crush Vipin, but his skin suddenly glowed a brighter bronze and he rolled out of reach and sprang to his feet.
An inhuman leap put him in the creature’s face, and the knife in his hand flashed in the moonlight one last time before he stuck his arm into the creature’s mouth.
Rina realized what he was trying to do because she had read about it in an old story. He was trying to stab through the roof of its mouth to get at its brain.
Shaipinob thrashed violently about, trying to shake Vipin off. He clung tenaciously to its head and shoulder, but his arm was still in that sharp-toothed mouth.
For Rina, the world narrowed to a cold, sharp point of fear for him. She darted forward, stabbed the Old One’s hamstrings, and darted back. The creature staggered more slowly, no longer able to shake Vipin off.
A moment later he jumped clear, and a moment after that the Old One fell like a stone. It glared up at the two of them, and cursed them viciously. It was no longer using the language of the Scriptures, but Rina realized that she could understand what it was saying.
“How is it that I know what you are saying?” She asked.
Oldblood...long ago, we made all the humans on the mountain Oldbloods. Shaipinob croaked. Not much of our power is in you. Just a little Oldblood.
“Why?” Rina demanded. Her heart was pounding so badly she could barely speak.
Your fear...tastes better...when you are Oldblood, Shaipinob answered. We feasted on your fear. It was...delicious.
“Scum,” Vipin said abruptly.
It turned its head towards Vipin.
Why do you hunt us, cousin, instead of them? You know the Scriptures, the stories of how the first humans sinned: they allied themselves with the cruelest of the Old Ones, and altered time and space to turn all our kind into monsters. Why not be monsters, as they willed us to be?
Vipin’s skin glowed like molten bronze, and his eyes glowed gold.
“If you know the Scriptures that well, you know that many of the Old Ones rejected those attempts to reshape them, and tried to live as they ought, not as monsters.”
“And that under their influence, the first humans repented of their sins, and tried to heal the damage they had done, to the Old Ones and to all creation. I hold to the code of my ancestors: to serve, to protect, and to heal.”
You will fail. The glow faded from its nostrils, and the beast lay still.
“To succeed partially is not the same thing as failure,” Vipin said.
“I’d say we succeeded pretty completely, in this case,” Rina said. “By the way, where is Zekull?”
“His orders from the Queens didn’t allow him to break out of jail when I did,” Vipin said.
“He expects to be released tomorrow morning, and hopefully the council will let us look for the Old Ones’ lair up on the peak.”
By the time the rest of the group rejoined them, Vipin was no longer glowing, but there were other signs of his heritage.
The right arm of his shirt had been shredded when he stabbed the Oldblood in the top of the mouth, and there was blood drying on his arm, but the wound the blood should have been dripping from had already closed.
“Who is this guy?” One of the girls asked, with a nervous, admiring quaver in her voice.
“What is this guy?” One of the boyfriends demanded. He brandished his machete menacingly.
Rina put herself between Vipin and the others.
“He’s a government agent with special powers who hunts down things like that. and he just saved our lives and those of every woman on the peak who got married to the Mountain King today. And he’s with me.”
Vipin took another step forward, putting his chest about in contact with Rina’s shoulder blades. She half thought she could hear his heart beating.
“That thing was an Old One, also called a Zata,” Vipin said calmly.
“You know that word; it’s a very old one from the Scriptures, used for a variety of things that can talk and think, commit crimes and good deeds, that are not human. Some of them intermarried with humans long ago; I am descended from one such marriage.”
Paa’s eyes bugged out, and he muttered, with grudging admiration: “Of course no regular man would do for my Rina.”
Rina thought she heard a weary sigh down the back of her neck.
“I am one of a group of humans and Oldbloods whose job it is to investigate situations like this, where an Old One is possibly making trouble,” Vipin went on.
“I’d flash a badge at you, but we don’t normally carry identifying materials in the field. Not all of these creatures are as feral and irrational as the Mountain King and its ‘sister,’ and we are under orders to conceal ourselves from them at all costs."
“The sister is real?” One of the peasant girls asked, nervously.
“She is dead. Rina and I killed her.” Vipin said firmly
.
“But why?” One of the rich girls asked. “Why did they do...those terrible things the stories talk about?”
“Some Oldbloods have the ability to sense human emotions. They often become addicted, if you could call it that, to particular sensations from the human mind.”
His voice hardened. “For these two, it was fear and pain. When they were awake, yes, they fed on flesh to stay alive, but the real pleasure lay in tormenting humans. That is why they could not be allowed to live any longer.”
“That’s why it didn’t fall for the beehive trap,” Rina said. Everyone stared at her.
She explained what she had seen, and added, “That’s why Shaipinob didn’t go in the tent. It knew that it should be sensing human emotions in there, at that range, and it realized that it had been fooled.”
“Exactly,” Vipin said.
“Don’t we get a party out of all this?” The rich girl asked. “You definitely owe us a party, Rina.”
“I’m tired, and I smell of goat,” Rina said. “You can certainly party tonight if you want, but I’m going home to wash up.”
“I’m going with you,” Vipin said. “Well, I’m showering separately, but you know what I mean.”
Most of the girls giggled, and the younger men snickered, and Paa’s eyes bulged out.
Rina knew she shouldn’t have been pleased by the sight of that look on Paa’s face, but she was anyway. Victory and moonlight made everything beautiful, from Vipin’s smile to Paa’s grimace.
Rina slept a heavy sleep that night, and woke up late the next morning. She did have dreams but they were not the kind of thing she would have told to anyone else. Except maybe Vipin, who was intimately involved in them.
“Where’s Vipin and Paa?” She asked when she came downstairs and found the women of the family eating a leisurely breakfast that they had clearly been trying to stretch out long enough to include her.
"Paa told Vipin to stay in his room in case anybody comes looking for him,” her sister Shirna volunteered. “Then Paa went outside to calm the angry mob.”
“What angry mob?” Rina asked.
“Well, the constable’s mad at him for breaking out of prison, a lot of other people are scared of him for what he did to the prison in the process of breaking out,” One of the aunts said.
The other aunt added: “Amita went into the decoy tent to get those old clothes she lent to you to use, and got stung by a bunch of bees.”
“That’s awful!” Rina said, feeling uncomfortable about all the bad things she'd said and thought about Amita recently.
“She’s in a lot of pain right now but the doctor says they didn’t do any permanent damage. Anyway, her father blames you and Vipin for that.”
“That sounds like him,” Rina said with a groan.
“Paa’s showing them the dead body up in the field by way of explaining why, and I quote, ‘You don’t want to form up an angry mob and go after my daughter’s new boyfriend.’” Shirna said.
Rina sighed. “I wish he wouldn’t put it like that. We’re still at the ‘getting to know each other’ stage.”
“I don’t know,” drawled a voice from the staircase. “I think we've learned a lot about each other already.”
Vipin was wearing a white polo shirt with blue stripes, apparently borrowed from someone half a size smaller than him, and a pair of khaki pants borrowed from some a full size smaller than he was.
“You should be upstairs hiding, young man,” Rina mother scolded.
“I’ve never been very good at that.” He said quietly as he sauntered down the steps and took a seat next to Rina.
“If I had been I would have been able to get the job down and get out of here without anyone knowing what was going on.”
“Are there very many people like you?” Shirna asked. “With ancestry like yours? Superpowers like yours?”
“A fairly large percentage of the population is probably descended from Oldbloods to some extent,” Vipin said.
“The ones who show some kind of abilities do not all have the same kinds of abilities, and we make up maybe one percent of the population.”
The kid sister sat there and did the math. “That still means that there’s over three million of you, since our country has the second biggest population in the world. How many Old Ones are out there?”
“My organization estimates that there are thousands of crimes that occur every year and involve either Old Ones, people using old beliefs about Old Ones as a cover to frighten people away from something else, or people with Oldblood ancestry using their abilities to commit crimes.”
“Well,” Rina said. “Maybe hiding it isn’t the answer. Maybe people need to be educated about what’s out there, even if the government finds it embarrassing.”
"Maybe," said Vipin. His face and voice were utterly neutral.
She put her hand on his thigh. “How about you philosophize later, and have eat your breakfast before it gets cold.”
“These clothes are borrowed,” He protested.
“So? You look great in them.”
“I’m going to have to work hard to keep from staining them.”
He managed to finish breakfast without any major mishaps by the time Paa got in.
“How much trouble are we in?” Rina asked.
Paa sighed.
“I managed to smooth over most of the trouble,” He said.
“It’s kind of like that situation you told me about, when the drug dealer confronted you, and then backed down when he saw what you’d managed to kill. It’s more about fear than about respect.”
Vipin looked over at Rina and raised his eyebrows, as if to say so much for the benefits of transparency in government action. Rina just made a face back at him.
“What about the jail?” She asked.
“Vipin’s employers have agreed to pay for the damages.” Paa remarked. “I didn’t know the Ministry of Culture had such a generous budget.”
“When it comes to bribes, they’re not really any better or worse than the rest of the government,” Vipin said blandly. “Although you could maybe argue that the money goes to a better cause.”
Paa acknowledged this unlikely possibility with a grunt.
“By the way, that Gnosha fellow found and demolished the Mountain King’s hideout, up on the peak. I don’t know how he managed it, he just said something about dimensional gates and all that rot. He’ll stop in to say goodbye before he goes.”
“What about the other brides? Are they okay?” Rina asked.
“They only just went to bed after partying all night and getting drunk on the best mead they could afford with their families and boyfriends. Nobody else wanted to go near them, because they smelled of goat,” Paa said.
Rina giggled and Vipin stared at his plate while his mouth twitched.
“It’s not really a laughing matter,” Paa said. “They’re the people most likely to feel somewhat grateful or sympathetic about what you two did. I had to get the council of elders calmed down without having any witnesses to back me up.”
“Don’t look at me, I volunteered to help explain things,” Vipin said. “As I recall, you turned me down.”
“You would not have help matters,” Paa grumbled. “I needed you out of sight while I got things straightened out.”
“So how do thing stand with the council?” Maa asked.
“They want you two lovebirds out of town by noon,” Paa said. “They’re willing to donate a tank of gasoline for that borrowed motorcycle if it will get you out of here faster.”
“The aunts have already packed you a lunch for the road,” Shirna volunteered. “They figured you’d want it.”
“Could we have a blanket or two for the road as well?” Rina asked.
“We’ll have at least one night on the road before we get to Barleyfields and return the motorcycle. I just hope they’ve gotten the avalanche cleared and the buses running again.”
Vipin sighed. “I hope the owner of these cl
othes doesn’t want them back.”
“It’s fine,” The one aunt told him. “They’re older clothes-my husband’s gotten fat and they don’t fit him anymore.”
Rina looked at her. “Have you told Uncle that you’re giving away his old clothes?”
The aunt shrugged. “He’ll get over it.”
Zekull showed up just as they were getting ready to leave.
“Thank you for destroying the Old Ones’ hideout,” Vipin said. “There’s no telling what deadly toys they were holding onto.”
“I could tell,” Zekull said firmly. “But I won’t. And Stetemo Hive thanks you for destroying two Avazatas. You fought our war for us.”
“I don’t understand,” Rina said.
“They designed us, and some other types of mortals, like the trollfolk, to make war on other Zatas more easily. Those wars all but wiped the Zatas out, and they destroyed most of the Gnosha’s hives.”
“Whenever any of the Wicked Old Ones, the Avazatas, arise, the Gnosha must fight them. And so you fought our war for us.”
“Um, you’re welcome? I guess? I hope fighting your wars for you is a good thing,” Rina said.
“It is,” Zekull said. “And now I must go back to Skymarket by a more direct route than you, to help the constable there with the drug smuggling case we discussed earlier.”
With that, he scuttled over the edge of the road, straight down the side of the mountain.
Rina and Vipin set out not long after. When they stopped for a breather in Stayout, to see if the dead Old One was still in Utiva’s yard, the mayor’s bodyguard was waiting for them by her house.
“My orders are to tell you to move along,” He said firmly. “The mayor appreciates you taking care of the creature, but you’ve stirred up too much trouble doing it, and he doesn't want you hanging around here.”
“What happened to the creature’s body?” Vipin asked.
He had told Rina earlier that he needed to file a report on its location to his superiors so that they could send a team to retrieve it and study it.
Courtesy of the constable’s radiom he had already managed to set that process in motion for the Mountain King’s remains.
The bodyguard shrugged. “The snobs down in Barleyfields heard about it and carted it away.”
