Hand of the Hunter: Chosen of Nendawen, Book II

by Mark Sehestedt

  “Jatara,” she said.

  The thing on the log cocked its head, and the blue eye blinked, as if with confusion or wonder, and then it said, “Ja-Ja-Jatara. Yes. Bits of her are still here. Little bits and bits. Very tasty. Not as tasty as you, I’d bet, I’d bet, I’d bite.”

  Jatara leaped. Not up into the air, but straight at Hweilan, like the loosing of an arrow.

  Hweilan rolled to the left and came up again, swiping out with the silver steel of her knife as she did. But it cut only air.

  The Jatara-thing had slid through the carpet of old pine needles and come to a stop against the bole of a tree. She crouched there, panting, both eyes locked on Hweilan.

  The reek hit Hweilan and almost caused her knees to buckle. It was a stench that hit the mind more than the nose—the smell of a thousand years of burning rot.

  “You killed muh-m-my brother,” said the Jatara-thing, and in the words Hweilan heard both voices—Jatara’s, drowning in darkness and fire, and the other.

  “No,” said Hweilan, and it was the truth.

  “Saw him die,” said the thing. “Watched him die.”

  “Yes,” said Hweilan, “I did,” and she brandished the stake in front of her. The uwethla carved into it flared, like slumbering embers fanned by a breeze.

  The Jatara-thing hissed and its eyes closed to razor-thin slits.

  “Going to stick that in me, are you?”

  “Yes,” said Hweilan, and took two steps forward.

  “You can try,” said the thing—and leaped again.

  Hweilan tried to turn the spike of the stake into her foe, but Jatara was so fast—a blur of shadow in the air, and then the force of a battering ram hit her.

  The stake flew from Hweilan’s hand, and it was only a reflex brought on by pain that caused her other hand to tighten around the knife and keep it in her grip. All breath left her body in one pained gasp, and she felt muscles grind and tear against her bones at the force that hit them. Hweilan flew back—skidded against the rough bark of a tree, shredding the shirt off her back—then hit the ground and tumbled end over end.

  She forced herself to move—again acting more by instinct than conscious thought—rolling away and pushing herself to her feet. The world rocked and shivered around her, and she had to force breath back into her battered body. Lights danced before her eyes, and she clenched her jaw so tight that she felt the roots of her teeth stabbing into her jaw and she tasted blood.

  “I’ve been waiting,” said a voice, and Hweilan realized it was coming from above her. The Jatara-thing had taken to the boughs. “Scouring these hard lands. Eating vermin. H-hunting for you.”

  Hweilan’s eyes scoured the ground around her. Where was the stake?

  “Searching,” the voice continued, “sniffing every trail. But they all went cold. Where did you go, m-my little morsel?”

  There! The stake was lying half-covered in pine needles just beyond a tree to Hweilan’s right. She ran for it.

  On the ground only a pace from the stake, Jatara hit the ground, landing in a crouch. “Wherever you were … you should’ve stayed there.”

  Hweilan dodged to the right, putting a thick tree trunk between them. She waved Menduarthis’s knife in front of her and chanted, “Bi viekka okhadit! Bi viekka okhadal!”

  The symbols in the knife flickered and then blazed, for a moment only, and as the light faded a wind whipped through the valley, making the boughs wave and causing the carpet of needles to erupt into the air.

  Hweilan knew they would cause no real harm to the Jatara-thing, but it might prove enough of a distraction for her to be able to reach the—

  Claws raked through the front of her shirt, shredding skin and flesh beneath.

  A hundred combat lessons ingrained into her mind and body took over, and Hweilan reacted on a level deeper than conscious thought, back-stepping, counter-striking, side stepping, and lashing out with steel and fist. She felt her enemy’s blows deflecting off her fist and forearm as Ashiin had taught her, and she felt her knife cut and pierce flesh. But the thing inside Jatara was relentless. For every blow that Hweilan landed, she avoided two and blocked another.

  The wind summoned by the blade died away, and tiny shards of bark and wood and millions of pine needles settled to the ground like a dry rain. Hweilan jumped back and away from Jatara, and for once her enemy did not follow, but stood her ground, watching.

  Hweilan’s chest heaved. Her body ached. Blood ran down her shoulder and chest where claws had torn away her skin and bit deep into the muscle beneath. Her free hand that she had used to divert her enemy’s claws and teeth throbbed with pain. She could feel hundreds of blood vessels in her skin and the flesh beneath that had burst and were turning her entire forearm into one massive bruise. She flexed the hand, and by the pain that shot all the way into her teeth, she knew that part of the bone had cracked.

  “Gooood,” said the Jatara-thing, and for a moment it closed its eyes and breathed deeply through its nose. “Fighting … fear … makes your blood run w-w-with … heat. Makes you taste so much m-more … sweet.”

  She charged again, her clawed feet raking through the ground, her talons outstretched before her.

  Hweilan just had time to swipe the other knife from the sheath and pivot her body to one side.

  The ivory-yellow claws almost missed her entirely. Jatara’s right hand missed, but the left gouged a thick divot of skin and flesh out of her left arm. But Hweilan’s steel struck as well—Lendri’s knife in her right hand slicing up and into the tendons under Jatara’s left arm, her left burying Menduarthis’s knife between two of Jatara’s ribs, then letting go, leaving it there, while Hweilan rolled and tumbled away.

  Jatara shrieked, but it was half-laughter as she turned again to face Hweilan. Her left arm hung loose at her side and only gave a feeble twitch as she tried to move it.

  “You think your steel can hurt me?” she said. “Hurt me really?”

  Hweilan crouched and picked up the sharpened shaft of wood from the forest floor. “No,” she said. “Not really. But this will. Really.”

  Jatara’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. She watched Hweilan a moment, then looked down at the steel dagger protruding from her chest. No blood leaked from it. She reached for it with her right hand.

  Hweilan whispered the incantation—“Dalvi batunik. Dalvi batunik dal!”

  Although she couldn’t see them, she knew the runes etched into the blade flared—this time not summoning winds, but calling upon the forces of winter itself, of cold and frost and—

  The Jatara-thing shrieked as the flesh around the knife—her dead heart, the muscles of her chest and arm, and the fist grasping the knife’s hilt—froze solid.

  Hweilan charged, the stake raised high. The Jatara-thing struggled—Hweilan could feel the power of fire stirring inside it, counter attacking the knife’s magic, thawing the muscle and bone—but it was not quick enough.

  Hweilan brought her fist down and buried the sharp point of the stake deep into the Jatara-thing’s neck.

  She stepped back, wide-eyed with triumph—

  But nothing happened. No sudden green flame catching in the uwethla. No nothingness suffusing into Jatara’s gaze.

  Jatara lurched forward—one quick step—and caught Hweilan with her one good arm, wrapping her in a crushing embrace around her lower back. She felt her body pressed in close to the dead flesh, and no matter how hard she struggled, she could not break free.

  “Surprised?” said the Jatara-thing, and the charnel reek of her breath washed over Hweilan, and she had to choke back bile. Jatara leaned in close, like a lover sharing an intimate secret. “Oh, I searched for you so long … so long. Every trail ran cold. I’d be searching still, if not for … for what, hmm?”

  Hweilan beat at the creature with her bruised arms and both legs, but she might as well have been trying to push over one of the nearby pines.

  “What would you call it?” said Jatara, and she squeezed.

 
Hweilan shrieked. She heard her spine snap like a branch broken over against a knee, but she didn’t feel it—couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything below her waist. And then the arm was gone.

  Hweilan fell to the ground. She had to force breath into her body. Panic was setting in—a primal reaction, for she could feel nothing below the new pain in the middle of her back. Her back. Her back! That monster had broken her back, like a child tired of an old plaything.

  The Jatara-thing paced around her. A predator toying with its defenseless prey.

  “You would call it treachery, I think,” said Jatara. She pulled the stake out of her neck and brandished at Hweilan. “This, I mean. See it? See!”

  Against her will, Hweilan looked at it, and despair and horror settled in over her. It wasn’t the stake she had made. The engravings were there, burned into the wood, but there were subtle differences. Not true uwethla, but close imitations. And there was no power in them. She could feel their absence, just as surely as she could no longer feel her legs.

  “Never never would I have found you,” said the Jatara-thing, “without help. Your … friend? Brought me to you. Though I wouldn’t call such a one friend. Would you?”

  Hweilan’s mind reeled, and she fought to remain conscious. Gleed’s words—spoken to her so long ago—came to her again. Spoken about Ashiin—

  … do not trust her. That one serves the Master. But for her own reasons. If she thinks you do not further those reasons …

  “The end,” said the Jatara-thing. “The end. You were the last. Oh not the last that your Master will try to send against my master. But the last who had a chance. By the time the next Hand is ready, it will be too late. This world suits us. All the hungers and lust and wanting … we will fit in quite nicely here. By the time your lord sends another, it will be too late. Finished. The end. And this?” She waved the counterfeit stake over Hweilan, then tossed it aside with contempt. “A fake. Yes?”

  “That one is,” said a new voice—

  —and the air behind Jatara shimmered—

  And a hand lashed out, the symbols etched in the wood in its grip already flaring, and plunged into Jatara’s back.

  Jatara’s jaw stretched, but it was the thing inside her that screamed—a sound of cracking mountains that filled Hweilan’s soul as the being of hunger and fire was bound and trapped. Green fire spewed out of Jatara’s eyes and mouth, and an inky, viscous fume leaked out of her ears. A final spasm shook the body, and then it fell, lifeless and free.

  Ashiin stood behind it. She cocked her head and looked down at Hweilan. “I am thinking you have questions. Yes?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  IT WAS THE MOST HORRIFYING FEELING HWEILAN HAD ever known. Below her waist, she could feel nothing. Her loins, her legs, her feet no longer existed to her. But radiating above that point in her back … pain. It was as if that break in her spine was a seed of agony, newly hatched and sending shoots of fire into every fiber of her body. Every beat of her heart seemed to spread the pain farther.

  She couldn’t even muster the strength to weep. It was all she could do to keep her body breathing.

  Ashiin crouched beside Jatara. Taking her time, she wriggled her fingers into a glove, then yanked the stake out of the corpse. A final spark shot out of the uwethla along the stake’s surface, followed by a faint smell of brimstone.

  “Have you figured it out yet?” said Ashiin.

  Hweilan clenched her jaw against the pain and took three careful breaths through her nose, then forced the words out. “Gleed was right. About you.”

  Ashiin, still kneeling beside the corpse, looked at her and smiled. “Sometimes I despair of you, girl.” She stood and slipped the stake into an empty pouch at her belt. “I switched the stakes. That much, at least, I hope you have realized by now. You seem to think I tried to kill you—and you’re remembering the bitter words of that old toad to fuel your conclusion.” She shook her head. “That makes you an idiot, dear girl.”

  With that, Ashiin grabbed Hweilan’s right wrist and began dragging her out of the woods. The pain was unbearable, and Hweilan screamed so loud that she heard the echo off the nearby mountain.

  “What I have to tell you,” Ashiin said, her own voice calm and utterly relaxed, “is best said in the light. Besides, we should get away from the stench of that thing.”

  Ashiin dragged Hweilan out from under the cover of the trees. The dead weight of her legs made a despair grow in Hweilan that was worse than anything she had ever felt. Worse even than the day she’d seen her father’s dead body. Worse than the day Scith had told her that her family was dead. Worse than the day Scith himself had been killed and Hweilan had helped to burn his body. All of that had brought fury and sadness and grief. But at least there had been the hope of something else—even if it was only revenge. Now … what did she have? Her hope for vengeance, her calling as the Hand of the Hunter … all over. She’d failed.

  Sunlight washed over Hweilan as they left the woods. Ashiin dragged her around a fallen tree, walked just beyond it, then dropped her.

  “I switched the stakes,” Ashiin said, and she crouched beside Hweilan. “But not so that thing could kill you. If I wanted you dead, I’d have killed you myself long ago.”

  “You …” Hweilan forced the words out. “Brought me … here. She … it … knew.”

  “Yes,” said Ashiin, and she cocked her head in that odd way that always reminded Hweilan, more than anything else, how truly inhuman Ashiin was. It was a movement that was altogether bestial. “I came here. I told that thing you’d be coming, and I brought you here. But this was a lesson, Hweilan. For you. Now what have you learned?”

  “You said … this was … sacrifice. To use … the bow.”

  “No,” said Ashiin. “I said that to wake the bow, to make it your ally, Nendawen requires sacrifice. I never said this was the sacrifice. You really think that filth was sacrifice? That was justice. To waken your father’s bow … you have yet to make that sacrifice.”

  Hweilan tried to lash out, but her strength was failing her, and the woman was just out of reach.

  Ashiin laughed. “Your back is broken, and still you fight. I like that.”

  “I … hate you.”

  “That hardly matters. Those bandits you killed, they were meant to show me you could kill when the need arose—and to show you. Success in battle is not only about skill. Many skilled warriors have died under a peasant’s axe. Success in battle is about will—the willingness to kill another. To hesitate, even for a moment, means death. That’s what the bandits taught you.

  “Today’s lesson was far more important: You are no match for Jagun Ghen and his minions. No matter how strong you become, how adept a fighter, no matter whose blood runs in your veins … you’re no match for them, Hweilan. And you never will be.”

  That was it then. She’d failed. Nendawen could find a new Hand. All the effort and agony of the past months … all for nothing. She might as well have gone back to Highwatch that day after running from Jatara. At least then, perhaps she and Scith could have died together and she might have taken a few of her enemies with her.

  Several of the tendrils of pain originating from her back had wormed their way into her chest, and even as Hweilan struggled to breathe, the tendrils seemed to constrict. Every breath cost her more than the last. Her entire torso seemed to have turned to some cold, immovable metal.

  “My … back!” said Hweilan, and in the cough that followed, she tasted blood. More than her back then. Other things were broken inside her. That was some relief, at least. She no longer had to worry about the rest of her life. That would be over soon. Hweilan closed her eyes, and despite the pain she managed a smile.

  Ashiin laughed. “Little fool.”

  She felt Ashiin cradle her head in one palm and lift. Hweilan thrashed out with both hands, pummeling Ashiin with her fists.

  “Stop that,” said Ashiin.

  Hweilan struck harder—hard as she could—though that was
scarcely more than the force a small child could muster.

  Ashiin reached inside her vest with her free hand and said, “Open your mouth.”

  The world was beginning to go fuzzy—light and darkness bleeding together—and Hweilan couldn’t feel if her mouth was open or not.

  Ashiin’s hand moved to her face, and Hweilan thought she saw something cradled in the woman’s fingers. Then the smell hit her—acrid and earthy, but with the sharp fumes of strong spirits. Hweilan’s throat closed instinctively and she tried to jerk her head away. But Ashiin had a handful of her hair in a tight grip.

  “Open,” said Ashiin.

  She must have done so, for in the next moment liquid fire filled her mouth and ran down her throat. Hweilan screamed, what little of the liquid was left in her mouth spewing onto Ashiin. She thrashed, breaking Ashiin’s grip, and new strength filled her limbs. The heat from the liquid caught. It didn’t spread. It went down her throat and exploded, sending waves of heat through her whole body. The tendrils and shoots of pain that had been growing inside her withered and evaporated, like dry petals thrown on fire.

  Hweilan’s eyes flew open and she froze, afraid to move. Her whole body was in agony. Her whole body.

  She could feel her legs again. Feel her feet. Even her toes, which felt as if ten-score hot needles were burrowing inside. In that moment of paralysis—brought on by shock and the fear that if she moved, the feelings would go away—Hweilan actually felt hundreds of tiny strands inside her backbone writhing and twisting and burrowing as they knit back together.

  Hweilan sat up and took in a great draft of air—so much so fast that it was like a scream in reverse, filling her lungs with much-needed air.

  “Hurts, doesn’t it?” said Ashiin. She was still crouching beside Hweilan, a mischievous grin on her face, her yellow fox eyes glowing in the sunlight. “Most things worth anything bring a certain amount of pain.”

  Wide-eyed, Hweilan looked down at her feet, and just to be sure, she tried to wiggle first the right one and then the left. They moved—and better, she felt them move, felt the rough fiber of her stockings moving between her skin and boot. So plain. So mundane. Yet at that moment it was the most wonderful feeling in the world, better even than the clean air filling her.