When they found another trap the day after, they had to accept that their foes knew exactly where they were headed. There was no way they had put enough traps out across the region to cover every conceivable route to such an extent they had already run into four of them on their path.
“It’s a good thing we didn’t teleport,” Emerius was saying. “They obviously have their sights on us. If we were trapped and helpless, they would have swept us up or just killed us, whichever they liked.”
Sam was watching Ix as the hunter spoke. She flinched and wore an embarrassed look as she averted her eyes to the trees surrounding them.
“We could not have known that there were more traps,” Nalia said just as Sam was about to speak to comfort the assassin. “We supposed that there would be more and we made the decision to be cautious. One cannot blame another for an eagerness to help.” She flashed a half smile at Ix, who wore a look of open astonishment.
No one spoke for a moment. Sam thought that the rest of them were probably as surprised as he was. It sounded like Nalia had just stuck up for Ix. He smiled at both of them.
“That’s right,” Sam added. “We have to make judgment calls sometimes. At times, we’re right, at others we’re not. We all do the best we can. The important thing is to work together. Now we need to figure out what to do.”
Emerius leaned his bow against a tree and stretched. “If they didn’t know exactly where we were before, they do now. The traps Rindu has disarmed trace a perfect trail for them to follow us. If they have a way of communicating with each other, even if it’s just messengers on fast mounts that overtake us while we rest at night, they will be figuring out how to ambush us. They’ve learned that the traps will not work.”
Ix opened her mouth to speak, but Emerius continued. “But that doesn’t mean that we can risk teleporting.” Ix closed her mouth with a snap. “It just means we have to watch out for more conventional dangers now, too.”
Everyone agreed. They discussed changing their route, but the geography of the land prohibited changing it too much or they would take much more time to get to where they were going.
“Up until now, there were some options. We could have taken a path through more rugged territory at the expense of a little time, but we’re going to need to turn more northward soon, if the maps I looked at were correct, and we’ll be restricted to passes going through the mountains.
“There’s nothing for it but to continue as we have been doing,” Emerius said. “Maybe I should start ranging out in front a little to scout for more conventional traps. It wouldn’t do for us to find and disarm all the rohw traps but then get caught in an ambush and be killed by arrows.”
As they finished their break, Emerius and Oro went ahead to scout, letting the party catch up every hour or two. The rest of the day was uneventful, and as they teleported back to Whitehall, after checking for any more rohw traps in the area, Sam wondered if there was something else they could do to move faster. He was anxious to get to the third artifact, but he also had the feeling that something was waiting for them—something dangerous.
The next day, they were traveling through a rocky area with small trees and shrubs inhibiting their travel. The first Sam knew of the attack was the grunts carried to him on the air. Then came the sounds of large bodies crashing through the foliage, followed by several howls and screams as their ambushers charged into sight.
“These are new,” Emerius said, looking at a tall, skinny mutant that moved so gracefully it seemed boneless.
Sam watched as the creatures ate up the distance between them. The tall one pointed to the left while looking at some of the mutants and at the right while focusing on others. Those he indicated peeled off to where they were directed to flank the party.
“The big ones, too,” Ix said, pointing toward a group of towering mutated creatures with four massive arms each.
Sam referred to them in his own mind as “tanks,” mainly because they were built like them. They must have stood over seven feet tall, blocky with muscle and moving with speed he would have thought impossible for such big creatures. Their four arms, two on each side, set one above the other, were as thick as a normal man’s leg. One of the creatures struck a tree with an enormous club. The trunk shattered.
There were five of the tanks, the one willowy creature that reminded Sam of the description of the assassin that had tried to kill Dr. Walt, and at least a dozen other mutated creatures, all roughly humanoid. At least there didn’t seem to be any mutated hapaki in the group. His last thought before the enemies came within range was that this must be a scouting party called into service to ambush them when they located the travelers. If it had been an attack planned far in advance, there would have been more, he was sure.
Sam looked to Nalia on his left. She had her shrapezi out and a stone-hard look in her eye, the one that meant she was listening to the song of battle. Rindu, to Sam’s right, calmly unsheathed his swords, the two together named Sunedal. Sam himself separated his staff Ahimiro into two sticks and prepared to fight for his life.
Arrows started whizzing by Sam’s head. Not toward him, but from behind. Emerius was firing two or three each second. Some of the lesser mutants stumbled and went down, arrows in their throats or eyes. Just before the mass of enemies got to Sam, he noticed arrows bouncing off the skin of the big, four-armed creatures. Tanks indeed. They seemed to have some sort of armor plating, or their skin itself was as durable as boiled leather, if not harder.
Three of the creatures veered toward Sam. He deflected claws and teeth and thanked the powers that be that the mutants didn’t use arrows. One of his adversaries, approximately the same size as him and dressed in some sort of loin cloth, had blades where his hands should have been. It jabbed straight at Sam’s face while bringing the other around to slice him from the side. At the same time, a shorter mutant tried to tackle him, and a third leapt at him, teeth flashing and claws reaching.
Sam moved fluidly, easily, twisting his torso just enough to allow the blade-hand to pass while deflecting the slash from the side with one of his sticks. The sharp edge skidded down the length of Sam’s weapons with a screech. Right into the opponent that was launching itself toward Sam’s knees. He had only to flick his wrist to roll the stick around the blade and strike downward onto the head of the tackler. The creature grunted as the deflected blade bit into its shoulder and its face slammed into the ground from the stick strike. That was satisfying.
Sam’s evasion and deflection threw the blade-handed mutant off balance. Sam pivoted, delivered a hard strike to the creature’s neck and collar bone with his other stick and, using the momentum of his turn, caught his other adversary with a perfectly placed spin kick, levering the beast up and over him to strike a nearby tree with its back, upside down and limbs flailing.
Taking advantage of the momentary pause, Sam looked around to see Rindu and Nalia whirling about with their swords, killing mutants with every slash, and Ix teleporting around the battlefield to slash at throats. Four of the four-armed tank mutants were still up, two of them bristling with arrows that had somehow penetrated their natural armor at their shoulders and the joints of their arms, but Emerius was concentrating on them to keep them at bay. The creatures hadn’t yet been able to get close enough to the hunter to attack him, but that would change.
Sam’s adversaries were recovering from the first round of attacks, finding their feet and starting toward him. It was time, he knew, to use lethal force. Sadness welled up in him, but he pushed it down and concentrated on the song of battle, on the calmness of his rohw.
They came at him in a clump. Blade-hands was moving his right arm awkwardly and wheezing. The strike Sam had delivered had crushed its collar bone and damaged the throat. The shorter mutant was dazed but still stumbled toward Sam. The jumper was limping, approaching behind the others. This time, Sam attacked first.
He feinted with the left stick, aiming for blade-hand’s heart. It reacted with its right arm, but slow
ly. Sam tapped the blade away with the stick in his right hand and then thrust the end of it to the creature’s chest, ejecting a strong rohw pulse as he did so. It was a strong enough burst of energy to shatter stone, and the front of the mutant exploded out through its back.
It dropped dead instantly, but Sam was still moving, weaving through the arms of the short mutant and striking the reaching arm of the third opponent. He used as much force as he could muster, striking the hairy appendage from opposing sides with his sticks. There was a loud snap, and the claw dangled from the shattered arm.
Sam was now within a foot of the taller mutant with its one uninjured arm, his own arms crossed from the momentum of his strike. He thrust his left foot back and met the throat of the shorter mutant as it tried to grab him from behind. Its head snapped forward, and through his boot Sam felt the vertebrae in its neck shattering. At the same time, he wrenched his arms outward and struck either side of the taller mutant’s head, right at the temples. With rohw force added to the blow, the top of the creature’s head sheared off and spun away. Sam ended with his sticks at the ready, crouched in a low stance, right leg extended and left bent underneath him. That’s when he noticed that two of the four-armed behemoths had apparently decided he was easier to get to than the archer.
The hulking monsters moved more quickly than Sam would have believed. Too fast for their bulk. Sam bobbed and threaded his body through the eight limbs attacking him at once. One of the beasts had two clubs in its arms and the other had a club and two swords, although in its hands they looked like long knives.
As he barely escaped being crushed, slashed, and pummeled, Sam took inventory of what was happening in his peripheral vision. It had only been seconds since the fighting started, and more than half the mutated creatures had fallen. Three of the tanks still fought, including the two Sam faced, and everyone else was busy with their own battles. Sam was on his own.
He hoped he survived the fight.
Sam ducked behind a tree as one of the tanks sliced at him with a sword from either side. It wasn’t a large tree, maybe eight or nine inches thick. The swords whistled toward him and sheared the trunk cleanly. Sam had to jump clear to keep from getting crushed by the falling mass of wood. Before it had fallen, the swords had reversed direction and come back toward him. Sam jumped up, turned a flip, twisted in the air, and struck down as hard as he could with both sticks while infusing the strike with rohw. The sticks struck the creature’s ugly face. Sam felt lightning shoot up his arms, as if he had hit both funny bones. It felt like he had struck solid granite. He had no doubt that if he had been holding anything other than porzul wood, his weapons would have shattered. Yeah, he thought, I’m definitely in trouble here.
All Sam could do was to evade the creatures, hoping the others would be able to help him before the behemoths killed him. He deflected some blows, though even that was difficult because of their sheer force, but mostly he evaded them. He was tiring fast and didn’t know how much longer he could last.
You’re thinking too much, and in the wrong ways. Relax, come into balance, and feel the rohw. He heard it in Rindu’s voice, not his own. It helped. He relaxed. As much as one could when walking a knife’s edge between life and death.
Calm washed over him as his body moved without thought. The tanks trying to kill him had not relented, not slowed one bit, but now that he moved in harmony with the song of battle, he didn’t need to think about individual movements anymore. His evasions seemed easier, more fluid. He spun and dipped and dodged around the small clearing his opponents had chased him into. And he began to plan.
When Sam lunged directly toward one of the tanks, surprise showed on its face. It had probably never seen anyone do that before, and it hesitated for a fraction of a second. The tank beside it had no such hesitation. That one swung a sword and a club, and a third arm aimed a long, arcing blow with the mallet of its fist toward Sam’s head.
Sam ducked under the arms of the tank in front of him, barely slipping to the side in time. The satisfying sound of a heavy thud and a fainter squish told him that at least two blows meant for him had landed on the hesitating tank. From behind it, Sam turned, dropped one knee to use every bit of hip rotation, gravity, and rohw force he could muster, and drove his hands down, jabbing the short ends of the sticks where the kidneys would be on a human. Hoping the anatomy was similar, he rolled out of the way, just evading a club and sword that shook the ground.
Rolling again, he came up on the other side of the creature he had struck and delivered another rohw strike to the lower back, on both sides of the vertebrae. The splintering sound could only have been bones being pulverized, shortly followed by the creature’s scream and the thud of it hitting the ground when its legs no longer worked. Sam had been hoping the armor plating covered only the front, and he was glad to see that it was so. But he still had one more adversary to deal with.
The final tank battered the one that was falling, shoving its twin out of the way to get to Sam. As it stepped over its fellow, the club and two swords it held came at Sam in a blur intended to crush him from above and cut him from the sides at diagonally downward angles. Sam jumped, swinging his sticks outward and downward to deflect the swords. The force of his parries allowed him to jump almost six feet straight up, where he kicked at his opponent with both feet.
When Sam’s feet connected to the creature’s armored chest, he shot backward as if he pushed himself off a concrete wall. He knew he wouldn’t move the beast much, but he was surprised that it didn’t move at all. He jetted back so quickly that he was already out of range when the club came down where he’d been. Sam executed a graceful back flip and landed lightly, ruining the effect somewhat by sliding back a pace on the blood-slicked ground.
Sam reattached the sticks into staff form and tried to keep his foe’s strikes at bay. It took all his focus, and he barely managed it. Try as he might, he was unable to circle around the mutant to strike it from behind. Apparently, it had learned from watching Sam dispatch the other tank. He was rapidly tiring. One mistake and the creature would have him.
Parrying a flurry of blows and delivering a few of his own that bounced off the hardened skin of the tank, Sam tried to figure out a new strategy to compensate for his fatigue. He wondered if he could get a strike through to its eyes. The extended brow on the beast’s face seemed custom-designed to prevent that, but Sam was running out of options. He shifted his weight to allow another sword slash to pass him by within a hair’s breadth. Gathering the last of his precious energy in a final attack, he hoped he’d have enough left afterward to survive.
The creature’s eyes widened as steel tips emerged just below them. It made a strangled choking sound, dropped its weapons, and then crashed face first to the ground. Sam had to jump out of the way to prevent being crushed by the mass of flesh. Behind the falling beast, Ix landed on her feet, obviously having jumped to reach the back of the tank’s skull. She crossed her ring daggers in front of her in salute and disappeared. Sam saw the flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye that told him where she had gone: right beside a furry mutant whose throat she immediately cut as she materialized.
Sam looked around and saw that only a few of the mutants were left standing. In fact, as he watched, Rindu and Nalia finished off the last of them. Emerius was standing to Sam’s right, hands holding his long knives on his knees, breathing hard. His bow was on the ground nearby, and the quiver on his back was empty. Ix appeared next to him, looking him over for injuries.
Sam found a few gashes on himself he didn’t remember receiving. The rest of them seemed to lack serious injury, though he could pick out some cuts and bruises on Emerius. Rindu and Nalia, though covered in blood, seemed not to have been hit.
“Well,” Sam said between labored breaths, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen those mutants before.” He pointed to the two tanks in front of him. “Tough little buggers.” He looked to Ix and saluted her. “Thanks, Ix. I don’t know if I would have surviv
ed that without your help.”
She smiled at him and winked. “That’s what friends do, cover each other’s backs.”
Nalia fixed her with a level stare but said nothing.
“It seems as if the forces of the one who calls himself Chetra Dal have found us at last,” Rindu said. “I do not think we will have an easy time traveling from here on out. We must be more wary.”
Emerius was picking through the corpses, retrieving his arrows. He seemed to be looking for something, his eyes flicking over the bodies as he pulled his arrows free.
“Are you looking for something, Em?” Sam asked.
The hunter’s head snapped up as if he had forgotten the others were there.“Just surveying the types of creatures. There was one, a tall wiry one, completely hairless, that seemed to be directing the smarter mutants with gestures. Quick as lightning, that one. It dodged several arrows, twisting its body in ways it shouldn’t have been able to.”
“I killed it,” Nalia said, pointing with one of her shrapezi. “It is over there.” Her weapon moved again. “And there.” Once more she shifted her blade. “And there.” Her wicked smile made Sam shiver.
They all gathered around the head of the creature. Its bald pate looked too big for the body that lay a few feet away. Its eyes were large even in proportion to the oversized head. Pointed ears lay flat against its egg-shaped cranium, and wicked, sharp teeth ringed the mouth that was frozen in a snarl.
Sam inspected it carefully. “That looks like the assassin described by Torim Jet, Danaba Kemp, and Palusa Filk. The one that tried to kill Dr. Walt.”
Resonance: Harmonic Magic Book 3 Page 8
