Harmonic Magic Series Boxed Set

by P. E. Padilla

“Of course. Perhaps on a later visit, when you have more time, you will allow us to show you the hospitality that Medit can provide. If you insist on leaving now, at least allow me to lead you through this warren of streets to a northern exit so you don’t have to backtrack to the main street. It is, after all, my job to be of service to visitors in any way I can. My directives come straight from the mayor and I take them seriously.”

  “That would be splendid. You have been more than helpful. It is very much appreciated.”

  “Oh, not at all, not at all. It’s my duty and my privilege.”

  The pace the party kept was a casual one. Thad Altiri led them from the warehouse district through several trade districts where weavers, dyers, tanners, and smiths had their workshops. Sam looked at them all with interest, never having seen any shops where these trades were performed. The mix of sounds, smells, and sights were exciting, though the pungent aroma of the tanning shop was something he would prefer not to experience again. Soon, they were traveling down a narrow alley through which they could only proceed two abreast.

  Abruptly, the alley ended in a sort of cul-de-sac, wide enough for the party to spread out, but blocked off so that the only exit was the way they had come in. The blank, high walls were apparently the back sides of the buildings and there was only one door on each of the buildings, with no windows. The shadows from the structures blocked out the afternoon sun and made it seem much later than it really was.

  As Sam turned, he saw that not only had Thad doubled back to stand at the entrance to the cul-de-sac, but he was being joined by probably three dozen other men, all carrying weapons of some sort. They had walked into a trap.

  Thad Altiri smiled at them with his perfect teeth. “I am sorry, my friends, but my master requires something of you. You,” he pointed toward Dr. Walt, “he wants to ‘interview.’ As for the rest of you, I’m afraid he requires your lives. Give up and we will make it quick and painless. Resist and we will go to great lengths to make your pain last as long as possible.” With that, several men pushed to the front of the group. They all carried bows and, as one, they all nocked arrows and drew them to their cheeks.

  For Sam, time slowed. He watched events unfold as if in a slow motion replay on television. Thad said something and the men aimed their bows at the party. Before they could release their arrows, however, Rindu went into action.

  Sam saw the Zouy out of the corner of his eye. A glow quickly sprang up around him and then he thrust his palms forward toward the men. All but two of them scattered as if struck with hurricane force winds. The remaining two, on the outer edges, steadied their bows and released.

  Simultaneously, Sam saw Nalia move and he himself moved. It was just a small gesture, just a swinging of the end of his staff that was not resting on the ground. By reflex, or guided by his rohw, he moved the staff from right to left directly across his face. He saw a blur and heard a slight tch and then a thunk when the arrow that was to have gone through his eye embedded itself in the wooden wall behind him.

  Before any of the archers could recover, Rindu pushed Dr. Walt back against the wall and charged the group of men, striking left and right as soon as he was within range. Sam watched the monk dodging blows as if by magic in the confined space until all but one of the archers were down, some with broken bones, some obviously dead from a single blow. Turning from having torn the throat out of one of the last, Rindu delivered a vicious spinning heel kick to the back of the neck of the remaining archer. Sam could hear a sickening crack as the man’s head snapped backward at an impossible angle and his lifeless body flopped to the ground.

  The archers dispatched, Rindu lunged backward until he was just ahead of Nalia and Sam. The rakkeben surrounded Dr. Walt, growling with their muzzles retracted and teeth bared. “Are you ready to test your training, Sam?” Rindu asked without looking at him.

  Sam lifted his staff, separated it into fighting sticks with a thought and a small burst of his rohw, and nodded gravely. “Let’s do this,” he said, immediately feeling his face heat. Who did he think he was, some movie hero, spouting clever soundbites in the face of certain danger? He cleared his throat. “I mean, yes.” And then the men charged.

  Contrary to practical tactics in fighting against a force whose numbers were vastly greater, the three split up and moved as far as possible from each other to allow room to dispatch the maximum number of assailants possible without interfering with each other. It said something, Sam thought, about the level of training and proficiency of the warriors—well, the other two anyway—that this would be their tactic.

  Before he was engulfed by attackers, he saw Rindu spinning and dodging weapon attacks while striking with impossible combinations, doing so with a calm face and intense eyes. Nalia, too, having drawn her shrapezi, was raining death upon her attackers, dispatching them so quickly he was not sure he would even have to fight.

  When the men surrounding him attacked, all thought of the others fled his mind. He automatically sought the calmness of his rohw that he had been training these last few months and he found his balance easily. He saw flashes of energy patterns out of the corner of his eye, seeming to be able to see all the way around him, far past his normal peripheral vision.

  He didn’t even need to see, though, he found. He sensed the attacks before they came and his body, in perfect balance with his energy flow, simply moved in the most expedient manner in which to counteract the attacks. In the first second, in which no less than five assailants attacked him simultaneously, he somehow shifted and wiggled and twisted his body to allow the strikes to miss him by fractions of an inch while striking out at the same time. Two knives, one sword, a wicked looking spiked club, and a stick all missed their targets, but his kick to the side of the head of one man, hard stick strike to the brachial nerve to deaden the arm of another, and slashing strike to the eyes of a third with the tip of his stick left three of the attackers incapacitated, at least temporarily. One was dazed and nearly unconscious from the kick to his head, one had nervelessly dropped his club, and the other was now blind, both eye sockets crushed by the stick’s edge and his nose shattered in between to boot.

  Turning and using the spinning motion to deliver a vicious backfist to the temple of one man, causing him to drop bonelessly to the ground, Sam used his momentum to strike the last attacker with a spin kick that caused the man to be thrown off his feet, accompanied by the sound of breaking ribs. Stopping his spin, he brought the sticks up into a guard position, the right stick held out front and the left stick tucked under the opposite armpit, to quickly assess the next threat.

  There was one person in front of him, a woman. She held two long knives, looking like she knew how to use them. In his peripheral vision, he saw Rindu and Nalia finishing up with the last of their attackers. “You can’t take me alone,” he told the woman. “Put the knives down and leave and you will live.”

  She sneered at him and slashed with lightning quick combinations. Not wanting to fight a woman like this—what was that about, anyway?—he backstepped several steps, parrying her knives with his sticks. When his back bumped against one of the walls, he knew he had no choice. She would not stop, so he must defend himself.

  The woman was good. Her guard was solid and she left no openings despite attacking with both knives. Still, she was no match for him. As she came in for a deep thrust, he smacked either side of her forearm with his sticks, causing the nerves to release the knife. It clattered to the ground. When she spun in for a slash toward his throat, he stepped forward, jammed her arm with one stick, wrapped his other arm around her arm, heaving up and twisting to lock it in place, and then rotated his hips slightly. He heard a pop as her shoulder dislocated and the second knife bounced off the paving stones.

  Releasing her and pushing her away, he thought it was finished, but apparently she did not agree. Her dislocated arm hanging limp, she started throwing kicks at him. She initiated a lightning-fast combination, but then suddenly dropped to the ground, unconscious.
As she dropped, Sam saw Rindu behind her, his hand just coming down from the nerve strike he had delivered to her neck at the base of the skull.

  Nalia dragged Thad Altiri to the others by his collar. He had a massive bruise on his head, looking suspiciously like the outline of the flat of Nalia’s shrapezi. “I left this one alive. Maybe he feels like talking.” As she spoke, she touched the tip of the curved and razor sharp end of her hooked sword to his throat. He raised his head to try to keep from being cut.

  “Anything,” he whined, “anything you want to know, just ask. Just please don’t kill me.”

  Rindu stepped up to the man, face-to-face. “Why did you lead us into this trap?”

  “The Gray Man, he gave us orders. We are to take the old man and kill the protectors. I don’t know why. I just follow orders.”

  “What does he know of us?”

  “I don’t know anything except what I told you and that he knows you are heading toward the Gray Fortress. Honest, that’s all I know.”

  Rindu looked to each of the others in turn to see if they had anything else they wanted to ask the man. Dr. Walt stepped up from his position at the rear of the cul-de-sac. He had not been injured, probably not even been in any danger during the fight. “What does he want with me?”

  “I don’t know. He just said to take you alive if possible. That’s all I know.”

  Dr. Walt looked thoughtfully. Then he nodded to Rindu. The Zouy leaned over and touched the man at the base of his neck and Thad Altiri dropped to the ground, unconscious.

  “You really have to show me how to do that,” Sam said to the Zouy. “That seems a very useful thing to know.”

  Rindu’s smirk was his only answer.

  Chapter 41

  The party found their way out of the maze of alleys to the main street and then out of the city. They would be pursued, to be sure, so they traveled the rest of the day and into the night, only stopping around midnight to sleep for a few hours before continuing on.

  A day and a half later, they came to The Grinder.

  Dr. Walt explained. “This area is called The Grinder because it takes all who try to travel through it, grinds them up, and spits them out of the other side. If they survive. It is a difficult land, with mazes of canyons and heavy vegetation. There are several types of nasty creatures here. Bandits have taken up residence in some areas, not so much to attack the few who pass through, but so they can retreat into the maze when being pursued. We must be careful.”

  Rindu nodded morosely. Nalia, too, was nodding. She had been through the Grinder, she explained. She passed through twice, once on the way up to the Gray Fortress and once, alone, on the way back. That second trip through was after all the other Sapsyra with her, including her mother, were killed. She almost didn’t survive the return trip through the area.

  She was the only one with firsthand information of the area and so would likely take the lead. Sam joined her at the head of the party, continuing her language education as they moved forward.

  Looking ahead from the slight rise where the party had stopped, Sam scanned the miles of twisting canyons hemmed in by ragged cliffs jutting up sharply from the ground. In between the dirt and stone walls, the deep green of closely packed trees and underbrush smeared jade over the landscape for as far as his eyes could see. It was the type of landscape where they could get lost and never find a way out. Well, at least there seemed to be plenty of water, and he was sure his companions could find edible plants, so there was no real risk of starving or dying of thirst, even if they did get lost. He gulped. “This is the only way?”

  “The only way without going fifty of miles out of our way through treacherous mountains,” Nalia answered.

  “Well then,” he responded, “what are we waiting for?”

  Before traveling even a quarter mile, Sam was hopelessly lost, his sense of direction completely befuddled. Rindu noticed Sam scratching his head, looking to and fro.

  “You have lost your sense of direction.”

  Sam nodded, embarrassed.

  “Perhaps it is a good time to teach you something new. It will be too difficult as we are moving, but when we take our next food break, I will show you.” With that, he walked past Sam up to Nalia and began speaking softly with her. Sam had dropped back so as not to distract her from leading the party, their language lessons postponed for the moment.

  Travel was difficult for more reasons than just his foiled sense of direction. The vegetation, as thick as it looked from the rise, was even more congested when they were in it. There were so many types of plants, Sam could not begin to count them. Trees—he really should learn to identify different types of trees—were crowded close together and had some type of vine hanging from many of them.

  Between the trees, there were ferns—he could recognize those well enough—as well as many different types of bushes and what looked like small trees, trying to push their way into the space between the larger trees but failing.

  As they made their way through, the passage they took varied in width, from thirty or forty feet or more down to less than five feet, forcing them to walk single file. The truth was, they were in single file more often than not anyway because clearing a path for the width of one person was much easier than clearing a path for two.

  The rakkeben, seeming to be casually wandering behind and around them, would sometimes stop, Sam noticed. When they did, their ears would prick up and they would raise their noses. He would hear them snuffling and sniffing, trying to catch a scent, but they always relaxed and continued on without anything else happening. It was all very disconcerting.

  The narrow gully in which they were traveling widened out suddenly, the sixty foot high walls on either side curving outward to make a roughly circular area that was less crowded with plants. Nalia led them to some boulders that were half obscured by bushes and suggested that they stop to eat. She didn’t have to convince any of the party, who were more than happy to stop, even if just to break up the monotony of the constant bushwhacking they were doing.

  Rindu came over and, through mouthfuls of dried meat, said to Sam, “Apologies for my snack, but I am very hungry. It is not meant as a lack of respect to you.”

  “It’s fine,” Sam said, suddenly realizing he was hungry too.

  “Good. Join me.” He patted down a small patch of grass near the rock on which Sam sat, gesturing to a large patch of moss just in front of him. Sam took his place on the moss so that both men sat in the familiar, cross-leg posture they always used for rohw training.

  “Now then, I have taught you about ley lines and vortices at the junction where they cross.” He paused for a moment, looking at Sam, only continuing when he saw Sam nod. “When one is sensitive to the rohw, he is able to distinguish the major ley lines, one from the other. It is like hearing an old friend’s voice. It may be similar to others, but it is distinctive because of your familiarity.”

  Sam sat in rapt attention as Rindu continued. “If you pay attention, and you learn the feel of these lines, then you will be able to sense them, and sense where they cross other lines. They may pulse more strongly, or less, depending upon interaction with other lines and other things. This can be used for location. Do you understand this?”

  “GPS.”

  “What?” Rindu cocked an eyebrow and looked at Sam, trying to determine if it was a joke.

  “GPS. Global Positioning System. On my world, there are machines that we put in the sky, very high up above the ground. We communicate with them to triangulate position.” Rindu’s face was painted with confusion.

  “Let me try again. These machines allow us to ‘paint’ a grid system on the ground, all over the world. Like ley lines, except that they are numbered. At any point, we have coordinates, the numbers of the lines that cross at that point.” Sam broke off the stem of some succulent plant next to where he sat and used the sap to draw several straight lines on the rock next to him. Then he drew several more perpendicular to the first, and crossing them
. “Like this.”

  Understanding dawned on Rindu’s face. “Yes, yes. That is the same, but without numbers. We simply feel the unique energy signature, the unique vibration of the lines and where they are and how they interact with the other lines and we can pinpoint location. Good, you understand. Now all that remains is to put your understanding into practice.”

  Knowing what he needed to do, Sam settled into his posture, closed his eyes, and assumed the khulim. He could assume the “almost trance” instantly now, after all the practice he’d had. He sat, body feeling detached, mind at ease, just on the brink of leaving reality. Once there, he waited for Rindu’s instructions.

  “Good.” He heard, though it was muted as if he was underwater. Strange, it hadn’t ever done that before. He allowed his mind to settle into rest again, thinking of nothing.

  “Now,” Rindu continued, “extend your senses. Feel the ley lines closest to you. See them in your mind if that helps, but you must feel them as well.”

  Sam tried. Nothing. He tried again, harder. Nothing. He was beginning to get frustrated, knowing that it was counterproductive, when he heard Nalia’s voice, muffled as Rindu’s was, “Focus on the ground. Touch it.”

  Sam reached down and put his hand on the patch of moss on which he sat. It felt as if he was shocked or stung. He immediately pulled his hand off the moss. The feeling was not painful as much as it was surprising. He had felt some kind of pulse, some kind of charge, that he was not expecting. Trying to maintain his calmness, he slowly lowered his hand to the ground again and touched the moss. Being ready for it this time, he felt something travel into his hand, start to make its way up his forearm, and then fizzle. What was it? A buzz? A glow? Some bit of both? He couldn’t decide.

  He turned his internal eye toward the energy source. He sat and just experienced it. It was like when he “softened his gaze,” letting his eyes go out of focus so as not to be distracted by sharp details. When he did so, he realized that he could see, in his mind’s eye, a glowing path wider than his body and angling off from where he sat toward his left side. Straining his inner eye to follow it, he saw that it continued in that direction until it was out of sight.