The red-rimmed black eyes of Silicim Mant went wide and he made a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a wheeze. Then, he dropped onto his face on the stone and remained motionless. Ayim Rasaad froze, standing still as a statue in the shadows. She had seen a glow just before Mant fell, the telltale sign that rohw was being used. By reflex, she used a talent that had served her well in the past, a little trick that she was born with. She folded in on herself mentally, becoming invisible to vibration-sensitive sight.
She had learned early on in her training in the Zouyim temple that she was able to do this. It was a little thing, and useless for the most part, but she had played with it, practiced it, and refined it to such an extent that when she was younger, she was never found in the games of hide-and-seek the masters had the disciples play to increase their rohw sensitivity, the sensitivity to the vibrational energy used by the Zouyim and the Arzbedim.
When she used her ability, she showed virtually no vibration or any hint of vibratory powers that could be recognized by other energy users. She had come a long way from hide-and-seek champion to where she was now, and this small ability might just save her life this night.
“It’s nothing personal, you understand,” a rich voice, laden with vibratory power said to the body lying on the floor. “It is merely something necessary, though if there was one with whom I would take my time in prolonging his suffering, it would be you.”
Hiding in a shadow that seemed much too thin to act as the shield she needed, Ayim Rasaad looked carefully toward the visible piece of the speaker, peering out of the corner of her eye to prevent him from seeing the white of her orb. He looked similar to the other Arzbedim—pale and completely hairless from manipulating dark energies—but more ragged. He was thin and wearing clothes that were too baggy on him, as if they belonged to someone else entirely. She had never seen him before, but that wasn’t saying much. She had only seen a handful of the Arzbedim.
The tense seconds dragged on. The man cocked his bald, white head slightly, as if listening. No, as if catching the barest hint of a scent. His eyes softened and went out of focus, then flared briefly. With a slow, soft nod, he turned on his heels and headed back the way he had come, quick footsteps retreating down the hallway. Before Rasaad was able to take a step, she heard another surprised grunt and scream, cut off as immediately as it had started.
She was not sure what was going on, but she had just seen the leader of the Arzbedim, the most powerful enemy of the Zouyim order, killed in less than a second with barely more than a thought. Some foe, it seemed, was going through the fortress and purging it of life, if what she had heard was any indication. This was no place for her to be.
Slowly, ever so slowly, she inched her way along the wall, pressing her body up against the shadows while trying to ignore the cold that not only radiated from the stone but now came from within as well. Her breaths came in stuttering gasps, threatening to make her hyperventilate, but she wrestled them under control and forced herself to breathe in, breathe out, and try to relax. She was almost to the secret door now. It was her escape, her salvation. A few more inches.
She had never been so scared in all her life. During her fifteen years at the Zouyim temple, she had prepared for every situation, always with the focus on remaining calm, at peace. Life-giving breath was a staple for a Zouyim monk, and she had thought that nothing could faze her, nothing could cause fear to sink its paralyzing tentacles into her as long as she could breathe deeply of the life-giving air. She had been wrong.
When an agent of the Arzbedim had contacted her three years earlier, she thought she would finally be able to learn all the secrets that had been kept from her. She was pushing, always pushing, trying to learn more and more, but the masters held her back. When the Arzbedim offered her a place among them, she jumped at the opportunity. She had proven her worth, her loyalty, over the last three years by spying on the Zouyim activities, informing the Arzbedim and now, tonight, she was finally to join them officially.
She had left the Zouyim temple to join her new brotherhood, and had been given instructions on how to find the secret passage and directions to meet with Silicim Mant himself. She thought she had finally achieved her goal, finally found a way to unlock the secrets to the rohw, the vibratory energy she had been learning to use for so long. She would truly become a master now.
But it was clear that was not to be. In fact, if she couldn’t get to the secret passageway and escape, she too may end up face-down on the cold stone floor like the ex-leader of the Arzbedim. Anyone with the power to kill such a powerful rohw-user instantly was not someone she wanted to deal with. She would escape and figure things out after she was safe. Just a step or two more now…
She reached out and swung the secret door—which she had not closed all the way—open. Quickly slipping inside the passage, she closed the door behind her and made no sound as she shuffled a dozen feet before leaning hard against the corridor wall. She closed her eyes and took a very deep breath, held it, and then exhaled. The ex-Zouyim repeated this three more times before she stopped shaking so violently that her teeth were chattering. Now she was merely trembling.
Taking one more deep breath, she straightened her back, softened her gaze so she could use her aura to guide her in the pitch black corridor, and made her way back outside the walls of the fortress. She knew she had narrowly averted being killed in the most ignominious of ways and she was thankful. With the Arzbedim dead and the Zouyim no doubt aware of her betrayal by now, she did not know what she would do. She was alive, though, which meant she had at least a little more time to figure it out.
Chapter 1
As was his habit, Sam Sharp was up before the sun rose. Sitting on the back porch of his small home, he greeted the sunrise in meditation. Eyes closed, his breathing deep and regular, he heard the sounds of the forest waking up behind the buffer of his almost-trance. Khulim was what his teacher, Rindu Zose, had called the condition. It was just shy of being in a trance, body completely relaxed, mind focused inward on nothing, awareness of the surroundings complete but muted so as not to distract. There was no better way to start the day, Sam thought.
Half an hour later, the sun was visible just above the horizon and Sam rose to his feet. He took a deep breath, the scent of the cold forest filling his nose. Wet leaves, moist earth, pine bark, and fresh clean air. Smiling, he started slowly jogging toward his destination.
It was not quite spring, so by all rights it should have been colder, but he was glad it wasn’t. It had been relatively warm and dry lately and there was not much left of the snow that fell a week ago. His muscles quickly warmed up as he plodded around his training area for one, two, three laps, gradually increasing his speed. When he stopped and stretched his now-warm muscles, there was a sheen of perspiration on his skin that reflected the diffused morning light.
Feeling loose and warm and powerful, he began his daily routine. He had built a training area on the forty acres of forested land he owned. The area included obstacle courses, martial arts training devices, and general fitness equipment, some of which he had invented and built himself.
It had been about a year and a half since he had returned from his adventure and his life could not have been more different than before he left. He had been living in the desert in Southern California; now he was living in a forest in Southern Oregon. He had been working at a warehouse; now he didn’t need to work because of the gold he had been given. He had always enjoyed physical activity, but now he had brought it to a new level.
His adventure had taken him to another world, Gythe. It was another dimension, really, sharing the same physical space as his own world but vibrating at a different frequency. It had been an accident that he was even able to go there, but once there, he had learned many things, not the least of which was combat. He had learned about vibrational energy, too—it was called rohw there—and had come to realize that he had a knack for it. When he had finally come home, he knew that things for him woul
d never be the same as they had been.
Bringing his mind back from its wanderings, he paid closer attention to what he was doing. Jumping up on the first of two dozen wooden posts set in the ground—their height above the ground differing—he hopped one-footed from post to post. He flowed smoothly over them, barely breaking stride. Jumping off the final post high into the air, he tucked into a tight ball and turned a perfect flip, landing lightly on his feet. As his feet touched the ground, he collapsed his right knee and smoothly turned his momentum into a shoulder roll, coming back up almost instantly, running to the next obstacle.
He dove through the small opening between movable bars—they could be adjusted vertically and horizontally to increase or decrease the opening size and the window was set so it was just barely bigger than his body—not even grazing the bars, landing in a roll and regaining his feet.
Next was a series of horizontal bars. Sam jumped up and grabbed the first. His forward momentum was enough to allow him to swing, release immediately, and grab onto the next, higher bar. He swung his body up, pulling at the perfect time while bending his body around so that he ended crouched with his feet on top of the bars and his hands still gripping in between them for balance.
Pushing away strongly with his feet, he launched himself to the next bar, which was at the same height as the one he was standing on, ten feet from the soft forest floor. He kept the nearby trees trimmed carefully so as not to interfere with his obstacles, but their height and lush foliage made it so that the entire area was normally heavily shaded. It was only partially so now, since fully half the trees had lost their leaves for the season. Only the evergreens sprawling overhead showed their verdant hues, though some of the other trees seemed to be sprouting.
He landed with his feet on the next bar and immediately sprung to the next, and the next. He jumped precisely, landing on three more bars until he dove at another, this one vertical. He grabbed it with both hands as he passed. Spiraling around the bar, he released his grip and flew back the way he had come, toward a crowd of hanging wooden targets in the shape of small logs. The targets were two feet long, hanging from ropes at different heights. He struck them as he passed, a side kick to this one, a punch, an elbow strike, a crescent kick, followed by a spinning back kick as the small log swung away from him.
Making it through the targets, he jumped onto the balance rail. It was three feet off the ground and twenty-five feet long. There were three such rails, all parallel and spaced five feet apart. He ran quickly down the first and, when he got to the end, jumped over to the next one. On this one, he planted his right hand and began a series of cartwheeleds until he reached the end. Instead of leaping to the next one, he dove up into the air and across to it, landing with both hands on the two-inch-wide rail in a perfectly balanced handstand. Shuffling his hands while holding the handstand, he moved down the length of the rail. When he got to the end, he stopped, tightened his body, and then lifted his left hand in the air, holding a one-handed handstand for ten seconds. Flipping gracefully to his feet on the ground, he moved on.
When he finished the remaining obstacles, he moved over to the striking target area. Here, he had bags of differing weights set up for power training, along with many moving targets to practice precision strikes. Before long, he was sweating profusely and felt his muscles burning.
Sam dropped to the ground and sat motionless in a loose cross-legged position. He paused there, breathing and slowing his heart rate to a more normal pace. Just a moment before he caught movement out of the edge of his vision, he sensed a presence. His adversary moved silently, but he had trained himself to sense and notice things that were out of the ordinary since he had returned to this world. He would not be caught unaware.
With lightning speed, he vaulted to his feet in time to meet his attacker before a blow could be struck. Kicks and punches came at him with blinding rapidity but he parried the first few aside and then stepped out of range to render others harmles. He slipped a few of the subsequent blows, letting them barely graze his skin, before he attempted to trap the striking arm. However, his assailant was too skilled to be trapped.
Realizing defense would not give him victory, Sam went on the offensive. Twisting to avoid a front kick that transformed into a side kick in the blink of an eye, he jabbed with his left hand and then came around with his right in a hook punch that should have been outside the attacker’s field of vision. A flick of the combatant’s elbow deflected the punch so that it narrowly missed the head, going up and over and putting Sam at a disadvantage.
He immediately shifted the course of the punch to strike the assailant’s face with his elbow while throwing an uppercut with his left hand and attempting a knee strike with the right leg. His adversary, using the arm that had deflected the hook punch, punched his elbow, sending electricity shooting up his arm; caught the uppercut with the other hand; and shifted slightly so that the knee strike passed harmlessly to the side.
Then, without hesitation, the assailant grabbed Sam’s tingling arm, twisted it up with the failed uppercut, and spun Sam around like a top, causing him to spiral outward because of the force and pain in his shoulders. He spun in the air and landed hard on his back with a loud huff, looking at the bright blue sky and the wispy clouds passing by, just visible through a break in the pine boughs above him.
“Ow,” he said, when he was finally able to get his breath back. “That was awesome. Can you show me that?”
Nalia reached her hand out and helped him up. “If I showed you, then how would I use it against you again? Do not be ridiculous.”
Sam came to his feet with a smile and a groan. He wrapped his arms around Nalia and squeezed. “Fine. I’ll just have to think it through. I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”
She smiled at him, flawless white teeth flashing in the morning sun. Looking at her, he was struck again, as he had been thousands of times before, by how perfect she was. Her chestnut-colored hair was gathered in a pony tail hanging down her back to keep it from getting in the way. Her eyes, blue one moment and pale green the next, looked into his own blue-gray eyes. Her delicate face, oval-shaped and the perfect mix of soft curves and strong features, still took his breath away. Her nose, which he found adorable, crinkled slightly as her perfect lips formed a smirk.
Yeah, he had it bad. She could have asked him to walk into a bear trap and he wouldn’t think twice about it until it snapped around his leg. He smiled back and took her hand.
“So, now that we’ve had our little workout, what’s on the agenda for today?” he asked as they turned and walked toward the house.
“We must go into town to get some things. And we need to talk about returning to Gythe.”
“Yeah.” Sam stopped, forcing her to stop or release his hand. She stopped. “We’ll have to talk to my mom. I’m not sure how she’ll react to it.”
Those perfect lips made a straight line. “Sam, I do not think it will be as big a problem as you predict. We will get the things we need and then talk to her when we return.”
“I know you don’t think so,” he said, “but I think it’s a big deal. I’m the only one she has, the only one in the world. She didn’t know I was gone that last time I was in Gythe because time flows differently in the two worlds and it hardly passed here while I was there. If it was the same, I would have been missing for months and it would have killed her.”
“Yes, but that is because you simply disappeared. We will tell her this time. She will know where you have gone. It is different.”
“Maybe.” He ran his fingers through his hair, as he always did when worrying about something. “I’m just nervous about it. What if she really takes it hard, feels like we’re giving her no choice? Or abandoning her? I love her, Nal, but she sometimes reacts to things differently than I’d ever think. Just look at what she did when my dad died when I was very young. She cut all ties with every friend and family member we had and moved us to the other side of the country.”
“Oh, Sam,�
�� Nalia put her hands on either side of his face and looked into his eyes, “do not worry overmuch. Your mother is not as she was back then. We will discuss it with her and then you will see if there are problems. Does that not sound reasonable?”
“Okay,” he said. “I guess that sounds good to me. Do you mind if I stay here while you go to town? I have some work to do.”
Nalia pulled him toward her and drew him into a hug. “We will do the shopping. Do your work and we will talk with your mother later. Do not hurt yourself doing your work. You are a clumsy oaf, after all.”
It was an old joke, one that made him feel warm inside. “I know. It’s a good thing I have you and mom to look after me.”
Nalia Wroun watched Sam head out to his workshop. She had spent almost the last two years with him, first in her home on Gythe, and now here. He was precious to her and became more so every day. She loved to look into his blue-gray eyes, to run her fingers through his short blond hair. Well, she liked to run her fingers through it if he did not put the sticky stuff in it to make it stay in place. She still could not understand why people here did things like that.
The point, though, was that she was happy here with him. Happier than she could remember being for many years. She felt as if she belonged with him, wherever that may be. Yet, she missed her father. And truth be told, she missed Dr. Walt, too, that lanky old scholar.
“Are you ready to go?” Nicole Sharp asked Nalia, interrupting her memories.
“Yes, I am.”
The other woman looked around. “Uh-oh. Sam isn’t going, is he? How did he get out of it this time? What’s his excuse?” She winked as she said it.
Harmonic Magic Series Boxed Set Page 54
