by C H Duryea
“A champion,” the Lady Regent repeated. “For a test of combat. Throw him in!”
Eighteen
“Combat?” Zeke asked, backing away from the two soldiers. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake. I’m no—”
“The crucible of combat,” the Lady Mica called, her voice resonating over the crowd, “will judge you foul or fair!”
Suddenly, Harbinger was at Zeke’s side.
“Any defensive moves,” he whispered, “lead with your left. Offensive moves, lead with your—”
The soldiers thrust Harbinger roughly aside and came after Zeke. They caught him by the arms and hauled him through the crowd towards the fence.
“Throw him in!” Mica commanded again.
To the crowd’s delight, the soldiers lifted Zeke and slammed him bodily against the iron rails of the fence. The rails gave way under his weight as he dropped through a spring-loaded hatch.
He only had time to watch the hatch slam back shut before his back slammed into the floor of the pit. A hoarse gasp escaped him, and he sprawled there for a moment in a daze. He rolled to his knees, trying to get his bearings. Through his dizziness, he saw a sword land on the sandy ground in front of him. He looked dumbly at it, not fully realizing just what was happening. But then his head and vision cleared and the events of the last minute or so came back to him in an unwelcome rush.
He looked up and the throng was now crowding around the fence, roaring in happy anticipation of something very unpleasant about to happen. Beyond the crowd, he saw the Lady Mica and her entourage taking a position on the upper ambulatory where they had a fully unobstructed view.
He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet, looking back to the sword as if he was still uncertain what he was supposed to do with it. He realized that it was presumably in his best interest to pick it up, though he still didn’t know what he was to use it on.
But then the growling sound issued again, coming from the shadows under the lip of the pit’s rim. Zeke turned towards it as he heard the heavy rattle and creak of an iron fence opening and then slamming closed.
Zeke reached down and picked up the sword.
A shape slowly began to emerge from the shadows. A big shape. Zeke’s knees went weak, and the crowd roared its approval as it moved into the light.
It was tall, Zeke quickly noted—a good two and a half to three meters in height. It stood on sturdy legs that were small for its height and its torso piled up like a matted fur and armor covered tree trunk. Its head looked like nothing if not a huge slavering hyena. If hyenas had three-inch-long canines, glowing eyes and dreadlocks that appeared to have the bones of its victims weaved throughout.
In one clawed and mighty hand, it gripped the long haft of a huge double-edged battle axe, although Zeke assumed the creature didn’t really need it. And when it roared, Zeke was suddenly sure of one thing.
He should have gone with Vibeke for that sword lesson.
The crowd was loud and vocal in its approval of the regent’s choice of champion. Through the clamor overhead, Zeke heard Harbinger’s voice.
“A gnoll!” he yelled. “It’s a gnoll!”
Zeke couldn’t tell if the fact that Harbinger recognized his opponent was good or bad—even if, at the moment, good and bad were highly subjective terms.
Then he heard Vibeke.
“Qaant Yke,” she was calling. “Can’t you do something?”
“He is being tested,” the alien answered. “We must bear witness.”
“Bear witness to what? His fractionation?”
Their voices were drowned out by the crowd as the gnoll closed in. Zeke felt the ground shake with each of its steps. It swung its axe, which, despite having a blade the size of a Volkswagen, it brandished with ease. It grinned as it advanced. Zeke held the sword point towards the gnoll and shuffled backward.
“I appreciate that we all have our own ways of vetting new arrivals,” Zeke said to his opponent. “Can I assume that this is merely a formality?”
The gnoll gnashed its teeth and brought the axe down. Zeke dove aside as the blade sunk into the ground.
“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” he said. He scrambled to his feet and jumped behind the creature. It ripped the ax back from the ground and whipped around, ramming Zeke in the chest with the pommel. Zeke flew several meters backward and skidded to the dirt, his sword tumbling to the side.
The gnoll roared. The crowd roared.
Zeke stood, jumped over and retrieved the sword. The gnoll turned and advanced again, swinging the axe in a wide, underhanded cut. Zeke brought up his blade to block. Their blades met.
Perhaps the gnoll was not expecting a serious attempt to block. Perhaps Zeke was enjoying a bit of beginner’s luck. But Zeke’s parry was enough to divert the gnoll’s blade just enough to miss him. The huge blade bit into the ground again.
The crowd howled. The gnoll was not amused. It came at him again, and again Zeke met the blade with his own. Again, Zeke’s parry robbed the gnoll’s blade of barely enough momentum to hit its mark. Zeke realized, however, that this was hardly a sufficient defense. It was only delaying the inevitable.
The gnoll paused, tossing the axe from hand to mighty hand, its glowing eyes narrowed on Zeke. Zeke shuffled, keeping the sword point between them.
“Lady Mica’s tossed us both into an unfair fight!” he shouted—trying to appeal to whatever code of honor gnolls might have. “What kind of bragging rights are you going to earn by squashing little old me?”
The gnoll snarled and advanced again. Apparently whatever elevated gnoll status killing Zeke would garner, it was enough.
It came again, swinging the blade, and Zeke tried to parry. Instead, the axe sent the sword flying from his hand and clattering to the opposite side of the pit. The gnoll grinned, its eyes glowing as it swung around for another strike.
Zeke didn’t have time to think. The axe was going to slice him in two. He raised his left hand in reflexive defense, and the blade met the cyex cuff around his wrist. The impact sapped the axe’s momentum and sent the gnoll off balance. As the creature staggered, Zeke lunged past it and scrambled for the sword. But he wasn’t fast enough. Or the gnoll was too fast. Either way, the gnoll recovered, spun and charged. The sword was within centimeters of his fingers when the axe came down again, forcing Zeke to dodge away empty handed. He rolled and bounced back up as the gnoll looked at him with its teeth gnashed into a feral grin. Then it laughed—a disturbingly hyena-like bray. One heavy rake of a hand swept down and scooped up Zeke’s sword and threw it. Zeke flinched expecting to be the target. That would have been better—at least he would have been able to make a dive for the blade if it missed him. But no. The gnoll cast it aside and it sailed through the bars of the enclosure, a loud clang like a bell ringing as it left. It clattered to the ground a good two meters outside the gate, inaccessible, useless.
The crowd whooped with delight, and the beast came again, its feet shaking the sandy ground with each stride.
Zeke shuffled backward. He was running out of options. Not that he had been given many, to begin with. He could not match this monster in strength—and hand-to-hand gnoll wrangling wasn’t part of the skill set he needed in the lab. He could take advantage of his size and agility, get behind him and attack him from behind. With what, though? And what the hell was he going to accomplish by leaping on its back? He’d just end up another dismembered bangle at the end of one of those snake-like dreads.
The gnoll attacked with a vicious cross cut, and Zeke dove and rolled, feeling the breeze of the blade cutting the air just above him. He tried to scramble out of range while the blade’s momentum was carrying it away from him, but the gnoll took advantage of the angular momentum and brought the axe behind him and around again. And before Zeke could move far enough away, the flat of the blade slammed into him, throwing him through the air. He crashed into the iron bars and thudded to the sand.
His head rang like a struck anvil as he twisted in pain on the sand
. The roar of the crowd sounded very far away. His eyes struggled to make sense of the spinning mess in front of him. But when his vision resolved, he wished it hadn’t.
The gnoll recognized that his work was just about done here; it closed in, raising the axe almost casually. Zeke tried to retreat, pushing away with his legs until he pinned himself against the bars. The gnoll stopped and grinned down at him, the axe resting on its massive shoulder. Zeke looked up at it, his legs shifting as if trying to escape on pure instinct. But he knew that even if he tried to move, there was no way he could move fast enough to get beyond the range of the beast’s weapon. So when the gnoll got around to swinging the blade, Zeke fully assumed he was about to be bisected.
His hardwiring, however, refused to give up and he reflexively brought his left arm up in a defensive move—
And suddenly the blade stopped. The cutting edge of the weapon held frozen at the first point of contact with the cyex vambrace, as if it had forgotten about Newton’s laws of motion. Not that they would have ever heard of Newton in this neck of the woods.
Zeke didn’t even feel it. The gnoll hadn’t stopped its swing. Quite the contrary—it continued to bear down on him, its muscles bulging with the effort, its teeth gnashing first in puzzlement, then in frustration. But Zeke’s arm, blocking with the vambrace felt no force, no pressure. It was as if the beast and the blade were mere projections.
They weren’t, as indicated by the quiver of the ground as the gnoll leapt back. The crowd fell silent as the monster attacked again. Zeke blocked with the vambrace and again the blade froze at the point of contact. And again Zeke felt nothing.
Not quite nothing. On the second strike, Zeke sensed something he couldn’t quite describe. Instead of the jarring shock of impact he would have expected, he felt the lightest of electrical currents passing through the vambrace and into his body, as though the momentum of the blade and the unanswerable strength of the gnoll—
It was as if the vambrace was absorbing the kinetic energy of both.
The gnoll roared in exasperation and threw the axe aside.
Zeke’s focus shifted from the monster looking over him to the band of metal around his forearm. The strange current still radiated from the vambrace. He clenched his fist and he felt an odd surge seeping into his curled fingers.
Defend with your left, Harbinger had said.
He stood up. The gnoll growled and balled its clawed and mighty fingers. It swung its great fist at him with the force of a hammer throw. And when Zeke blocked, the vambrace again captured every erg. The beast backed up a step and appeared to be reconsidering its agenda.
Then Zeke remembered something. He looked at his other wrist. The first vambrace Harbinger had given him—the one forged from the moolite tiles. The metal Narissa had activated when she blasted Scar’s men. The metal Harbinger had told him to—
Attack with your— Harbinger had never finished his sentence.
Attack with your right.
Suddenly Zeke felt a surge of hope. He took a stride towards his opponent and raised the fist of his right hand. He felt the strange energy coursing up his arm and he remembered what Harbinger had said that morning.
He squinted hard at the gnoll and wished it into the cornfield.
And—nothing. He tried it again, wishing the gnoll gone, picturing it plowing into the opposite wall with enough force to crack it.
But instead, the gnoll issued its braying laugh—and seized Zeke by the throat. It lifted Zeke off his feet and slammed him against the bars. The gnoll pressed him hard, and it kept pressing until Zeke felt his airway begin to close. Zeke’s leg started flailing as he tried to kick the beast. But its arms were longer than his legs. With its other clawed hand, the gnoll grabbed Zeke’s left arm and began to twist, as one might a drumstick off a roast chicken. The crowd whooped again, and Zeke realized that, one way or another, he was about to die.
He thrashed desperately about with his free hand, trying to get some response out of the right vambrace. He punched at the gnoll’s tree-trunk-like arm, only to catch his sleeve on the points of its barbed armor. He pulled back and his sleeve tore away, revealing the vambrace—and the haptic blaster he had forgotten was still strapped to his upper arm. His frantic motions freed the inert device and it snaked from its nest into Zeke’s outstretched palm.
He felt his strength and his consciousness start to fade. He thought about Vibeke and his team—his friends—and cursed himself for dragging them to this impossible place, with no way to get home. The anguish of that thought lit one last angry burst of fire in him, but he was fast losing his ability, or even inclination, to use it.
He knew it was an empty gesture, a meaningless expression of contempt from a dying man. Even still, with the last ounce of his waning strength, he raised the muzzle of the blaster, pointed it at the face of his killer, and pulled the trigger.
Nineteen
Light slowly seeped back into Zeke’s awareness. Light—and pain. His neck was immobile, his back felt like a tank had run over it, and his throat was a raw as an uncooked steak. He pried his eyes open through sheer force of will. Above him, a tall gothic-style window let in a shaft of sunlight that bisected his view of an arched ceiling. He tried to raise his head to look around, but that only caused his neck to spasm even worse.
“Your mobility will return in time,” an unfamiliar voice said. A woman’s voice. “My mages have repaired most of the damage to your neck and torso. But in the meantime, it is best you do not move.”
Zeke did not heed the advice. Despite the pain, he twisted just enough to get a view of the speaker.
“Your Regency,” he said.
Lady Mica sat in a chair by the bed. Beside her, a table held a water pitcher and wash basin, along with a variety of devices and substances that Zeke could only hope were medical by design. Behind her, a tapestry hung on a limestone wall next to a wooden door and a line of cabinets.
“We need not stand on ceremony,” Mica replied. “You may address me as ‘My Lady.’”
“Grand.” Zeke let his head drop back to the pillow. “So—my Lady—what happened to me?”
“You were about to be drawn and quartered by one of my best gnolls,” she said, “but your strange weapon caused his head to burst like a melon.”
It started to come back to him, in small but steady drips. The gnoll slavering down at him, its claws around his neck and arm. The haptic blaster. The explosion of gristle and gore.
“How did I do that?”
“Frankly, Traverser, I was hoping you could explain that to me.”
“I can’t,” he said. “But I can’t say I’m sorry for decapitating your gnoll.”
Lady Mica dismissed it with a shrug. “I can make more.”
Her reply made him think of Qaant Yke and his little carapaced figurines.
“Where are my friends?” he asked.
“They are here. We have seen to their needs as well. They are anxious to see you.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I wake up and you’re here instead of them. Why?”
“I need to know what your arrival portends,” she said. “It is my hope that you have come to Inverketh’s aid.”
“Aid? Lady, you tried to kill me.”
“My Lady,” she corrected. “It was necessary to test you.”
“You were about to toss my chief mathematician into that pit.”
“That was the test.”
“Was it? Well, I hope you finally got that sorted—my Lady.”
“There are questions that must be answered, Traverser,” she asked. “What ill fortune brings you back to Inverketh?”
“Back? I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never been here before.”
Mica leaned forward, her eyes drilling into his. “Then who are you?”
“I don’t know what you want to hear. I’m just a lost traveler, trying to get home.”
Mica slowly straightened in her chair. Her expression suggested she was recalibrating a fi
nely tuned set of priorities that had been knocked out of equilibrium. She held Zeke’s eye for a moment longer, then stood.
“The healers will soon return to check on your recovery,” she said, turning to the door. “After that, I will have some repast brought to you. Get some rest. You will need it.”
“Why?”
“There is something I must show you tomorrow. Hopefully, it will help answer some of your questions—and some of mine.”
She left, the door latch reverberating against the stone walls as it closed. Zeke leaned back, looked up, and watched the shaft of sunlight slowly swinging through the space overhead.
As Mica had promised, Zeke was ambulatory the following morning. The mages had given his neck and ribs one more going over with a poultice that smelled vaguely like curry and a wiry tool similar to an old TV antenna. He would have laughed at the setup, if it wasn’t for the strangely annoying fact that it worked. After a light breakfast, they gave him some clean clothes, Inverkethi-style: leather boots, linen shirt, wool trousers and a doublet. A pair of apprentices escorted him out of the convalescence ward and brought him to a sunny courtyard where Qaant Yke stood waiting like a slightly briny-smelling statue.
“Thanks a lot,” he said, walking up to the alien. “You were going to let that thing kill me yesterday.”
Qaant Yke’s head shifted slightly, and his beady little eyes turned his way.
“Do I have to remind you of my duty to the fates?” he asked. “The native fighting creature could well have settled my debt. Besides, you may already be cognizant of the fact that you resolved your crisis without my interdiction.”
“I’m touched by your loyalty and confidence in me.”
“Please refrain from invoking the matter in casual conversation.”
“Is that your way of saying ‘Don’t mention it?’”
“Is that not what I said?”
“It probably sounded more elegant in the language of your forehatchers.”