by RW Krpoun
Taking a deep breath, he released it slowly, breathed deep again, the extra oxygen buzzing behind his eyes, and then stood and spun, children and his blankets falling away as he moved with the grace particular to some large men.
A flint-tipped spear slashed through the cold air at him, its wielder hastily correcting for the unexpected move only to have the black stone head glide past Fred’s side as armor charms burst into dust.
His club pulped the spearman’s skull even as the earthy smell overlaid with greased leather reached his nostrils. “ELVES!” he howled. “SON OF A BITCH! ELVES!”
Shad slept in light trousers, soft camp shoes, and his coin-harness, the latter not terribly comfortable but essential as he had memorized the pouch placements while it was worn; he snapped awake with a veteran’s clarity at the children’s startled cries and his hand was on the hilt of his cane knife under his rolled coat which served him as a pillow even as the sound of Fred’s club pulping bone sounded through the cold air.
He was rolling out of his blankets as a spear punched through the coverings, drawing a line of fire across his ribs despite the ivory pendant he wore. Cursing at the pain, surprise, and the cold air and snow as he rolled away from his bedroll, Shad reflexively plucked a coin and tossed it left-handed, bringing a ball of light into being which hovered over the camp.
Derek was dreaming of the sad-eyed girl who had been murdered in his hotel room in the Realm when Fred’s shout jerked him to complete awareness, and he shot out of his bedroll with his sheathed katana in hand as if he was spring-loaded. The shock of the cold air nearly staggered him, as the Ronin was wearing nothing but his socks and geta sandals.
A ball of light burst into existence overhead and Derek found an Elf coming at him with a flint hatchet in each hand: a lean being at least six two but wiry, clad in well-worn and clean buckskins decorated with beads, coins, and bones. Its face was vaguely Human but the bone structure was high and harsh, with eyes that were twice the size of a man’s and completely blue-black. The ears that thrust out of the fine reddish hair looked like a bat’s, and its skin was dusky gray.
The Elf flowed at him in an elegant attack; Derek parried one stroke with his scabbard, losing the sheath in the process, and executed a clumsy nuki maneuver which got him out of the second hand axe’s arc even as his stroke reached the Elf’s head. He felt the enchanted backlash of armor charms firing, and his blade merely sliced his foe’s scalp and lopped an ear in half.
His foe ignored the wound and bored in, but Derek had gotten his feet under him; the two whirled around the edge of the lightened area in a brutal dance of swirling martial expertise.
Jeff had been dreaming about fishing in high mountain lakes when Two landed on his head, the boy having been tossed by Fred’s suddenl move. The Shop teacher exploded out of his bedroll with a sword in each hand only to catch a war club just above his left knee, sending him tumbling across the snow-covered ground. Rolling to his knees, he spat damp dirt, coldly aware that he could not stand on his injured leg.
Fred was holding off at least two spearmen with swings of his club and carefully giving of ground, but he was aware that he couldn’t keep that up for long: even with his strength the tetsubo was not a weapon to be used casually. All he could hope for was that the others would turn the tide of the fight.
The spear-wielder abandoned his weapon and dove onto Shad, drawing an ugly serrated-blade flint knife. The warder promptly head-butted the Elf and tore into him with both hands, both knees, and his teeth; the Elf was taller and more graceful, but it couldn’t match Shad for pure mindless savagery as the two tumbled across the snowy dirt.
A whip barbed with fire-hardened thorns lashed around Jeff’s neck and back, raising a deep welt studded with painful cuts, but before it could be jerked back the Shop teacher chopped the braided hair cord in half. Discarding the useless whip handle the Elf circled to the left, darting in to make savage swings of his club. Jeff parried the blows, but the effort of turning on his injured leg was sending jolts of white-hot pain up his leg and spine.
Then the orphans were around him, their cut-down spears at the ready, moving and shifting, clearly not very experienced but just as clearly willing to plant steel into flesh if the opportunity presented itself. Grinning, the Elf hopped back and draw a flint knife with his off-hand.
Shad had lost his cane knife in the struggle, but not before burning off the Elf’s armor charms and getting a couple cuts in. Getting his legs wrapped around his foe’s lower torso he made an eye-bulging effort and twisted himself around so his foe was under him on his stomach, helped by the creature’s unfamiliarity with wrestling techniques. Getting a sleeper hold in place, he applied all the pressure his limbs possessed, ignoring the cuts the increasingly desperate Elf was inflicting. Shad was where he lived best: an all-or-nothing fight to the death, where conviction counted for a great deal.
Derek was enjoying himself thoroughly: the Elf was fast, lithe, and skilled with its axes, letting the Radio Shack manager draw the full spectrum of his skill into play. In the intricate flow of move and countermove he truly felt the mystical spirit of Bushido running through his veins. He was truly a bushi, a Ronin Samurai, a student of the sword.
But he was also a Black Talon, and it was time for business. Side-stepping a brilliant axe-slash he pivoted into a perfect shomen, lifting the Elf’s head from its shoulders.
Jeff was wheezing, his entire body a pillar of incandescent pain. The kids were willing, but the Elf had decked three of them so far, with only Four left upright and back-to-back with the Shop teacher. In the hectic seconds of the fight Jeff had lost a sword, and the Elf had lost its armor charms and acquired several modest wounds, not all from Jeff. The outcome was certain, however: the Shop teacher was succumbing to fatigue, injury, and pain; once Four went down he was finished, and even if she stayed up he didn’t have much fight left in him. He parried a club stroke and tried for a thrusting riposte, but the Elf hopped back, chuckling in a throaty voice.
A chuckle that was abruptly ended as something very white darted in and the club-wielder’s head fell off its neck. Then Derek, buck-naked and turning blue with cold, was standing in front of Jeff. “Wheeeeeee! It’s cold. I’ll get help.” The Ronin darted off.
“Thanks,” Jeff mumbled, slumping down onto his side.
Shad scrambled across the ground towards his cane knife so he could slit the throat of the unconscious Elf before it recovered from the sleeper hold, pausing to flip a coin and send a volley of silver-black bolts of arcane force into one of Fred’s opponents.
The bolts of power didn’t kill their target, but the Elves in front of the healer backed off, gathered up the body of their comrade, and faded off into the darkness. Grateful for the respite Fred leaned against his club and gasped for air.
Derek bounded up. “Jeff’s hurt, so are some of the kids.”
“Where? Why are you naked?”
“I like fighting in the buff.”
“Where’s Jeff? Thanks, now go put some clothes on before you catch pneumonia.”
“You seen Shad?”
“Off to my left.”
Derek found the warder sitting on a dead Elf and binding up a nasty cut. “You OK?”
“Yeah. Why are you naked?”
“I move faster this way.”
“You running around naked just adds to the horror of a night attack. Go get dressed.”
“I got two.”
“Good for you. How bad is Jeff?”
“He’ll be OK.”
When he had done what he could Shad rose and threw a blanket around his shoulders before limping over to where Fred was working. “How is everyone?”
“Three kids with very mild concussions and Jeff is torn up pretty good. How are you?”
“Chewed up, but it can wait. We’ve got two bodies.”
“They carried off at least two more,” Derek advised as he came up, flinging his cloak around his shoulder, dressed in shirt, hakama pants, and boots
. “You want me to see if they left a trail?”
“No, they’re better in the woods and the dark than any of us. Go light a lantern so I can douse the light spell; its doing nothing but making us targets.”
Derek made broth after lighting the lamp, and after Fred finished dealing with wounds the Black Talons, less Jeff, gathered around the fire pit with the orphans to drink the hot salty liquid.
“We were lucky,” Shad sighed. “There mustn’t have been more than six or seven Elves. Any more and we wouldn’t still be here.”
“It was close,” Fred agreed. “We were lucky the kids didn’t get hurt worse than they did.”
“The one that went after Jeff was a slave-taker,” Derek pointed out. “He sapped them with considerable skill so they could be tortured later.”
“The million ku question is whether they are coming back with more friends,” Shad pointed out. “It’s too close to a village for there to be an Elf enclave nearby, so was this just a patrol slithering around, or a portion of a larger group?”
“We’ll know by morning,” Fred mumbled.
“Fred, you get some sleep; Derek and I will finish the night. Stay in full battle rattle.”
“They’ll find a lot different reception if they come back,” Derek said quietly as Fred and the orphans turned in.
Shad rubbed his scar. “Yeah. We’ll still die, though.”
Chapter Eleven
A cold dawn found the Black Talons still amongst the living. Grumbling, they ate a quick breakfast and got moving.
“We have got to find these kids a home,” Shad gestured obscurely. “Anything is better than what we’re putting them through.”
“Well, when we met ‘em what they were going to go through was an Orc’s digestive tract,” Jeff, pale-faced and limping from the effects of blood-loss, pointed out. “They have been a real help to us. Three heats our socks every morning-I would pay good money for that.”
“They’re willing,” the warder conceded. “But I’m not interested in burying kids. We’re here because we chose to be here, and none of us are any great loss to Mankind, but those kids don’t know any better. If they had any sense they would have taken their chances back in Litam. I don’t want any of them on my conscience.”
“Do you actually have a conscience?” Derek wondered. “I haven’t seen any evidence to support your claim.”
“No one asked you, you degenerate nudist,” Shad snapped. “And from now on you sleep in enough clothes to fight in.”
“I find swordsmanship in the buff is very liberating.”
“We’ll find the kids a place,” Fred muttered. “They’re country children, so we’ll get them a place out here in the boonies. Maybe in the village up ahead.”
“The sooner, the better,” Shad glowered at the snow-dusted bog-land to the north.
“I’ve been thinking,” Fred muttered as the Black Talons waited for lunch to cook. “Midori’s group says they have been guarding the truth about the Lance while waiting for warriors to arrive who can use the Lance as a weapon, right?”
“Yeah,” Jeff nodded tiredly. “So?”
“And they have been piggy-backing off the Death Lord’s search for a replacement for the Lance to create conditions where the warriors would appear, right?”
“Shit,” Derek shook his head.
“What?” Shad asked uneasily.
“If they know so much about the whole business of roads and such, why did they need the Council?” Fred continued. “If they needed people from Earth, why not just create their own roads?”
“Because travel between spheres is a one-way trip for the locals?” the warder sounded uncertain.
“That is one possibility. Another is that Midori is taking credit for something that did not actually happen. The Death Lords visited Death Valley in the Prison, right? We know that because they left revenants. Midori said they were looking for a replacement for the Lance, which is possible, but we know they arrived right on the heels of the battle, which is why the place was never really looted.”
“You think the response time is suspicious?”
“I think the first story we heard was true: the revenants popped up in the aftermath of the battle. I think that made it possible for the Death Lords to look at the field, but not visit.”
“Wait, how do you know they didn’t visit?” Shad objected.
“They would have stripped the place; the revenants wouldn’t stop them. Instead, they introduced necromancy the hard way: experts sent on one-way trips.”
“Crap, I never considered that.”
“So the Council figured out road-theory from the revenants. They pull the whole Council deal, and so forth. Meanwhile the Death Lords are looking for their arcane key to start the World Stone. They find the Staff, and use us and Tek power to bring Cecil and the Staff home. We follow, but in the Realm all we were was a tool and a complication; once here they can protect Cecil and the Staff from us, so there is no danger from us.”
“Well, Midori lying doesn’t come as a big shock,” Shad noted. “But why is she lying?”
“Because she and her people aren’t guarding the Lance.”
“The Death Lords are hunting her, that is a fact,” Shad countered. “Why would they waste the effort if her group doesn’t have the Lance? Getting that group of Undead into the city must have involved a heavy expenditure of power.”
“This is what I think: the Death Lords know that the Lance won’t work for their purposes anymore; changing the Lance is an obvious move for whomever grabbed the Lance in the first place. So they have been searching for a replacement, which they found. I think there are three players in this game: the Death Lords, whose ambitions we know, the group hiding the Lance, who might not even be around anymore, and Midori’s group, who want the Lance but can’t get it themselves.”
“We’ve speculated about that already,” Derek pointed out.
“I think Midori’s group doesn’t want to stop the World Stone, I think they want to control it, and they think the Lance can make it happen, if they can get to it.”
“With the World Stone they would be able to control everything,” Jeff admitted. “But you’re got a lot of speculation without facts.”
“Look, Midori said they turned the Lance into a weapon,” Fred jabbed a thick finger at the Shop teacher. “It stands to reason that they took the Lance out of play because the Death Lords have been looking for a replacement. So you’re the guys who stole the Lance to save the world: what do you do?”
“Well, you know that the Death Lords will never stop looking, so the only safe thing to do is destroy it,” Derek mused. “Although you would probably know that there are other possible keys for the World Stone, so the smarter move would be to create a weapon that could create problems for the World Stone if the Death Lords get another key.”
“OK, but if they created this weapon, why did they hide it?” Jeff countered. “Why not move against the World Stone as soon as it is finished? Waiting just gives the Death Lords a chance to capture the Lance.”
“Because the Lance only works against a powered-up World Stone,” Fred muttered. “Maybe a design flaw, maybe arcane reasons.”
“Interesting,” Shad held out his bowl after Fred had served the children. “So why are we useful to Midori’s group?”
“Because we have no other agenda other than opposing the Death Lords,” Derek pointed out.
“Of course, given our history of getting double-crossed by the Council and Cecil we shouldn’t be considered too trustworthy,” Jeff countered.
“They know our resume,” Shad shook his spoon at Jeff. “So did Cecil, and therefore the Death Lords. But most resumes are facts arranged to deceive. If you wrote down a dispassionate summary of what we have done you would get the impression of an idealistic group who are capable but not terribly bright.”
“We’ve established we’re not bright,” Jeff grinned.
“Midori is arrogant,” Shad persisted. “The same as Ce
cil.”
“You’re thinking that Midori believes she can control us,” Derek scratched his cheek.
“Look at our resume: the Council fooled us, Cecil made us dance to his tune, and the Death Lords don’t care enough to bother killing us. She sees us as violent fools, and nothing she has seen so far will change that opinion.”
“Nor should we change her opinion,” Fred agreed. “Right up to the point where she tries to kill us. If she thinks we’re tough but too stupid to figure out her game, her endgame will be better for us.”
“Man, I just thought getting tenure was cut-throat,” Jeff shook his head.
“That doesn’t look good,” Derek pointed ahead. Boam was a good-sized village surrounded by a ditch, stake belt, and an earthen embankment. The gates were gone and the embankment to either side were fire-blackened; a cart and stacked firewood imperfectly blocked the gate. Beyond the wall the blackened beams of destroyed buildings thrust up amongst the rooftops.
“Those are from chimneys,” Jeff pointed at lines of smoke rising from the center of the village. “Question is, who is cooking what?”
“Be ready,” Shad tucked his mittens under his belt.
Four donned her helmet as they moved forward; Fred had used a knit cap and a cut-down wicker basket to fashion a helmet liner so that it rode better.
“She looks like a miniature Darth Vader,” Shad observed. “All she needs is a face plate and asthma.”
“You know, I never noticed how Vader’s helmet looked like a Samuari’s until I came here,” Jeff nodded. “Lucas really screwed the pooch on that franchise.”
“After the first two,” Shad checked their flanks and rear. “The third would have been good except for the Ewoks. Although the Ewoks looked good after Jar-Jar desecrated the screen. Even Liam Neeson couldn’t save that script.”