by Linda Mooney
“She killed sixteen of us in practically no light from nearly a hundred yards with just a bow and arrow. Imagine the damage she could do in broad daylight. I want to know how she’s able to do it. If there’s some trick she does. Or is it just skill? Either way, I want her to teach it to us.”
“What if she refuses?” the physician asked.
“Then we flay her,” was Yulen’s flat answer. “If she doesn’t work with us, I can’t have her against us. She teaches us to kill, or she becomes target practice.” He stared at burn marks on the tips of his fingers. Too late, he remembered the dagger sheathed at his hip. Pulling it out, he first wiped it on the thigh of his pants then stabbed another piece of meat and began gnawing on it.
“And the compound?” This question came from Karv.
“Leave a small squad behind to make sure there’s no uprisings. I don’t want any surprises before we leave. If we convince the Mutah-”
“Her name is Atty,” MaGrath interrupted.
Yulen gave him a disapproving glance. “If we convince her we’re not going to kill everyone in the compound, she’ll be a lot easier to handle. If we need to, we can use them as leverage to keep her in line.”
“And once she’s safely away from this place we can go ahead and raze it,” Karv finished.
MaGrath shook his head. “I don’t like the plan. I agree with you, she’s a formidable foe. But what if she gets wind this place has been torched? Then what are you going to do? And something else I’m wondering if you’ve thought of... sure she’s a miracle with a bow and arrow, but what about other weapons? How is she with a sword? Heaven forbid, what about a crossbow?”
“Liam, I want her examined. Is she Mutah, or is she a Natural being raised by them?”
“All right, I will, but what if she is a Mutah? What if her deformities are inherent and not visible? What if her ability is because of what she is? Then taking her back with us will be useless.”
Yulen didn’t answer. Instead he shoved a piece of potato in his mouth.
Karv snorted. “Guess you hadn’t thought that far ahead.”
The physician turned to get his due from the feast but not before the Battle Lord answered, “Maybe we need to start re-thinking our methods. Maybe this time it would be better to leave the compound alone and take only what we need.”
Karv jumped to his feet, dropping his plate of food to the ground. His face was flushed with indignation, his nostrils flared. Without saying a word, he strode off toward where the rest of the men were sitting and having their fill.
Yulen watched his second in command stalk off but didn’t follow him. He didn’t have to explain his actions, least of all to subordinates. Although he considered Karv a friend of sorts, there was still too much he couldn’t trust him with. It was beginning to look as though the Mutah-
Her name is Atty.
-was going to be one of them.
Yulen tossed his platter onto the ground and licked his fingers before wiping them on the thighs of his pants. Striding over to where his horse had been tethered, he reached into a saddle bag and pulled out a small, battered tin. Inside it was a leather pouch containing a whitish powder. Dipping his finger into the powder, he sucked on the finger, then reached for his skin of water to wash down the foul-tasting stuff. He grimaced from the medicine’s bitterness, yet the taste was forgivable in light of the fact that it often was the only thing that kept him standing between sanity and indescribable pain.
He restored the tin of powder back to the saddle bag and walked over to the small row of shops where a couple of his men were keeping guard. They were crouched over a small flame, eating their own portions of food from the pit.
“Mastin, when you’re finished, I want you to make arrangements for the villagers to eat.”
The soldier gave his superior a surprised look but repeated his orders as he’d been taught to do. “Yes, sir. Let the villagers eat.”
Yulen spent the next hour checking on his men, seeing that they were taken care of and given their allotment of food. He gave orders for the bodies of their fallen comrades to be wrapped in their own bedding and tied over their horses for transportation back to their home compound.
Having made sure the area was secured and his men were settled in for the night, Yulen headed back to the small row of shops where the Mutah was being held apart from her people.
Despite the proof that she was skilled with the bow, a skill he couldn’t deny came from the fact that she was a Mutah, and that her mutant strengths and abilities far outpaced those of regular men, he couldn’t get over the fact that she bore no signs of deformity.
All Mutah had “the mark”. It was the easiest way to discern the naturals from the unnaturals. In his nearly thirty years behind a sword, Yulen believed he had seen almost every conceivable type of deformity there could be in a Mutah. Some manifested themselves in the most obvious way. An extra appendage was the most common. After that, an extra “something else” may be present—a third or fourth eye, or having more than ten fingers.
Many had disruptions in their skin. Spots or stripes were common, as was the “melting wax” effect. There were also those with severely diseased-looking appearances, those who looked like animals, and many who were just different colors.
In some cases, the extra could be hidden from view. He’d seen mouths appear in areas usually covered by clothing like extra penises on the males. Or more than two nipples or breasts on females. Those Mutah were in high demand back at compounds where they could parlay their sexual atrocities into high-paying livelihoods.
In other mutants, the signs were less obvious. Sometimes they were completely overlooked or missed, or ignored. Yulen knew there were Mutah who never bore a mark or stigma. He’d heard of such people, yet until now he’d never come across one. There were scholars who claimed that the disruption to mankind which had caused the Mutah to appear in the first place was fading away. They said that the initial shock of the catastrophe which had spawned the crossbreeds was settling, much in the same way kicked-up dust on the road eventually settles back to earth.
Where before the belief was that Mutah, interbreeding among themselves, would create more horrific forms of the disease, that thought was slowly dying. In recent years new theories had been brought forth, the most accepted ones explaining that nature was healing herself. Given time, she would bring back the plants and trees and animals species initially lost in the Great Concussion. Given more time, she would do the same to humanity.
It was predicted that in another thousand years or so, there might not be any Mutah left. Not because of the extinction of their race, but because the extra appendages would slowly disappear back to whatever genetic pool they’d originally come from. The skin deformities would fade. The animalistic tendencies would shrink like healed wounds. All the differences would grow smaller and fainter and less definable until, finally, mankind would all be of the same ilk as before.
It was a future Yulen D’Jacques wished he could be a part of. But he couldn’t, so he had to live the one he’d been given.
He reached the small candle and soap shop just as MaGrath was coming out.
“Well?”
“No problems so far,” the physician answered.
“And did you examine her?”
“Yes, I did,” MaGrath nodded his head. “I saw no signs. No outward visible signs.”
“But you swear she’s a Mutah?”
MaGrath’s eyebrows lowered and the light in his eyes hardened. “Let’s wait until daylight,” he finally said, his voice tight with irritation. “There’s not much I can glean in lantern light.”
“How old do you guess her to be?” the Battle Lord suddenly asked.
The unexpected question seemed to throw the physician momentarily off guard. “How old? She’s not a child, if that’s what you’re asking. She’s a fully developed woman. Why do you ask?”
“It’s not your place to question me,” Yulen reminded him sternly. Having gotten a so
mewhat acceptable response, he returned to his horse to make sure it was bedded down for the night. Then he found a spot near one of the shops to lay his own bedroll. In the forest he preferred to sleep with his back to a tree, thus preventing an assassin from sneaking up behind him. Tonight he had a sturdy rock wall, a new compound full of fresh provisions, and a Mutah with an incredible ability.
It had been a good day.
Chapter Seven
Meet
Atty spent the night in torment. Despite the medicants given to her by MaGrath, and the plaster salve on her face, a numbed throbbing continued to pulse in her face, behind her eyes, and in her brain. Yet most of her dreamt terrors came from her own inner demons which ate away at her like tiny insects devouring a dead animal one minute morsel at a time. In her nightmares she saw her mother and sister brutally tortured and murdered by the same men who had invaded the compound. She saw them being beaten senseless, then her over-fertile imagination saw a more horrific ending, including being gutted like an animal.
But because her mother’s mutant traits had not been outwardly noticeable, Atty continued to hold onto that one last shred of hope that she had been spared a disembowelment. For Keelor, though...
A shudder shook her awake. Too late, the last wisps of her dreams swept through her, and she remembered what had been in them. Sweet Keelor. Beautiful little sister with the sky blue eyes, the wayward curls, and the elfin-like pointed ears that sometimes stuck out like butterfly wings whenever she was in a particularly playful mood.
“You were only twelve,” Atty murmured as more warm tears dripped over the bridge of her nose and down the left side of her face. Her lips were numb lumps of flesh on her face, totally without feeling.
There was a movement behind her, and a hand grabbed her by the arm to pull her over onto her back. Someone raised a shielded lantern to be able to look down at her. Atty squinted and turned her head.
“You’re awake,” a voice commented. She immediately recognized it as the one belonging to the person MaGrath had called the Battle Lord. Yulen. If he saw her tears, he made no comment. Why should he? She was Mutah, and to all Cleaners the Mutah were below even the filth on their boots. Which was why his next remark stunned her.
“What’s wrong?”
Wrong?
Atty jerked on the ropes tying her wrists behind her back. Why would anything be wrong? her subconscious laughed bitterly. A bubble of laughter made its way up her chest, but by the time it reached her lips it came out more of a sob. The lantern shifted and drew back, and for the first time she got to see the enigmatic Battle Lord without his helmet or face mask.
The first noticeable thing was the deep scar which ran down the right side of his face from his hairline near his temple to the tightly clenched jaws. It looked fresh and painful. Despite the injury, he had a strong face, the face of a man who bore the burden of leadership like pennants on a staff. His eyes were deep-set and dark. Atty wondered fleetingly if they were brown or blue. His hair was pulled back and tied, and what she could detect in the bad light was that it was orange-ish in color.
The Battle Lord shoved the lantern beside her head once again. A large, calloused hand touched the bandage on the side of her face with surprising gentleness. “Are you in pain?” he asked her gruffly.
Sighing, Atty closed her eyes. What was the use? Her life as it had been a few days ago, the only life she’d known her entire twenty springs, was gone. Her body also felt like a lifeless husk, devoid of feeling and reason, devoid of thought and hope. She was a lifeless husk, completely empty except for the morass of memories and nightmares which swirled now in her mind.
Again her arms twitched as she unconsciously jerked on the rough ropes which dug into her wrists.
“Quit struggling,” the voice ordered. Ordered...but with a breath of worry. Slowly Atty opened her eyes to find herself gazing back into his dark, hooded ones. She spotted the silver gleam of a dagger rising above her, and instantly she struggled to save herself from the plunging blade. The hand that had touched her face now pressed down hard on her ribs, holding her as easily as if she’d been a sack of vegetables.
“I said to quit struggling,” the deep voice angrily whispered. “I won’t hurt you, but if you continue to move about I might accidentally nick you.”
Wide-eyed, Atty watched as the knife descended and slowly gnawed at the horsehair ropes which had torn into her flesh and absorbed her blood. As pieces of the fibers fell away, the dagger rose again, but this time it stopped a breath away from her right eye. The hand that had held her down remained pressed along her ribcage. The Battle Lord held her at arm’s length. In the soft yellow light his eyes glittered as hard as obsidian.
“You are my enemy,” he told her. There was a bitterness to his words, and he almost spat at her. “I will not hesitate to kill you. Do you understand?”
Atty’s body shuddered unexpectedly. Her wrists were raw and bleeding with bits of rope still embedded in her skin. She nodded. “You’ll kill me if I make a move for my weapons,” she managed to comment.
The Battle Lord grinned. “Precisely. You know I can place this blade through your eye and into your brain without a second thought in the time it would take for you to try.”
She nodded again, very slowly. Instead of looking toward her bow and quiver which still sat propped against the door on the other side of the room, she glanced out of the window. The stars were gone from the sky, meaning it had either gotten cloudy, or dawn was nearing. The Battle Lord noticed the direction of her attention.
“It should be morning within another hour,” he told her.
“Why are you here?” she whispered.
“To see how you were doing.”
“Why?”
The question apparently amused him, and he gave her a crooked smile. Atty noticed the scar seemed to be giving him trouble, and any undue movement in his facial muscles caused him pain.
“I’m taking you back to our compound.”
“Again, why?”
“To teach us your tricks.”
“My tricks?”
The hand against her ribs slowly pulled back, but the one with the knife never wavered from her face.
“I want you to teach my men how to kill with the same efficiency as you showed us.”
“Why not go ahead and kill me now?” she asked him. She brought her hands before her face and began digging out the short shreds of rope from the wounds in her wrists. She had to get them all or risk infection.
“Do you want me to kill you?”
“Why not,” she snapped heatedly. “You’re going to kill us all anyway. I won’t teach you or your men a damn thing, I don’t care what you say or order me to do.”
To her astonishment, the man suddenly slid the dagger back into its sheath belted at his hip. Atty blinked and looked up into the man’s face where she could see hard lines forming around his mouth and eyes.
“I’m willing to make a deal with you,” he stated flatly.
For some reason, the proposal seemed funny. Atty gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Oh, that’s just peachy. A Cleaner making a deal with one of my kind? What kind of trick is this? How stupid do you think I am?”
“I’m offering the lives of the inhabitants of this compound in exchange for your knowledge and skills. There. That is my offer. In full.”
Atty froze. Several seconds passed as she tried to see through the man’s subterfuge and into the heart of the truth, but the Battle Lord’s expression never wavered. Her lungs finally kicked in, reminding her she needed to breathe again. “You lie,” was all she could manage to respond.
The man shook his head. A lock fell over his forehead, somehow softening the terrifying visage. “I’m not lying. Not in this case. In exchange for you teaching my men how to shoot like you do, I will spare this compound. Furthermore, I will have my men give your people a few suggestions on how they can better fortify this holding, and possibly help prevent future exposure to the outside world. Next tim
e...the next time there may not be someone like me to grant you impunity.”
She gave him another long look. “How did you discover us in the first place?”
“The smell of your cooking,” he replied simply. “First one or two men catch the scent. They tell their squad. The squad sends a messenger. It was a domino effect.”
“Is your compound near us? Is that how you were able to get here so fast?”
This time it was the Battle Lord who gave her a long, searching stare. “No,” he finally whispered. “Our compound is many days’ ride from here.”
“So you were just on a cleaning mission when you came across my home by chance?”
“Would you have killed every one of my men if I had not brought in the rest of my forces when I did?”
Rubbing her watering eyes, Atty surrendered. “Yes.”
The Battle Lord slowly nodded. “Then my answer is yes as well.”
“Then what happens?” she asked. “What happens when I teach your men all I know? Are you coming back here to finish what you left behind?” Biting her lower lip, she lowered her voice and added, “Will you let me come back home?”
“You know I can’t let you do that.”
Although she had expected almost those exact words, the sound of them coming from his lips was too much to bear. She lowered her face into her hands, pressing the heels of her palms against her mouth in a vain attempt to stifle her sobs.
Long minutes passed as she began to accept her fate. When she pulled the hem of her shirt out of her pants and lifted it to wipe her eyes, she was surprised to see the Battle Lord still standing in the exact spot. He had never moved while she’d wept. Neither had he made a sound or made any further gesture toward her. He had waited until she could regain control of herself. Once he was sure she was ready to listen again, he continued.
“Are you Mutah?”
“Didn’t you already ask me that?”