But right then, he didn’t give a crap how badly he was banged up. He just wanted to get warm and sleep. He would feel better thereafter.
Jerriel murmured a spell and drew the excess water from his body and his clothes. In an instant, he was completely dry–even his hair.
Wow. That was a pretty convenient spell.
Jerriel carried the small orb of floating, muddy water through the air into the kitchen and dropped it in the sink.
She came out and pointed back to the kitchen where Rosayln Hayward had briefly showed them around. Rose was the one who knew about the house and the former tenants.
“Daeved. Are yoo hungry?” Jerriel asked.
He smiled at her, his eyes heavy and drowsy. “No. Not hungry.”
“Sokay.”
He folded his hands and leaned his head against them. “I’m very tired, Jerriel. I don’t know about you, but I just need to sleep.”
“Yes. I am tie-hard also. Wee shall sleep then. Like at yoor friends’ hoome.”
“Sounds good.” He could have dropped right there and slept on the floor. Only the thought of a nice warm bed kept him from doing so.
He pointed to an open bedroom with light blue walls and a queen-sized bed. “You take that room. That is now Jerriel’s room.”
She followed him.
He stumbled in through the next door. “And this is now David’s room.” All he saw was a full-sized bed, green covers. He fell into it.
His head, heavy as a rock, found the heaven of a cool linen pillowcase.
#
The sky was still dark and raining later that day. Thunder rumbled. David opened his eyes. Jerriel? Probably sleeping in her room. Time? 1:23 in the afternoon, according to the wind-up clock on the night stand.
Most mechanical stuff still functioned, just nothing electronic. Guns still worked mechanically, but somehow the Merge messed up the chemical reaction of gunpowder and explosives and most highly refined fossil fuels.
He groaned in agony when he moved. Oh, hell.
Very sore. Incredibly sore. Even jousting all weekend never left him that beaten up. He felt painfully stiff–as if his body were made of dry sticks. Sticks of pain that ground, popped, and splintered with every move. He lay there, moaning and grunting.
Damn it all.
So much change. So much uncertainty.
So much death.
The world he knew was now gone–in an instant–probably forever.
Part of him wanted to remain alone with his grief, frustration, and pain. Part of him wanted Jerriel holding him again. He wanted to scream.
He stuffed the pillow into his mouth and shuddered, sobbed, and yelled.
As usual, there was nothing to do but keep going forward. Figure things out, and do the best that they could do. At least Jerriel could use her magic again. That was really something. She could cast her spells–very powerful spells, as it turned out. Good thing she was on their side.
But those other wizards, sorcerers, or whatever he’d seen that distant, enemy camp. All of that, after he stepped into that weird glowing pool and his spirit left his body. He had seen and heard them all plotting against Michiana as plain as day. Those mages and those other weird creatures were behind all of this. They were directing the monsters, organizing the attacks. They were clearly on a mission, but who did they work for?
They didn’t seem to have any trouble using their magic. They talked about the Merge as if they knew exactly what it would do to both worlds, both dimensions.
Had they planned it? Did they help cause it?
That possibility enraged him. The militia needed to take some of those bastards alive and force them to talk.
But the night before, during the battle, most of those wizards had been about to depart in a great hurry. Their leader said they were badly needed somewhere else. Where had they gone? Yet they could still return and use their magic against David and his friends in the future. Even Jerriel couldn’t stand up against a dozen other wizards who had powers similar to her own.
He had to get up, despite the pain. He needed to speak to Jerriel and learn more about her and her world–Tharanor. Half of that reality was now merged with half of Urth on both sides of their two mixed-up dimensions.
Knowledge was going to be the key to freedom or slavery–life or death.
They now existed and struggled to stay alive on a mixed-up, double-sided jigsaw puzzle. Only on a 3D, worldwide scale.
Their survival, perhaps the survival of both worlds, depended on understanding exactly what had happened. And next, what was going to happen.
David had a great deal to figure out, and he guessed that there was not enough time to do so. He staggered to the door and sniffed the aroma in the air.
But first, before he saved the world, he had to find out what smelled so great. His head was still fuzzy. Thoughts came and went.
He rubbed his empty gut; he was starving.
Downstairs in the kitchen, he could see at a glance that Jerriel didn’t know how to use the stove. The gas was cut off anyway. Instead, she heated a pan with a reddish, glowing heat spell emanating from one hand, while she hummed and stirred the contents with a wooden spoon from one of the drawers.
He peeked inside the pan from behind her. Creamy stuff bubbled and boiled. To one side on the counter, he saw the mess of spices, cans, and bottles Jerriel had amassed from a concerted search of the pantry and cupboards.
Her face lit up when she saw him.
“Daeved!” She left off heating the stew, put her spoon down, and flung her arms around him. He stopped smelling the stew.
Suffused in Jerriel’s embrace, suffused in her own luscious scent, and the wafting fragrance of her long dark hair was a new form of paradise. All he could think of was holding her close to him, breathing in the scent of her skin, her hair. She took his breath away and didn’t give it back easily. After two days of terror, they were still alive, and she was in his arms.
Jerriel and all of the wonderful ways he felt around her. Just having her near him.
She pulled away, leaving him so wobbly that he clung to the doorjamb. He smiled, noting every line of her pale, happy oval face. He couldn’t get enough of her big violet eyes, dark brows, and long lashes. Her pretty nose and mouth–the way she concentrated and bit her dark pink lower lip. She had not painted her lips today, but they were just as alluring in their natural state.
She went back to stirring her stew or whatever the concoction was. A nice sweetened white sauce, what looked like canned chicken. Peas. Carrots. Maybe some cubed potatoes. Did he smell rosemary?
“Did yoo sleep good, Daeved?”
He nodded, still staring at her.
She laughed. “Hungry now?”
“Famished.”
“Sokay. Me too. Let’s eat.”
David set the table and discovered where to find the plates and silverware. Most Urth houses were set up pretty much the same way. Everything in them had to be somewhere.
He did feel a sudden twinge of guilt about taking over the dead couple’s house. He felt sorry for them. Rose said they had been good people. They didn’t deserve what happened to them. No one who perished in the attacks did.
Somewhere their kids had lost their parents, just like David had. He knew what that was like. But things were tough. Lots of people were already gone, and he and Jerriel needed a place to stay. Theirs wasn’t the only empty home in town. And the living needed to survive. He did his best not to feel guilty about that.
Frankly, at the moment, David simply enjoyed sitting with Jerriel, enjoying their little pot of magic stew, served up in stoneware bowls. Very tasty.
He didn’t know if he could have done as well with the same ingredients. And he considered himself a pretty fair cook. Both of them ate two bowls and split the rest of what remained between them. They washed it down with warm apple juice.
The milk in the non-working fridge had already gone sour.
Jerriel licked her spoon clean def
tly with a slender pink tongue and her pretty lips. David looked into her eyes and smiled, his belly nice and full.
He felt so much better.
She put her hand on his and looked back into his eyes.
“We need to talk with more of yoor people, Daeved. There is much to doo.” She pointed at a bookshelf full of books. “I want to learn to read yoor language. Perhaps yoo and some of yoor peeple should learn to read and speak mine. It is only a matter of time before you meet oother Tharanorians. I’m guessing our many nations, peoples, and languages are as different as yoors.”
“I agree,” he said. “There’s so much we need to know about each other. So much we have to talk about. But we need to stay alive first. We have to make sure the monsters don’t come back tonight.”
Her eyes widened. “We defeated and destroyed so many of them,” Jerriel said. “I doubt they will be able to attack yoor city in such noombers again. Not for a loong while.”
“We have to be ready all the same. Let’s go check in at headquarters and go from there.”
They left the house, with its broken windows boarded up. David gave her one of the sets of keys he found on the key rack.
He showed her how to lock and unlock the doors front and back.
They rode their bikes to the courthouse and the County City Building in the rain, wearing the plastic ponchos David found for them
At HQ, the militia scrambled to train more recruits. There was no new word on how Dirk was recovering. David got his orders for that night, and was asked if he was fit for duty.
He told them that he would report to his unit at nightfall.
But there were several urgent messages waiting for them both from the new town council. The council was swamped, but doing its best to gather facts and information about the Merge.
Dirk and Belle had informed the remaining city leaders about Jerriel, and the council was extremely interested in having various local linguists, historians, and experts speak with her as soon as she was available.
Before they left HQ, David located an empty meeting room that wasn’t being used. This one had a bunch of donated school and office supplies sitting around in boxes. He gathered a few notebooks, drawing pads, pencils, and pens. He put them in a decent, almost new black backpack for Jerriel.
They’d both need to take a lot of notes in the weeks ahead.
Jerriel especially liked the colored markers he found for her. She delighted in them. To her, they were a kind of magic.
On a whim, David went to the white board and taught her his Urth alphabet.
Jerriel wrote the characters down quickly. Then they went through the sounds of each letter with him correcting her.
She took the marker from him and they switched places. Jerriel drew corresponding symbols or runes that matched some of the same sounds in her language. Tharanorian had a runish alphabet all its own. David made notes on those. He had always enjoyed studying other languages, but had never taken the time, thus far, to master another besides his own. This was a starting point for both of them and their peoples.
“We could do this for hours,” he told her. “But people are waiting to talk to us, and the day’s almost over. I’ll have to report for duty tonight.”
Jerriel slung her backpack on the same way he did.
“I’m going with yoo, Daeved. Wherever yoo go, I go.”
At least it had stopped raining. They got back on their bikes, and reported to the town council think tank, conveniently set up at the main branch of the public library downtown.
Half of the town was gone. Half of everything and everyone was gone. Everything that remained suddenly became very important, fortresses for protection and centers of knowledge, training, and learning.
Crews of workers labored to fortify buildings and brick up exposed, lower level glass windows and doors.
From the public library, aides and advisors to the acting town council made many busy appointments for both David and Jerriel the next day. Then they took them to a section where local linguists were setting up an office.
They located the office and went inside, but the linguists had already gone home for dinner that day, and to prepare for nightfall.
Two grad students, Danielle Callahan and Theo Miller, were ecstatic to meet Jerriel. They fell all over each other trying to talk with her, made quick notes, and begged her repeatedly to come back early the next day.
They ignored David almost completely, but that was to be expected. Until he showed them Jerriel’s alphabet. Then they almost fainted. They were soon drooling as they copied down the symbols in their own notebooks. David wouldn’t give his up.
Jerriel’s partially working language translation crystal that she wore on her forehead fascinated them all to no end. The sudden prospect of magic, mindstones, and alien languages boggled Urth minds.
But in no time at all, the sky darkened once more. Time to go.
Another night approached.
No one knew if another enemy horde would attack again or not.
“We’re going to hole up in one of the storm shelters,” Danielle told them.
“You should, too,” Theo suggested to Jerriel. “We can’t afford to have anything happen to you.”
“I will be sokay,” Jerriel said, smiling at David.
They biked home to their new house.
David quickly patched up and repaired his battered armor as best as he could. Jerriel helped him put it back on. He readied his weapons.
Fortunately, his troops had retrieved his longsword and tomahawks. His crossbow was in his bike basket. His katana and wakizashi were already at his side. His troops also brought him another quiver of bolts.
And, of course, the rain started falling again.
A nice cold, drenching April rain. Poncho time for everyone.
Jerriel went with him. He didn’t try to stop her. With her spells working, she could definitely handle herself against any kind trouble.
The air smelled full of wood smoke, propane smoke, and charcoal grill smoke from everybody cooking. Some people even found a way to burn coal they had gathered. Only the rain kept everyone from choking.
An hour passed.
Then another.
The militia waited–in the dark. In the drenching rain.
“There’s no attack coming tonight,” David finally said, both relieved and disgusted at the time they had wasted. “Any attack would have already started. Send word to Dirk and the other militia commanders. Stand down most of the troops and let them rest. Keep large patrols at all of the intersections and near the borders. Rotate them in shifts.”
Finally they caught a break. Either they had defeated most of the enemies in the area, or their foes didn’t appreciate the rain. Or both.
Then word reached them.
“Captain Pritchard,” another commander said. “Our scouts have discovered an enemy base in the deep forest, in a hidden vale in the hills, three or four miles west from here. The remnants of the enemy have a large group of captives there that they’ve been…feeding off of. It appears that they were preparing to bug out, but got stuck in the rain.”
“Hmm… We definitely need to free those people, and fast,” David said. “I guess there will be some action tonight after all, folks. I hate to think about what’s been happening to those poor people. We’ll surround that area, take out those bastards, and free the captives.”
Jerriel twirled her staff. “Then let’s go get thoose bast-hards.”
He chuckled slightly at her eager bravado. “We’ll need to be careful and quiet. They’ll kill or injure as many of the captives as they can if they get wind we’re coming. We have to take them by surprise. At least the rain will help dampen our scent and the noise of our approach.”
They waited for a response from HQ. The rain let up a short while later.
Great. Just great.
Now that they wanted rain, it stopped. “How many enemies?” David asked the scouts, as they continued to relay information. “We ne
ed to know.”
“The scouts say around four to five hundred, sir,” his current runner said. “Including several of those big gozog creatures.”
“Hmm...we’ll probably need about a two thousand fighters, just to be sure.” He sent out another runner, asking for that many troops.
“General Blackwood must want to be real sure,” Lieutenant Craft said, upon his return, with the reinforcements. “He sent us three thousand, and as many archers as he can spare. He insisted on you leading the assault, Captain Pritchard, and Captain Hayward leading the archers.”
David laughed. “All right, then. We’d better hop on our bikes and join up with them all at the head of the strike force. I’m glad Dirk’s up and around.”
Jerriel put a hand on his arm. “I have a few spells that might help.”
He smiled back at her. “Sounds good. It’s going to be a wet, dark walk in the woods. And then a battle. Hopefully a quick one.”
26
With Thulkara’s help, they reached the nearest mercenary-controlled slave camp shortly after dark. They circled the area and studied the camp from all directions. They watched and learned everything they could about the enemy organization, patrols, and troop movements.
The entire area already reeked of human waste and despair. Even in the dark, the camp seemed to hold over ten thousand souls, and was guarded and patrolled by more than a thousand troops. The camp was built like a spiral, and when patrols brought more people in, the sloppy, sprawling camp of tents and flimsy huts expanded and continued to spiral out in size, and misery.
They watched how the new arrivals were processed. Much like the bandits, the mercs took anything from the refugees they wanted, and beat down anyone who protested or tried to escape.
They were slightly more civilized. They didn’t exactly force females to become comfort women. But they made a point of separating attractive women at first, and announced loudly for all of them to hear. The mercs made it very clear to the slaves that any who signed a contract to become comfort women would get special treatment that the regular slaves would not.
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