Plane of the Godless

by Peter Hartz

  Aaron swung the chains on his wrist at her, trying to use it as a weapon, as the queen she had only just met behind her gasped audibly. The guards didn’t know what to do, having never seen someone else, especially a human and a woman at that, step in between the queen and danger. Certainly someone who had been granted the protection of the Crown and the Queen’s own house should not be where she was. She should have been kept behind them, as their honor-bound duty was to protect her, not the other way around. They were already reacting, but a moment too slow, when he struck out at her. But it was over before they could get there to subdue him.

  The chain went past her as she suddenly spun away from the swing on one foot, twisting her body out of the path of the swinging chain, and she pivoted onto the other foot as she used the momentum of avoiding the chain to bring her other leg sweeping up, leaning into the motion to put her full weight and power behind the strike, and her foot connected with the side of his jaw and head. The powerful kick knocked him completely off his feet, out cold as he spun like a dropped toy to hit the floor some few feet further back where he started, in front of the huge red-skinned jailer.

  Dave winced at the results as his wife flawlessly performed the same spinning back kick that he had been on the receiving end of many times during their sparring and training sessions. He knew that he was no real match for the nearly two decades of additional martial arts training she had had since very early childhood, but the speed and effectiveness of that single strike still stunned him for a moment, driving home just how deadly she could be when she was not holding back. He was lucky she had been holding back all these years, he decided. And those three idiot wanna-be gangsters outside Kieran’s Irish Pub that late Saturday evening awhile back were abundantly lucky to be alive at all, he realized with an internally shudder.

  Allison watched the body on the floor for a moment, satisfying herself that he was still breathing but unconscious and therefore no longer a threat, then she turned to the throne, and bowed to the queen, a motion that Dave recognized from the dojo.

  “I apologize, Your Majesty,” she said, with her head still bowed but her eyes up. Then she straightened, and walked back to where Dave and Michelle stood. Both came forward and pulled her into an embrace, while the rest of the guards looked at her in surprise, then back to the body on the floor. Sadie jumped up and licked Allison’s face, and a satisfied “good” came from her. Dave and Michelle both felt the tension in her slowly release as her emotions calmed down and her breathing slowed as she regain her center once again. She had to get her anger on a shorter leash, she thought to herself. Losing control like that fell under the heading of Not Good At All. Sensei Davis would be disappointed in her.

  Karonashkk looked down at the body at his feet in astonishment. He had never seen the like before, and no idea how the human woman had done it, but her method was clearly effective. He winced as his injured arm flared in pain, and then turned to Giltreas as the other approached.

  Giltreas had a strange smile on his face as he looked up at his oldest friend. “Where did you find these humans, Treya?”

  Giltreas shrugged, smiling at the private name the huge being had given him all those years ago, and cast a short healing spell on the injury, then looked up again. “I am not sure where I was. I was lead there by my patron.”

  Karonashkk flexed his arm, and smiled down at his friend. “You are a good healer. You could always live in one of the temples and help the humans out.”

  Giltreas laughed softly at his friend’s predictable statement. Karonashkk had been trying to get Giltreas to leave his Path and follow something more… gentle ever since he first heard of it. He was concerned about the cost that Giltreas would pay later in life, in the dark of night. Giltreas sighed internally even as he smiled at his one-time mentor and trainer. Karonashkk would never understand, or even believe, that Giltreas had been chosen, nor that he had unwillingly acquiesced to do what he now did for his Patron.

  Minotaurs had very little regard for the Gods, with good reason. They were a long-lived race, and reproduced slowly, and his race had suffered greatly during the War of the Gods. It had been all of six thousand years and more since that disaster had nearly ended the entire race, and the clan leaders still counted all the Minotaur peoples at barely thirteen thousand.

  When Giltreas had been pulled away from his mentorship to begin training for his Patron, Karonashkk had urged him to ignore the call, but Giltreas had accepted his fate with resignation. His explanation to his friend had been received with much skepticism, but had been accepted as the reason Giltreas believed he was supposed to go. He had never accepted it as a truth, however. And he made it his quest to turn his friend and protégé back to a gentler path. Karonashkk had often tried to enlist him into the guards, to place himself in the role of protector, where he would find opportunities enough to test his mettle against the wit and whim of evil. The huge Minotaur believed that one always had a choice, and that Giltreas had simply never made a different one when he had the chance. Karonashkk respected the choice Giltreas made, and his right to choose. But he also believed one could always change one’s mind.

  Giltreas smiled up at his old friend and patted him on the arm with a soft smile, then turned away to stand with David, Allison, and Michelle.

  He was no more certain than any other in the throne room what Allison had done, except, perhaps, Michelle and David, he realized. They didn’t seem surprised that Allison had prevailed. Giltreas had never seen such a move before. It was almost that her response to his attack had been the move of two dancers, practiced long and hard. It certainly showed that she was well trained in… something. He turned to look at the throne, and his eyes lingered on one of the three chained humans remaining in the room. The man Giltreas seemed to think was their erstwhile leader looked upon Allison with a combination of fear and… something else. Giltreas snorted internally. Fear he could understand. Every intelligent being faced fear at least once. He was not sure what else he was seeing in the man’s eyes, though. Something certainly foreign to Giltreas’ own makeup.

  ◆◆◆

  Jack looked at Allison like she had a second head. He had never imagined that she could do something like that. The pressures on his mind bore down further, and he sank deeper into a black depression as despair seemed to color everything around him. He revised his estimation of her considerably upwards, as he had with the other two. He had thought ‘taking them out’ would be such a simple task. Proof that he was completely wrong hammered at him. And his spirit broke a little more under the strain.

  Chapter 13

  His friends always thought he was a little off. He had wandered through his freshman year of high school almost in a trance, distracted by the thoughts running through his head. He had spent so many hours of his life playing games, reading fantasy books, and watching anything that had to do with magic. He even talked some friends into playing magical roleplaying games when he was younger. Most never had much interest, but Daniel had enjoyed immersing himself in a world where powerful mages cast spells and used psychic abilities to change the world around them.

  He always felt like if he just concentrated harder, bear down more, and applied every bit and more of his willpower, he could move things with his mind, just like the characters in a book, or like a movie.

  Now, laying on his bed propped up on his pillows in his room, he read a favorite passage in the worn-out copy of his favorite book again, and at the pivotal moment, when the good blacksmith reached out his hand, and broke through to use his mind to call his sword to his hand, and fight off the evil knight, who was shocked by the sudden reappearance of his foe’s weapon from the grass where it had fallen. Daniel’s pulse soared with the adrenalin that rushed through his blood as he wished so hard that he could do it himself. He reached out his hand towards the desk at the foot of his bed and ‘pulled’ with all his will, when he suddenly felt something different as he imagined the pen on the desk lifting up and flying to his grasp
. A surge of power flowed through him, and the pen flew straight at his head. With a yelp, he threw both hands up in front of his face, the book flying across the room and out of sight somewhere. The pen shot towards him, the tip stabbing into his hand in a sudden flash of pain. He shook his hand instinctively, and the pen flew away from where it had temporarily stuck, and he stared at the hole in the palm of his hand. Then the unreal nature of what had just happened hit him. He had actually levitated something with just his mind, from across the room! More than that, he had thrown it with so much force, it had stuck into his hand!

  Then the pain registered, and with it the realization that blood was dripping from the wound. He wrapped his other hand over the injury, and tried to will the pain away. Another surge of power went through him and down his arms to his hands, and with a tingling sensation, the pain suddenly disappeared. He slowly lowered his other hand, and looked where the wound had been. It was gone. Then so was he, as the room swam, his vision tunneled, and for the first time in his life, Daniel fainted.

  ◆◆◆

  The room was small, dark, and permeated with the smell of stale sweat and fear. The door leading out of the room to the rest of the building was solid wood, and didn’t have a knob on the inside, only a keyhole. A small door was set at an adult’s eye level in the door, and also opened outwards. The walls, floor and ceiling were solid oak planks, set tightly together to not allow any light through. A small light fixture was in the middle of the ceiling, with a single bare bulb in it. There was no light switch to turn the light on and off inside the room.

  She had been thrown into the room late last night, after a long trip tied up and blindfolded in the back of a produce truck. She had no idea how much time had passed since she had been tossed into the dank, smelly room. She also had no idea what time of day or night it was, since there was no view of the outside to see the sun, or any other indicator. The light from the ceiling was joined with the light from under the door; neither had gone out since she arrived.

  As she sat huddled in fear and pain in the almost empty room, her thoughts wandered back to her family and her life at home. Her mother, father, and younger brother had all been on holiday in Sebastopol, the Ukrainian city on the Black Sea. She had gone down to the hotel gift store to look for something for her mother for her birthday. She wanted to get a nice card, and possibly a flower. Her father had winked at her when she asked to leave the room briefly, and ushered her out almost before her mother could object. Now, she wished that she hadn’t gone.

  She never got a good look at the strange man that had come up behind her suddenly, and he had clamped his hand over her mouth before she could even make a sound. Before she knew it, she had been pulled into the back room, through a door out into the alley, and tossed into the back of a waiting van before slamming the door, where the man who took her and another man tied her hands, put a blind fold and gag on her, while a third one had drove the van away.

  A short time later, some hands had flipper her over onto her face and stomach. She shrieked in fear, but the gag prevented the sound from carrying outside the moving vehicle. Hands pulled her clothes down, and she suddenly felt a sharp pain in her rear end, and then the hands shoved her away, leaving her sobbing in fear as she pulled at her clothing, covering herself once more. Soon after that, her mind began to feel hazy and strange. As she lay in a drugged stupor, and a part of her mind tried to make sense of what was happening to her, she barely noticed as hands grabbed her again and pulled her out of the van.

  Much later her mind slowly began to clear, and with that clarity, came terror. She seemed to be in a tightly restricted area, and from the sound and motion, she had to be in some kind of truck that was in motion. She had no idea where she was, and where she was going. Worse, she had no clue how much time had passed since she was abducted. At several points many hours in between, the truck had stopped, someone had come to feed her and let her out in the woods along the road to relieve herself. She thought about running into those woods to try to escape, but she was never alone. A man, dressed in workman’s clothing, was always within arm’s reach, and her legs were chained together, allowing her to shuffle, but never to run.

  She tried everything her desperate young mind could think of. She begged and pleaded to be set free. She told the man that her father was an important man in the government (which was true, but she really didn’t know much more than that, as he never spoke of what he did), and that he could find her and would come and kill them all. She promised him all her savings and any money she could get from her parents to buy her freedom. She tried attacking him in her frustration and tears, but he was so much bigger and stronger than her, and he seemed to know just what she was thinking. He just restrained her while he laughed, then tied her hands behind her back once again, put the blind-fold back in place, and threw her back into the specially constructed room behind the false wall at the front of the cargo area of the truck. The next time they stopped, she started up again, with the same results. The third time they stopped, he threatened to beat her unless she behaved. When she opened her mouth to yell at him, he simply slapped her across the face hard enough to knock her off her feet. After that, she could only cry at the nightmare she was in.

  She guessed that nearly four days had passed before she was blindfolded and gagged this time, and pulled from the back of the truck that had carried her away from her family for so long, frightened beyond rational thought, crying and shaking from fear and the harsh conditions, and weak from inactivity and being in the nearly lightless and restrictive compartment specially built for smuggling people across borders throughout eastern Europe.

  She heard voices talking, laughing, and at one point thought she recognized a few words in Russian, but the accent was strange. Then someone said “Da,” and a new voice spoke to her. She was dragged into a building, through some doorways, down a flight of stairs, and thrown into a room, where her blind fold and gag were removed, along with the chains on her legs and the rope used to tie her arms together at the wrists. She tried to struggle, but was unceremoniously thrown against the wall, hitting her head hard enough in the impact to see stars.

  In heavily accented Ukrainian, he told her that there was a chamber pot in the corner for her to use, and that he would be back in the morning to begin her training. Then he walked out of the room, and she heard the solid sound of a heavy lock securing the door.

  She looked around, tears running down her face, desperate to do anything to escape or do something to get free, but the light from the small fixture on the high ceiling told the story. She was in a room barely three meters by four meters. There was a crude bed with a lumpy mattress on it pushed into the corner of the wall opposite the door. She saw the chamber pot in the back corner opposite the bed, and shivered at the phone book next to it with some of the pages torn out, its intended use obvious to her. The door and floor looked to be made of solid, heavy planks, and the walls and ceiling were chipped plaster covered by stained and faded paint. She walked over to the bed, and despite the stale smell to the coarse blanket, her exhaustion and fear made her climb onto it and sit with her back against the corner so she could watch the door, crying constantly.

  Her name was Svetlana, and she was a long way from home. She was only fifteen years old.

  After the crying stopped, she relived again what had happened as her subconscious mind tried to process the events so different than anything she had ever experienced.

  Through the long, sleepless night in the dank room, she wondered what her parents and her younger brother Mykola were going through. She knew her family loved her, and she loved them completely.

  She had once been lost in a store for hours when she was only six years old, and when she was finally found, both her parents wept and held her tight. She had been terrified, even though nothing bad had happened – she had simply gotten separated from her mother and father during a shopping trip for new clothes for the family.

  Since then, she had always tri
ed to stay close to them, knowing that as long as they were close, she was safe. But as she got a little older, she stepped a little further away, testing the limits of that feeling of safety. Nothing ever happened to her, so she still felt safe.

  This time, she didn’t leave the hotel, confident that her parents were just two floors up in their room. And her father’s pride and trust in her had left her feeling a confidence that was now long gone, a distant, misleading memory.

  The door opened, and the same man from the previous night came into the room.

  “Stand up when I come into the room,” he growled at her.

  She started crying again, and asked through her tears, “What do you want from me?”

  “You will learn your place! Stand up!” He shouted at her.

  “My father will find me, and he will kill you! There is no place in Ukraine that you can hide from him!” She screamed at him even as she slowly and fearfully climbed to her feet, shuffled a half step away from the bed, and stood there shaking.

  He just laughed. “I don’t care who your father is. And what makes you think you are in Ukraine anymore?”

  “Where am I?” she asked, shaking further and fearful of the answer.

  “You are in Georgia. Your father will never find you here. And if he does, I will kill him myself.” Her captor then told her in heavily-accented Ukrainian that he was going to force her into her new life as a prostitute using the most crude, unimaginably barbaric methods of which she had ever heard. But first, he demanded to know if she had ever lain with a boy or man before. Her horrified negative response brought a look to his face that only the most generous would ever mistake for a smile, and his response froze her in her place.

  “Good. Your first time will be worth much, much more. Very good.”