One of the muscle grunts reached the young man and placed a booted foot on his back, twisting the knife as he yanked it out, wiped it on the guy’s shirt, and sheathed it. He hauled his victim over his shoulder and walked to the edge of the entity, where he heaved the young man into the roiling mass with a precision that meant he, too, could see exactly where the entity sat.
The body rolled down in slow motion and came to rest a good foot from the ground, limbs twisted to reflect the shifting energies and clothes and hair drifting as though he was underwater.
“If he wasn’t dead before...” Quinn said through his teeth.
“Not helpful,” Garrie said through hers.
“Do something,” he said.
“Like what?”
Because even injured, Anjhela was a force to be reckoned with. And Trevarr might be recovering, might be free, but he didn’t yet know how to use those newly liberated parts of himself.
Besides, the two muscle grunts weren’t taking any chances this time. They were armed to the teeth, clearly happy to take him down.
She had no idea what tricks Master Shahh had up his tunic sleeves.
“I don’t do people!” she said in some desperation. Except apparently it was no longer true. No longer allowed to be true.
Master Shahh raised his hands. Black glyphs dripped from his fingers, and the breezes stirred tightly around him. But nothing moved through him, not as it did through Trevarr or Anjhela or Garrie herself. She glanced at Trevarr for insight, and then understood it on her own. Glyphmaster, commanding the glyphs. And the glyphs, commanding power drawn from Kehar.
Dark, cold power, the kind that had once burrowed through her, fueling that sharp, hasty anger, demanding her attention and greedy to supplant everything bright and good about her—right up until the moment Trevarr had chased it away with his warmth. Redeeming her.
The glyphmaster gestured at the tightly gathered hostages, trailing a flow of living glyphs. “You cannot save them all. You cannot even save one of them if you try to save yourselves. And in the end, you cannot do even that.”
Sklayne emitted the tiniest chitter of fear, a sound that twisted weakness through Garrie’s knees.
The muscle grunts grinned. Their teeth looked like tusks, pierced and yellowing.
“Breathe,” Trevarr said under his breath as the muscle grunts started his way. He withdrew the ekhevia from the satchel and tucked it away in his duster pocket, letting the satchel fall to the ground with no awareness of the other things it held, the critically important things it held, the damned echveria they couldn’t use that it held...
Garrie bit her lip on saying it, and on grabbing Trevarr’s arm to plunge her hand into the satchel. Because no. If Ghehera got this thing...
He gave her an odd look, startling her thoughts into hiding. Had he heard...? Were they that different now, the two of them?
Sklayne stropped briefly, invisibly, against her leg, and then fled.
Trevarr raised Lukhas to guard. “Ebb and flow, atreya. We will do this thing. You and I.”
She thought he was optimistic. But she set her feet to the ground and found her center and spun out another shield—sending it higher, protecting the mountain entity and protecting them all from its reaction.
And then suddenly no one hesitated any longer. The muscle grunts charged and Anjhela flung herself toward Garrie and Master Shahh flicked glyph-blackened energies from behind—a scattering of ethereal drops that at first seemed inconsequential but lengthened and accelerated and then flew at her with the sharp force of speed-blurred war darts.
Metal clashed behind Garrie; men grunted. Someone took a solid blow, and Garrie recognized Trevarr’s snarl, barely heard Sklayne’s yeowl of protest. Anjhela reached her as Shahh’s darts penetrated the first shield, shredding it. Garrie slapped up a new shield as she blocked Anjhela’s gauntlet—wrist to wrist, with her knife up in time to meet the gauntlet claws, a rending of metal against metal that left neither weapon marred.
Except that Anjhela, too, had a knife, and she slashed out to tag Garrie’s arm—the old bandage falling away, Garrie’s skin sliced anew.
Garrie cried out and spun away, putting distance between them to face Anjhela narrow-eyed. “Don’t,” she said, all too aware that she would never survive a purely physical altercation. “Don’t make me do this.”
“Can you?” Anjhela’s voice came in a sultry challenge, with no sign of the resistance she’d shown Shahh. Whatever her internal conflict, she’d given way to his influence, and he knew it; he left her to it while he pulled up more glyphs in visible effort. “Can you shield yourself from him and strike me at the same time?”
“Gonna find out, aren’t we? Your choice.” She risked a glance at Trevarr, couldn’t see anything but flashing metal and flying hair and swinging limbs beyond a small blur of frantic sandy red color galloping from side to side and unable to join in.
Anjhela surprised her with a bitter laugh. “Human,” she said, taking no notice of the ongoing battle to the side of them. “It was never my choice.” And struck again, lashing out with the glove—aiming again for Garrie’s face and bringing the knife up from below, but pulling the blows to a surprising degree.
They wanted her alive, it seemed.
Garrie twisted aside—smaller, faster, and burning through her energies at record speed. She parried the knife with determination more than skill, just barely slipping inside the line of attack—but not before the gauntlet landed over the curve of her shoulder, metal talons digging in.
Fine. Be that way, then. You had your chance.
Garrie struck out, blocking and pushing and shielding all at once, shoving back at the gauntlet by fighting in kind—all her fears when Trevarr disappeared, all the pain she’d absorbed through him—all still close to the surface and easy to grab.
Anjhela gasped, shuddering, and forced Garrie back a step—then another, as if the physical domination would make a difference. She fought for control of the gauntlet, seeming not to notice the barely formed breezes surging in through the connection she’d created. The ones that infiltrated every metal joint and every metal plate, sinking into place.
I don’t do people. I don’t WANT to do people.
But here she was, doing people. About to break one.
Anjhela twisted her fingers more deeply into Garrie’s flesh, her face a grimace of effort and intent, metal claws driving toward bone. Instant agony bloomed, a sensation so profound that Garrie instantly knew she could lose that joint—lose the whole arm. That Anjhela had turned the gauntlet into a different kind of weapon, drawing on its unnatural strength to rip Garrie apart in the most literal way.
Garrie screamed pain and fear and panic, no longer thinking—only reacting. She slammed the vaguely infused breezes with a glut of energy, exploding them outward. A universe expanding, a world exploding...
A hand rendered mute, connections severed.
Anjhela screamed, staggering away. The knife dropped as she clutched her hand—her naked hand, her bleeding hand with the nails ripped away and the gauntlet torn into bits of twisted metal, broken scales falling away to the ground.
Garrie fumbled at her shoulder and yanked away the remnants of one gauntlet finger, leaving a sharp metal claw buried in her upper arm—a spike of agony, trying to consume her.. She wiped the back of her hand across her eyes, muzzy and staggering, and her hand came away sticky with Anjhela’s dark blood.
The muscle grunts rushed at Trevarr; he spun away, Lukhas glinting and smeared—she could get no good look at him, but the grunts were wary, failing to push as they first had. They seemed unaware of Rick and Quinn easing closer to the edges of the conflict, each armed with nothing more sophisticated than a rock. Be careful, she thought at them. And don’t get in his way!
The entity shifted and darkened and roiled behind her shield. Shahh finally reloaded and stood nearby, one cupped hand overflowing with dark, tumbling glyph trails, his angry gaze riveted on Anjhela. “Bring her to me
!”
But Anjhela only bent over her hand, crying like a wounded animal, and Shahh’s face darkened. He lifted his free hand, twisting it in a harsh gesture.
Anjhela made a strangled sound, clutching at her throat and falling to writhe against Shahh’s hold for a long and horrifying moment during which Garrie couldn’t help but hold her own breath. Released, Anjhela rolled instantly to her feet—her hand useless but her eyes sparked back to wild intensity and no longer quite sane at that. She spared Shahh one murderous glance and turned to launch herself at Garrie.
Garrie, who bled so freely from her shoulder and couldn’t even lift her arm, and who’d scattered her energies and efforts so far spun that she wasn’t even sure what she had left inside. She took a staggering step back and braced herself, already spinning the finest ethereal garrote.
It wouldn’t have had any impact on a human—a pure human. But Kehar’s semi-ethereal beings lived on more than just the human plane. Trevarr had shown her that from their very first encounter.
“Stop,” she told the other woman, and damned if she wasn’t farking crying, leaking exhausted and emotional tears. “Just stop. I don’t want to hurt you!”
Anjhela didn’t stop. She collided with Garrie without grace and mowed her right down to the ground—but she ran straight into that ethereal wire on the way and her features flashed astonishment as it tightened...tightened...
She should have fought it—clutched it and tugged it and made some futile attempt to free herself of it. Instead her eyes went even wilder and she thrust her neck against it, pushing harder—parting skin.
Because she’d never had any choice. Not until now, when this was her choice. Suicide by Garrie.
But Garrie couldn’t do it. She eased back on the thread, closing her eyes to cry stupid weak tears and wordless fury and frustration and acceptance of her failure, still grappling to keep Anjhela’s weight from crushing her.
Glyphs danced behind her eyelids, reflections of the barely visible marks crawling down Anjhela’s neck. Glyphs. Energies.
Control, as Trevarr had been controlled.
Garrie slid the garrote along Anjhela’s skin, beneath the soft fine scales of her neck, beneath the line of glyphs.
She yanked.
Anjhela shouted surprise and pain, collapsing over Garrie with more weight than a graceful woman of her size should have carried. The metal claw tip shifted in Garrie’s arm and she cried out. “Get off! Get off, dammit!”
Gasping, Anjhela did just that—pushing herself up to regard Garrie with wonderment and shock, her neck bleeding from the paper thin cut and the glyphs melting down her skin like wet ink. She rocked back on one hip as Garrie scrambled away and they eyed one another warily, gasping and wounded and each waiting for the other to strike...or not.
Only then did Garrie realize that her outer shield had been shredded again—and that Shahh, instantly discerning Anjhela’s freedom, had spent his glyphs with no concern for her, and already had a significant reload. He flipped his hand out from his chest, spreading glyphs—and this time Garrie knew they would turn to darts. She struggled to raise yet another outer shield, staggering to her feet with Anjhela rising beside her.
But she didn’t know that the darts would be legion, or that Shahh had refined the darts to mere pinpricks.
They tore through her half-erected outer shield and then they tore through her strong inner shield. A solid body rammed into hers and Garrie went flying, but not before the darts tore right into flesh. Her flesh—and Anjhela’s, and the muscle grunts, and Trevarr, who jerked around and went down.
Anjhela didn’t get up this time. She rolled back and forth on the ground, moaning quietly. The muscle grunts staggered; one fell to his knees, dropping his war ax.
Quinn darted for the weapon, hefting it. The grunt surged back up to his feet, grabbing for Quinn—only to go right back down again when he met the blunt end of the ax in full swing. Quinn staggered back, stunned by his own actions, and the remaining grunt took sharp note—hefting both his swords and turning to dispatch this new threat.
Rick ran in from the other direction and slammed his rock against the back of the remaining grunt’s head in a slam-dunk motion. The grunt barely wavered, lashing back with his sword pommel to catch Rick in the chest. Rick flew back and landed hard, gasping and paled, and the grunt immediately returned his attention to Quinn—who stumbled back a few more steps and ran into a tree. He lifted the oversized ax with a resolute set to his jaw.
Trevarr came back to his feet, his stance too wide—too unsteady. But he spoke low words to the grunt, and the man wobbled when he turned back to that threat—maybe not quite as unaffected by Rick’s blow as he’d seemed.
Sklayne quivered at the edge of them all—herding the terrified hikers together by dint of claw and hiss, his tail lashing. *Trey! Careful, careful!*
Garrie looked down at herself and found her flesh whole but her breezes leaking again, oozing from the dart wounds. The world shifted beneath her, and she clutched at the ground to steady herself—and then realized she hadn’t yet faltered.
But the world itself had shifted. Had rumbled. Had growled, on a deep ethereal level, lifting itself to a rising fury.
The mountain kyrokha.
She lifted her gaze to Master Shahh. “You didn’t,” she said. “Tell me you didn’t. That you aren’t just that stupid.”
Shahh only smiled. “You can stop this,” he said, releasing another, discernibly smaller, wave of darts directly at the entity. “You have only to come with me.”
Anjhela had made it to her side, clutching Garrie’s arm with her one good hand. “Stop him!”
“You think?” But Garrie couldn’t even get to her feet. She couldn’t touch the entity. And she couldn’t stop the darts, not their true flight or their shuddering impact or the entity’s outraged response.
“Come with me.” Shahh smiled again, as if he could well see that her bleeding energies would give her no choice. Her world shifted to a strange slow-motion fade.
Quinn dropped the ax and ran. Trevarr dispatched the grunt who’d fallen to Quinn and turned to face the one that hadn’t—too late, falling before a sweep of sword and spatter of dark blood. Sklayne’s yowl rose to a shriek; he shredded the ground with furious claws and spun himself into a pinprick of sun-bright light.
A new wave of darts hit the mountain entity, flaring into starbursts of impact. The entity didn’t draw back so much as it drew on the rest of itself, surging into the canyon, rapidly filling it and mounting higher, red and orange and darkness and hate and impending death, trees already falling to its newly crushing weight.
The world returned to real time and Garrie managed to gasp, “Sklayne. Bring me—!”
And then she was out of words, but she held the picture brightly enough in her mind.
Silvered metal and alien gemstones and flooding power.
And more danger than she’d ever thought she could imagine.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 40
Come and Get Me
Sklayne leaped into explosive motion, more than ready to do something and not as careful as he might have been when it came to concealing his nature.
“The sklarr!” Shahh cried, stabbing a finger at Sklayne in free-flow form and currently without glyphs. “Get it!”
As if anyone could. The only grunt still standing merely stared as Sklayne flowed over the ground, wrapping himself around the satchel and sinking into it until he disappeared. An instant later he poked his head out the top, Abyssinian cat again and much with the ears and whiskers. He emerged the rest of the way with a tiny new set of wings, slinking along the ground in a sinuous high-speed stalk.
He reached Garrie and crouched in a clump of weeds beside her. Eye level. Only then did Garrie realize she’d drooped all the way to the ground. He mewed a wordless sound of distress and opened his new wings—no, they were hands—to drop the plastic egg. It broke open, the echveria tumbling free. She reached for them.
Except she didn’t. In her mind she was reaching—had reached. But her body lay sprawled and awkward, barely propped on its elbows—leaking etherea slowly and blood somewhat more quickly. Broken again.
The echveria rocked to a stop, glittering without the benefit of direct sunlight because oh look the mountain entity now towered above them, manifesting solidly enough to block and dim the sun. The cries from the clustered refugees and Lucia’s voice rose over them all, trying to reassure but quite obviously on her very. Last. Nerve.
Sklayne nudged the echveria closer, a reluctance to his movement and his fur running sparks. *Not stable.*
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Neither was she.
~~~~~
The Garrie didn’t look quite right. Not as she ought. Not sparkly in the skin, not gleaming so much in the hair.
Trevarr didn’t look quite right. Not as he ought. Not tall and fierce and moving with the strength of the kyrokha behind him, but tumbled out in the grass. Too much blood splattered where it shouldn’t be, no telling whose.
The mountain didn’t look anywhere near right, pulling itself together with so much presence that Sklayne felt its gravity. Not the silvery grey glimmer of barely manifested kyrokha, not the hint of fang and wing and sinuous strength. Just an angry blackened crimson with hints of orange and yellow, rolling into ponderous shapes that only clumsily reflected what they should have been. A massive foot, a thick curved claw, an intimation of horny scale, a sketching of leathery limp wings without the grace of feathery scales.
A creature trying to be itself and failing.
The Garrie. Trevarr. The bounty hunter between them and threatening both. The glyphmaster straining a little as he generated more glyph darts, threatening them both. The mountain entity looming and threatening all.
Choose.
*Trey!* he said, whiskers pinching in behind his mouth, one paw on the unstable echveria. Trying to do two things at once, trying to be in two places at once. Trying to protect not just one of his people, but two.
That, he had never managed.
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