Harmonic Magic Series Boxed Set

by P. E. Padilla

  He waited for a moment as if for some sign, some acknowledgment. As he began to turn to leave, she did the only thing she could will herself to do, she slowly nodded her head.

  “Thank you,” he said as he turned and walked away.

  After an hour of meditation, trying to regain her center and eject her negative feelings, Nalia stood from her seated position and ate a simple dinner in her room before going to sleep. She was calmer now, but still in no mood for dealing with others. Relaxed from her meditation, she went to sleep and hoped tomorrow she would be able to act more honorably.

  Chapter 14

  Nalia’s eyes snapped open and she instantly came awake, fully alert. She paused a moment, listening. There was a faint scratching from the other side of the compound. More than that, though, was the feeling she had, one she recognized. It was a sense she had worked on developing over the last three years. There was a wrongness, a trespassing on her aura. She quickly pulled her mask on, which she took off before sleep each night when her room was locked and secure.

  As she passed Rindu’s door, she started despite herself when it swung quietly open and her father emerged, silent and fully dressed. She herself was still in her sleeping clothes, the snug soft material she wore to bed each night. Nodding to her, he moved in step with her toward the main compound grounds.

  They quietly exited the main building and stood motionless in the dim light of the quarter moon. There were many shapes moving about, getting into position for an attack. She had to admit that they moved more quietly than normal soldiers. Assassins or trackers, then. Taking a rough count, she was surprised to see that there were only twenty or so shapes moving. Assuming this was the bulk of the force, there were probably over thirty intruders altogether. This was going to be messy. Silently drawing out the twin blades she brought, she prepared for battle.

  Rindu breathed in deeply, to the bottom of his abdomen, and then exhaled over several seconds. Focusing his mind and relaxing his entire body, he glanced at his daughter. She had brought her favorite weapons, the shrapezi. Incredibly difficult to use with expert precision, they were very versatile in the hands of a master. Which Nalia was.

  They were just a bit longer than Nalia’s extended arm from shoulder to fingertip and had the general form of a sword, but they were so much more. Instead of a wooden handle, the weapons were all one piece of metal, the handgrip section being heavy thread wrapped around the main straight section of the weapon, approximately two handspans from the end. On the end near the hand grip, the weapon ended in a sharp triangular point with sharpened sides. Surrounding the hand grip, a half moon shaped section of the sword protected the hand and provided more razor-sharp surface for cutting, slicing, and trapping other weapons. It was for this section that the sword was named. Shrapezi meant “iron moon” in Old Kasmali.

  The long straight section above the hand grip was sharpened on both sides and bent into a hook with a wicked point. All sides of the hooked part were also sharpened to a razor edge. There were seven cutting surfaces, or eight depending upon each master’s use of the weapon, and four sharp points that could be used for puncturing. They were made of steel, a rare thing on Gythe. They were worth more than a laborer could earn in his lifetime. The weapons were given to her by the Sapsyra, heirlooms of the order for untold generations, when she had bested twenty-five of her sisters in tests of combat.

  Nalia raised the swords and prepared herself. Rindu focused his mind on the moment, letting his eyes soften to see the energy signatures of the intruders and the area in which they would die. Looking at Nalia’s mask, he nodded. Without delay, they went into motion.

  The four unlucky assassins who were closest to the father and daughter never knew what happened. Nalia swirled into motion, making no sound herself except the soft whistle of her weapons cutting the air. When she finished her turn, two men were dead, one with his head separated from his body.

  Meanwhile, Rindu manipulated one man’s energy, literally bursting his heart in his chest as he stood while dancing around another man who was looking at another of the assassins. Maneuvering behind the distracted man, he struck three times, too quickly to be seen, precisely hitting two places in the neck and one place on the side of the head with his fingers. The strikes were not hard, but the contact was enough to send very specific vibrations through the man’s body, destroying his brain and spinal cord. Rindu had already moved onto the next enemy by the time the lifeless body came to rest on the ground.

  With the fall of the four assassins, the others were suddenly aware that they were discovered. One of them yelled orders and the clearing erupted in chaotic motion.

  Sam jumped as someone in the compound screamed. Rubbing his eyes to try to get his vision to clear, he leapt out of bed and headed out of the cabin in which he was sleeping.

  Skitter, are you all right? he sent.

  I’m fine. I’m hiding in the forest. I have no skill in fighting. The compound is being attacked. There are many humans. I can’t read any memories from any of them. I tried.

  Sam, relieved, sent back: Keep hiding. I’ll see if I can help.

  Be careful Sam. I have grown accustomed to having you around.

  Sam’s half-smile at the momentary humor slid off his face as he heard the screams and saw whorls of motion in the near-dark night. He hadn’t lit a torch or lamp before coming out, so his eyes were still adjusted to the darkness. He could see better by the light of the moon than he would have expected. What was before him was the most frightening thing he had ever seen.

  There were dozens of people dressed in dark clothing, all wielding weapons. One of the men was shouting: “Take them alive. The Gray Man wants as many alive as possible.”

  Closest to him, Sam saw Rindu moving through what had to be a dozen attackers. To Sam’s eyes, the mage appeared to glow faintly as he danced through and around attacks. Mesmerized, Sam stopped and stared. Lucky for him, all of the intruders were focused on the two warriors already fighting, so he was not seen.

  Rindu flowed—there was no other way to put it—under one assailant’s sword strike to his head while simultaneously moving just enough to dodge a horizontal thrust from his left and a diagonal slash from his right. It was inhuman the way he detected and moved around the weapons.

  He was surrounded by at least eight attackers now, in addition to a second ring of more attackers who could not get at him because of their fellows. After the Zouy evaded the weapons, Sam watched slack-jawed as Rindu struck out with his right hand, connecting with a finger strike to one assailant’s head while chopping out with his left hand to strike the neck of another attacker and also delivering a blinding kick to the hip bone of a third.

  To Sam, each point of contact seemed to glow brightly in a quick pulse. Then, without any break in his motion, Rindu focused on four more attackers. He was already incapacitating them as the first three dropped. The recipient of the finger strike dropped to the ground like a stone, and Sam could see how he fell that the man was dead already. The man who received the sword hand strike made a choking gesture, spit out a gout of blood, and wilted to the ground, tripping two of the oncoming attackers. As for the woman that was the target of the kick to the hip, that may have been the most disturbing of all. From the way she screamed and then flopped to the ground, Sam knew that her hip bone was pulverized by that one kick. Goose bumps raced up Sam’s arms and neck.

  Once, Sam had seen a demonstration given by a traveling troupe of kung fu masters from China. He was amazed at the precise, accurate, and blindlingly fast movements. The men seemed superhuman. Their motions reminded him of water, of the waves he sometimes would sit and watch when he visited the Southern California beach. But with Rindu, it was something altogether different. With the kung fu demonstration, the combat was still responsive, still within the bounds of human reflex and intuition, even though it was choreographed to look natural. What Rindu was doing was simply impossible. Right now, he was evading five weapons at a time: a club, three sword
s, and some type of long knife. Unlike many of the martial arts movies Sam had seen, the assailants all attacked at the same time, trying to coordinate their attacks to catch the Zouy unaware and unprepared. They failed spectacularly.

  Looking away as Rindu dispatched the next batch of attackers, Sam found Nalia. If anything, she was surrounded by even more attackers than Rindu. He tried to decide where to go to help and saw her in motion against the intruders.

  She was using a pair of swords. Were those hook swords? He had seen those in the kung fu demonstration, with their wicked point at one end and a curved hooking blade on the other. But what he saw now might as well have been another species using appendages of its own body. While the monks using the hook swords in the demonstration were fluid and expert, doing things so precisely that it hardly seemed possible, Nalia was doing things exponentially harder. If the monks were tigers in their power and skill, Nalia was a tyrannosaurus rex. If the monks moved like the weapons were a part of them, Nalia used them as if they could think for themselves, and anticipate everything they needed to do.

  At the moment, she had five attackers trying to kill her at once. Two were swinging long swords at her, one toward the head and one toward the midsection. One attacker had a club with metal banding and studs on it and he was aiming at her left knee to cripple her. Another intruder, a woman by the look of her body shape, was trying to slash her from behind with double daggers. Finally, an assassin was trying to strike her with double sticks from the right side. Sam watched in horror because there was no way anyone could evade all the blows coming at her. His horror multiplied as he noticed a man sneaking into range with a bow in his hand, drawing an arrow from a quiver and preparing to shoot her.

  He watched her whirl in a circle, even more fluidly and gracefully than Rindu’s movements. She bent at the waist at an impossible angle to her left as she thrust her swords out. The bend was just enough to allow the sword coming toward her midsection to miss her, though it cut her clothing. The sword in her left hand swept past the man holding the offending sword and a dark line suddenly appeared on his throat. He garbled something and then fell.

  Meanwhile, the lower part of the sword somehow simultaneously blocked another sword and then, with a twist of the crescent blade that acted as a handguard, tore it from the attacker’s hand. At the same time, the right sword blocked both daggers aimed at her back with the lower part of the sword and the crescent while the hooked end of the sword caught and removed one of the hands of the attacker with the sticks.

  Amazingly, while in the awkward position, Nalia threw her left leg out in a kick that connected directly on the middle part of the metal-bound club coming at her knee. There was a sharp crack that Sam heard, even as far away as he was, and then half of the club was flying through the air, eventually striking another intruder in the face.

  Finishing the movement, she rotated clockwise, swirling the swords in a complex motion that seemed to defy physical laws. Though it was too fast to clearly see, Sam could see the results. The attacker with the metal sticks lost his other hand, the woman with the knives failed to block the sweeping strike that took her head, and then the attacker who was now holding half a club received vicious cuts to his legs, almost taking them off completely, and to his midsection. His eyes grew wide as he watched his entrails pour out onto the ground, and then he too was down.

  Finally, Nalia finished her swirling motion with a vicious cut that consisted of diagonal slashes with the long side of the swords, tracing an “X” pattern that caused the final swordsman’s head to fly into the air as Nalia kicked his body away into another attacker. A lightning quick spin kick caught the head before it fell, propelling it into another attacker, knocking him down.

  Sam hesitated a moment. What he had just seen was just not possible. It was as if natural laws did not apply to this woman. She had foiled five simultaneous attacks and killed the attackers in less than a second, at a speed that was so fast it was almost invisible.

  Shaking his head to clear it, he started toward the hidden archer. Nalia was still surrounded by the ten remaining attackers. The bowman had found a good position and was slowly nocking an arrow to the bow, trying not to move quickly lest he be noticed. Sam kept to the deeper shadows and crouch-ran toward the archer, hoping he would get there in time without himself being noticed and shot. His focus was on the archer only, watching for any sign he had been seen.

  He was able to get within a few feet without being noticed. The archer, obviously not thinking about hidden enemies while he was concentrating on Nalia, was moving his bow to and fro, trying to find a clear shot. Glancing over at Nalia, Sam saw that she had whittled the enemies down to only three. She would soon finish them off and then the archer’s shot would be clear. Sparing a half a second to look for Rindu, Sam saw that the Zouy was just finishing off the last four of his attackers also.

  Taking his chance, Sam went to jump on the archer to keep him from shooting. The archer noticed him, surprise registering on his face, but recovered immediately, obviously being well-trained. Sam was already too close for the arrow, but as he got near the archer, the man dodged left and pushed to deflect Sam's hurtling body. Luckily, the arrow skittered from the bow, sticking in the ground just a few feet away. He had done it; he had saved Nalia. Now if he could only keep from getting killed, his victory would be complete.

  He kept as close to the archer as possible to prevent him from nocking another arrow and he swung at the man, a clumsy and slow hook punch. The man dodged the blow, feinted like he was going to kick Sam. Sam braced to block the kick, but realized too late that the fake kick was a setup. As he felt the solid bow stave crack the back of his head, he was grateful at least that he was able to keep him from shooting Nalia. Then everything went black.

  Chapter 15

  Dr. Walt had just finished the finest presentation of his career, and was the winner of the most prestigious of awards. The audience was giving him a standing ovation and clamoring for him to speak further.

  “Dr. Walt,” one of the audience members said. “Dr Walt!” Why was the audience speaking in Kasmali?

  He realized the he was being shaken awake, interrupting his dream. Sputtering, he sat up and reached for his eyeglasses on the little table next to his bed. He strained to make his tired eyes focus and saw Rindu in front of him. The Zouy looked like he was wet.

  “Ahh, Rindu, my friend. What is it? And why are you wet?” As he took in a deep breath, he smelled an unfamiliar scent. “What is that smell?”

  Rindu reached over to the table, took up a lamp, and lit it with a wave of his hand. The doctor didn’t think he would ever get used to that particular usage of vibrational energy. It was too much like magic.

  Once he adjusted to the blinding light, Dr. Walt could see clearly. Rindu was indeed wet, but not with water. “Is that blood all over you?”

  “It is. We have had…a commotion. Please come with me.”

  “Of course, of course. But, are you ok? Are you hurt badly?” the doctor asked him, looking at the drenched robes that now looked like they had been dyed red.

  “I am not hurt at all. The blood is not mine. Sam was injured slightly, however, and three of the servants were killed. Their throats were slit, silently. They did not suffer much.”

  As they walked toward the room in the main building they often used as an infirmary, Dr. Walt asked, concerned: “Sam? What happened? Is he ok?”

  Arriving at the room, the doctor saw Sam sitting up in a bed, his back propped up with blankets. He had bandages wrapped around his head, but he did not have any other apparent injuries.

  “Are you all right, my boy?” Dr. Walt asked him.

  “I’m fine, thank you. I have found that a good solid long bow is no match for my skull. Then again, I wouldn’t care to test their relative strengths again. Ouch!” He winced as his movement seemed to cause him pain.

  Dr. Walt checked Sam’s injury. It was just a small cut on the skin of his scalp on the back of his head,
and a sizable lump. Checking his eyes, using the lamp to contract and dilate the pupils, he said, “Good, you don’t seem to have a concussion. So, what exactly happened?”

  Rindu looked at Nalia and raised his right eyebrow. She nodded and Rindu explained. “A group of forty-eight assassins visited us. They killed three of the servants, obviously to get in place without an alarm being sounded. The leader was shouting about capturing us, which was their biggest mistake. They began the battle trying to injure us for capture. It was only after the first dozen died that they began to try to kill us.

  “They did not prove to be too great a challenge, though they were obviously trained in combat. We believe they were a group of the Gray Man’s Collectors.”

  “Wait,” Sam interjected. “What are Collectors?”

  Dr. Walt answered, “The Gray Man has several groups of men spread throughout the territories between here and the mountains that are far East of us, the mountains that we call the Rockies on Telani. These men are trained in combat, tracking, and for some groups, assassination. Their sole purpose is to bring people and important things to the Gray Man. He wants people for two purposes. One is so he can use them as slaves and for experiments. The other is that the Gray Man is trying to collect all the knowledge he can.

  “These Collectors bring artifacts, books, scrolls, and the like to him. They also bring people who may have information the Gray Man wants. He has been after me for years. It appears that they finally found my compound here. It is time to move, I’m afraid.”

  Rindu cleared his throat. “There is more. One got away. Both Nalia and I counted the intruders as we were fighting. We both arrived at the same count: forty-eight. We counted the bodies three times. There are only forty-seven. That means that the Gray Man will soon know where we are. He will send a larger force. A much larger force. I tried to track the missing person. He must be a tracker because he moves quickly and with little evidence of his passing. I was able to find tracks of a manu bird, so perhaps the survivor escaped mounted. We could probably find him, but there is no way we can track him quickly enough to catch him. Not unless we follow him all the way to the Gray Fortress and try to catch him before he gets there.”