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CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Marty’s eyes blurred. He felt bone weary from having stayed awake for almost two days straight. It was all he could do to focus and keep himself on the path. The green grass to either side rose nearly to the height of his waist. The sky was a deep lavender bruise, mottled with the last, largest stars of the night, and as Marty stared along the trail, the sun rose at its end. For a perfect moment, the sun’s golden light poured out across the sky. The light relieved the heaviness of the night, it burned away all the stars, and it blazed at the end of the straight path like the flaming head of an ignited arrow, for a long, perfect moment.

Then the sun and the path both disappeared, and Marty was lying in a dirt trough on a cold hillside.

He had fallen asleep.

He was about to shake himself to chase away the last shreds of sleep when he heard a heavy footfall on the slope below him. Sleepiness vanished.

Marty raised his head slightly from the trough, peering around a large rock. His body was covered by a sheet of rough cloth that had in turn been buried under a thin layer of sand, creating a hiding spot for him, a little like a hunting blind.

He looked down into the ravine. For a moment, he was blinded by the laser, angling up into the night sky. Then he recovered his vision to see Surjan, who lay against the gully wall mostly covered by his cloak. He was a little too short really to pass as a wounded Sethian, but he was taller than most of the others, and he had insisted. His face and feet were hidden, and one arm gripped the Sethian’s spear that Surjan had taken. His chest was exposed; the amulet lay on it, firing its beam to the cloudless night sky.

Then Marty saw, just beyond Surjan, an approaching Sethian. This monster, too, was the height and build of an NBA power forward, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. It carried a spear, and a cloak fell from its shoulders to its ankles.

But it was alone.

On the one hand, that should make the battle easier. Marty hadn’t relished the thought of battling four of these beasts simultaneously. On the other hand, it meant that there were further battles to be fought beyond the present one. And where were the other Sethians, anyway?

The Sethian called out, words Marty couldn’t understand.

As planned, Surjan groaned in response.

The Sethian entered the mouth of the ravine. It slowed its steps, halted, and turned to look behind it. Men lay on the ground, tents burned, and herd animals roamed free. It was a scene carefully set to convince the Sethian that its fellow had come to the village, had a fight, and wreaked great carnage before activating its distress beacon.

The Sethian turned back around to look at Surjan. It raised its spear, couching it like a lance in its elbow and stepping forward as if it intended to poke Surjan.

Then Badis and his men rose up from their fake deaths and yanked the rope.

The loop, hidden like Marty’s body under a carefully placed layer of sand and pebbles, closed up around the Sethian’s ankles and then snapped tight. The rope was woven; Lowanna had made it, together with a number of the Ahuskay women laboring under her guidance, and it was as thick as a human wrist.

Badis and his men gripped the line with all eight of their hands and dragged the Sethian toward the lake.

Surjan leaped forward. Without bothering to remove the amulet, he attacked repeatedly with the spear. Stabbing overhand, he brought the sharpened point down over and over onto the monster’s skin.

The Sethian raged and thrashed, and its skin did not break.

Marty scrambled down the side of the ridge with other warriors at his side. Gunther and others rose and attacked the Sethian. Gunther smashed a rock against the side of the beast’s head, and Ahuskay warriors stabbed with stone knives and wooden spears.

The Sethian roared but did not bleed. Rolling onto its back, it lashed out with one hand and grabbed Surjan by the ankle. It dragged the Sikh into a wrestler’s embrace and squeezed.

Surjan bellowed, his voice pitched to the same note of rage and hatred as the Sethian’s.

They knew—the villagers had warned them and they knew from their own experience—how hard it was to break the skin of one of the Sethians. Water was their second plan; they would drown the beast. Badis and his men sloshed through waist-high water, trampling reeds and churning up mud as they dragged their burden. The Sethian bellowed and rolled again as it hit the lake, thrusting Surjan under the surface.

Gunther threw rocks, hitting the Sethian in the chest and shoulders to no effect. Ahuskay warriors stabbed and slashed, and nothing happened.

The Sethian stood, hauling on the rope. Badis and his men fell into the water. Surjan got his head above water to take another gasp of air and then the Sethian refocused its attention, pushing the Sikh back under.

Surjan had lost his spear in the fray. He thrashed under the water as the Sethian held him down, and Marty finally caught up. He wanted to kick, knowing that his power was in his legs and feeling some confidence in the fact that he’d killed his first Sethian with such an attack. In the waist-high water, though, he couldn’t jump, and he couldn’t raise his legs to attack quickly, either.

He punched the Sethian in the ribs and in the kidney. He slammed his fists as hard and as fast as he could, landing a flurry of blows such that would have dropped any ordinary man in his tracks.

The Sethian grunted, and didn’t fall.

Surjan still thrashed, churning the water, but bubbles weren’t coming up anymore. If his lungs were empty of oxygen, he didn’t have much time left. Marty grabbed the Sethian by the elbow and stepped on its knees. He planned to lever himself into the air and attack the Sethian’s face.

Instead, the Sethian batted him away, sending him flying ten feet.

But that action required an arm.

With that one limb pulled away from its task, Surjan broke free. He surged up from the water gasping and grunting, and in his two hands together he held his sharpened ankh.

The Sethian punched Surjan in the face, and in the same moment, Surjan stabbed the Sethian under his ribs with the sharp tip of his ankh.

The ankh penetrated and sank all the way to the crosspiece in the alien flesh.

Surjan spun about with a crack and a splash, and collapsed into the water.

Badis and his men thrashed forward in the lake, trying to regain their end of the rope. Gunther raised a large rock over his head and stepped forward. Marty struggled in the mud to regain his feet and rejoin the fray.

But the Sethian stood still. Blood poured down its side and it stared at the wound. It opened its mouth and blood poured out, sloshing into the churned mud of the lake. Finally, without a sound, it collapsed forward into the water.

Marty rushed toward Surjan. He heard the victory holler of the Ahuskay warriors, and then he saw that the Sethian’s skin was shimmering. He dragged Surjan up from the water and saw that the Sikh was breathing, and then a blob of light rose from the Sethian’s body.

It drifted into Marty, sending a tingling sensation through him.

The Sethian, floating on its face on the lake, began to melt. Skin sloughed away and disintegrated, the firm and too-muscular flesh seemed to dissolve into sludge before Marty’s eyes, and the bleachy-smelling sludge, diluted by the waters of the lake, drifted away in slow, greasy curls. Within moments, the terrifying apparition of the Sethian was entirely gone.

Surjan stirred. “What happened?” he murmured into Marty’s shoulder.

Badis knelt, patted around on the bottom of the lake with both hands, and came up with Surjan’s sharpened ankh. “You had a magic weapon, my friend,” he said. “You didn’t tell me.”

✧ ✧ ✧

Lowanna scooped the throwing stick off the ground and charged.

The stick was not made to be thrown at this close range. But she could slash with it, and she did, hacking the Sethian in its rib cage.

It responded by slashing at her with its dagger. She managed to throw herself out of reach, and while she lunged a few steps to one side, François was dragging himself to his feet.

“If any of you wishes to flee,” the Sethian rumbled, “do so now. I will not pursue you.”

Zegiga shrieked and hurled herself forward. Lowanna expected an awkward and untrained lunge, but the woman had clearly used a spear before. She caught the Sethian by surprise, too, and struck it under the arm with the point of her spear.

It clamped its arm down, trapping the spear point. Turning to face Zegiga, it roared at her. It opened its mouth shockingly wide, and Lowanna could see the bloodred flesh of its tongue and the bloodred tissues inside its mouth.

Zegiga didn’t let go. She held onto the spear with both hands. The Sethian pivoted, dragging Zegiga sideways across the ground. The movement skinned her knees raw instantly and she left a pink smear of blood on the grass and soil.

And then a second of the young mothers charged with her spear. The third sprang after her at the same instant, and they poked the spears into the Sethian from two different sides. It hissed and spat. “Look!” it bellowed. “You cannot harm me!”

It was true. Its flesh was scratched, maybe, but it wasn’t bleeding.

“Help me!” Lowanna cried. “Attack!”

François stared at her and she charged. She leaped and grabbed the Sethian by a long, square-tipped ear, and threw all her weight into it. The monster staggered and slipped to one knee. The women with spears pressed forward and forced it back a pace before it caught his balance.

Then the old women swarmed the Sethian. They issued a ululating war cry, a shuddering vibrato sound that pierced Lowanna’s heart, and they grabbed it with their bare hands. Spears abandoned, they tore at its belt and kilt and shoulder band. They tugged at its ears. They took wounds from its jaws and from its swinging fists, but where one fell, there seemed always to be a second.

“The fire!” Lowanna yelled. “Onto the fire!”

François charged back into the fray. “What on earth are you saying?” he demanded.

He stabbed the Sethian with a spear, not breaking the skin again, and then got knocked down for his trouble.

“I’m telling everyone to attack!” she yelled.

The women were swarming the Sethian, but it had regained its balance. It stood just a pace or two from the fire at its back, but now it flung the women away. It hurled Zegiga into the pond and knocked two old women senseless with one swing of its fist.

“Who are you even talking to?” François asked.

We are here.

What?

Lowanna looked around the low depression. The children had vanished, slipping off into the night to escape. But a herd of goats stood arrayed on the low depression, staring down their long muzzles at Lowanna. In the center of their line stood the wise old billy she had spoken to minutes earlier.

“Knock it into the fire!” she cried again, to the wise-faced old billy goat.

The goats charged.

The Sethian stood its ground. Snatching a spear from the earth, it impaled the foremost of the goats, skewering it entirely and sending Lowanna to her knees with a violent wave of nausea. The goat wailed as it died, a human sound that ended in gurgling.

But the second goat butted the Sethian and rocked it on its heels. The third knocked it back a step. And the fourth knocked it over.

The Sethian crashed back onto the fire, sending sparks and small coals flying in all directions. Lowanna jumped onto its chest with both knees. She felt the air leave its lungs just as it tried to howl, and then it and she were both sucking in smoke.

François joined in, poking the Sethian in the belly as if to pin it in place.

Then the women pounced on it again, ululating and shrieking, and this time they hurled stones. Dragged up from the pond or snatched from the sides of the depression, they tossed rocks onto the Sethian’s arms and legs and cracked them onto its skull. They seized Lowanna and tried to pull her off, but she refused. Seeing the fleeing children in her mind’s eye and hearing the final screams and choking of the impaled goat, she struck the Sethian again and again. François helped, kicking the monster and stabbing it with his spear, and the flailing and grabbing arms thrashed, then became groggy, and finally went still.

A charnel stink of burning flesh rose from the fire and the Sethian’s body.

François finally pulled Lowanna away. She fell to the ground and vomited.

She looked up just in time to see the Sethian’s body begin to shimmer. The fire was almost entirely buried beneath rocks, only cracks of orange light escaping here and there, but its skin suddenly seemed to glow.

And then a white light distilled itself from the body of the dead Sethian. It drifted toward her, and blinked out of existence the moment it touched her, leaving only a slight tingle in her leg as evidence that it had even been there.

Most of the women were no longer watching. They had already rushed to the edges of the depression to gather up and reassure the children, and to look for further threats.

One woman turned and faced the three standing stones that watched from above. “The gods!” she shrieked. “The gods have delivered our children!”

François laughed. “The gods, and Lowanna Lancaster.”

The wise-faced billy licked Lowanna’s face and bleated.

Not many Two-Legs speak our tongue these days.

“No, indeed,” she said. “Not many. Are there other Big Two-Legs here tonight? Here or at the village?”

Not tonight.

Eventually, François and Zegiga helped her to her feet. She passed the shuffling walk back to Ahuskay in stunned silence, and when she arrived, someone she couldn’t see made her drink cold water. Gradually, she found herself standing in a small circle with the Godspeaker, the Tribespeaker, and Marty.

“I failed,” she said immediately.

Marty put a soft hand on her shoulder. She wanted to lean against him and wrap herself in a comforting embrace, but kept her feet.

The Godspeaker spat on the ground. The bones pushed through his cheeks quivered with emotion.

“No.” The Tribespeaker shook his head. “We killed one Ametsu here at the village. You and your speaker killed the other one at the hiding place of the children. You saved the lives of all our children. You did not fail.”

“A woman died before I could save her.” Lowanna flinched, remembering the sight of the Sethian slurping down her liver. “I didn’t learn her name.”

“Her name was Kahina,” the Tribespeaker said gently. “She was my mother.”

“A life is forfeit.” Lowanna found she was crying, and she swallowed, trying to dam the tears. “Let it be mine.”

“I knew about my mother’s death,” the Tribespeaker said. “I heard it from Zegiga. Is Zegiga’s a name that you know?”

“Yes,” Lowanna said. “She was very brave in rescuing her children.”

“Zegiga told me about your reckless courage,” the Tribespeaker said. “She told me also that you summoned the animals themselves to fight the battle with us. She told me that you are worthy of my esteem, that you all are. And do you know why I place so much weight in what Zegiga tells me?”

“Because she’s fierce and loyal,” Lowanna said.

“Yes,” the Tribespeaker agreed. “And because she’s my wife. There will be no more deaths tonight. The Tribe has spoken.”

“Except deaths of Ametsu,” Marty said.

The Tribespeaker looked surprised. “You have appetite for more blood, Seer?”

“No,” Marty said. “But if we wait, the other Ametsu will realize that we’ve defeated these two. We can retain the initiative, and maybe catch them by surprise, if we attack tonight.”


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