The Infiltrators (21 page)

“An accomplice.”

“Pardon.”

“You’re a damned accomplice to
kidnapping.”

“And you’re a damned wanted rascal
who’s killed some deputies tonight. You’ll hang unless I pin it on
someone else; catch my drift?” he said, a glint in his blue eyes,
the only attractive feature on his fat face.

“Take me to Donive. Or I’m going to
her.”

“Now just cool down there, son. What
Rucifus wants is just for you to be the sword smith for her men.
That’s it. She’ll pay you falons by the bushel. What’s the
harm?”

“Arming anyone who works for her would
be as bad as handing a knife to the outstretched palm of a robber
holding an innocent victim with the other.”

“Don’t get all moralistic, son. You’ve
murdered a handful of innocent people tonight just doing their job
and who didn’t have anything to do with this kidnapping,” he said
with a gleam in his eye.

“Job hazard. People will start to
question whether working for Rucifus is a good thing, wouldn’t you
agree? Maybe even deputies.”

“Why you smart-mouthed fool! You could
have your wife in your arms by now; instead you’re blabberin’ about
job hazards!”

“So let me get this straight . . .
.”

The deputy turned around, a sly look in
his eye.

“If I agree to make swords for Rucifus,
I get Donive back . . . right now?”

The deputy gave Pitkins a long, hard
look like a man playing poker and deciding what his next move would
be.

“Well, tonight might be a slight
exaggeration, but once you craft a few top-notch swords, you’d have
her back all right.”

“So, basically, my wife—the woman whom
I swore to love, honor, and defend until death do us part—is to be
collateral to ensure that my stated acquiescence to your boss’s
extortion demands is in good faith.”

“Lots of fancy talk, but I think we got
an understandin’.”

The right dagger fell so smoothly into
Pitkins’ hand it went without notice, but when a flip of a lever
caused it to grow to a monstrous four feet in length, the display
was anything but subtle.

Pitkins rushed forward while the deputy
appeared to question what his eyes were telling him and stabbed him
directly through his throat. He then grabbed the deputy by his hair
to prevent him from falling and used him as a temporary shield
while he breathed deeply and then sent a side kick flying directly
into the trachea of a man rushing him like a bull.

His windpipe crushed so quickly he
could make no sound as he toppled over to the ground.

Pitkins let his shield go and
immediately introduced his left dagger to his left palm. He
adjusted it to sword length as two men came rushing him from each
side. He squatted down until his butt touched the ground and then
thrust his body upwayrds with a loud “HUMPHH!!!” coming from his
lungs as he shot his arms out laterally and poked each man through
the tummy with cold steel.

He lunged towards an incoming man and
brought his left sword down across his neck at an angle, followed
immediately by the sword’s twin brother, slicing through the
carotid and cutting all the way down to his chest.

He then sucked air more vigorously than
a whale and then exhaled loudly as he moved towards a group of
incoming attackers with a series of tornadic twists and turns that
presaged the helicopter blade.

He hacked off several legs and
disemboweled four people until just one lone man was standing
uninjured. He shrieked and went running down the street, appearing
to have decided on early retirement.

Pitkins heard a groan and went towards
it like a dog towards a bone.

The man had both eyes fully open, but
his mind somehow seemed absent from them.

“I bet you’d love a little of this
right now, wouldn’t ya?” Pitkins asked, placing a small sample of
Spicy Green near his nose.

The man salivated upon sensing the
pungent smell.

“It’d take the pain down a notch or
two, wouldn’t it?” Pitkins inquired.

He took a quick look around him and
then squatted down to one knee. He saw some blood coming out of the
man’s mouth.

Pitkins put his hand on the edge of his
deep abdominal wound and then placed the Spicy Green near the man’s
nose.

“Your choice, pal. This
or
this
!”

The man screamed in agony as Pitkins
pressed down on the gut wound.

Pitkins dropped his face down to where
his eyes were just an inch away from the man’s.

“Is she here?”

The man’s eyes twitched back and forth,
as if Rucifus was standing directly over him, threatening something
even worse than toying with his gut wound if he opened his
trap.

Deciding Pitkins was the more imminent
threat, he said, blood sputtering from his lips, “Earlier . . .
maybe still, if you hurry. HUUUUH!” The man sucked in a greedy
portion of air for his last breath, like a man making the most of
the last call at the bar.

Pitkins closed the man’s eyes and
sprinted toward the shrubs.

As he navigated the bushes and edged
towards the first sentry, he envied the Metinvurs. This would have
been their element, their world. Yet, he felt like a fish on dry
land. Open combat was his game, and yet Donive’s life was going to
depend on more than just charging and slashing.

As he continued slowly through the
shrub bushes, he saw he was near the end of this cover and facing a
large open yard. He reduced his speed even further, taking care
that each movement would not crunch a twig or do anything else to
alert half of mankind to his location.

Once he was down to a few inches of
cover left, he cautiously spread the branches just enough to give
him a peek of what he was up against.

He halfway regretted it. The front yard
looked like a castle courtyard filled with an army ready to go to
war against an approaching invader. There had to be at least fifty
people, and while he didn’t have time to do a written inventory of
their weaponry, it looked like everyone had a club, knife, chain,
or sword, and it looked like there were a few crossbows to
boot.

His heart began to pound. He didn’t
care if he died. He had faced death with a sneer many times on the
battlefield after his family had been killed, half wishing he would
be felled by a worthy opponent. But there was a sweet, helpless
innocent life depending upon his performance and not a damned soul
in the world he could summon to help him.

Sure about that?

His left eye wandered down to his front
shirt pocket. He hated what he saw Spicy Green doing to this town,
but he had heard enough about its effects to realize that it was
something he would have loved to give his Nikorian troops before a
major battle. They had often drunk savitas before large battles, a
bitter herb that could just about make you retch but that gave
enhanced energy for hours. Its disgusting taste removed any serious
risk of addiction, a protection he saw Spicy Green did not
have.

But he had had a long day, and even if
he had not had his energy drained by the combination of his prior
fights and the soul-sapping adrenaline of constantly thinking about
what Donive could be enduring at this very moment, he knew that
what lay in the yard before him would be a suicide
mission.

You owe it to Donive to do
whatever it takes to get her!!

The judge ruled, and Pitkins poured a
little Spicy Green into the palm of his hand, waited for a couple
of the men in the yard to start talking, and then sniffed up the
contents.

For five seconds, he felt nothing, and
he wondered what in the world the big deal was, but then like
lightning falling from the sky and striking the energy center of
his brain, it hit him full force, knocking him back a couple inches
as his mind rocked from the tsunami of energy that had just entered
his body.

The most energetic, adrenaline-rushed
moment he could think of suddenly felt like a nap in the shade
compared to what he felt now. He could see the god Leol smiling
wickedly at him:

You will find no peace until
you avenge your family, but first you must find Donive. I will help
you.

He remembered the oath he had made upon
finding their bodies that he would avenge them, something he had
regretted bitterly, as there was no way he could ever track down
the Varco. It would be like chasing a cloud. But he had made it,
and it was widely believed that Leol left no man in peace who
failed to fulfill his oath, though some said he enjoyed helping
people fulfill them.

Suddenly his mind cleared, the long-ago
oath being brushed aside like a simple task on a to-do list that
must make way for something more pressing.

He remembered the one time he had seen
the statue of Leol. He was six years old, and the large, snarling
face had given him nightmares for years. Now it seemed as if that
face turned into dust and went racing into Pitkins’ ears and
infused itself into his soul.

“GRRRRRRRRR!!!!” he shouted like an
enraged bear as he came shooting out of the thicket, a low sound
that vibrated his vocal chords at depths he had never come within
an octave of.

“Over there!” a man shouted
nervously.

Pitkins sliced the first man in half
with a scissor strike, the two swords coming towards each other at
the man’s waist.

With a quick expansion of air in his
lungs and a whippy snap of his lat muscles, both swords went
shooting forward into a man’s chest with a speed he had never
approximated in his best practice sessions.

Pitkins couldn’t even believe his own
eyes, as he watched himself pull out the two swords so quickly it
was as if they had never even been there, and as he immediately
spun to his right while stooping to one knee and bringing both
swords around in a perfectly horizontal arc.

A chef would have turned green with
envy as Pitkins’ two swords cut the man into three slices so
straight not even a geometer could have found fault with them, but
instead would have cited them as proof of the existence of
perfectly parallel lines in the natural world.

His breathing was deeper, calmer, and
yet more explosive when needed than he had ever felt it in his
entire life. He remembered one of his first sword masters telling
him that the legendary masters of old could beat a hundred of the
best swordsmen of modern times because modern man was too lazy to
develop proper breathing, it being a discipline with little show
value.

But now it seemed to Pitkins as if his
entire body was one giant lung, gulping up greedy amounts of air at
will and using it like coal in a furnace to fuel massive amounts of
explosive energy.

He ran straight towards his next
opponent, already calculating his next moves in advance. He jumped
up into the air and planted a nose-shattering kick to the man’s
face, stuck his sword into the man’s right trap muscle, and then
vaulted over him, slashing his throat in the process.

He heard the creak of a finger on a
crossbow trigger and immediately leaned backwards till his head
touched the ground. An arrow whizzed over him and buried itself in
the throat of a portly beast with a club in his hand.

“Watch it, Randy!!” a man cried out in
alarm.

Pitkins sprang to his feet and charged
at a skinny rail whose eyes grew wider than his torso when he saw
he had been singled out, apparently lamenting his calculation that
some other bastard would take this maniac out before he got a
scratch on him.

Pitkins brought his right sword down
towards the man’s neck at an angle. The skinny rail somehow managed
to jerk his own sword up to block it. A half-second at most passed
before Pitkins’ left sword came down and sliced the man’s hand off
neatly at the wrist.

Pitkins then spun to his right,
disemboweling a muscular, tattoo-covered hulk heading straight for
him, squatted to his right knee, and then brought his left sword
around and sliced off the skinny rail’s left leg at the meaty part
of the thigh, severing the femoral artery.

He was performing many sequences from
the fourth and fifth of the Death Dances, as these were designed
for situations involving large numbers of opponents. One of their
chief principles was training the body to never attack more than a
second or two in any direction before reversing, in order to keep
as many opponents at bay as possible.