Warp World (66 page)

Handlo glanced over his shoulder. Tirnich moved up beside him and signaled for Seg to stay close. They swept the terrain with their chacks, creeping silently in the shadow of the pinched defile.

“Map data puts us close,” Tirnich whispered.

Handlo lifted a palm to signal for quiet and cocked his head to listen. Seg and Tirnich froze in place. At first there was only the relentless drone of wind, but in moments the afternoon silence was broken by a series of blood-curdling whoops. All heads jerked up as a body crashed over the edge of the defile, tumbling down toward them, accompanied by a babble of sheer terror. As the figure rose to his feet, Handlo aimed his chack, finger sliding to the trigger.

“Wait!” Tirnich darted forward.

Seg glanced at the man—no, the teenager—who held up his hands as he continued his terrified ranting. He was dressed in the distinctive longcoat of the Etiphars but obviously had no intention of attacking.

Another whoop sounded from above. Seg lifted his chack and aimed above the rock face. More figures appeared, dark outlines against the pale sky.

“Tirnich! On high!” Seg shouted, as the men above them wound up slings. He squeezed off a burst of spines as he shuffled sideways. Stones, fired from the slings, crashed around him. Handlo and Tirnich added their own fire. A stone cracked against Seg
’s
helmet and sent him reeling into the rock wall. Another flung stone whacked against his arm, punctured flesh, and bit into his bicep. In seconds he was swept by a cold, burning rush and numbness spread from the wound.

Poison.

His arm fell uselessly to his side; Tirnich grabbed his harness and started tugging Seg back the way they had come. Ahead of them, amid the
thocks
and crashes of hurled stones, the young Etiphar was already rounding the corner with a surprisingly fast hopping hobble. Handlo brought up the rear, shifting his sights from left to right as he tried to make their attackers flinch away. A body tumbled from the walls as one of Handlo’s shots struck home. Seg glanced at it before freeing himself from Tirnich’s grasp.

The body was squat and lean, the skin dark and head shaved—nothing unusual for desert dwellers. It was the distinct red arrow painted on the man’s face and skull that held Seg’s attention longer than he could afford. The formal name of the tribe of Outers eluded him but colloquially they were known as the Bloodarrows.

Couldn’t be.

Seg stumbled, the poison spreading swiftly through his system. Tirnich reached out to grab him. “Don’t worry about me! Shoot the bastards!” Seg shouted.

Releasing Seg’s arm, Tirnich aimed high. Spines tore through the air with an incessant whine. But for every attacker that fell back, it seemed another took his place. A stone caught Tirnich’s rifle and sent a stream of spines clattering against the rock walls.

“Too many!” Handlo said, firing off continuously.

Seg lifted his chack in front of him and forged ahead. “Keep moving!”

The barrage continued, rocks pelting down like vicious rain. Tirnich and Handlo kept tight to Seg, ducking the worst of the blows. “Almost there,” Tirnich said as they neared the end of the narrow rock corridor.

Above, one of the bolder attackers crisscrossed the defile and leapt to the ground. His face and chest were splattered with fresh blood but Seg could see no injury.
He’s not wounded, that’s not his blood.
Images from his training offered the explanation and, for a second, his stomach lurched. Studying cannibals was not the same as facing one whose meal you’ve just interrupted.

The lone attacker pulled a saw-toothed bone blade from a sheath and ran at the trio with a shrill scream. His scream was joined by another, but the second noise was not human. Everyone looked skyward at the sound. It came once more, a piercing avian cry. A leather-winged shadow descended in a swoop and snatched one of their attackers from the rock. The creature pulled the shrieking man into the sky. Blood poured down as razor talons sliced open flesh. With cries of terror the attackers fled from the rock face as the creature screeched another hunting call.

Down in the defile, the moment stretched as Seg, Tirnich, and Handlo looked back to their suddenly isolated attacker. He gave one more glance above and lifted his bone sword. Three streams of spines slashed into him and he howled wildly before collapsing to his knees, blood gushing from his mouth.

Tirnich, chest heaving, looked at the fallen man, then to the sky. “Nen’s death, what was that?”

“A perasav.” Seg panted as he stepped up to their fallen assailant, who was gurgling his final breath. “Supposedly extinct.” With his chack, he nudged the dead man’s hand to one side, to study his markings. “Much like this one.”

“Is it gone?” Handlo scanned their slim view of the sky.

“For now. It will pick off the easier prey, above us,” Seg said.

“And them? Are
they
gone?” Handlo glanced down at the corpse.

Tirnich, looked left to right. “Doesn’t matter, we have to move. The lieutenant says—” He stopped in mid-sentence and turned in the direction from which they had come. “The kid! We have to find him!’

Seg nodded to Handlo as Tirnich jogged off. “Go with him.”

Seg slung his chack and dragged out his auto-med. The cool numbness was radiating up to his collarbone now, the poison would be moving toward his heart.

“A rock. What a dumb way to die.” He sagged against the wall, wrapped the sleeve around his forearm, and cued up the machine. His tongue felt thick and he resisted the urge to guzzle water before he had a report from the auto-med.

Bloodarrows, a perasav, and an Etiphar boy wandering outside the Keep? What other secrets were the wastelands hiding?

In moments, Handlo returned. “Tirnich says you need to come right now.” He turned to leave again but quickly added, “Sir.”

“Help me up.” Seg extended his hand. The progress line on the auto-med was taking an appallingly long time to tell him if he was going to die, but he would damn well be productive in the meantime.

Handlo pulled Seg upright and positioned himself to take the tall man’s weight as best he could. “Kid’s in a state,” Handlo said. “Tirnich can’t calm him down and whatever language he’s talking isn’t in our chatterers. He’s scared, though, worst
I’ve ever seen.
”

As they stepped out into the open once more, Seg could see Tirnich grasping the boy’s torn coat to keep him from running.

“He’s half dead, and his ankle looks busted from the fall. I found him trying to crawl out on his hands and knees. I know he’s from the Keep, because of the coat, but he doesn’t speak your language.” Tirnich spoke loudly, in order to be heard over the frantic mutterings of the young Etiphar.

Wide-eyed, the boy turned to Seg, tears muddying his face as he pled and pointed.

At the same moment, the auto-med on Seg’s arm chimed. He glanced at it long enough to determine it had recognized the venom and had a stock antivenin that it was busy injecting. Apparently he had an eighty-four percent chance of survival. Good odds.

He looked back to the Etiphar. “The language is a blend. Older words and phrases my People don’t use anymore, mixed with what must be some native language. The
Eaters
, that’s probably a reference to our attackers. The Bloodarrows practiced cannibalism on their home world. It sounds as if they may have killed this boy’s friend. Hold on.”

He pulled loose from Handlo and fell to his knees as his stomach emptied. He vomited the remnants of ration bars onto the rocks until there was nothing left, and rode out a wave of dry heaves. Finished, he wiped his mouth and accepted help from Handlo to stand again. “We need to move.” He gasped to catch his breath. “Now. We’re taking him with us. Slap on an auto-med for his pain and let’s go.”

Tirnich nodded and tried to communicate to the boy through gestures. Understanding dawned, and their captive let Tirnich fix a cuff around his arm. “Didn’t know why he was out here, Theorist,” Tirnich said to Seg as he brought the machine online, “but as soon as I saw the fancy shoulder decorations were missing off his coat, I figured something was off. You said they were important.”

“It was good work.” Seg glanced back at their
prisoner
. “This could change everything.”

“You’re going to be okay now.” Tirnich attempted to assure the boy, who was not much younger than him. “Our camp’s safe.” He gestured to himself with his free hand. “I’m Tirnich, Tirnich Kundara. You got a name?”

The boy nodded, eyes darting everywhere before he wheezed a reply. “Hephier Bendure.”

Seg’s head whipped around at the name. “Bendure?”

“That name mean something, Theorist?” Tirnich asked.

“It did a century ago.”

Inside the Field Headquarters, Ama and a small crowd watched Elarn tend to the Etiphar boy. An even larger crowd hovered just outside. The arrival of the prisoner had ignited a blaze of curiosity among the Kenda, despite Fismar’s best efforts to quell it.

Elarn had set to work on his injuries right away but Seg had insisted on questioning the young man as he worked. Though she sympathized with the boy’s pain, Ama knew Seg wanted to dig out as much information as possible while the patient could still speak.

“How many defenders? All men?”

As Seg spoke, Elarn simmered with quiet disapproval and attached another lead to the young prisoner’s arm. Fismar watched impassively. Ama’s emotions, and Cerd’s, from what she could see, were far less subdued.

“He’s just a boy,” Ama said under her breath. “Who throws a child out into the wasteland?”

“Did my first Hard March out here when I was a bit younger’n him,” Fismar said.

“That doesn’t make it right,” Ama said.

The boy spoke softly to Seg, who had re-tuned his chatterer to compensate for the antique language of the Etiphars. Elarn reached in with a pair of tweezers and extracted a long string-like object from the boy’s back.

Fismar winced at the sight. “He wouldn’t have made another day with the strings in him.”

“Strings?” Ama asked.

“Parasite. Sneaky one. It’s a kind of plant. Tasty plant, and for good reason. Something, human or animal, eats the plant, next day it’s got a garden growing out of its skin. Day after that? Dead. We call ’em p-strings.”

“The plant didn’t cause all that other damage, though.” Cerd nodded to the old bruises and scars that were visible on the boy’s slender frame. “He’s been beaten.”

“Fingers have all been broken,” Fismar said. “Right ankle was busted in the fall but he
’s got a limp on the left, too. Old injury
, you can tell by the way he’s adapted to it. Yeah, I’d say they weren’t handling him too kindly back there in the Keep.”

“How many stand watch?” Seg asked Hephier, oblivious to the ongoing discussion.

The boy replied in his own language, which no one but Seg could understand. He coughed as Elarn directed him to roll to his other side.

“Theorist,” Elarn said, using the Kenda tongue so the boy couldn’t pick up a stray word, “I understand the need for intelligence, but the boy is riven clean through with p-strings and if you want him alive by tomorrow, I need to work on him.”

Seg looked up at Elarn. “How long?”

“Give me two hours to clean his system and pull the strings.”

“Two hours.” Seg stood and dusted off his legs, as he turned toward the others. When he spoke, it was in Kenda. “We have them, we have the Etiphars.”

He relayed a summary of what he had learned.

“Sounds better’n I’d hoped,” Fismar said. “Though sixty-odd can still bottleneck the karg out of us if they get any time to put it together in there.”

“What did he do?” Ama kept her voice to a respectful whisper. “What did that child do to deserve to be beaten and driven out of his home? Look at him. He’s younger than Tirnich and Slopper; he can’t be more than fourteen.”

“He was male,” Seg said. “The Etiphar leaders have consolidated the women among the faithful. They drive out the competition as soon as the boys come of age. Useful for our purposes.”

“Savages.” Cerd spat, then lifted his chin to glare in the direction of Julewa. “So how do we get in? And how soon?”

“The Etiphars make offerings and exchange with the local
stam
, what we would call tribes or gangs,” Seg said. “So we exploit that habit. We slide the grabber in, and once the control signal goes positive—”

“We go in,” Fismar concluded.

“We go in. And, if he lives, we take young Hephier Bendure with us,” Seg said.

“Bendure?” Fismar looked past Seg, at the boy. “Seriously? Of course seriously. Damn.”

“What does that mean?” Ama asked.

“Devian Bendure, his ancestor, was a karging military genius,” Fismar said. “She’s the reason Julewa’s even an issue now. Everyone in the World coming after them, she’s the one who kept Etiphar’s Guard together long enough to get here. She got them set and dug in enough that they held out against a full wing assault. For what it matters,” he said, looking hard at the teenager, “kid’s got some impressive bloodlines.”

“Given that they’ve fallen into gender polarity, I wonder if the Bendure bloodline is discredited because Devian was a woman?” Seg mused.