"Don't be glad or mad,

O, be very very sad,

When the Low Horn blows for you!

Don't run or move slow,

'Cause where you gonna go,

When the Low Horn blows for you?

Don't cry or go far,

Hey-hey! Stay right where you are,

'Cause the Low Horn blows for you!"

– A hopscotch rhyme by Wyrmdov chidren

In a flash, Dorja raised her weeping-hands above her head and ignited her palms. When the faery lights shone, they illuminated half the alley. All four men leapt back like they had just realized they stepped on a hive of swiftsnakes. Dorja took the initiative, spinning the glaive in her reaching-hands and launching herself at the two men behind her. She raised the weapon high in the air and brought it down on her opponent’s rapier so hard that the weapon fell from his hand and clattered to the ground. She kicked it away, and spun the glaive so that the dull end of the shaft was pointed at his chest, and struck his sternum. With a grunt, he fell backward, gasping for breath.

Dorja continued with her momentum, moving forward and swinging for another man’s sword hand. He brought his free hand up, and her blade glanced off a steel bracer around his wrist. He thrust his dagger at her chest. Dorja parried it away with a weeping-hand, then parried his rapier and gave him a teep-kick to his gut, sending him backwards, tripping over a bag of trash someone had tossed into the alley.

Movement from behind! She heard it clear!

Spinning back around, she was just in time to raise her glaive and block the leader’s attack, as well as the next three. He came at her with unfiltered ferocity and with surprising power and speed. But Dorja knew these movements. He was using the basic five angles of attack that any half-decent killer used. And while he knew them well, his limited skillset caught up to him, and Dorja matched her blade to his and performed a gissard, her blade sliding down his until it smacked the handguard, pushing the weapon hand off center and exposing his hand. Dorja stabbed at it, her razor-sharp blade slicing off two of his fingers. The man screamed, dropped to his knees, and clutched his bleeding stumps.

The fourth and final man was even more talented, performing the twelve basic strikes of Illustrisimo, over and over. High-low, then low-high, then high-low-high and low-high-low, then mixing it up, performing ascending flourishes, one or two of which skated through her defenses and cut across her armored sleeves, biting deep. Dorja backpedaled as she deflected, then shuffle-stepped to one side, lured him in, and left herself open a smidge in order to invite his attack.

With a primal roar, he lunged at her, and she performed a C-step, circling out of his way, allowing him to overextend and stumble forward. Dorja stepped in from behind and at an angle, shot out her right weeping-hand in J’ing fashion, hissing as she did to expel the breath, exactly as Master Korvix had taught her. Her arm struck his jaw with a sickening crunch, and two of his teeth fell out—

He reached for her, grabbed her armor by the collar. Dorja married her hips to his, wrapped an arm around his neck, and completed a hip throw, smashing him into the ground before dropping a knee onto his head. He was half unconscious, blinky and moaning, eyes searching for something.

It was over in less than twenty breaths. She looked at them all on the ground. The leader was screaming curses in a dialect she didn’t understand, pulling off his jacket and wrapping his hand with it to stop the bleeding.

“You witch! You’ll pay for this! You fei’ya? You’ll pay, you-you!” he screamed.

She pointed one of her weeping-hands at him, so that the faery lights could illuminate his wound. Didn’t appear to be too much blood. And they were just fingers, you could regrow those, or find replacements. Might be a bit pricey on a place like Wyrmdov, might take some time, but it could be done.

“Be thankful Dorja is merciful,” she said. “Even to navel-dwellers like you.”

One of the others stood and tried to run. Dorja quickly swept the dull end of her glaive at his feet and tripped him. He fell forward, faceplanting. She stood on his ankle and put all her weight on it and he screamed. Then she turned the tip of her blade on another man, the one she had flung to the ground. Through bleary eyes, he stared at her sharpened compristeel blade, then snarled up at her.

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

“Now, where is this…House of Red, did you say?” Dorja asked. “They know where Lullock is? And Lullock is the leader of the Hekkites?”

“I’m not…telling you…nothing, me! You fei’ya, witch? Nothing!”

“Dorja is merciful. She will not take lives, no matter the evil done.” She cast him with a baleful gaze, and her eyes glittered. The same chemical bioluminescence that cast a light from her weeping-hands could also, on occasion, take place deep within her eyes. Like her mother, it happened at times of extreme anger, and her eyes glowed icy-blue. “But Dorja will hurt you, brothers. All of you. Like a mother spanking her child until she gets the truth, only you are men, and your crimes are far worse than just lying. So a spanking will not do. Dorja has ways to undo you so no surgeon can fix you, no synthflesh can heal you. Tell her!”

“Lullock will kill you, him!”

“Then tell Dorja where he is, so you can have your vengeance more quickly.”

The man glared at her. They all did. One of them had stood up and was walking slowly over to where his disarmed sword lay. He was thinking about picking it up again. Just thinking about it. But he saw how close her blade was to his friend’s neck. And he saw that Dorja was watching him…with those icy-blue eyes.

“Dorja came a long way for the girl,” she said in a low tone. “And Dorja will not leave the girl alone, is that understood? So, tell Dorja—”

Suddenly, a horn blew.

Dorja looked around the alley. It was loud and low and it seemed to come from far away. She heard raised voices, people calling to each other. She thought she heard someone scream, “Get inside! Get inside!” The horn kept blowing. Sounded like it came from loudspeakers, though Dorja could not see any such devices around her. She waved her faery lights around, trying to find the source, but all she saw were smiling faces.

The four thugs were all grinning up at her. Laughing.

“That’s the low horn, witch!” said the leader. “And you don’t have to worry about finding Lullock now, fei’ya? Cuz he’s coming for you!” He laughed madly, showing rows of blackened teeth that had been sharpened to fangs. “He come now for you, lovely-lovely! He knows about you now!” With bloodied fingers, he pulled down the collar of his jacket and revealed a strange, square-shaped mark on his neck. Looked like a lump, or something buried beneath the skin. “He tracks his people! He knows we injured! Drone saw you, it did!” He pointed up, and when Dorja looked to the sky, she saw the red lights flashing on a black, spherical drone flying overhead.

At once, Dorja had the sinking feeling of being inside a trap.

Once again, she had flung herself headfirst into a problem and attempted to solve it with direct force, just like her mother and her Master had warned her against. She’d led these men here to challenge them, hadn’t she? Yes. And you did it within the first few hours of touching down on a new world, Dorja. You didn’t even think to take it slow and easy. Without knowing more, she had gone ahead without guile, without subterfuge.

But what did it really mean, this low horn?

Just then, the sun returned. Wyrmdov had once more circled around to the sunside of Mago.

The horn sounded only louder. Dorja looked around at the laughing faces. She backed away from them, jogging to the end of the alley and looking up. The orb drone was hovering high above her. Tracking her. It was almost exactly like the orb drones that had hovered around Herenov’s castellan.

Raised voices carried all around her. Dorja saw people rushing indoors. Shop owners closed their stalls and locked up their wares and quickly rushed inside nearby buildings and shut the doors. “What’s going on?” she asked them. “What’s happening?” None of them would speak to her. In fact, some shrank from her in fear before running off. Dorja looked around the street again.

That’s when she saw the giant holopanes, perhaps twenty feet tall or more, showing images of her. Dorja’s own blue face, as seen from above, was projected onto the exterior walls of almost every building she saw. There were red circles and other symbols around her face, which she didn’t recognize but didn’t need to. She imagined they translated as “WANTED” or the like.

Disorientation was brief. She looked up at the orb, and when she did, the image of her on all the holopanes did the exact same thing. They were projecting a live image of her. Everywhere. To everyone. And directly below her face, there was a large number. A price. Eighty-five thousand dah’ms. The reward for her capture, or her death?

Dorja stood in amazement a moment, gripping her glaive, unsure of what this meant. Inside, her guts flipped over. She walked out into the middle of a street, which had now all but emptied out. A few homeless people in rags and with glowing fungus on their faces were dashing for cover someplace else. The low horn was still sounding.

The first crossbow bolt hissed past Dorja’s right ear, smacking into the wall behind her. She gasped, leaped behind the cover of a stall, and peeked around the corner. She saw windows open. Not many, but a few. Now in broad daylight, she could see faces peeking out of those windows, out of doorways and alleys, some of them holding up a bow, a crossbow, a sling-shotter.

Dorja looked up at the dome. Skyrakes were still buzzing around. A couple of wyrms, too. Small ones. She noticed a couple ’rakes descending to nearby rooftops. Another crossbow launched from a window across the street and hissed past her face. A serpens alighted at the end of the street, and ten men armed with blades leapt off the wyrm’s back.

She was surrounded. The city had turned against her.

They were coming for her.

image [https://i.imgur.com/f6fHUfp.jpg]