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Chapter 24: Panic
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“Betrayed? Noronabi alone commands my loyalty.”
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Logan rolled backwards over his shoulder, landing in an awkward crouch. Air buffeted him like the draft of a car speeding past as the llort, this one smaller by half than the last, long sheets of pitch black hair billowing as it flew, dove past only a few feet in front of him, cleaving the space where he’d stood just moments before.
It landed on its protruding, exposed stomach. Unlike the previous llort they’d just slain whose body had been that of chiseled muscle and granite, this llort was bulbous and soft, its blue-grey skin smoother, its limbs fuller and fattier.
“Huck!” Logan shouted, getting to his feet, and dashing towards the llort’s outstretched arm.
He saw Synec off to his side also moving towards the llort, and heard Ryan’s screams on its other side. Tarn certainly had the same idea as Logan.
The llort was slowly rising, dragging its knees and arms under itself, trying to get to its feet.
Logan skidded to a stop, the llort looming above him; one knee bent, foot planted in a lunge and posted on a single extended arm, its torso was straightened, its head towards the sky. Huck hung, dangling unconscious, grasped by his right arm in the llort’s thick, barrel-like fingers, over the creature’s gaping mouth.
Logan screamed, summoned his bow, knocked a paralytic arrow, and drew it violently back to his cheek. He was trembling, shaking, his body filled with fire, his mind red with rage. An unknown power surged within him, feeding on his anger, adding to it, overwhelming him, an all consuming current that rushed over him, drowned him, then filled the arrow, leaving him an empty husk. He released it, then collapsed to the floor. The innocuous ring at his finger flashed, its black lettering shining brightly with a ravenous, hungry darkness, dousing his body in ice. Logan lay in the dirt, convulsing, his spasms continuing even as his eyes turned upwards into his skull, and his mind blanked to unconsciousness.
Tarn flung Jaber at the upstart llort’s wrist, barking the invocation word of flight. He readied jakar in his other hand, its cool steel a familiar weight in his hand. He turned to look at Logan, yelling like a Numie on his first hunt, as he fired an arrow at the llort.
Not a scared battle-cry, that’s something else entirely, Tarn thought, cringing at the peeling scream. Ryan screamed beside him, likewise firing arrow after arrow at the llort’s head in panicked desperation, trying in vain to save his father from being eaten.
Jaber connected, finally, and Tarn yanked downwards, shouting the word of pursuit. He flew through the air towards the llort’s hand, grasped tightly around Huck’s arm, making an inevitable descent to its mouth.
I’m not going to make it in time.
He gritted his teeth, glancing at the boy, around the same age as his own son, then at Logan, who’d inexplicably fallen to the ground, his body racked by great, convulsing spasms. Synec noticed also, and seeing that Tarn was already closing in on the llort, changed course to help Logan.
He turned his attention back to the llort, rapidly growing before him. Moments before landing on its wrist, he shouted the word of transformation, commanding jakar to change into its other form, its killing form.
He flung the blade forwards, intoning the word of reaping. On the other end of its chain, jakar’s twin blades began to spin. They sawed through the llort’s fingers, a whirring onslaught of steel that, if Logan had been conscious to remark upon, he would’ve likened to the cyclical, spinning blades of a helicopter’s rotors.
Just as jakar’s twin blades began their sawing assault, Logan’s arrow struck the llort’s eye with the devastating force of a meteor.
To say the llort’s eye was pulverized would so great an understatement that the word would ought to be removed from the arsenal of common speech forever, discarded and forgotten for lack of efficacy and a total nonexistence of the descriptive faculty.
Where the llort’s right eye used to be there was now only a cavernous window, a perfectly spherical abscess, an utter void of emptiness. For a moment there was silence, even Ryan’s screaming had stopped. Then, like the first pioneering bout of clapping after a stunning performance, showers of dark, sickly maroon blood began pouring from the thin, curving top of the wound where the llort’s skull continued past the spherical gouge, falling through the gaping hole like a demonic rain.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The llort fell sideways towards the bent knee still on the ground, its grip on Huck’s arm releasing as the lower three fingers dropped, severed, to the floor. Tarn scooped the big man into an awkward hug, hefting him half over his shoulder, then leapt free of the llort’s falling corpse. They were perhaps forty feet in the air, and there was naught that he could do but fall through the air, brace himself, and feed Jaber and Jakar with energy, trusting their straightened chains to absorb the force of their impact.
Ryan ran to Tarn and Huck, their bodies lying in a tangled heap of twisted limbs and chain, having not a care in the world for the dead llort.
“Pa! Pa,” he shouted, his voice hoarse and choked.
Reaching them, he fell to his knees, pulling the two men apart and rolling his father off of Tarn, setting him gently onto the ground. Tarn gasped, a heaving breath, freed from his suffocation under Huck’s weight. He coughed several times, lying flat on his back, trying to catch his breath.
Ryan stared dumbly at his father’s broken body. His face, strong, powerful jaw, full beard, high cheeks, and calm, knowing eyes, was gaunt, pale, and caked with blood and dirt. His mouth was closed and his eyes were shut and unmoving. Ryan placed his face close to his father’s nose; the faintest whisps of air tickled his cheek. He was alive. Tears rose in Ryan’s eyes and fell unrestrainedly down his face, wiped away by a sleeved arm as he inspected the rest of his father’s body.
Ryan unclasped his father’s cloak. Underneath, his clothes were dirty and torn in places, but he didn’t seem to have any pressing injuries that Ryan could discern without undressing him further; that is, besides his right arm. The shoulder was twisted, rotated internally, the fabric of his jacket ripped and dark with wet blood. Beneath the hide sleeve, his arm looked far too small for Huck’s brawn. The sleeve was coated with a sheen of blood, soaked through and saturated. It sunk inwards, and Ryan came to the sickening realization that the arm had been crushed, squeezed to a pulp, a ruin of bone, skin, and blood.
His eyes continued reluctantly down the sleeve from the upper arm, and fresh tears sprung to his eyes. Ryan began to sob, rocking back and forth on his knees, hands on his face and in his hair. Huck’s elbow was simply absent, the sleeve flat, no hand protruding from its end. The upper half would have to be amputated too, he knew; their lesser healing potions had no chance of restoring that damage, and Kiens, however talented, could do nothing for it. Ryan pulled at his hair, the pain of it giving him a blessed distraction from the nightmarish sight of his father’s beaten body below. He slapped himself in the cheek, hard. He needed to snap out of this and help him, or his father would bleed out and die in front of him.
He turned over his shoulder and made eye contact with Synec, kneeling over Logan, holding him rolled over onto his side. Synec nodded at him, and Ryan spared a glance at Tarn. He was slowly sitting up, a hand to his head.
Ryan took the quiver from his back and leaned it and his bow on a rock next to him. Sniffling and fishing in a satchel at his waist, Ryan produced a roll of cloth bandages, a tin of painkilling coagulant ointment, and his healing potion. He lay them on Huck’s cloak, then using a belt knife, cut away the sleeve of his jacket.
The skin beneath was deeply bruised and almost entirely covered in blood. He unfurled the bandage, opened the tin, dabbed the ointment onto the exposed flesh a hand span below the shoulder, and wrapped bandages tightly around the whole crumpled arm. The bicep and triceps area were disgustingly smushed, the bone cracked and shattered inside. He did his best to wrap it tightly and staunch the bleeding, but within seconds the bandages had turned from a light beige to a dark red. His tears returned, falling on the bandages, mixing with the blood as he wrapped the arm in yet another layer.
He leaned over his father and delicately opened his jaw with a hand, tilted the contents of the health potion into his mouth, then lifted his head slightly. He had no idea if it was working, but all he could do was sit there, holding his father’s head in his hands, casting wary, darting looks around the clearing.
Tarn scooted backwards a few inches to sit leaning against a protruding rock. He coughed loudly, then downed his own health potion.
“Praise Skel for these,” he said after swallowing the last of the translucent red liquid, stopping the vial, and returning it to a hidden pocket in his robes.
He turned his head to look at Ryan’s work on Huck’s arm.
“You did good lad, better’n I coulda done. He’ll be alright, your father. He’s a tough one, that man is.”
Tarn’s gaze drifted past Huck, falling on the mouth of the cave behind him some sixty yards away. It loomed high, yawning like the mouth of a giant. It was silent now, but they’d been deceived before and he eyed it warily.
The potion hit him, and his concussion faded quickly.
“Al-Tarn!” Synec’s voice called, and Tarn turned to look at him.
He was bent over Logan, waving him over.
Tarn rose, placed a hand on Ryan’s shoulder, then walked towards Synec. He felt exposed in the open clearing; though the two enormous llort corpses blocked the vision of anything on ground level, there were thousands of places to hide high among the trees. Without a bow, he had no real way to retaliate without closing distance. He picked up his pace, jogging over to Synec.
The two of them hefted Logan, unconscious but graciously still, and began walking him slowly to Ryan and Huck, one of his arms over either man’s shoulder.
Both men had been injured themselves, but with the help of the healing potions they were recovered enough to walk. If there are any more of these bastards we’ll be in trouble, Tarn thought as he looked over Synec beside him. He’s in worse shape than I am, that’s for certain. The Sellis still limped, and his hair and face were caked with blood. The scalp wound had stopped bleeding however, and it seemed like he was breathing well enough. A fine warrior, that one. And Logan… he was a foreigner, sure but—
“What do you make of it, Al-Tarn-ak? His bow is of plain wood, the arrows simple. He doesn’t carry the strange ones the boy wields, which are certainly enchanted; these are no ordinary men, and Logan the least.”
Synec didn’t look at Tarn as he spoke, his eyes fixed on Huck and Ryan. His voice was low and even, somehow sounding distinguished and reserved even despite his injuries and disheveled appearance.
“Aye. I haven’t seen the likes of it myself, though stories are told of our Ka-Zak that’d break a man’s mind.”
“The shaman warriors of the sand.”
“Aye, the very same.”
Twigs and needles crunched underfoot as they trudged slowly towards father and son.
“In Sehiaha there’s an order of scholar knights, a sect more prestigious than even my own Sellis. Outside of the King’s purview, answerable only to themselves and the Protectorate, they deal in these things. Rei, they call it.”
“I’ve heard the word. You think he’s a rei user?”
Tarn thought of his chain blades, precious weapons forged by the Ka-Zak weapons masters and bestowed upon each Rider on their Day of Naming. These were crafted, imbued with their maker’s rei, and responsive to his verbal commands, the words of intonation.
“Something happened to him during this fight, I felt it. He may not be waking up any time soon, Tarn.”
They shared a look, then arrived shortly thereafter next to Ryan and his father.
“We’ll hole up in the cave, much as I’d not fuckin’ like to. Think we can move ‘im, lad?” Tarn said, nodding at Ryan while gesturing to Huck, still prone, unconscious on his back.
Ryan set his jaw, his face like stone.
“We have to, so we will.”
“Just so, son,” Synec said, nodding, his voice gentle.
They fashioned a wide sled from branches and sticks cast about the clearing and some twine that Synec had kept for setting traps, then loaded Huck and Logan side by side and began to drag them towards the cave, the Sellis and Awali Rider pulling, and Ryan leading the way, bow in hand, glistening black arrow knocked and at the ready.