CHAPTER
TWENTY-SIX
“There are Ametsu,” Kareem said. “Sethians. Three. Or maybe four.”
Marty squinted. The sun was high behind his head, beginning to sink into the west. “I swear I see camels. And the riders don’t look like Sethians.”
“No, those people are fleeing,” Kareem said. “Behind them. The things they are fleeing from.”
Marty had learned to trust Kareem’s eyesight—its sharpness, let alone the fact that he was able to flat-out see in the dark. “Time to test our host.”
Surjan and Lowanna raced forward to join their spear and sling companies. Gunther gave Marty a soft smile and a shrug. “It isn’t in me to shed blood.”
“You’re a healer,” Marty said. “Can you heal our side?”
Gunther nodded and moved to join Surjan’s fighters.
François raced back. He wasn’t running away, he was rushing to the supply wagons. Digging out more of his explosives?
Marty and Kareem reached Surjan just as the instructions ended. The spear-fighters divided into two platoons and lay down in the tall grass on either side of the trail. They wore undyed fabrics and hides and their own skin was tanned deep shades of brown and orange; huddled down behind their shields, they didn’t exactly disappear, but they became . . . inobtrusive.
Lowanna and her sharpshooters, which consisted of people with both slings and bows, scampered around behind the ridge of rock they had just been using for target practice.
Badis lay down at the front of his men on the far side of the trail while Usaden positioned himself with the warriors on the near side. Surjan told Marty and Kareem, “Usaden’s platoon attacks first, on his command. After they turn to fight us, Badis rises and attacks.” Then he went and lay down at the front of his own men, on the near side of the trail.
“I sort of want to use my knife skills,” Kareem said, “but it’s smarter to kill the Sethians with spears.”
The young man had a spear. Marty had his stick.
“Yes, it is,” Marty agreed. “Your ankh might be better still.”
“But I sort of want to use my knife.”
Marty sighed and lay down.
The fleeing camels reached them. The beasts were bloodied and panicked, foam streaking from their lips and matting their hides. The riders clinging to their backs were women and children, the women either quite young or aged, and the children all below, Marty guessed, ten years old. Several of the women were wounded. Children shrieked, and their wailing dopplered up in pitch as they drew near, and then dropped off again as they passed.
Behind them came four Sethians, with two doglike things.
Two sha, to use the Egyptian name. Two Seth-beasts, as the earlier generations of Egyptologists would have called them. Things with bodies like lions or enormous wolves, but with forked tails. And their heads were nearly exactly the same as the heads of the Sethians—the same tall, square ears and long snout on a generally doglike head.
Usaden hollered and sprang from the tall grass. His men rose with him, and so did Surjan, Marty, and Kareem. True to the training he’d given, Surjan pressed to the side of Usaden’s platoon and joined them in disciplined spear-fighting. Usaden bellowed an advance and up-shields.
The four Sethians stumbled to a halt and pivoted to face Usaden’s platoon. The sha did not. One turned and sprang at Badis’s men. The other raced after the fleeing women and children.
Cursing, Marty chased the running sha.
He yelled as he ran, freeing the sling from his pocket and fitting a stone into it. He was surprised that he had the coordination to do it, but he was able to get the stone cranking around his head, once and awkwardly, and then he let the stone fly, striking the sha in the flank.
It wasn’t much of a blow. But the sha wheeled around and roared at him.
Usaden’s spear-fighters struck the four Sethians at a brisk march, spears pumping forward like pistons. One of the Sethians fell, but the other three pushed back, swinging axes and long swords. The spears that bristled so fiercely in drill mostly bounced off the Sethians’ skins—but in two locations, Gunther saw drawn blood.
The monsters’ skin was thick, but it wasn’t impervious.
Kareem rushed past him, spear-tip raised to eye level, to hurl himself at the nearest Sethian.
On the far side of the trail, Badis’s men were struggling against the single sha. It had taken them by surprise, and they were trying to form up a shield wall to defend against it.
Gunther looked for fighters to heal. No one had yet fallen out of the battle, but he kept his eye on a couple of men who looked faint.
Kareem and two of the warriors together knocked one of the Sethians down and stabbed at it where it lay on the ground.
One of Usaden’s warriors staggered away from the fight, bleeding from a gash in his forehead. Gunther moved to intercept the man—Munatas, that was his name. Grabbing Munatas by the elbow and murmuring reassuring words, he induced the warrior to kneel and then laid healing hands on his scalp.
The flesh knit together as light poured over it. Gunther no longer felt strange performing these . . . miracles? Enchantments? But they drained him. Munatas grunted thanks and rose to reenter the fray.
Gunther looked toward Kareem and froze; the Sethian who had been knocked down first, whom Gunther assumed to be out of the fight for the duration, was rolling over onto one elbow and struggling to rise. He had a spear in his hand, and he was behind Kareem.
Kareem didn’t notice him.
Another warrior lurched toward Gunther. Gunther’s ears roared with the noise of battle and he couldn’t make out words, but the man’s arm hung at a sickening angle, and he thought he could make out pleas for help. Idder, that was his name.
But the rising Sethian would kill Kareem.
Gunther pushed past the wounded man. “Sit here, I’ll be right back.” He stooped to pick up a rock and ran.
In his haste, he had hoisted up a rather large stone. How was he strong enough to even carry it? It was nearly the size of his own chest. It might be adrenaline. But he couldn’t focus on his own surprising strength; Kareem was in danger. Gunther charged around the end of the spearmen, staggered up to where the Sethian was trying to rise, and smashed the stone down right into the monster’s skull.
He fell to his knees. The Sethian’s skin shimmered and light collected in a pool on its sternum, just above where its head was now pounded flat into the ground. The light rolled into a ball and rose into Gunther. He felt it like electricity, like the tingling before a thunderstorm. He felt it also like the same energy that flowed out of his body when he was healing, only now it was flowing in.
He stood, and Gunther felt a new level of clarity. His mind had never felt more focused. He took a deep breath and a newfound energy coursed through him. So this was level three.
He snorted. What a ridiculous terminology.
But he couldn’t deny the reality of the experience.
Badis’s men had driven the sha attacking them against the ridge of rock. Lowanna’s sharpshooters had mounted the stone and were firing sling stones directly down into the monster’s hide. Lowanna herself was roaring and howling at the monster. When it tried to scramble up the rock, Badis and his men stabbed it and brought it back down.
Usaden and his warriors had two of the Sethians down. They shimmered and were dissolving into sludge, as was the Sethian Gunther had killed. But the last of the four was wounded and flailing. He spun about, thrashing with an ax in one hand and a mace in the other, like a monstrous free-range Cuisinart, and his violence shattered Usaden’s line.
The Sethian broke through and ran—headed straight for the man with the shattered arm.
Idder was sitting, as Gunther had directed him. His back was turned to the charging Sethian, and he was slumped forward . . . stunned at least, and maybe unconscious. He was oblivious to the monster bearing down on him.
And Gunther had put him into the monster’s path.
Gunther sprinted, but he saw he was never going to make it. He looked for stones on the ground to throw or strike with, and there were none.
The Sethian raised its mace over its head.
“Stop!” Gunther shouted.
And the Sethian froze.
But it didn’t stop moving. Its muscles instantly and thoroughly locked as if it had been tased. Without control of its muscles, the Sethian’s forward momentum sent the creature tumbling forward onto its face and it skidded nearly ten feet, plowing a deep furrow into the sand before finally coming to rest just past Idder.
Gunther stopped, too. What had happened?
The Sethian snarled at him, and then Surjan and his men crashed onto the Sethian with their spears.
Marty flung himself at the sha.
He was trying to remember any advice his grandfather had ever given him about fighting wild animals, and all he could remember was, don’t do it. An animal could be diseased. An unknown animal could have unknown diseases, or this one could have ancient illnesses against which Marty had no immunity.
But the beast sprang at him, and he had no choice.
Marty dodged, forgetting for a moment that he had a weapon in his hands. Then he leaped after the monster, cracking it across its low-slung back with the staff.
It was an animal, wasn’t it? An unreasoning brute? If he could sting it or frighten it, maybe it would flee.
Unless it was rabid. Or a trained killer.
The sha whirled about and leaped at Marty, faster than he was expecting. It had a lionlike body but its head was canine. Canine, but enormous, with an ass’s ears. Its jaw yawned wide open, so wide that Marty was certain it must have become dislocated. The animal’s teeth were long and curved and they glistened about its bloodred tongue.
Marty fell back, dropping onto his haunches and wedging the staff underneath the sha’s breast. Planting the butt of the staff into the sandy soil, he let the beast’s momentum carry it forward and it lurched like an upside-down pendulum. Marty rolled down and into his shoulders, flattening himself. Time slowed. The sha swiped with its front claws, tearing through Marty’s shirt but narrowly missing his skin. Then the beast soared over him, the hind legs raking at Marty in a single blow. If it had landed, it surely would have gutted him completely, but the sha missed.
Marty continued his backward roll, a little surprised himself that it turned into a somersault. He snatched up the staff as the animal launched yowling toward a sandy hill, snapping himself into a defensive position.
He felt fluid, acrobatic, alive.
The sha skidded around when it landed, finally reorienting itself to point at Marty. Marty was already running to attack, taking short, calculated swings with the staff that left him still able to parry, and kept the length of the stick between himself and the beast. He struck it in its face twice, and it hissed like an angry cat.
Then it hurled itself at him. Marty tried again to get his staff under the animal, and this time he failed. The monster struck him with its shoulder and sent him bowling across the hillside. Marty’s enhanced reflexes brought him to his feet again. He’d lost hold of the staff, but he had his hands up, and he was prepared to instantly take another full-body attack.
Instead, he found Gunther beside him. He stood with a ramrod-straight back and held his hand toward the sha, palm up, fingers splayed.
“Stop!” Gunther yelled.
The sha roared and leaped at Gunther.
Marty dove, but he knew he wouldn’t make it in time. He saw Gunther in his mind’s eye, torn to shreds by the sha’s long talons.
A hail of stones and arrows crashed into the beast.
The projectile onslaught couldn’t knock the beast from the air or push it back, but the sha shrieked and lost its focus. It curled, cringing back from the stones that pelted it, and when it hit Gunther, it was massive and moving fast, but it wasn’t slashing.
The sha rolled over Gunther and found itself facing spearmen. Badis’s and Usaden’s warriors had arrived. They ringed it in on three sides, turning slowly as Surjan shouted commands for both platoons, pivoting so that the open side of the enclosure of spears turned toward the open savannah.
“Kill it!” a woman cried. She rode a camel and she was disheveled and bloody; Marty didn’t recognize her. “It’s a monster!”
“No!” Lowanna pushed through the spearmen, positioning herself alongside Badis. She faced the sha with empty hands at her sides. “No, it’s not a monster. It’s an animal.”
Marty helped Gunther climb shakily to his feet and met Lowanna’s gaze. “It’s wise and compassionate and noble to show mercy to animals, but sometimes, if an animal is a threat to the community, it has to be put down.”
“Let me talk to it,” Lowanna insisted.
Marty nodded slowly. “Okay. But it can’t leave if it’s going to come back and attack humans. Here or anywhere. Does that seem fair to you?”
Lowanna hesitated, but nodded.
“I don’t know what happened,” Gunther muttered.
“You stood like a dumbass in front of that monster and told it to stop,” Marty whispered. “A noble, beautiful, brave dumbass. Still a dumbass.”
“Yeah, but it worked last time, with the Sethian,” Gunther said.
Lowanna made calming sounds at the sha. They were plaintive noises, the shushing sounds a person might make to calm a puppy or a baby. The sha slunk from side to side, sniffing at the tips of the spears ringing it in, and then gathering itself into a sitting position in the center.
Lowanna continued making soothing sounds and gestures.
The sha finally opened its mouth, threw back its head, and roared.
Lowanna shook her head. “It eats the flesh of men, and will have no other meat.”
“Kill it,” Marty said.
The sha sprang forward. The spear-fighters bellowed and surged to the attack. They fell on the animal like a storm, and in a few savage seconds, it was dead.
Lowanna stood to the side and shed silent tears. Marty reached to touch her with a comforting hand, and she pulled away.
François trotted into Marty’s view holding a wax-sealed pot, one of the next batch of explosives he was working on. The Frenchman grunted disappointment that he had missed the fight.
The sha soon dissolved and sank into the sand, leaving a wet spot like a nuclear shadow.