Escana (61 page)

'Get the fuck out of my face
before I gut you, you're C-Company. If someone from A-Company wanted
to speak to the likes of you he would.'

Jimmy backed down, there was no
sense getting impaled trying to reach The Hermit, either the man
would do something or he'd stand idly by. He began to doubt that any
insistence on his part would change that.

Looking back down on the arena,
Jimmy noticed that Yalem hadn't made any further moves. Had he
devised some strange war of attrition to frighten Jakob into making a
mistake? Why would he try to force an error if Jakob's guard was
down? Was he confused as to how to proceed after watching The Hermit
adopt a similar style? Maybe he was just giving him a degree of
deference on account of his quick rise to A-Company.

'Get on with it Yalem! Stop
toying with him!'

That was Dyson's voice,
containing a clear note of frustration and impatience, why was he so
eager that this fight be done and dusted? Why was this even a fight
to the death? There were too many unanswered questions here,
something else was going on that Jimmy was entirely unaware of.

Yalem grunted in response and
moved forward, he looked like he was trying to wade through the space
between them as if the very air had turned to sticky tar.

That was when the air exploded,
buffeting them all with shocking force.

Jimmy's head ached in pain and
chaos broke out around the arena, people were shouting and picking
themselves up, it took a moment for anyone to realise what had
happened on the arena floor.

The sand settled, Jakob lay in an
unmoving heap and Yalem was nowhere to be seen. A shout went out and
Jimmy realised that he was wrong.

Yalem lay next to the far arena
wall, slumped face first in the ground, the wall behind him displayed
cracks of impact that must have come from being the focal point of
the blast.

Everyone looked to Dyson then, he
gazed down at the arena and said nothing, his expression told the
story, curdling at the scene before him.

Jakob had thrown Yalem across the
arena and into the far wall and Jimmy still had no idea how.

H
ern had
thought the weather was hot in Je'dara, he was entirely unprepared
for blistering temperatures of the deeper desert. He vaguely
remembered being carried away from the arena and assumed that what
was left of him was being disposed of in the desert. Idly he realised
that the sand had flowed too quickly for such a purpose, as if it
were a stream rushing past his head and willing him further away from
the fort. That was when he remembered that Re'tak had taken him, they
had escaped Greyhawk.

Where
are
we?
He
willed
to
the
lizard
still
carrying
him.

We are in the deep desert now,
we head for the canyons.

Why don't we stop for water?

Re'tak
grunted,
his
breath
was
foul.
The
high
sun
will
cook
us
alive
unless
we
seek
shelter,
yellow-skin.

Hern was too exhausted to argue,
he could only once remember being in such a terrible and helpless
state, at the initiation ceremony long ago. The masters had beaten
him to a pulp, exposing his every weakness and picking apart every
flaw in loud voices. It was the last test, either the assailed
crumpled under the blows and renounced their desire to join or they
crumpled under the blows and learnt how to avoid doing so in future.
No masters could treat Hern in such a manner now, though the stranger
he had faced seemed to have no difficulty in doing so.

What was that stranger we
faced?

He waited for an insightful
response from Re'tak, he didn't get one. Apparently being bested by a
mere human was a sore subject and one that his lizard friend wasn't
used to.

Hern was actually surprised by
how alert his mind seemed, it was a strange sense of lucidity that
people claimed to get when heavily injured. He wondered in a detached
fashion whether he was going to recover from his injuries and if so,
how it was going to happen when his primary carer was a giant lizard.

You think we are barbarians,
we care for each other.

The words caught Hern off-guard,
he hadn't intimated those to Re'tak in any form of message, was he
reading his mind?

The human Hern was in a bad
state, he would need to be cared for within the canyons as soon as
possible. Re'tak hoped that the alliance lasted in the far fringes of
Sah'kel, they were a long distance from the war zone and alliances
made there tended to fray the further away they seemed.

This gave Re'tak pause. How did
he know that such things were true? He had no practical experience of
the shifting allegiances of those around him, his clan had little
contact with others and no friction that he had witnessed. Where had
that thought come from?

The human's voice started to
trickle into his head, talking to himself of lucidity and seemingly
daunted by the prospect of Re'tak nursing him to health. He sent out
a slight reprimand and that seemed to startle Hern. Re'tak wasn't
entirely pleased with the workings of his own mind either, were his
thoughts becoming transparent in kind?

Re'tak, is that you? How can
you read my mind? What's happening?

The yellow-skin could hear his
thoughts too, Re'tak's confusion mirrored his human companion's.

I do not know, we seem to be
akin.

Akin, what do you mean?

Re'tak felt somewhat reticent
with regards to telling him this, no outsider knew of the activities
of his people.

You don't have to tell me, if
you think of it I will know.

The yellow-skin made a good
point, his every thought now seemed to flow forth into Hern.

Stop calling me that.

Re'tak was momentarily confused,
then realised that the yellow... that Hern may take offence at such a
term.

Thank you, do you want to tell
me what you meant by 'akin' now?

Re'tak thought of an even better
way of explaining. Casting his mind back he observed the twins again.
They were not of the same nest yet the connection between them seemed
prescient, they worked in tandem stalking their prey from a young
age, almost as if they were one being with two separate parts.

Something was wrong, the words
were wrong. He did not know this 'prescient', yet now he did.

I
know
the
word
you're
thinking
of.
Re'tak
felt
Hern
say.

He saw giant walls of stone, it
was the building that the masters used to educate the young. He felt
the sting of a wooden cane beating across his knuckles as he
incorrectly extrapolated the possible words for a single meaning.
Prescient was one of those words, he had missed prescient and his
stinging hands didn't appreciate his laxness.

He blinked, this was not his
memory nor was it shared intentionally as far as he knew.

The masters treated you
harshly for not knowing that word.

He was greeted with a lingering
silence that answered his unspoken question.

You wanted to know if the
memory you witnessed was intentional. It was not.

Re'tak almost shook his head
instinctively, catching himself at the last minute when he realised
that Hern was still dangling from his mouth.

This is very confusing to me.

A brief glimpse of a memory of
Hern nodding into a mirror, the sudden realisation that he now knew
what a mirror was. An interesting way to convey agreement, apparently
he was not alone in his confusion at events.

Hern couldn't shake it, the
endless inundation of thoughts and feelings and flashbacks to earlier
times. Dealing with it was like balancing his own self on a scale
with that of another life, in order to think he had to impose his own
thoughts over the top of the strange symbiosis. At what cost to the
original mind?

You think that I am so weak?
It is our people that have learnt this, not your kind.

Re'tak had a point. Who was he to
assume that the lizard's mind wouldn't overpower his own? What would
then happen to his body? Could one mind really control both of them?

I do not think it will come to
that, though I have not heard of a joining between different species.

Hern caught the thought
immediately after that, prior to their unexpected joining Re'tak had
not known the word 'species' existed.

Over the course of their journey
as he faded in and out of consciousness, it became a constant effort
to disassociate the thoughts he was having with those that truly
belonged to him. The heat pelted down upon him and his parched
condition gave him other more immediate thoughts to linger on that
made managing this peculiar joining even more difficult.

Turn your head to the right.

Hern looked, and spotted the
vague brown shapes in the distance, it was the only thing he'd seen
aside from dunes since their departure from Greyhawk.

We make our way to those
canyons, they will provide us with shelter and food.

Not being in any position to
disagree, he decided not to say anything further. Trust didn't come
easily to someone like him but ultimately he had no choice but to
place it in his lizard companion and hope Re'tak knew how to care for
a human.

I can keep you alive, human.
The heat must be affecting your brain, lest you forget I can hear
your every thought.

Hern could feel his friend's
concern as the speed they travelled at increased, he hoped they'd
make it to the canyons soon.

G
arth
surveyed the scorched camp, the look of disbelief plain upon his
face.

Sah'kel had been a hell-hole when
he had been forced into command before, it seemed to have degenerated
even further in his absence. What bothered him most about knowing
this was when he had been in charge they had been a fractured group
of left-behinds. The rear-end of the Empire's army left to cook in a
sandy domicile, a fighting force consisting of criminals claiming
they were reformed men.

The tents stretching off into the
distance were the Empire's entire standing army, they were meant to
be the finest soldiers in all the land united in purpose and cause.
In the past Garth had been forced to sacrifice his best officers to
promotion and eventual relocation to the main army, now he was in
charge of it entirely and none of those sea of faces he had lost were
here. Some he could understand had gone on to comfortably retire and
were now too old to be drafted, others had been much younger than him
when they had departed. Where had all the competent officers in
charge of the day-to-day operations gone? Had the war gone so badly
that anyone with command skills was lying in a sandy grave?

His first request had been to
replace Mayer with someone who knew what they were doing, he had
secretly relayed the message to his fresh-faced new runner,
Inglewood. The boy had come back empty-handed and sweating buckets,
apparently he had jogged around the entire camp and there were no
other Colonels. When asked who was running the camps he kept
mentioning a man known as Cutter. Garth had told the boy to take a
rest and had tasked Mayer with fetching the man.

The young Colonel had changed
over the last few days, his initial enthusiasm had died down
considerably after realising that he wasn't going to be called out
for any further recruitment drives. He spent most of his time pouring
over the maps and trying to think of some strategy to turn the tide
of the combat. It was looking very bleak and only highlighted further
the difference between the current incursions and the ones Garth had
dealt with all those years ago.

The lizards were territorial and
disorganised when Garth had fought them last, they often attacked
each other and the incursions he had been charged with curbing were
rarely more than a few of the creatures at a time. Now it seemed that
there was a unifying force driving these monsters south, they seemed
organised and lethal in their assaults. Their hit and run tactics
inflicted massive devastation and before any troops could be rallied
to defend the area under attack it had already been lost.