Taken: The Life of Uktesh Book 3 (18 page)

She hugged Basam before he walked away and said, “I’m so sorry.”

Basam smiled sadly and said, “Basam knows if you hadn’t led that charge Basam would have lost all of his children here.

The force slowly started to move out.  Laurilli jogged to the prisoner, ordered him tied to a horse, and Walked to the front of the troops.  “Men!  We have to find a tunnel that goes from this side of the mountain through to the other side. It’s only if we find this tunnel will we have a chance to protect our countrymen.  So now’s the time to run!”  She turned and ran up the hill as twelve hundred soldiers followed her.

As she ran harder and faster than she ever had before, tears blurred her vision. She cursed herself for a fool, and an idiot,
of course they would have a bone to pick with Uktesh!
She prayed she could get to Heathyr and Lana and the kids in time to save them from the army heading toward their home. 

She ran for as long and she could, not looking back, not wanting to see how few had been able to keep up with her. The day which had started out so well, had now turned to dusk, and she had a brief moment of wonder about how she’d run as hard and as long as she had. She realized that she was getting tired, and so she slowed down to a walk and started to look for the tunnel before night fell and complete obscured her vision. 

Belial said, “You run as well as any Beletarian, probably better considering none of us are, what six or seven months pregnant?”

She smiled her thanks for the compliment and said, “Seven.”

Belial smiled and said, “If all the women in your country are like you, our own war against your people may have been destined to fail.”

Several Beletarians ran passed them and she asked, “If Uktesh was here would Belario have tried to kill him?”

Belial smiled and said, “You caught that, huh?  Dangerous indeed.  If you ever get tired of Uktesh and wish to switch husbands just let me know.  It’s complicated between Belario and Uktesh.  Belario never beat him, not once, but now he’s a grand master and able to use the perfect form one hundred percent of the time.  Then you tell us that the ultimate achievement of mastering all the forms isn’t the pinnacle, and what’s more Uktesh, his rival, has already ascended to stand above him once again.”

Laurilli said, “If I know Uktesh, and I do, by the time we see him again, he’ll have ascended to yet another level.”  She found a cave hidden by some trees, she said, “This might be it. I’ll check it out. You gather the troops,” and then walked into the cave.  She smelled and heard a horse, or horses.  The next thing she knew, she could feel a knife held at her throat.  A wave of sadness overwhelmed her.
I just let my back up walk away!  And now I’m going to be killed, by a thief or a mugger, or maybe a bandit.
 

Courage tempered by caution rose up inside her.
Yes, I’m scared and I don’t want to die, but I damned well am not going to die without a fight, even if it’s a quick one.  I can’t wait for Belial to return as that could be in a minute or fifteen.
  Her training with Uktesh in unarmed combat against armed opponents had not been stressed, and half the time when he was behind her with a knife to her throat they’d ended up wrestling in a completely different way.  Laurilli had been learning how to fight for nearly two years and knew the value of her own body as a weapon. 

With her right hand she stabbed up blocking and disengaging the knife from her neck.  Next she held one arm at bay as she sank her teeth into the other arm and bit as hard as she could.  With a quick twist of her waist, a repositioning of her feet, and force applied to the arm she held, she had the knife hand and arm in a submission hold.  Her forearm was bleeding shallowly where she’d blocked the knife, but other than that she was fine.

She kicked the back of her attacker’s legs, forcing him to kneel, then twisted and wrenched his arm behind his back and tied his arm to his neck with his belt, so that if he tried to move his arm he’d choke himself.  Laurilli grabbed his other arm and forced the man to lay on it.

Her would be mugger said, “If you’re going to kill me, you Beletarian garbage, then do it, and be done with it.”              

With a shock Laurilli recognized the voice, “Three?  Is that you?”

She could hear Three’s sneer in the darkness, “So my reputation precedes me.”

She sighed and said, “No, idiot it’s me, Laurilli.” She let him go and he untied the belt.

He sighed, “So it is. I had been cursing myself that after I had gotten the drop on you, you not only got out of my attack, but to reverse it.  Now, however, I have to say your true training is coming to the front. Please untie me. I can’t get this with one hand.”

Laurilli lifted her eyebrow and said, “I tied it while subduing you; figure it out.  And what do you mean true training?”

Three said, “You’re either from Beletaria, or you’ve trained there. Don’t deny it, anyone who had ever watched you fight could tell that.”

Laurilli said, “Yet you let me join the training. No. You made me.”

Three said, “I knew as soon as I saw you. Why do you think I had a one-armed girl far too young to be there forced into a sword fight?  Though why your father beat the crap out of me is still beyond me.”

Laurilli said, “Because he didn’t want me to have to fight that boy.  That boy had basically sexually assaulted me a few months earlier while we fought in the tournament.”

Three said, “Oh. Now I understand.”

Laurilli asked, “Why did you let me join?”

Three said, “A one-arm girl barely into womanhood?  I knew that you’d improve all of the recruits skills, just by constantly beating on them.  I never guessed that you’d want to actually train them as well.” 

Laurilli said, “So when the training was over, why did you leave them under my command?”

Three said, “I thought that you did a really outstanding job and that you frankly were deserving of the rank. Now, the truth comes out. You were a spy all along.”

“What?  No I wasn’t. We were ambushed. I killed several before, wait, an Imperial spy or a Beletarian spy?  I need to know what you’re accusing me of.”

Three said, “A Beletarian spy!”

Laurilli said, “They came with us after we won the skirmish. We got intel from a captured Imperial trooper that they were attacking Manori.”

Three shouted, “Liar!  I was there!  I saw you run!”

Laurilli felt her face flush from anger and embarrassment, “Did you see me kill them with my knives?  Did you hear me tell the company to stop and reverse?  What about the other leaders, who didn’t follow up with their scouts?  Are they spies too?  I was specifically told not to do anything, which is why I didn’t, until I realized that we were walking into a trap.”

Three asked, “Then why did you have a spare horse ready?”

Laurilli didn’t know what he was talking about and replied, “What spare horse?”

Three said, “How did you make it here?”

Laurilli said, “I ran.”

Three raised his right eyebrow, his eyes hard, and said, “You ran?  You’re look nine months pregnant!  You’re practically about to burst!”

Laurilli slapped him and said, “Yes, I’m big, no need to be rude about it, but I’ve always been good at running, so I ran, and I lost myself to the run.”

Three said, “It took me all day to get here, and that was pushing my horse hard.”

Laurilli thought about that, then thought about the fact that Three had run by himself too, “You ran from the fight?  What about the people you left behind?”

Three said, “Right back at you kid.”

“But I was being a coward, and I was afraid for my child!  You’re one of the ten and you never went back. I did.”

Three said, “That can’t be true, if you went back that means you ran up this high that quickly when I had at least an hour head start.  Being a Number doesn’t mean that I don’t know the difference between a fight I can win and a fight that my death won’t help at all.”

Laurilli said, “Why’d you ride here?”

Three said, “This cave runs all the way through the mountain and comes out near Manori in Sinia. I had planned on going through to the other side. It’s about a two-day trip through the mountain, I was going to warn the people that there was an army on the way, but I would guess that, that is not in your plan.”

Laurilli saw that Three had finally untied himself and she said, “You guessed wrong. I’ve got twelve hundred with me and we are going save the people of Manori. One of my lieutenant’s betrothed, his kids, and my mother. Trust that we will fight to the fullest extent of our power to save them.

Three said, “That I believe, but how am I to know that once they’re saved you won’t just run off.”

Laurilli asked, “What do you mean?  You’re the only one that ran and kept running from that fight. For now you are still my prisoner, in the sense that I have weapons and you don’t. So we are going to wait for the rest to show up then we’ll start moving into the mountain and we won’t stop until I say so.”

They waited another several minutes before Belial walked in and said, “Everyone has caught up except for those that had a late start due to climbing over the rocks.  Who’s your friend?”

Laurilli said, “This is Three.”

His face drained of all emotion and he asked, “This is one of the Numbers?  Move aside. Before they were called Numbers they killed my village.”

Laurilli said, “No, that was during a war. They were just doing their job.”

Belial said, “You don’t understand, they weren’t just doing their job.  They slaughtered women and children and took perverse joy in doing it!  Other units were rotated out, but not them; they stayed and fought long after they should’ve gone home--because they were too busy raping and killing my people.  Move aside.”

Laurilli said, “But not all of them?  Not their leader. Not Number Four.”

Belial said, “I don’t know them by their numbers.  What weapon was Four a master of?”

Laurilli said, “Dual swords.”

A strange light entered his eyes and he asked, “Do you know who Four is?  I would pay you any price for the chance to kill that one!  That one was the worst!  He’d let children escape the fighting only to hunt them down.  Sometimes he’d hunt them down only to let them go again, and hunt them down again and again.  Sometimes he’d just kill them.  Sometimes every time he caught up to them--let me remind you these are children--he’d cut off a body part and let them go only to hunt them down again.  That one took sadistic pleasure in hunting down the helpless.  The pattern seemed to show that the more capable children he’d either just kill or let them go.  There was no rhyme or reason to it either.”

Three started to laugh and said, “Yeah. Those were good times.  See Four’s smart, he knew what randomly killing, maiming, and freeing children would do for your morale.  We Numbers became the bogeyman for more than one generation for an entire country.  If every time we attacked everyone was killed it would become a sad and cautionary tale, ‘beware the Numbers.’  Four knew that the ‘why’ of it would freak you out more than just killing everyone and everything.”

Laurilli took a step away from him, “You’re a monster!”

Three said, “You know we caught Uktesh once.  He led us through one of the most tiresome chases we’d ever gone through, and he hadn’t even been running from us.  Just running.  Then we come back from a job well done only to hear about this boy that turned the tournament upside down, and bankrupted every bank and every money lender in Baenok.  We had a good laugh over than one!  To think that indirectly we’d caused that was a good laugh.  When I think back I don’t really regret letting him live.  Some I regret killing; at least I regret killing them before I could use them more.”  Three drew his tongue across his lips, “There was this one girl-”

Laurilli didn’t realize that she’d thrown her knife until she saw it imbedded in Three’s eye. 
They are heroes here in Sinai.  They’re heroes and we don’t even know they’re monsters. 
Laurilli sat down on a rock and cried. 
My father’s a monster!  First the Afflicted thing and now this!

Basam entered the cave at that moment and shouted, “What did you do to her?”

Laurilli said, “He didn’t do anything, Basam, but thank you.  I just learned that the Numbers need to die.”

Basam said, “All of them?  Basam doesn’t understand what happened.”

Laurilli said, “I thought they were heroes, but it turns out they’re villains.” 

The cave entrance was suddenly very full and people. Someone shouted, “Who killed Three?”

Laurilli didn’t say anything, but took out a second knife and after she removed his shirt, she carved, “rapist,” into his chest.  She left both knives in the body.

Silently the group started to walk deeper into the cave.  The Beletarians demonstrated that they were prepared for anything as they created several torches and lit them one by one as they walked into the darkness.  Belial lead the way with Laurilli following him.  They’d been walking for a few hours when Belial asked, “So you think you’re a coward, huh?”

Laurilli said, “What?”

Belial said, “I was listening before I walked in, and you said that you were a coward. What did you mean by that.”