The Fire and the Storm - Metric Pro Edition: Fiction, Dragons, Elves, Unicorns, Magic (17 page)

“Quewanak, what are your thoughts on this?” she asked of the thin air, knowing the dragon god’s vast awareness would insure she was heard.

“You’re correct in assuming that I designed this community’s training with equal consideration for their emotional health and for their combat capabilities.”
He psionicly answered. 
“And you’re correct in thinking that this training program has been designed to advance steadily in difficulty over the full twenty-four year span of our time here.

“For now, a victory over a more numerous enemy feels far better than defeating a small but realistic band of demons.  The realism of the enemy, and their numbers, will gradually increase over the full score of years, culminating in fully realistic simulations.  You need not worry that you will form bad habits that lead you to underestimate the enemy, because your habits will gradually change as the training changes.  The only long-term habit you will form is the expectation that the demons will always be a bit more dangerous than they were the last time you faced them, which is likely to be a realistic assumption.”

“Ah.” Mark nodded.  “That’s good thinking, so long as the time-bubble isn’t ended early for some reason.”

“I see no reason to think that it might be, though that is within the realm of possibility.  If it ends without warning, we will have to see that these people receive accelerated training in the main time stream, assuming that the time-bubble cannot be resumed for some reason.  If we have some warning that the time-bubble will end early, the training program will be accelerated accordingly.

“But you can trust me on this; so long as things continue as planned, in twenty-four years these people will be as fully prepared and trained to wage war against the demons as it’s possible for them to be.  Ourselves included.”

“Thank you.” Talia nodded.

“Do you have any thoughts on the twins’ mental health?” Mark asked.  “Or ours, for that matter?”

“You’re all doing fine.  Don’t worry so much.  The twins have a good grasp of their own abilities and limitations.  When they’re ready, they’ll ask to join the community training program, and shortly after that their worth will be known.  Then everyone will want the twins in their squad.  Their popularity will take care of itself.

“You should have heeded your son’s warning, and been better prepared for the emotional shock of the memory he gave you.  You were still filled with loving parental concern, which is a foolish state of mind to be in when a powerful psionic says that they are about to pass you something traumatic.”

“I guess you’re right.” Mark chuckled.  “He did say it wasn’t very nice.  I should’ve known from that.”

“He told you in three separate sentences that it was a bad thing.  You are his father, and he loves and respects you very much.  That was as much warning as he felt comfortable with giving you.  He trusted you to know what you were doing.  You failed to take him seriously enough.

“He and his sister were less traumatized by the memory than you were because they actually spent a minute considering that a memory of the demons was likely to be a horrible thing, and they were far more emotionally prepared for it than you were.  You let your parental concern over-ride your intellectual consideration of what they were telling you.  It’s a common failing of first-time parents.”

“All right, all right, I get it!” Mark laughed.

“You’re doing fine.  Don’t worry.”
Quewanak repeated, and then his mental contact was gone.

“Hmm.  Maybe we should go in and see what they’re up to.” Talia said as she stood with a smile, then took his hand and pulled him to his feet with magically-augmented strength.

“Yah.  And we’ll tell them what Quewanak said about the training.  Hopefully it’ll set their minds at ease about us taking the demons seriously enough.”

Life continued without any further exceptional developments for the next six weeks.  Then there came a warm summer’s evening that found the twins relaxing in the grass beside the chicken pen.  They were six and a half months old, and were playing vlah; a basic war game they’d learned from the unicorns, played on a hexagonal board covered with triangles on which three kinds of markers were moved in turn to capture territory.  The moves on the board were only half the competition, since they each had to block the other from their mind enough to conceal their moves, which was exceedingly difficult for both of them.  As each of their turns came and they considered their next move, the other would be probing their mental barriers and offering ingenious distractions.

Then Reggie’s barriers slipped, and Helemia saw his entire strategy.

“Ha!  I’ve got you now!”
she crowed as she prepared to counter his forces.

“Wait.  Check Stripe.”
Reggie told her.

Their barriers dissolved, and they thought almost as one again.

Reggie had psionicly ‘heard’ what sounded like Stripe growling in the distance.  When they checked his rudimentary thoughts, they found that he was stalking, and that he hated his prey because his quarry meant harm to Helemia and Reggie.  And there were more than one of them.  Furthermore, he hated them because he couldn’t see, hear, or smell them, though he knew that they were there with his psionic sensitivity.  The discrepancy irritated him to no end.

The two pets hadn’t been back to the house for weeks.  They’d hunted for food, while patrolling for the Sylvan scouts who’d occasionally approached the settlement.  Now there were more than scouts; there was a force of enemies moving into position.

“Stripe, wait.”
Reggie commanded, and the cat froze.

The twins spent a long moment checking the vicinity, while continuing to play their game without any apparent distraction, in case they were being watched.

“It’s Vanakit Lamitkeze.  And he’s brought a lot of friends.”
Helemia realized.

“Yes.”
Reggie agreed.
  “They’ve cast a big domed Shield over this whole valley.  A really strong one, psionic as well as Force, I bet.  I don’t know if we can break through it to call for help.  There really is a lot of them.  And they’ve found a way to get past Father’s Wards.  We’ve all underestimated these Sylvan.  They’ve had a very long time with nothing to do but get better at being dangerous in every way.  We should’ve thought about that more.”

“They picked a good time.”
she noted.
  “Father and everyone else are all doing a training exercise.  No doubt Vanakit planned it that way; the community schedule is pretty obvious if they’ve been watching.  A bunch of them are on the top of the cliffs on either side of the pass.  They’re probably waiting to ambush us when we go home.  The rest are scattered along the ridge around the valley.  They’re probably going to try to scare us into running home, and make sure they herd us the right way.  They’ll likely wait until it gets dark, if we don’t try to go home first.

“I can’t tell what Vanakit’s thinking.  He’s gotten a lot better at Shielding, and he has a couple of the others helping him with it.  He sure hates me though.  I’m surprised he managed to get so close without me noticing.

“This…  This is actually pretty scary.  But it’s pretty exciting too!”

“Yup!”
Reggie agreed, suppressing a grin.
  “Let’s see if we can find some with less mental Shielding.  We’ll have to be careful to make sure they don’t know they’ve been Read.

“Ah, here’s one.  Just her surface thoughts and emotions, but…  Ha!  They’re just as scared as we are!  They’re scared of Vanakit ‘cause they think he’s crazy and he hurts them a lot, they’re scared their god will be mad at them for attacking us, and they’re scared of…  Something unseen that they know has been stalking them.  That’d be Stripe!  He’s about the only thing that’s as stealthy as they are!”

“They’re scared of our parents and the rest of our settlers too, especially the dragons.”
Helemia pointed out. 
“Vanakit has them convinced that it was our parents that attacked him.  They think he’s attacking us to get revenge on our parents.  Because he’s ashamed to admit he got taken by me before I was born, I bet!  And they actually think that after they kill us, they’ll be able to hide it from our people!  They really have no idea who they’re dealing with!”

“Huh.  Well all we really have to do is keep from getting caught by them for the next two hours, at most.  Mother and Father and Aunt Alilia will be done with the exercise in an hour and a half.  When they get home and find that we didn’t come home at sundown, they’ll come looking for us.”

“Bah!  Nuts on that!”
Helemia snorted. 
“Let’s get ‘em ourselves!  We’ve got Stripe and Scout inside their Shield with us, we can take ‘em!”

“I don’t know.  It’s pretty risky.”
Reggie countered. 
“We still couldn’t win a physical fight against even one half-grown Sylvan, even working together.  And we still don’t have any magic.  And we don’t know how many of them there are.”

“Well then, let’s try to get a count of them.  I’ll take the ones above the pass, you take the ones along the ridge.”

“Okay.  Then we’ll need a plan.  And it’ll be dark in about a half hour, they’ll probably come after us then.  We should move before then.  We’re right out in the open here, and I’m sure they’re all watching us.”

 A few minutes later Helemia had her results. 
“Crap.  I count a hundred and five of ‘em on each side of the pass.”

“Three hundred and eleven of them along the ridge.”
Reggie reported. 
“Five hundred and twenty-one all together.”

“Double crap!  You’re right, we won’t be able to take all of them, there’s way too many.”

“Yes, but you’re right too, we’re going to have to get as many of them as we can.  There’s too many of ‘em for us to avoid them all if we don’t.”

“I’m surprised that they’re all inside their big psionic Shield.”
Helemia mused. 
“They could have stayed hidden from us if they were outside it.”

“They have to be inside it, to stay hidden from our grown-ups.  And they think their personal psionic Shields are strong enough to protect them from attack.  I doubt they’re worried about us detecting them, they don’t think we’re any danger to them anyway.  Vanakit’s the only one who knows different, and he’s not telling them.

“How many do you think we could beat with psionic attacks before we got too tired to keep fighting?”

“Maybe thirty.  We should save that for last, to get the ones who’re holding the big psionic Shield.  So we can call for help if we have to.”

“Good thinking.”
he agreed. 
“The easiest thing we can do is help Stripe and Scout.  Scout can’t detect these Sylvan at all.  Stripe knows they’re there, but he can’t locate them exactly, which is probably why he hasn’t attacked them yet.  We can show Stripe and Scout exactly where the Sylvan are.  And we can make it harder for the Sylvan to detect them.”

“We’ll have to be really sneaky.”
she mused. 
“And that’ll be hard, ‘cause these Sylvan spend their whole lives being sneaky.  And they hunt each other all the time, so they know how to find people that’re being sneaky.”

“Yup.  So we’ll need a really good plan…”

Twenty-five minutes later, as the sun was disappearing behind the ridge, they picked up their game and casually strolled into the goat shed, which was under the edge of the trees.  There they retrieved their darts and a small water-skin, and climbed the bars of a stall to the top of the low rear wall, and wedged themselves between the top of the wall and the pine-bough thatch of the roof.  It was hard to push the thatch up enough to get under it, and it was hard not to cry out from the pokes and scratches they got from the pine needles and twigs, but soon they were in position.  They checked to make sure that Stripe and Scout were ready, then waited another few minutes for darkness to fully fall in the bottom of the valley.

It was still twilight at the top of the cliffs on either side of the narrow slot canyon that formed the pass out of the valley to the west, with the occasional beam of red dusk light still filtering through the underbrush.  The Sylvan formations were lined up right to the edge of the cliffs, knowing that their god’s gift of absolute Stealth hid them from the sight of any others.  All that had a vantage of the goat shed watched it intently.

When Stripe had first alerted Reggie, the great cat had been on the slope near the ridge on the north side of the valley.  He’d halted his stalk at his young master’s command, and a few minutes later his awareness of his prey sharpened considerably.  He now knew the locations of the closest few exactly, including their motions and the positions of their limbs, and the twins assured him that for now, the Sylvan couldn’t detect him.  At Reggie’s direction, Stripe had moved west and up, gaining the top of the ridge where the cliffs to the west began, and he’d stalked along the top of the cliffs to the edge of the Sylvan formation.  He was now hidden in the bush less than a meter and a half from the closest Sylvan, who crouched at the cliff’s edge and diligently watched the goat shed.

“Okay.  Let’s start it.”
Reggie decided.

“Wait.  Are we really ready to kill these people?”
Helemia asked.

“Yup.  You know Vanakit’s gonna torture you to death if he catches you.  He’ll just kill me quick to get me out of the way.  And we’re not good enough to stop them without killing at least some of them.  We’ll let the wounded live if they’re hurt bad enough that they won’t attack us anymore, but that’s as nice as I’m willing to be.”

“Good.”
Helemia grinned with satisfaction.
  “Just checking.  Let’s do it.”

At their direction, Scout took off from the tree he was in near the valley floor, and flew up to the top of the ridge to the south-west.  He pumped his wings hard as he flew just above the ridge going clockwise, gaining speed.