Torrent (26 page)

“Oh,” Simon said again, this time with an enthusiastic bounce, “maybe the monster was the scientist’s first creation, and the reason it’s back here destroying everything is because—”

One of the rocks half burying the Roman centurion shifted and tumbled down the pile. I jumped a yard.

More helpfully, Temi pointed her flashlight at the body. My breath caught. His eyes were open, his face contorted in a rictus of pain. As with the other warriors, his chest had been torn open by claws and his neck slashed, but the creature must have been in a hurry for it hadn’t severed the jugular. The man tried to turn his head to look at us, but ended up gasping, short wheezing breaths. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

I wasn’t sure whether to run from him or try to comfort him. Was he an enemy? Or a friend? Or neither? Just a victim?

Temi didn’t hesitate. She knelt by the pile and took the man’s hand.

He looked at her, his dark brown eyes full of pain. He whispered something, urgency lacing his tone.

“What?” Temi asked.

I crept forward. I could barely hear him.

“I don’t know what he’s saying,” Temi told me. “It’s not English.”

I knelt at his head. “It’s Latin.” I didn’t know if that made perfect sense or blew my other theory out of the water. If some American geneticists were engineering super warriors for who knew what purposes, why wouldn’t they teach their soldiers English? Who was even around to teach Latin any more, especially the verbal form?

“He keeps saying the same thing over and over,” Temi said. “What does it mean?”

“I am my own… man? No,
erus
is master. Lord.”

The centurion turned his head toward Simon, gasped, and tried to sit up. Rubble tumbled down the pile. He spit out another sentence, then coughs overtook him. Blood sprayed from his mouth and he flopped back down. He tried one more time to speak, but failed. The rigidity left his body, and his eyes rolled upward, unfocused.

I rubbed a hand down my face, blinking a few times. All of this was too strange, too upsetting. Why’d we ever get involved?

“Uh,” Simon said.

He’d turned toward the tunnels the monster had used to leave the chamber. Two familiar figures were standing there, one holding the curved sword, its silver glow illuminating the air around him more effectively than a flashlight. Jakatra. Eleriss stood at his side, staring at us in disbelief.

I realized the Roman hadn’t been looking at Simon when he spat out those last words.

“What did he say?” Temi whispered. She must have realized the same thing.

I responded in a whisper of my own, not wanting our black-clad friends to overhear. “Don’t let them enslave you.”

CHAPTER 25

I
hadn’t needed to worry about whispering. Eleriss and Jakatra were busy pointing at us and arguing with each other in their own language.

“I don’t suppose you know what
they’re
saying?” Temi murmured.

I was still waiting for the final verdict on the language, but I ventured, “If I had to guess? ‘How did those idiots get down here?’”

I stepped away from the Roman to join Simon in facing Eleriss and Jakatra. A few minutes ago, I would have been relieved to see them. After hearing the soldier’s last words, I was less certain that their appearance was a good thing. What if
they
were the mad scientists behind everything?

The argument ended, and Jakatra strode toward us. His gaze flicked toward Temi—she’d come up to stand at our backs—but it returned to Simon, as if he were in charge. Jakatra stopped two paces from him and extended a hand, one long finger pointing between Simon’s eyes. The fact that he held his big sword in his other hand made the gesture all the more threatening. I fingered the grip of my bullwhip, though I didn’t fancy the idea of skirmishing with him again.

“You will leave now,” Jakatra said.

“We came to warn you about the creature,” I said. “It dropped in through the ceiling back there. It’s here now. Close.”

Jakatra glanced at the destroyed alcoves. “Obviously.”

“Has it attacked you? What does it want?”

“This is none of your concern. It’s—”

“Jakatra,” Eleriss whispered. He had his own weapon out, the serrated dagger, and he’d turned to face one of the dark side passages.

Jakatra sniffed the air, and he too spun in that direction. I hadn’t heard a thing yet, but their reactions told me enough. I grabbed an arrow out of my quiver and readied the bow. Rock scraped rock behind us. I whirled, expecting to see the creature charging from that direction, but it was Temi, pulling the spear out of the first alcove.

“Good idea,” Simon muttered and grabbed a katana out of the ninja’s stash.

I eyed the centurion’s sword for a second, but decided it’d be better to stick with a weapon I knew how to use. Jakatra waited in a combat stance, the sword raised to shoulder level, blade pointed forward, ready to strike.

I had no more time to think about it. A black shape charged out of the shadows of the nearest tunnel. Though Eleriss was the closest person, it blasted straight toward Jakatra.

I might have had time to loose an arrow, but I hesitated, afraid it’d turn toward me if I annoyed it, and in that split second it crossed the chamber. It had to weigh five times as much as Jakatra. A sane person would have run. He waited like a statue. At the last instant, he leaped to the side, the sword whipping around so fast it blurred.

His blow would have decapitated a lion or tiger. The sword bit into the creature’s hide, but only an inch deep. It was enough to make the creature lurch backward, a startled snarl escaping its lips.

Jakatra followed, taking several more swipes with the glowing blade. The creature batted at it with its paws, but its strikes seemed slow in comparison. Or maybe it was that Jakatra was so fast—his movements were hard to follow. One moment he was in the predator’s face, slashing at its eyes, and the next he’d hopped over its lunging reach, landing on its shoulder to run down its back, stabbing and cutting every step of the way.

During a rare moment when there were a few feet of space between Jakatra and the creature, Temi threw her spear. It struck one of the sleek black haunches and bounced off. The creature didn’t notice; it merely lunged at Jakatra.

Feeling I should be attempting to help as well, I loosed an arrow the next time the combatants were separated. It struck the creature’s shoulder, but also bounced off. Again, if it noticed, it wasn’t apparent.

“Stop throwing your worthless weapons at it,” Jakatra said. “They cannot damage it.”

I flushed. I’d understood that but had thought we might at least distract it. But if he didn’t want help…

I met Eleriss’s eyes on the other side of the fight, and his expression was surprisingly sympathetic. Maybe he’d heard similar commands from his comrade. He remained in a ready position, his dagger at the ready, but it didn’t appear to have any special properties, not like the sword.

Jakatra lunged in, feinting a frontal assault only to duck under a swiping paw to slash his sword at the side of the beast’s ribcage, if it
had
a ribcage.

The creature howled, a high-pitched noise that reminded me more of a siren than an animal’s cry. It sounded like frustration rather than pain. Jakatra didn’t have its strength or bulk or armored hide, but the predator couldn’t land a blow on him. I was reminded again that whatever he was, he wasn’t entirely human.

Jakatra eluded a lunging attack and leaped straight up, somersaulting over the monster’s head before landing on its back. He’d twisted in midair, then slammed the sword down onto the creature’s neck, right below its skull. It should have been a killing blow, and indeed another high-pitched yowl burst forth from its mouth, but it reared and shook him off. Jakatra was flung several feet, and I raised the bow, fearing the monster would charge him when he landed.

But the creature howled again, then whirled and loped toward the nearest tunnel. Jakatra ran after it, stabbing it once more with the blade and drawing another cry. The monster only ran faster and soon outdistanced him.

Eleriss called out, his tone one of urgency and command. Jakatra slowed to a trot and stopped before he could disappear into the tunnel after the creature. He spewed a few sentences full of clipped words back at Eleriss, who merely shrugged and waved for him to return.

Something black had fallen to the ground during the fight. It took me a moment to realize it was Jakatra’s wool cap—he’d lost it somewhere amidst the somersaults and being hurled off the creature’s back. He had a ponytail of dark blond hair—we’d known that—and he also had—I stared—a pair of pointed ears. The bottom halves were as normal as any person’s, but the tops… yes, they were distinctly pointed.

“Do you see…?” I whispered.

“I see,” Simon whispered back.

“What
are
they?” Temi breathed.

Jakatra stalked over, grabbed his cap, and stuffed it into his pocket. He looked more defiant than mortified that his… unique cranial features had been revealed.

“We can damage the
jibtab
,” Eleriss explained to our group without acknowledging Jakatra’s bare head, “but it is, as you saw, a battle of attrition.”

“To kill it will take a great many blows. We must set a trap for it,” Jakatra said, speaking to his comrade and ignoring us, though he did deign to use English.

“Unfortunately, the
jibtab
is clever.”

I decided not to mention that we were only down here because it had trapped
us
.

Simon raised a hand. “We’re good at setting traps.”

Jakatra gave him a disdainful sneer, said something in his own language, and stalked up the chamber to study each of the alcoves in turn.

“What’d he say?” Simon asked Eleriss.

“Do you really want to know?” I asked.

“My comrade observed that you are holding that weapon incorrectly if you wish to use it.” Eleriss pointed to the katana.

Somehow I doubted the original words had been as politic.

“I don’t suppose you’d care to explain these dead people,” I said.

“No,” Eleriss said. “You must leave now. Forget what you’ve seen.”

“We’d be happy to, but the door’s been locked.”

Eleriss tilted his head.

“The creature shoved a boulder over the tunnel entrance,” I said. “We’d need you to burn a new hole to the surface for us to leave.”

As soon as I said it, a part of me wished I hadn’t given him the idea. He might boot us out right that moment, and I was more curious than ever about what was going on down here. Especially now that we were standing next to someone who could hold off the creature…

I frowned at the train of thought. Not five minutes ago, a dying man had pointed at Jakatra and Eleriss and said not to let them enslave us. I couldn’t let myself think we were safe around them.

“There is no time for that,” Jakatra said from behind me.

I jumped. I hadn’t heard him approach. Temi, too, looked surprised and took a step back from him. No longer so intrigued after she’d heard the centurion’s dying words?

“These are all dead,” Jakatra continued, ignoring us. His words were for Eleriss. “We should not have bypassed—” He glanced at us, then finished speaking in his own language.

“We must reach the last station before the
jibtab
,” Eleriss said, striding toward one of the tunnels, not the one the creature had chosen.

Jakatra fell into step at his side.

I shrugged at my comrades, and they shrugged back. With few other options, we jogged to catch up with them. They’d have to get out when they were done doing whatever it was they were doing, and that’d be our chance to escape as well.

The tunnel we entered was wide enough for Temi, Simon, and me to walk side by side, though the floor had the evenness of a rock slide, and we had to scramble up and down lumpy hills. Temi kept up, but sweat soon bathed her brow.

“What happens if he turns that sword on us?” she whispered.

“No point in killing us now,” Simon said. “We can be cannon fodder for them.”

“Any theory on the ears?” I murmured. I’d been waiting for Simon to triumphantly exclaim that his hypothesis had been correct and that
Star Trek
aliens were real.

“We already knew they weren’t human, at least not entirely,” Simon said. “From the blood sample.”

“I’m surprised you’re not eager to proclaim them Vulcans.”

“Vulcans have green blood.”

Not to mention being make believe…

“All right, then what has red blood and pointed ears?” I asked. “The experiment of some mad scientist who happens to be a Gene Roddenberry fan?”

“I was thinking elves,” Simon whispered.

“Elves? Come on, this isn’t
RealmSaga
.”

“No? That elf is toting a magical sword around.”

I jostled him as we clambered up a bumpy slope. “Please.”

“What, they didn’t make you take mythology as part of your degree?” Simon asked. “Elves come up in a lot of cultures’ old stories.”

“Oh, I know,” I said. “They were one of the misbegotten creatures mentioned in Beowulf, and they were all over Norse mythology, not to mention that they star on cookie boxes these days. Perhaps we should ask those two if they bake chocolate-covered shortbread treats from a kitchen inside a tree?”

Up ahead, Jakatra and Eleriss exchanged glances. I had a feeling our whispers weren’t as soft as we’d like, so I dropped the conversation. Temi had fallen behind. I slowed down to wait for her. Just because the creature had given up for the moment didn’t mean it wouldn’t try for Jakatra again—or take out its fury on some easier prey along the way.

Temi waved for us to go on. “I’ll catch up.”

I waited anyway, adding my flashlight’s beam to her own to better illuminate her path. Simon waited too.

The glow of Jakatra’s sword faded from sight when he turned a bend. The passage was a lot darker with only the power of our flashlights to drive back the blackness.

Temi caught up, and we started again, only to halt when a bright yellow warmth bled into the tunnel from around that bend.