1.5 - Destiny Unchosen (7 page)

“Look out,” Jakatra yelled from above.

Temi dug in with her feet, left the fingers of one hand wedged between two scales in the bark, and slid the sword out with the other hand. Light splashed the side of the tree and illuminated part of the ground, as well as the black feline-like creature leaping into the air, a paw slashing for her leg.

Temi swatted at it weakly, afraid she would fall from her precarious perch. Luck guided her hand, and she connected with a pointed nose. The creature yowled, and she glimpsed a rack of sharp fangs before it dropped back to the ground. Countless others were swirling around down there.

“Keep climbing, go,” came Jakatra’s muffled voice from the other side of the trunk.

His unexpected proximity startled her, and that alone was almost enough to upset her balance. He caught her wrist, as if to secure her to the tree. The hilt of his sword was clenched between his teeth. Another feline leaped, but Jakatra let go of Temi and intercepted it with his blade.

She was tempted to stay and help, but he clearly meant to buy her time to climb. And what good would she be if she fell into that snarling mass of animals, anyway? She would only get herself killed. With her eyes on that first branch, she returned to climbing. Instead of putting away the sword and plunging them into darkness again, she tried to use it as an aid. She drove the serrated part into the bark like an anchor, using it to help pull her body up foot by foot. Grunting and straining—and lacking all of Jakatra’s agility—she muscled herself up the tree through will and determination. She clasped onto the branch with a great sigh of relief and pulled herself astraddle it, putting her back to the trunk.

Jakatra was right behind her.

“We’ll be safe up here?” she asked, squinting into the gloom below. There was a bump halfway up the tree. That couldn’t be one of the creatures, could it?

“Safe? No. They can climb.”

Temi’s heart sank. “Then why...?” Why had they bothered scrambling up to this perch?

“Only one or two can come at us at a time, and we’ll have the advantage, the high ground.”

Temi grimaced, not sure how advantaged she felt, sitting on a branch. Even as she watched, Jakatra slashed and stabbed at a feline that must have weighed four hundred pounds. It made a tiger look small. The animal hissed and slashed right back at him. Those eerie yips came from the ground, and more creatures started up the tree.

“Turn off the light of your sword so I can see something,” Jakatra said, a strange note to his voice. “The glow is disturbing my night vision.”

As much as that notion went against her every instinct—surely light could only help her fight these beasts—she commanded the sword to dim, as she had been taught. After its illumination, the night was especially dark, and Temi blinked, willing her eyes to adjust. There were stars up there above the trees, but she hadn’t spotted a moon on this world yet.

Clangs and thuds came from below her branch. Temi shifted her weight, trying to find a position where she might help him attack. Standing or crouching on the branch might be best, but then what would she hold onto?

“Look down,” Jakatra said.

“I can’t see in the dark,” she said, though he had to know that by now. She squinted toward the ground, though she didn’t expect to pick anything out of the gloom. To her surprise, she spotted a few glowing blue dots moving around the base of the tree. Another was halfway up the trunk. “What the—”

“Command devices,” Jakatra said, his voice grim.

“Like the ones the animals that first night were wearing? The animals you said were domesticated?”

“Yes.”

“You were controlling those other ones, right? Who’s controlling these?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh.”

Temi cut one of the shaggy felines between the eyes, then slashed at the paw gripping the branch she was standing on. The beast let go, tumbling into the darkness below. A startled cry came from it or one of the buddies it landed on. She slumped against the trunk, wiping sweat from her eyes and wishing, for the fiftieth time, she had her water bottle with her.

“I had intended to pit you against a number of different types of animals tonight,” Jakatra said from a branch on the other side of the trunk. They had climbed up another ten feet to find separate perches for each of them—and in hopes of deterring the giant cats. That had been two hours ago. They hadn’t spoken much; there hadn’t been many lulls. “Nothing else will approach while the
saru
are here in such alarming numbers.”

Temi wouldn’t
want
anything else to approach. She was so tired that she no longer cared about being trained, about her knee, about her career, about anything. She wanted to go home. And if that couldn’t happen, a glass of cold lemonade would be almost as good.

The cats were milling suspiciously at the base of the tree. She heard them more than she saw them—the silver illumination of her sword didn’t reach the ground—but those angry hisses and eerie yowls marked their presence.

“There is little more to be gained from this. You are tired and the creatures are relentless.” Jakatra, his angular face silhouetted by the glow of her sword, gazed toward the starry sky above, then at the nearby trees.

“
You’re
not tired?” Temi asked. He never seemed to be, but even he had to be worn down by the constant fighting. He was doing as much as she and with a sword that didn’t have nearly as much bite.

“I am no longer satisfied by this situation.”

That was probably the closest he would come to admitting weariness. “How many hours until Eleriss comes to get us?” Temi asked.

“Six hours until dawn.”

An hour ago, Temi would have stifled a groan, lest he think her complaining. Now, she didn’t bother to hide the heartfelt noise of frustration and distress. She hadn’t been injured yet, beyond scrapes and bruises, but her back ached from bending and fighting, and she had lost the alertness that had kept her movements crisp in the first few fights. A numb exhaustion was creeping into her body now.

A spitting hiss came from below. One of the creatures was climbing again. Temi straightened, keeping one hand on the trunk and the other on the sword. Her branch was not very wide. If at any point she slipped, the exercise—and her life—would be over.

“When Eleriss comes,” Jakatra said, “I will suggest he takes you to a portal.”

“To return home?” The notion renewed her flagging energy. Even if Prescott was a long way from the home where she had grown up, Simon and Delia were there, and they would know where to find a lemonade. And their irreverent quips would be welcome after this week of relentless training. “Have I learned enough?”

“Someone is trying to kill you tonight. It is no longer safe for you here.”

“How do you know someone’s not trying to kill
you
?” she asked lightly, though the implication that she
hadn’t
learned enough stung. What had she expected? To become a master sword fighter in less than a week? It had taken her more than ten years to start winning tennis tournaments at the highest level. Besides, she hadn’t even wanted to become a sword fighter and a monster slayer, right? She had wanted to fail, to be released from this commitment. That had been the plan anyway. Somewhere along the way, things had changed. Funny how her desire to show Jakatra that she was capable, that she was a worthy student, had turned into an acceptance of her fate.

“It’s possible but unlikely,” he said. “Murder is uncommon among our people.”

“A rule that doesn’t extend to humans?”

The creature had climbed close enough to their branches that they had to stop their conversation to deal with it. The animals always came up on her side of the tree, a fact she hadn’t missed. She lowered herself to a crouch, the sword raised for a swing. At the same time, Jakatra leaned around the trunk from his own branch.

The cat hissed at him, then sprinted up the side of the tree toward Temi. Her heart tried to jump out of her throat, but this was the fourth or fifth time one of the cats had done this, and she kept her calm, merely meeting it with a slash to the face. Jakatra had more of a stabbing blade than a slicing one, and he rammed the point into its side as it tried to fly past, to make it to Temi’s branch. Her weapon cut into the creature’s pointed maw, the magic or whatever gave it its power, guiding it deep. The animal screeched, but flung itself upward anyway, its claws raking at her leg.

She stumbled to the side, slashing again and putting her back to the tree. Her heel slipped off the branch, and she almost pitched over the side and fumbled the sword. Losing
it
would be almost as bad as losing herself over the edge.

With a twist and a wild flinging of her arms, she regained her grip on the hilt, as well as her balance on the branch, but the creature had the time it needed to climb up in front of her. It looked all too comfortable on the narrow perch. It bunched its legs and sprang. There was no way to dodge. With her back to the tree, she lifted a leg to her chest and kicked outward, her heel taking the feline in the face. At the same time, Jakatra swung onto her branch out of nowhere—from above, she thought—landing in a crouch behind the creature. He stabbed it in the back and heaved it sideways, somehow maintaining his own balance on the narrow branch.

The cat fell away, but his sword, embedded deeply in its flesh, didn’t come out without a hitch. Temi, her back still against the tree, reached out and grabbed his shoulder to keep him from tumbling after the animal. With his agility, he probably wouldn’t have fallen anyway, but he gave her a nod when he straightened up, his sword still in his hand, the creature down among its buddies again. Hopefully dead. A fall of thirty feet
should
kill an animal, shouldn’t it? Temi and Jakatra had landed killing blows on some of them, but the milling pack down there never seemed to grow smaller.

“As I was about to say,” Jakatra said, “I don’t know how the laws would relate to killing humans. Eleriss and I may be the only ones who have interacted with your kind in recent generations. It is likely my people would regard you as a trespasser. Some would evict you through the nearest portal. Others might take more drastic measures.” He tilted his chin toward the prowling predators. “I do not think anyone would be punished for slaying a human, not if it happened here. But this method of sending predators... It suggests someone doesn’t want to be caught. They must know I’m here as well. I suppose if I were to die out here with you, Eleriss would only be able to report my death as a hunting accident. Perhaps because I am helping you, I am now a target as well.”

He didn’t sound happy about that. Of course not. He hadn’t wanted to help her in the first place.

“These portals,” Temi said, “is there any way we could escape to one now?”

“They must be... created—that is not the correct word, but I do not know another in your language—with the... portal opener.”

Temi was sure it was all far more sophisticated than someone rolling up to a house and tapping a remote control to open a garage door, but that was what came to mind.

“Eleriss has the device,” Jakatra added.

“Of course he does.”

Jakatra didn’t reply. She expected him to return to his branch, but he remained on hers, standing a couple of feet away, his sword in hand, a silent guardian. She wasn’t sure when he had turned from teacher to protector, but he must think she needed protecting now. She hoped that was a reflection of the odds they faced rather than of her ability to handle herself. Fighting on the ground would seem a breeze after this.

“It is possible I erred in seeking out this isolated scenario,” Jakatra said.

“Oh?” She couldn’t remember him ever admitting to an error.

He gazed toward the dark forest. “When Eleriss gave me this task, I objected to teaching you, to teaching any human.”

“Yes, you made that clear.”

“You have been...”

Temi arched her brows.

“A good student,” he finished.

The compliment surprised her into speechlessness, and she could only gape at him.

“I do not think that killing the
jibtab
will make any difference or change the fate of your world, but I will concede that you are worthy of carrying that sword.”

Strange that it felt good to receive praise for a skill she had never wanted to acquire. “Thank you.”

“Now I see why they’ve been quiet,” Jakatra said after a few moments.

“Why?”

“They’re climbing up that tree.” He pointed to another stout trunk about fifteen meters away. “They’ll be able to leap down on us from there.”

“Great.”

A light appeared in the distance, something that reminded her of a headlamp. It was up in the air, a little higher than their branch, and it was coming their way. Jakatra, focused on the felines climbing the tree behind them, didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Any chance that’s Eleriss?” Temi asked. “Coming early?”

“That is not his truck.”

Temi thought about pointing out that the word hovercraft might be more appropriate for their flying vehicles, but it hardly seemed important just then. “Any chance it’s someone else coming to help?”

“A chance.” Jakatra turned, putting his back to her as he faced the light—it was getting closer. Whoever was flying the craft knew exactly where he was going. “Stay behind me,” he added.

Given that she was standing on a branch, Temi couldn’t imagine where else she would go, but was happy to follow the order.

The top of the hovercraft was open, and she thought she could pick out a couple of heads in there, but its headlight didn’t do anything to illuminate the people riding inside. If they had weapons, she couldn’t tell.

She expected the craft to fly closer, but it stopped, the powerful yellow beam of its headlight sweeping back and forth, searching the trees. Searching for them. The light brushed the snarling felines below—Temi tensed, because a new one was climbing the tree—but it didn’t stop there. The beam traveled up the trunk to shine in her and Jakatra’s eyes. He lowered into a deep crouch, ready to spring. But where? Thirty feet to the ground? Into the maws of those giant cats?