The Infiltrators (9 page)

He rapped on the door quickly, and to
his relief he soon saw Pitkins standing before him, a grin on his
face and seeming like he too perhaps had a genuine enthusiasm for
today’s lesson. Perhaps he also had cares that only swift strokes
of the sword and body slams to the mat could assuage.

“Mr. Simmers - how’s my favorite
student?”

“I’ve seen better days, that’s for
sure. But here I am and hoping to change the course of this
one.”

“A day that’s only half over holds as
much promise as a day that’s just begun.”

“In that spirit, let’s begin,” Righty
said, taking a peak at the afternoon sun before stepping into
Pitkins’ sword shop.

“All right, let’s see your progress. I
know it’s hidden somewhere,” Pitkins said.

Righty was standing barefoot on the mat
wearing a loose pair of pants he had brought with him.

Suddenly, quicker than a snake strike,
the sword slipped from Righty’s sleeve into his hand, extended
fully, and was then brought into a labyrinth of seemingly
spontaneous—yet precisely calculated—movements.

“YES, that’s IT!!” Pitkins said, his
eyes glowing with zeal, as he watched his student flawlessly embark
on the third of The Five Death Dances, the present one being Winds
of Death.

It was as if Righty didn’t even hear.
There was no pause in his movement. No nod of acknowledgment. He
had stepped foot into an alternate plane of reality, where no one
and nothing existed except for him, his sword, and the enemies whom
he was currently slaying with brutal efficiency.

“HUAAAA!!” Righty shouted out in
precisely the correct moment upon executing a circular stroke with
so much force Pitkins doubted a fully grown oak tree could have
withstood the blow.

Next, a dazzling display of
single-handed, figure-eight sword spins commenced while Righty’s
other limbs tended to other matters, such as launching gale-force
side kicks, poking out eyes, and ripping out throats.

Pitkins watched the unbelievable
display before him commensurate incredulity. Richard Simmers was a
phenomenal student, and he had always considered both his
discipline and innate talent top-notch. But what he was witnessing
right now was something otherworldly. The man before him—surely
capable of dispatching twenty competent swordsmen, should they
enter this dojo at this very second—was not the same Richie he had
seen just last week.

Any hint of stiffness. Gone. Any hint
of self-doubt. Gone.

He was witnessing pure art manifesting
itself via a human medium as if Righty was nothing more than a
conduit for some divine force currently present in the
room.

And yet, there was a certain
maleficence in Righty’s interpretation of the dance that seemed
more violent than even its name suggested. It was as if somehow
Righty had entered a different dimension, acquainted himself with
the blackest of spirits, and summoned its furious energy to be used
at his own pleasure.

When Righty finished the sequence, he
made eye contact with Pitkins for a brief moment before bowing
respectfully. In that moment, it seemed that Pitkins had caught a
glimpse of a demon, but a second later he was looking into the
calm, humble eyes of the sweat-soaked, heavily breathing hulk of a
man in front of him.

A brief moment of silence ensued, as if
some magic from the demonstration still lingered in the room and
would vanish disdainfully upon being defiled by the sound of human
speech.

Pitkins approached Righty with slow,
respectful steps, maintaining solid eye contact.

He placed a hand on each
shoulder.

“You could become one of the
greatest warriors who ever lived. Your skills defy any purely
natural explanation. Not just practice. Not talent—it isn’t a pure
enough word for what you possess. You have been given the gift
of
untricht
. That’s
a word from my mother country that means death and
destruction.

“Tell me, friend, with what aim do you
seek to progress so far in the arts of combat?”

“I’ve got a family to protect, sir.
I’ve got a ranch to protect. And, I’ve got myself to
protect.”

Pitkins continued studying
him.

“Sir, if I do have the gift of
untricht, I have yet to see it applied to the grappling arts. A
fellow at my ranch yesterday whipped me pretty good.”

“Oh?” said Pitkins, chuckling slightly.
“That’s kind of you to train with your men. Are there bandits
about?”

“There’re rumored to be. Some of the
ranch hands worked there long before I bought the place, and they
say that years ago bandits used to attack ranch owners that refused
to pay ‘protection money,’ as they called it. They’d kill cattle,
kidnap women, do whatever it took to make sure they got
paid.

“According to the stories, the ranchers
started to fight back. Those wars were years ago, and they drove
the bandits away, but ranchers have passed down some of the combat
arts to their workers over generations as a tradition. My men were
real deadly with the crossbow by the time I met them. They’ve
learned quite a thing or two about the sword lately, thanks to
you.”

“But some fellow there whipped you in
grappling, you say?”

“‘
Whipped’ is putting it
nicely. A lion slapping around its cub might not even suffice to
describe how lopsided this wrestling match was.”

Pitkins chuckled good-naturedly. “Do
you remember anything in particular that he did?”

“Well” (Righty retracted his sword and
put it back inside his sleeve), “it went something like this. I
came forward to grab him.” Pitkins then imitated Righty’s
movements.

“And then he just kind of dropped to
the ground and—” Righty attempted hopelessly to imitate the way
Halder had collapsed into a ball, rolled towards his legs, and
begun using legs and arms interchangeably to wrap up and
off-balance Righty.

If snow had started falling on a
blisteringly hot sunny day, Righty would have been less surprised
by the sudden chill that overcame Pitkins’ erstwhile warm
demeanor.

His eyes bore into Righty’s, and while
Righty maintained his gaze, he didn’t exactly find it a pleasant
endeavor.

“Have I said or done something
inappropriate?”

Pitkins shook off the chilly exterior
quickly, seeming a bit embarrassed in the process and quickly
muttering, “Sorry, it’s not you.”

“Well, sorry I can’t show you better
what he did, but the next step was—”

Righty then demonstrated as best he
could how he was then dragged down into a vicious choke.

He stood up, dismayed to see the icy
exterior had returned.

“Who is this guy?” Pitkins asked with
only thinly veiled fury.

Righty had never felt overly worried
about saying too much in Pitkins’ presence, because Pitkins was
typically a man of few questions who seemed to highly value
privacy, but this sudden inquisitive streak could be just a few
steps away from uncomfortable territory about who Mr. Simmers was,
what he did for a living, and how he managed to travel here so
often.

“You don’t like him either!” Righty
said, with a bit of a chuckle. “And you ain’t even the one who got
whipped by him!”

Pitkins’ exterior softened again
slightly, but not as much as the first time.

“I don’t know anything about him really
other than that he offered to start training the men. We had a
contest yesterday to get to see who will get moved up to Ranch
Guard, and this guy just cleaned house. I embarrassed myself in
front of all my men by challenging him to a grappling match, and
after everyone saw how he handled me I figured I had two
choices—fire him or hire him as combat instructor.”

Pitkins was studying every square inch
of Righty’s countenance with an intensity he didn’t particularly
care for.

With total absence of the usual
comradery that was typically in Pitkins’ tone, he told Righty
icily, “Find out who this man is—most importantly, where he’s from.
There are few men who use the combat movements you just described.
Most of them are wicked beyond your imagination.”

Righty gulped.

Chapter 13

After Righty left, Pitkins went into a
deep melancholy. Though his body was still his mind was traveling,
turning back page after page as his mind went hurtling backwards
through the book of his life.

Having heard the news of his wife and
children’s grisly demise did little to brace him for the sight of
it as he went galloping away from camp. Sogolian tradition demanded
that if the head of the household survived a murderous attack on
his family, the bodies of his family should be left untouched for
five days, in order to give him the opportunity to place their
bodies in caskets and spare them the dishonor that could be brought
about by an outsider handling such a tragic scene.

He had to urge his horse to new limits
of speed and endurance, as the fifth day was closing in by the time
he neared his home. The local sheriff greeted him somberly as he
came galloping up to his house, and he immediately beckoned the
armed guard surrounding the house to retire.

Pitkins was not mindful of the receding
witnesses as he shrieked out in horror at the sight of his beloved
Aithne. No longer visible were the twenty armed guards, whose cold
corpses had long since been extracted by the sheriff and his men.
But Pitkins had already heard of their demise.

As he neared his wife—who still adorned
a large pike, looking dignified even in this most undignified of
circumstances, as if to tell her husband she had lost her life but
not her pride—his mind suddenly came back to the present. He was
sitting cross-legged in his dojo in the Sogolian warrior meditation
pose, and he was dripping with sweat.

Suddenly, he screamed out loud, as if
the scream he had just heard in his mind now echoed back from the
past. He stood up and went sprinting out of the dojo, his memories
closing in fast, his feet doing everything to outrun
them.

The Metinvurs didn’t exactly have to
leave behind their business card to let him know they were to
blame. He knew he had been a target of the Varco for years, and
though he kept his family moving around a series of secret, heavily
guarded locations, he somehow knew this day would come. He had
lived it in so many nightmares before it actually came that as he
stood before the mangled bodies of his family he spent a moment in
shock unsure as to whether this was yet one more nightmare warning
him of the inevitable.

No one had led the Sogolians in battle
to more victories against the Metinvurs than he, and he never
failed to see through their covert warfare attacks. When a priest,
noble, general, or some other important person died under
suspicious circumstances he always ordered the most exhaustive of
investigations, and if there was any evidence the Metinvurs were to
blame he would lead a retaliatory invasion into their
country.

Only when a Metinvur city was
surrounded by trebuchets ready to lob flaming boulders into it
could they be lured into open combat and out of the realm of
shadowy assassinations. It was a strategy no other Sogolian general
dared employ, for it was known from centuries of conflict that the
Metinvurs preferred to kill the general of an army, or his family,
rather than defeat the army itself. “Defanging the cobra” was what
they called it, and he bitterly experienced first-hand the aptness
of the metaphor, as the Sogolian army was subsequently paralyzed by
its general’s incurable grief and malaise.

He had sworn to the god Leol to one day
personally kill each and every Varco agent responsible. While his
subordinate generals recommended they kill every Varco captive in
retaliation, Pitkins took a different path. He approached one of
the Varco, a man named Zolgen, and ordered him to teach the Varco’s
combat secrets. While the Sogolians were the Varco’s equal or
superior in open combat in general, and in sword fighting in
particular, it was well known that in the arts of hand-to-hand
combat and ambush attacks the Sogolians were their lowly
inferiors.

“Never,” Zolgen told him.

Pitkins grabbed a heavily restrained
Varco captive named Vilizen and told Zolgen, “Will you watch your
compatriot be cut to pieces one at a time,” extending the man’s
pinky finger.

Pitkins sensed some hesitation in
Zolgen. “You know that, even if we released you, you would be dead,
since your colleagues would suspect you have been turned into
double agents.”