Page 76 of The Inheritance
That desire to inflict suffering was a weakness, and I would use it. I needed answers. If I succeeded, I would get them today. If I failed, I would never leave this breach.
Everything I went through until now was training. This would be the real test. Only one question remained: could I hold out long enough?
I rolled to my feet and stretched, working out the stiffness in my legs and back. Jovo uncoiled and bounced to his feet. His eyes were calm and cold.
I pulled out the spider rope, folded it in half, and twisted the middle into a slip knot. I tested the loop on my arm. When I tugged on the rope, my makeshift lasso tightened around my wrist. I loosened the loop again and wrapped the rope around my left arm, holding the end in my hand.
“Ready?”
He nodded.
I reached for the dial and deactivated it. The barrier vanished. I waited for a moment. The gress could ambush us now, but he would not. The tunnel was narrow, and their bodies were fragile. He would wait until we entered the anchor chamber, where he would have plenty of room to maneuver. Attack and avoid, bleed the opponent and bide your time, wear them down and then strike the final blow, that was the Kael way.
The space beyond the tunnel lay empty. The way to the chamber was open.
I dropped the dial into my backpack, and we started forward.
The gress was watching us. I felt his gaze latch onto me. He was out there somewhere.
We passed through the massive stone doorway. Bright lights came on, flooding the big room in harsh artificial sunshine. The anchor chamber was a perfect square, sixty-eight yards across. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were identical, built with huge slabs of yellow stone, weathered and rough. Large clusters of pale crystals shone between the ceiling tiles, leaving no shadows in which to hide. The floor was bare, except for the dark pillar of the anchor jutting from the center of the room.
Jovo ran ahead, unhurried, his movements loose and free of tension. He leaped into the air and sliced the knapsack free of the cord securing it to the ceiling. The lees pulled the bundle apart. Things tumbled out, coins, hooped earrings, a sash… He sneered and tossed it all aside. Whatever he needed to get home wasn’t there.
The sound of stone sliding made me turn. The gress entered through the same doorway we’d used, all but gliding across the stone floor. At the other side of the room, the skelzhar padded in through the other doorway, huge and menacing. Behind them, stone slabs descended, blocking the exits.
The trap was sprung. And it was a good one.
The gress studied me. He was seven feet tall and clad in the devourer shroud, a grey, seemingly tattered garment that shifted and moved around him. Neither plant nor animal, it fed on the fluids of his body. In return, it stung anything it touched, applying a powerful paralytic agent and then sucking its prey dry.
The gress were a lean species with six limbs: two that served as legs, and four that were its arms, each pair with its own set of shoulders situated one under the other. They had evolved to climb their rocky world, and their distant relatives still scurried through the stone burrows on all six legs. The gress were terrible at stabbing but amazing at slicing, and the four blades held in the assassin’s hands reflected that. Narrow and curved, they were sickles rather than swords.
The gress stared at me, his eyes perfectly round, with huge dark pupils ringed with narrow purple irises. The shroud left a narrow strip of his flesh bare around the eyes and the lizard-like nose. Skin the color of mustard mixed with a pearlescent powder sagged off his cheek bones, the shroud having leeched all spare fat from his body. He was a skeletal killing machine, a lethal whirlwind of striking blades, and he was about to show me how fast he could cut.
Jovo let out a short, sharp yelp saturated with fury and outrage. His fur stood on end, and for a moment, he’d puffed up to nearly twice his size. I glanced to my right. He was looking at the skelzhar. A strange metal bracelet dangled from the beast’s collar.
The gress had used Jovo’s treasure to decorate his pet. The insult.
The big cat opened its mouth and coughed. It was almost a chuckle.
Beside me, Bear growled. It didn’t sound like any growl an Earth dog should have made.
I slipped my backpack off my shoulder. I’d taught Bear four commands, but Cold Chaos taught her others. It was time to put that training to use.
I pointed at the cat. “Fass!”
Bear exploded into a charge as if shot from a cannon. I spun away, shaping my sword into a long narrow blade, a double-edged katana that could thrust or slice. And then the gress was on me.
I flexed, stretching time. It bought me a split second, just long enough to recognize the pattern of his attack. I dashed away, running backward, my sword in front of me. The sickles carved at me, and I batted them aside, blocking just enough to keep them off me. The metal rang as his blades struck my sword.
He was fast, so maddeningly fast. If one slice of those sickles landed, it would carve through my arm all the way to the bone.
Strike-strike-strike.
I stabbed through a narrow opening between his slashes. The gress withdrew as if pulled back by a rope, widening the gap between us to twenty-five feet, and charged in again.
Strike-strike-strike.
My arm ached from the impacts. A blade slid too close, almost shaving the skin off my forearm. I leaped back, putting all of my new strength into the jump. I cleared twenty feet. It bought me a second, and I ran backward, right past the skelzhar. I glimpsed Bear and Jovo lunging at the huge cat. Jovo leaped in the air, his blades slicing. The skelzhar snapped at him, its conical fangs like the teeth of a bear trap. Somehow it missed, and Bear darted in and locked her jaws on the cat’s hind leg.
