“I’ll listen later.” The shape-shifter dismissed him swiftly. Then his voice hardened. “Now you listen to me. Don’t you ever mention what’s happened here. Not to me or to anyone else. Not ever. It’s finished.”
He turned and stalked away, Bek struggling to keep up.
26
Now,” Quentin Leah said quietly to Tamis.
She moved away from him, not hurriedly or with any outward sign of the turmoil she must be feeling, but as if the encounter were just one of many and in no way significant beyond that. She eased farther right and ahead of him, walking deliberately, choosing her steps and then her place to stand. They had waited until they were certain the wronk could see what she was doing. It was difficult to spy out, but she had stopped just behind a bare patch of ground that was strewn with a scattering of deadwood and scrub grasses. A trained eye would suspect a wronk pit, a well-concealed trap. But the trap lay elsewhere.
Quentin held his ground as the wronk turned toward Tamis. It studied her without moving, then abruptly started toward her. She brought up her short sword defensively and dropped into a protective crouch. Quentin waited a moment, then stepped forward, as well, the Sword of Leah lifting into the faint light. He felt the stirrings of its magic run down through the metal blade and into his arm. He felt its fiery rush enter his body, bitter and at the same time sweet. It infused him with a sense of power. It made him light-headed and alive in a way nothing else did. He wanted to use that power. Even knowing how foolish that desire was, he wanted it.
The wronk lumbered out of the night, closing on Tamis with inexorable determination, neither fast nor slow, but certain. The Tracker held her ground, refusing to give way, saying something now, taunting words that Quentin could not make out. It wasn’t what they had planned. She was supposed to give way to the wronk, to stay clear of it should the decoy fail, as it seemed now it might. Quentin came forward another few steps, stopping just at the edge of where he could stand and still know his place in the darkened landscape that hid their trap. As he did so, he felt a new surge of magic fly into him, and he was consumed by a need to release it in battle.
Abruptly, without warning, the wronk turned toward him.
The suddenness of it took his breath away. It drained him of the fire of his magic. In a single moment, everything changed. The wronk came for him swiftly, closing the distance between them almost before Quentin could recover himself to act. It thundered across the clearing, much quicker than the Highlander had remembered from their previous encounter. The sword in its human hand lifted. The blade in its metal one flashed.
Tamis screamed, too far away to help. Do something!
At the last moment, he remembered what it was he had intended and threw himself out of the monster’s way. The wronk’s blades sliced through the air next to him, one so close to his face he could feel the rush of wind it generated in passing. He darted left the six paces he had counted earlier, giving himself enough leeway to make up for the steps he had taken earlier, wheeled back and braced himself. The wronk was already coming for him again. From the helmet that protected its human head, Ard Patrinell’s features were suddenly, shockingly recognizable.
Don’t look, Quentin told himself. Don’t feel anything.
Tamis was rushing toward him, foolishly responding to his danger, impulsively acting to help. He shifted swiftly to his right as the wronk bore down on him, the sound of its machine parts a sharp whine against the hammer of its footfalls. It closed with an almost palpable expectation of crushing him—its momentum carrying it right over the pit they had intended for it. The screen gave way beneath its weight, collapsing in a shower of earth, a snapping of deadwood, and a rending of cloth. An instant later the wronk was gone, vanished into the hole as if it had never been. They could hear the sound of its impact as it struck bottom, then silence.
Tamis charged up, breathing hard. Her eyes were bright with surprise and excitement as she stared at the hole. “That wasn’t so hard,” she said as if she couldn’t quite believe it.
No, Quentin was thinking, it wasn’t. He moved over to the edge of the pit, still wary, and peered down. It was so dark that he couldn’t make out anything. “We need a torch,” he said.
She darted away, gathered up a likely stick of deadwood, wrapped it in a scrap of cloth from the edge of the pit, and, using tinder from her pouch, sparked a flame. As she did so, Quentin heard the first stirrings of movement from within the pit.
“Hurry,” he whispered, trying to stay calm.
They might have trapped it, but they had most certainly not killed it. The fall alone had not been enough. More would be needed, even to disable it sufficiently to render it immobile. He waited impatiently for her to join him, reaching over the side with the makeshift torch to see what was happening.
The firelight illuminated the sheer, smooth sides of the pit, all the way down to where the wronk was trapped more than fifteen feet below. They could just make out its dusty shell. It was battered and scraped, but still functioning. Neither the fall nor the sharp rocks embedded by the Rindge in the floor of the pit had been enough to stop it.
It heaved itself upward, grasping at stray roots, digging into the earth in search of handholds, intent on climbing out.
Quentin Leah and Tamis fought to keep it from doing so with a frenzy and determination that bordered on madness. They threw everything at it that they could lay their hands on—rocks, limbs, part of an old stump, clots of earth, and a fair-sized boulder that they managed to roll close enough to topple in. Several times they struck it hard enough to knock it loose, but each time it picked itself up and began the climb out once more, a relentless and inexorable force.
They used fire next, throwing mounds of deadwood into the pit, then lighting it with the torch. The deadwood blazed up, burning so quickly and fiercely that the wronk did not have time to stamp it out. For a few moments, it was trapped in an inferno, metal skin reflecting the flames of the burning wood so that it seemed as if it, too, were ablaze. In the fiery light, they watched as it tried to protect its human arm, the flesh of which soon blistered and blackened from the heat. Ard Patrinell’s terrified, anguished face peered out from behind its clear protective shield, and in his eyes they read things they did not want to know. Quentin hastened to feed more wood into the pit, but quit looking down at what was trapped there. Tamis was in tears.
But in the end, that effort failed, too. The fire burned fiercely for a time, then began to die out. The wronk climbed clear of the flames once more, blackened with ash and heat-seared, but still mobile.
Quentin stepped back in dismay. The Rindge would have been better prepared for this than they were. They would have had a backup plan for dealing with the trapped wronk. They would have been able to rely on strength of numbers. But the Rindge weren’t there to help. No one was.
“This isn’t working!” Tamis screamed at him.
Without waiting for his answer, she darted into the trees. For an instant, he thought she had abandoned him, that she was fleeing. He stared back down into the pit, where the last of the burning wood was turning to ash and the wronk was slowly digging out hand- and footholds on its torturous, but implacable ascent.
Then Tamis was back, dragging a huge limb by one end, deadwood, well over eight feet in length, most of its smaller branches reduced to broken stubs.
“We’ll use this to knock him back down each time he tries to climb out!” she shouted. “Help me!”
He leapt forward to do so, and together they hauled the branch to the side of the pit and tipped it downward, seizing the slender end and using the limb like a battering ram to hammer at the wronk. Grunting and huffing, they slammed their makeshift weapon into its metal body and sent it tumbling back down again. Again and again, they stopped its ascent, trying unsuccessfully to smash its mechanisms, to break up its working parts. Each time it just picked itself up and began the climb out anew. So the struggle continued, with no progress being made on either side. It was a battle that Tamis and he must lose, Quentin realized, because they would wear out sooner than the wronk. They had to find a way to disable it if they were to win. But he could not think of how to do that without getting close, and getting close was unthinkable.