Where before they had been ridiculously dangerous, savagely unpredictable horrors, full-body replacement transformed them into mindless, near-indestructible engines of destruction.
Sharuum, in her wisdom, commanded the moonbats to clean up their own mess, which made no appreciable dent in the numbers of e-drakes but in short order did an admirable job of thinning the moonbat population. Eventually the Grand Hegemon was forced to take a personal hand. She gathered the bulk of the land’s sphinxes and led them on a sequence of hunts over the course of a decade or two, until there were no more e-drakes to be found. Somehow, however, the creatures persist in reappearing at inconvenient moments.
Informed opinions on the reason for this are split. Optimists tend to believe new e-drakes are being created by a radical splinter sect of the Ethersworn, still carrying on their Noble Nut Job in secret. Realists are of the opinion that the creatures have found a way to breed.
Dangerous as they are, their most destructive power is the annihilating fire they can vomit at will-and to assault Baltrice with flame was worse than useless. The more flame they poured onto her, the stronger she got, and when a couple of them stooped like falcons to try their luck with fang and talon, she just opened her arms and invited them in with a truly happy grin.
The closest e-drake was clearly astonished to discover that Baltrice could herself claw and bite with the best of them. She slipped the beast’s viperish fang strike, got one arm around the thing’s long, snaky neck, and grabbed its wing joint with her free hand. In a second or two, the joint ran from red to yellow to white as radioactive milk, and dripped down through the e-drake’s ribs while the wing flopped off, twitching into the dunes.
I could happily have whiled away the whole afternoon watching Baltrice dismantle her new toys, except that this was the moment Silas Renn chose to hook his thumb into my left eye.
“Uh, by the way,” Doc said, “did I mention he’s awake?”
That was also the moment I discovered that the boiling had subsided from my blood, that the lightning crackle was gone from my skin, and that I was suddenly tired.
Very, very tired.
Not yet dead tired, though that state loomed in my immediate future.
Exhaustion, however, was not enough to stop me from twisting my head, latching my teeth into the ball of his thumb, and biting down until he squealed like a tea kettle. He got his other hand up under my chin and dug his thumb into my parotid gland until I had to let go so I could turn my head away, after which he undertook to deliver a very efficient, thorough, and professional beating, focusing on my face, my lower abdominal wall, and my groin.
This was a particularly inconvenient moment to discover that the education of scions of the House of Renn included comprehensive training in personal combat.
This was particularly inconvenient because I hadn’t been in a fistfight since I was (approximately) eleven years old, and because my lack of expertise was compounded by having only one hand I could use to defend myself. If I let go of his collarbone, he’d throw me off and roast me in roughly a heartbeat and a half.
Worse, it seemed that his etherium enhancements, in addition to being impervious to anything I could do with hands, feet, or head, also made him stronger than a rhox berserker. Each blow of his fists opened a cut on my face and shot stars across my vision, or ripped muscles and battered internal organs, or crushed my testicles until I had to vomit bile from my empty stomach, or inventive combinations thereof. “How’s it feel, scrapper boy?” he sneered in my face. “Bet you never thought I could beat you at this too, did you?”
I could not have answered him if I’d wanted to. Soon he got bored with thrashing me, and decided to break my grip on his collarbone by pinching the muscle between my thumb and forefinger with his thumb and forefinger, which was so unexpectedly and unbelievably painful that I yelped and jerked as if I’d been stabbed. But despite his enhancements, his hands were still only flesh and bone. With my free hand, I grabbed his thumb and pried it off me.
“Where I come from, this is foreplay,” I mumbled through smashed and bloody lips. “In a fight, we’re more like-” and I completed the sentence by yanking his thumb in a direction thumbs are not designed to be yanked.
The joint snapped with a satisfyingly wet crunch.
“Cesspit scum,” he snarled, his face white with killing rage. “After I beat you unconscious, I’m going to drown you in your own sewage.”
“You don’t have the balls. Remember?” I let go of his thumb, reached behind his head, and grabbed a fistful of powdered glass that I pounded into the ruin of his nose. “This is how we do it in Tidehollow, you snotty upslope bitch.”
The powdered glass spread across his face. I encouraged the spreading by pounding him with the outside of my fist as if it were a hammer. I may not know much about fist-fighting, but I do know how to swing a hammer, and there are few humans who can truthfully say they do it better.
Renn gasped from the impact, and when his mouth opened I hit him again, this time downward on his lower incisors, hyperextending his jaw with another wet crunch. He howled. In Tidehollow, that would be the moment to pound sand into his open mouth, so I did.
A cave brat from my part of the slum would also twist his hand on Renn’s face, to grind the sand harder into his mouth and into the ruin of his nose, to force it into his eye sockets, thumb it under his eyelids, and pack it into his tear ducts.
I did that, too.
Then I hit him again. And once more for good measure.
And one to grow on.
He gagged, and choked, and tried to howl some more, acting generally helpless and beaten, which I didn’t believe for a second; I knew how tough he used to be, and I assumed that now he was likely tougher. The fight would be over when one of us was unconscious. Or dead.
My suspicious nature paid off when I glimpsed a flash of blue sparks at the corners of his eyes, and so managed to avert my eyes before his Immaculate Form-a very minor magic, barely a cantrip, used for instantly cleansing oneself and one’s clothing-blew all that sand away from his face and straight at mine. Before I could get back to business, one of his arms snaked around the back of my neck and he caught his opposite forearm to lever his other arm across my face.
I had been expecting him to throw me off. By the time I realized what he was doing, he had locked my head into the crook of his arm. His hold tightened with the mechanical progression of a bench vise. “Tidehollow’s nothing,” he whispered in my ear. “This is how men fight.”
That built-in body regeneration of his seemed to be working entirely too well.
“Uh, Tezz…?” Doc said worriedly. “It seems like we’re in trouble here. Are we in trouble? Tezz?”
I couldn’t answer because my mouth was jammed full of etherium forearm. I managed to find his hands and clawed at them, trying for another fingerhold or a grip on his broken thumb, but of course he wouldn’t let me catch him that way again. “Oh, no no no,” he hummed. “You don’t want to do that, and here’s why.”
His grip tightened. I heard an alarming crunching sound that seemed to be coming from inside the back of my skull. “Do you know how I practice this hold?” he murmured. “On granite boulders. Until they shatter.”
Apparently my rhox-berserker metaphor had been something of an understatement.
“Tezz? Tezz! Do something!” Doc was starting to panic-and he sounded calmer than I was. Sangrite exhaustion seemed to have drained every drop of my mana reserve as well. I tried to organize my mind into planeswalking configuration, thinking that maybe Doc could ‘port us back to the cavern-but all I got was a moan of dismay that indicated “It’ll be hours before I can do that again!”
This, I thought, is a stupid way to die.
“How should I kill you? Let me count the ways,” Renn mused happily. “Squashing your head like a rotten melon has a certain visceral appeal… but no, no, that will never do-it would be over all too quickly. How might I do it leisurely… as if I have all the time in the world. Because, after all, I do.”
What could I have been thinking? Had I been thinking at all? I had never beaten him. Not once. But I had let my supercharged blood boil drag me into exactly what he was best at-single combat. Idiot.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Dying-again-would be bad enough. Dying because I was too stupid to live was more than I could take. If only I had stopped to think-because, after all, the only trait in which I had a real advantage over Renn was intellect, though one couldn’t prove it by anything that happened today. I had blindly thrown myself against him, my puny, all-too-mortal flesh against his unlimited power of etherium-
