a startled cry, she looked up to see the beast’s slavering jaws descending toward her.
Tesh-Dar was finishing her letter to the Empress when she sensed it. She was so surprised that she dropped her stylus, ignoring it as it rolled across the parchment, spreading ink over her neat script before clattering noisily to the floor.
“Priestess,” Syr-Kesh, who had been awaiting an audience with her, asked, “is something the matter?”
Tesh-Dar merely stared into space, her eyes unfocused, her hands flat upon the writing tablet, utterly still.
Syr-Kesh was about to ask again, concerned that something was seriously wrong with the kazha’s most senior warrior, when she felt it, too. It was a tiny warp in the fabric of the Way, a small voice crying out for the first time like a newborn babe. “It is not possible,” she whispered, her eyes bulging with disbelief.
The priestess’s head slowly traversed so that her eyes fixed the swordmistress like an insect upon a pin. “So have we always believed,” she said slowly. “But so it obviously
She turned to Syr-Kesh. “Fetch my shuttle here,” she commanded. “I must seek an audience with the Empress immediately.”
As Syr-Kesh fled to carry out her task, Tesh-Dar closed her eyes and searched with the eyes of her soul for the one whose blood had begun to sing.
Reza stood perfectly still, momentarily entranced by the prickling, burning sensation that was sweeping his body. Quickly, as if it were water spilled from a breached dam, he felt the fire in his blood crescendo into a roaring cascade of power that washed over his mind and flesh in a surge of raw, primal might.
Suddenly, in a flash of insight as illuminating as the lightning that sought to blind him, he knew what to do. Dropping the more cumbersome ax, he reached for the leather sling that was carefully, lovingly attached to his waistband. He quickly undid it and probed his fingers into the small pouch in which he carried the carefully prepared stones that armed the weapon. He found only two, but decided they would be enough. Placing a stone in the wide cup of the sling, he began to whirl it around and around, moving closer to the genoth.
“Here!” he shouted at the thing. “Come to me!”
The genoth whirled around at the sound of his voice, seeing another culinary treat with its glowing, multifaceted eyes. It paused for a moment, calculating the better of the two morsels to devour first. It was just what Reza had been praying for.
The sling circled faster and faster, the stone within gaining more and more energy. Reza’s heart pumped in time with the weapon’s rhythm as the enemy glared at him with its baleful eyes, perfect targets even in the darkest pitch of night. And suddenly, as if ordered by the Empress Herself, the wind was stilled for just one precious moment, and the tiny missile took flight, propelled with greater force than Reza had ever before mustered behind it.
As with the ancient tale of David and Goliath, the stone hit home. The round projectile blasted the genoth’s left eye into pulp, exploding it like an overripe fruit that cascaded down the beast’s face. But unlike David’s foe, the genoth was not to die under such an attack.
The beast reared up, a shattering shriek of pain echoing down the canyon, humbling even the thunder above. It clawed at its face, at its obliterated eye, roaring in agony and rage.
Esah-Zhurah rushed forward with her pike, her own blood burning with the Bloodsong that was sustenance to her people as surely as the meat they ate each day. She buried it in the genoth’s side, the weapon’s point piercing the flesh just behind the middle right leg where thinner scales covered the creature’s belly. Pausing only to ram it home with all her strength, she retreated, leaving it jammed into the dragon, with half of the pike’s shaft buried deep in its flesh.
“Run!” Reza shouted, “Get back!” She needed no prompting from him. She ran as fast as she could, but it was not fast enough. The genoth’s good eye caught sight of her, and the beast turned with astonishing speed to trail after its tormentor. Its slow, confident pace had all but vanished.
Its talons lashed out, and Esah-Zhurah was pitched into the air, flying head over heels. She hit the ground with a sickening thud, her metal breast armor screeching along the rocks that studded the canyon floor. Then she lay still.
“No!” Reza cried, running after the monster, now clutching his ax in his right hand. He realized with a sinking certainty that he could not reach her in time. The creature, grunting in its own pain and anger, was nearly on top of her, its jaws widening to crush her body into pulp.
Not realizing the strength that now lay within him, he was still trying to think and react as he always had, quickly, but not fast enough to avert the fate of his lover as the beast’s open jaws descended on her.
But he discovered that the Bloodsong was more than a mere voice. It was a portal to things that would have taken Reza many more years – years that he did not have – to understand. His eyes narrowing in concentration, he focused his mind on the ax and projected an image of it buried in the left side of the creature’s head. For a split second he felt his body and mind merge in a perfect union, as he were being guided by an unseen hand, and the ax flew with precision and power that he never would have thought possible.
The genoth’s scales channeled the razor sharp edge of the heavy weapon as it struck the monster where its head and sinewy neck came together. Blood erupted in a spray as the weapon sliced its way deep into the genoth’s flesh, the blade now buried up to the handle.
The creature stumbled forward, stunned, cracking its front teeth on the stone inches from Esah-Zhurah’s head.
Reza’s fierce battle cry was lost in the genoth’s trumpeting of pain. He dashed forward, drawing his sword as the beast whirled about, thrashing with its forelegs in a futile attempt to dislodge the ax whose cutting edge was creeping ever closer to the animal’s spinal cord. All thoughts of the prey on which it had been about to feast were forgotten as it fought against a new source of misery.
The genoth’s tail whipped to and fro, beating the sand and dirt from the canyon floor in its blind search for a target. Reza paid it no heed, heading straight for the beast’s exposed belly as it stood on its hindmost legs, the other four clawing uselessly at the air.
The Kreelan armorers would have been proud of the quality of their workmanship had they seen Reza’s sword cleanly cut the left middle claw from its parent leg as he ducked under the genoth’s belly. The beast mewled in pain and brought its head down to snap at him, but he whirled away, carried on the rising tide of power that flowed through him, slicing the genoth’s belly open in a wide arc. He danced clear of the creature’s remaining claws as its bowels spilled out onto the ground in a steaming deluge of viscera and blood.
The genoth whirled, its insides trailing after it like meaty chum from an ancient fishing vessel, and fixed Reza with its remaining eye. Its legs tensed to leap upon the tiny thing that had done it so much injury, and Reza knew that he could not escape. But he felt no fear, and readied his sword in a last act of defiance.
But it was not to be. In a starburst of flesh, the creature’s remaining eye exploded as Esah-Zhurah’s shrekka struck, sawing its way through the thinnest portion of the beast’s skull to embed itself in the genoth’s brain.
Relieved of its guidance mechanism, the body fell to the ground with a great thud, shuddering for a moment before its lungs exhaled a final, mortal sigh.
The genoth was dead.
Reza was not sure how much time passed between that moment and when he realized Esah-Zhurah was standing next to him, holding him by the shoulders and repeating his name.
“Reza,” she said again, “answer me.”
His eyes struggled to focus on her, and it dawned on him that he had been lost to the strange melody that flowed through him, something terribly alien, yet wondrous in its undiluted strength.
“Esah-Zhurah,” he rasped, finally lowering the sword. “Are… are you all right?”
Her armor was dented and scored from where she had been tossed by the genoth, and there was a thin trickle of blood down the right side of her face where one of its talons had nicked her. It had been that close.
