Chapter 9: A Key To Power Part 2

"Chrawlz?"

"Your accent is atrocious." Trals extended his clean hand toward the woman. "And your name, madam?"

She responded.

It took Trals some time to work his mouth around the strange sounds. "Njruwaa?"

"Andrea."

"Njrea?"

She muttered something.

"No," Trals answered her. "I am Trals. Not this 'Tarzan' of which you speak. Please pay attention."

Vrem splashed his paddle and grumbled from the bow of the canoe, "Face of God, this is ridiculous. Do you truly think she understands any of what you're saying? You took her magic armor, so why not just let her go free?"

Poor naive Vrem. But so Trals had been before the Slavers took him. How soon they would suffer. Trals smiled.

The setting sun reached playful fingers through the moss-hung cypress and sparkled on the lily-spotted water. Didelphodons, long and sleekly furred, played in the ripples cast by the canoe, and the brown surface parted around the long snout of a champsosaur. Good signs. A danger would be less serious than it appeared. "We cannot free her," Trals told his young Mentee. "We need her paarsoot if we are to wipe the Face of God clean of the Slavers."

"That's very well for tomorrow," said Vrem, "but I am speaking of today."

"So am I." To the captive, Njrea, Trals said, "I am Trals Scarback. Scarback. Do you understand?" He turned around in the canoe, unclasping Vritai's mosasaur-skin baldric as he did so. He let the sword fall, grabbed the paarsoot by its collar and pulled it down over his chest. The miraculous black fabric stretched and parted, allowing him to show off his namesake.

Njrea whistled in evident admiration.

Trals was now facing Vrem, and could see his Mentee's eyes roll.

"What, are you hoping to seduce her into obedience?"

"You doubt that I could if I wanted?"

Vrem huffed. "That creature you captured is stronger than a bull triceratops and at least as smart as you or I. How do you expect to control her?"

"Hostages." Trals twisted his head around to address Njrea. "Do you see? Do you understand? Those are the marks of a Slaver's lash. Slavers. Ngarong of the Ankylosaur is a Slaver Captain, and he has your friends. Your friends. Captain Ngarong. Slavers. The lash. Scars. Slaves." He made the appropriate pantomimes. "All of them are downstream, at the Slaver fort. Fort. Many soldiers. Spears. Your friends. Captain Ngarong. Slaves. The lash. Unless you help us."

"When the foreign woman regains her power," said Vrem, "she'll kill us all in an attempt to reunite with her tribe-mates."

"You think I will allow her to kill us?" Trals turned to face the woman.

Njrea's eyes were not floodplains green nor the blue or gray of the north, but dark. The iris almost the same color as the pupil. Trals Scarback had been many places and seen many people, but never seen eyes the color of the soil, the fertile Face of God.

"We need your help, and you need ours," he told her. "We must trust each other, or your friends will be slaves. And we will die. Do you understand?"

Vrem splashed his paddle in the water. "I don't, by the Face of God!"

Wasn't it obvious? But if one Eethlek asked the question, it would be in the minds of the other Ethlek. With the ease of long practice, Trals controlled the urge to kill Vrem and instead explained the situation. "The camp is several days' march in a direction our new weapon does not want to go."

"You have taken her paarsoot. Do with it what you like."

"Except that she is the only one who can use the paarsoot. Isn't that right, Njrea?"

Oh, she wanted to kill him. Trals knew that look well, had seen it on many a man, and many a woman too.

"Nonsense," said Vrem, "when I steal a Slaver's spear, it doesn't go flaccid in my hands."

"Now there is a picture."

"If it is a matter of technique," Vrem insisted, "we can make her teach us how to use this paarsoot of hers."

"No." This was the part Trals hated. Being forced to slow down and explain. Ngarong's men obeyed their captain without question, but not so the Ethlek. "In the Slaver lands, they use a device called a key to restrict access to doors and reliquaries. To open the door you must have the proper key."

"So we make her give us this key-thing. Where can she be carrying it?"

"No," said Trals. "She is the key. Without her inside it, the paarsoot won't work."

Trals gestured at Njrea. In her strange undergarments, the woman was compact rather than curvaceous. Her straight, unusually dark hair hung to her earlobes, like a high-class slave in the Luna Meridiana. But her face, her bearing, the very shape of her body, marked her as a free person. And a strong one. Her legs, especially, were well-muscled, smooth with skin the color of floodwater. "This one is not something to be handled casually. We aim her at our enemies, we let go, and we stand far back."

Njrea did not tremble when Trals grabbed one smooth shoulder and turned her. Nor when he took hold of the shark-leather cords that bound her wrists and ankles. But those strange eyes widened at the sight of his sword.

Trals held Vritai one-handed, turned it before her, let the egg-yolk afternoon light slide across the lacquered blade and flash sparks off the silver edges. "Njrea, meet Vritai, the All-cutter."

He cut the ropes behind her back.

"What are you doing?" Vrem demanded. "You're planning to put that magic cloth back on her after what she did to Gghel and Riggham?"

The tough shark-leather parted like fat under the sky-metal blade. "That won't happen again. Clearly this woman is motivated strongly by duty. She was defending the people she thought we'd killed."

"You always said duty-bound people cannot be manipulated."

"Unless one can put the object of that duty at risk. And this," Trals grinned, "we have accomplished through our excellent enemy, Ngarong of the Ankylosaur."

"Ngarong," Njrea repeated. Her black eyes did not leave his. She brought her hands up, rubbed the wrists.

"Now to give you your paarsoot back." Trals began to strip.

Vrem snorted. "This is insane."

"Controlling powerful creatures depends on aligning your interests with theirs. How far would you get if you tried to drive a triceratops from the front?" Trals peeled the slithery fabric off his legs and chest.

"Anyone in front of a triceratops will be gored and trampled." It was Eethlek saying so often-repeated it was almost a single word: "suicide."

"But by standing behind the triceratops with a goad, we make it go," Trals responded. "Now paddle, if you please." Trals squatted, Vritai across his naked knees, and handed the wad of black material to Njrea. "Now, though she knows it not, Njrea is led by my ultimate plan. With this 'paarsoot' of hers, she will crack the Slaver fort like an egg, and, finding no Ship of Years, she will be open to my suggestion to 'search' for Ngarong. If we are very clever," and Trals was quite clever, "we can drive her all the way to the city of Luna Meridiana, leaving a trail of dead Slavers between this sea and the other."

Vrem shook his head. "You are a glorious madman, Mentor."

"Thank you, Mentee."

"What's that noise?"

Trals's ears pricked. What indeed was that throbbing, pulsing roar? "I do not know. Paddle harder, Mentee."

But Vrem was looking at Njrea, his expression congealed like old blood. "It's her. It's something she's doing."

Njrea smiled. The folds and wrinkles of the black cloth twitched, flowed, shrank to fit her body. Spines and jagged-edged fins extended, blurring her outline. She steamed. Those dark eyes met Trals's, her smile turned sharp, and, too late, he realized his mistake.

"Vrem," he bellowed, "help me stop her. She's going to - ."

But even as he spoke, Njrea extended her legs in an impossibly powerful jump.

Brown river and red sunset sky whirled like dancers about Trals Scarback. He should have been faster to don clothes. He should have waited until they were off the river before waking Njrea. His other decisions, though, had been very good. His plans were still progressing well.

The elemental dance exploded in a spray of water and Trals was swimming. The brackish, blood-warm current pulled at his limbs, swept the ruined canoe and Vrem's bobbing head downstream. Downstream toward the rapidly receding Njrea, and what would soon be the ruins of the Slaver fort.