The Zalgyne flew so fast that the birds looked frozen to the ice blue sky, and when she cruelly ordered its highest velocity despite the engineer's objections, though the chassis rattled until the humans were pasty white and the werewolves' fur shook straight up, the brass locust sucked the clouds into their wake and stretched the Alsantian continent until it seemed pinched in the middle between the two vastnesses in their rear and forward horizons.
When Jezera's thought of returning to where they lost sight of the Efremian ornithopter proved fruitless, she reluctantly bade the speed cut so that she could lunch with a minimum of mess--after all, she snickered, she was now an Alsantian captain. I must keep up appearances, she thought wryly, as she popped the top of her watermelon-sized thermos, reached in for a pickled piglet, and bit off its head and shoulders before her squeamish, shuddering troops. Only Strelpa stared with undisguised disgust and enmity, not for her dining manners, she guessed, but for being promoted over the lieutenant by Queen Suvani. Jezeera admitted it was childish of the Queen, but the Queen was a child, after all, and the ogress profited from her immaturity. Not that she would defend the Queen in word or deed if called to do so, for she disliked her more than the bigot Strelpa, who had traveled with her to Earth and back but never said her name.
If the human--she used this word ironically, knowing Strelpa was, in many ways, a more capable monster than she was--did not pay well, she would have bitten his head off long ago--after giving him an earful, thus biting off his head twice, once metaphorically, and then literally--and if the ogress went on to take her pay from the tap, so to speak, cutting out this bigoted middleman, well then, Strelpa should have swallowed his prejudice along with his pride and spoken her name.
For despite her ogrish propensities--two heads taller than anyone else aboard, so that she must slouch in her stretching and buckling seat; blockish hands seemingly made of jammed-together thumbs; a papery complexion accented by violet eyes and ash blonde hair; and, a mouthful of needly teeth so sharp that she closed her mouth when looking in a mirror, for fear of being blinded by their pearly edge--Jezeera felt her delicate nature acutely, and desired a slaughter scroll to peruse on a cushion of softer purchase while scorning the romance of her fellow ogres. It was so long since she snacked on a bouquet of heads that she began to doubt her femininity.
"What course now?" inquired Royal Engineer Edrin Lombert. Edrin was such a good egg that if they crashed on an icecapped mountaintop, and she was forced to use the stranded aircraft as her own personal icebox, she would crack him after the rotten werewolves and the decidedly past his date Lieutenant Strelpa. That said, although he was unparalleled as a reverse-engineer, and had not only disassembled and reassembled the Zalgyne until he had methodically added every iota of its ingenuity to Alsantian science, but made it a hair faster as well, he had no appreciable synthetic intelligence. The engineer's limited genius, when presented with an unarmed Zalgyne, was to give the brass locust stone teeth. Which is to say that he installed arbalests--giant crossbows--that launched smooth stones through a tube mounted on the spine of the Zalgyne.
"Sir," rumbled Jezeera.
"Excuse me? I'm not an officer," said Edrin with an abashed tone.
"I am." Although Jezera allowed her meaning to linger ominously, the dullard enginner did not get the point.
"You're what?"
"An officer!" she seethed.
"Right! Right sir!" said Edrin. "What course now, sir?"
"Has anything changed? Do we know where our quarry is, or where they're headed? For that matter, do we know if they're alive or dead?"
"No," said Edwin, then hastily added, "No sir."
"Then we'll trust our luck." When Strelpa sneered at this order, she honored him with a charitable look. "Want some?" She held out the last morsel of pickled pig—the hind legs, both of which were gnawed around the thigh.
"No ma'am." When Strelpa curtly turned to the porthole, his tone shifted to the excited end of the human spectrum, so that to Jezeera's ear, which had become habituated to humans, he sounded almost happy. "That traitor luck finally double crossed in the right direction."
When Jezera leaned over his seat, Strelpa's lofty sneer of contempt was squashed into a deeply graven sneer of indignation, as he turned his head just in time so as not to cram a suffocating mouthful of her monstrous shoulder—for with an ogre crowding your seat, there is little room for anything else, even yourself.
"Excuse me!"
"Sir," Jezera rumbled. "I don't like the ma'am."
"Excuse me, sir!"
Jezera leaned back with a smile. While it was amusing to inconvenience her unwilling henchman, she was delighted to see the Ephremian Zalgyne emerging from a cloud and veering in a beeline for the horizon. If she had two heads like her cousins, she would smile twice, and her satisfied smile would outshine the spiteful one, but only having one face, the pettier emotion effaced the prouder.
"Edrin, take us back to full speed," said Jezera.
"Sir, I don't recommend it."
"Is this not a chase, Edrin?"
"They're not going top speed, sir."
"They'll regret that, Edrin. Now."
Reluctantly, the engineer moved the instruments. Although Jezera had observed him carefully, she could detect no pattern in the controls. Not that ogres had the human knack for seeing patterns as a whole, she reassured herself—ogres couldn't tell paisley from plaid. Ogres' entirely destructive intelligence perceived patterns and structures only in part, as something to rend or take apart, whether later or now. Without delayed gratification, ogre civilization would never have taken hold in Alsantia. It was only this acquired grace, by which she could look at Edrin, hear her stomach rumbling, and tell herself "later he will taste so much better," that separated the ogrish realm Elchomba from their hirsute, hairy kin in the hills of Ghulmarque.
Right now, this destructive intelligence latched on to the problem of the Ephremian Zalgyne. It wanted to fly and stay in one piece, and she wanted it to smoke, explode, plummet, and scatter on the continent, where she could extract the rebels dead or dying, and deliver them to the Queen a little nibbled but no more dead or dying. She sighed. It wouldn't be professional for a captain to nibble the goods. She and this child Queen must come to an arrangement if her employment was to be fair, balanced, and properly compensated.
"Are we close enough to try the crossbows?"
"No, sir. Crossbows will miss at this speed, no matter what the range."
"Then why did you install them?" growled Jezera.
"Oh, you mean the arbalests! They haven't been tested, sir. Let's give them a try."
Edrin's rank in the egg carton took a nose dive as Jezera's nose wrinkled at this overfinicky exactness. "Are there any crossbows on board, Edrin?"
"No, sir."
"In the future, when I say crossbows, I mean arbalests. Fire away."
"Is the enemy Zalgyne armed, sir?"
"How would I know? Why haven't you hit them yet?"
"Since we're pursuing, we're an easier target, sir. Moreover, we're fighting the wind of their slipstream, while they could lob a soup can and it would be a deadly missile. Did you have anything to advise for defense, sir?"
Jezera mulled this over.
"We can't bring them down if we get hit, so don't get hit, Edrin."
"Then my suggestion, sir, is that the pilot stay where he is, being the only pilot on board, while Lieutenant Strelpa mans the arbalest."
Jezera scowled. "Strelpa, do as he says."
"Yes, ma--sir." As Strelpa's uniform had been reshuffled by the ogress's jostling, he first flung his cape from front to back, then rebuttoned three popped buttons, before hauling himself into the cupola with the arbalests.
Nearly a minute passed.
"Are you going to shoot, Strelpa?"
"I've used all manner of weapons, and fired crossbows, arbalests, and ballistae, but this contraption goes against common sense. How do I load this, Edrin?"
"It's already loaded, sir."
"Then how do I reload?"
"It's already reloaded, sir."
"How is it already reloaded?" Strelpa's exasperated manner exasperated Jezera, who was nearly at the point of scooping the quivering lieutenant from the canopy like a clam.
"A tube funnels stones to each arbalest, sir. You can fire each four times."
"Who cares, Strelpa? Shoot! That's an order!"
Strelpa shot, then shot again and again. He missed every time.
Unbelieving, Jezera barged over the werewolves to cram next to Edrin and press her face against the windscreen. While up close against the thick window she could see less than she could from her seat--the misty, viscous glass made it seem like they were not flying but jetting through a translucent ocean--she could not reveal her error of judgment to her troops, as she so recently was promoted above them, and chose to swear by a guess, hope she was right, and if she was wrong, make as authoritative and terrifying an error as ogrishly possible.
"Strelpa!" she screamed. "You didn't hit ANYTHING! You even missed the ground!"
"Sir," said Edrin. "I think he grazed it."
"Did I ask you? Why would I take notice of a graze? Would they take notice?"
"It depends on what he hit, sir. They're landing, sir."
"Hound them, Edrin!"
"Sir, we should circle instead."
"What do you mean circle?"
"If they're crashing, and we trail them down, they have nothing to lose in deploying their weapons. By circling, we plot our own path to their landing site. Sir."
"They're not armed," snorted Jezera. "If they were armed, they would have fired on us."
"With all due respect, sir," said Strelpa in a mocking tone, "Edrin is right. Even rebels would be loath to start a civil war with her majesty."
Jezera considered this. She had been on the receiving end of more than her share of spiteful counterattacks from half-dead conquests. She lumbered to her seat. "draw your circle, Edrin."
No sooner had Edrin adjusted his instruments to mark the first arc of his circle than he muttered under his breath and hammered the controls to full speed, rattling the Zalgyne interior and setting the seats humming, so that the werewolves bristled again.
"It was a feint, sir!"
"Then that means you didn't hit them, Strelpa!"
As the other Zalgyne had only descended shallowly, and Edrin had veered thirty degrees off course to plot their circle, their prey only needed to accelerate through a gentle climb to lap the horizon. Only by Edrin's diligent grind of the knobs and handwheels did he keep their quarry in sight and chip away at their lead.
Having flitted so near that the Ephremian Zalgyne's wings could be glimpsed amid their rapid flutter, Jezera unbelted, stood to her full height, scooped Strelpa from the canopy, then poked her head just under the line of sight for the arbalests. When she rose on her tiptoes to aim the last two shots, one might say the triggers and handles fit like a glove, if it was a mitten ripped off a baby and stretched over monstrous hands. In the end, she tore the trigger, cracked the handle, sliced through the other Zalgyne's wing, and dissolved with the rest of the world into a mushrooming incandescence, the acrid scent of smoke, werewolf snarls, and the engineer's panicked yells.
Drifting through the bright white everywere were clouds of angry red and blue agony from slipping so hard her chair crunched, then bounced her to the shuddering floor.
Strelpa was oddly silent. Why wasn't he taking this opportunity to rub it in? "Strelpa, report!"
Despite the tumult of yips and groans amid a high-pitched whistling, the lieutenant's sneering mutter buzzed oddly clear only inches above her head. "The rebels fired a weapon, sir. As advised." Something cold touched her neck and chin—so cold that it felt wet. Then she felt the pinch and the trickle.
"Is this a mutiny, Strelpa?" While she still couldn't see, she knew the touch of a blade by heart. While she would have liked to keep her face impassive, some ancient ogrish reflex curled her lips and flared her nostrils.
If she was a human in a storybook, her hands would have closed on a window shard or a sliver of her smashed seat. As she was an ogre in a crashing Zalgyne, she simply closed her hands on nothing, making the heavy ogrish fists that had crushed the lives of many. While luck could be fickle, might was a renewable resource.
"It's not mutiny if you're unfit for command," Strelpa sneered.
"You call me unfit, you bowlegged skeleton?"
While Jezera was nearly as fast as the human killer, her hand had a yard to go and his knife only a millimeter. Although her desperation squashed the distance, he dragged the knife an inch before her huge hand clamped down to cover not only the blade, but the hilt and the hand holding it. By grunting and bringing his weight to bear, he raked the knife another quarter inch before she squeezed, snapping the blade, crunching his gauntlet scales, and crackling his knuckles and finger bones to the accompaniment of screams until there was only a wet but powdery smacking sound from the gory fistful and a frail gasp from Strelpa.
"That gross mess is a liability, Strelpa. You should have dropped the knife. You know, promotions aren't the only things done in the heat of battle. How about a good old battlefield surgery?" With that, she dragged his mauled hand toward her mouth and chewed.
Either the chewing stimulated her optic nerves, or it was coincidence, but Jezeera's vision trickled in as she masticated her mouthful of Strelpa. The treacherous lieutenant slumped on the riven Zalgyne wall and clutched his stump. "You monster!"
"Come now, Strelpa. As if I'd hear monster as anything but a compliment--an extremely vague and off-center compliment, like calling you 'human.' Also, you should have said 'you monster, ma'am.' I am still your commanding officer, at least until the court martial. Edrin!"
"Should I call you 'monster ma'am' too?"
Jezeera laughed. "Call me anything but sir, Edrin, and I'll bite off both your hands and kill us all. Are we landing, Edrin?"
"Yes, sir. Not nicely, sir."
"What's not nice?"
"We're on fire, sir."
"Land as near as possible to the other Zalgyne."
"Yes, sir."
"Wait, Edrin!" At first, Jezera could not believe her abysmal luck; then, she remembered who she was. There was no doubt that the ghastly wasteland sprawling to meet them was indeed the monstrous land she feared.
"There's no time, sir! We're landing!"
"I forbid you from landing here!" Jezera's strangled cry rebounded until drowned in their screeching impact, when a rocky spur flowered inside the cabin, gouging bronze and wood as it tore a trail from nose to tail, slashing off a werewolf's leg and tail mid-transformation and stopping just short of the ogress's brow. The wave of wreckage was followed by a howling gust of wind.
After snapping her restraints with a pinch of her nails, Jezera crawled over the wounded. The three-legged werewolf hobbled around her unconscious mate, who leaked blood from a head wound furrowed by flying debris, while Strelpa was a bit worse than she had bitten him, having been unrestrained, one hand short, and pinned by the collapsing brass wall of the Zalgyne.
When she bent near, Strelpa flinched, and she bared drooling fangs. While this was little more than a smirk in the ogre nation, he scrabbled against the cruel pinch of the crushed brass wall. Once the lieutenant bled from a half-dozen scrapes, she gripped the torn metal and bent it back. Between Strelpa's whimper, the screeching metal, and the shrieking wind pounding through the wreckage, it sounded like a battlefield--no, it was much worse than that, Jezera told herself--this was noisier than an ogress in childbirth.
"Get up, Strelpa."
Although maimed and pale, the lieutenant rolled to a three-legged crawl, and continued this frantic hobble to the door release.
"Don't think I won't sic a three-legged werewolf on a three-limbed Strelpa." Jezera barked a mocking laugh, and the werewolves, through their wounds, barked louder.
"You bit my hand off!"
"Maybe I did." Jezera's snarl was backed by a diamond-bright glare. "But you had a hand in that."
The ghoulish jest so consumed the werewolves with laughter that the woman werewolf collapsed unconscious mid-laugh.
Edrin, whose head had struck the instruments, awoke with a clamorous shriek, unbuckled his restraints, jostled Strelpa with a roughness that belied his timidity, and pulled the door release.
"Edrin!"
"Abandon ship..." Edrin's jump was followed by a thud, a groan, and a feeble "...sir."
As the Zalgyne floor was slanted by the steep angle of their landing, Jezera leaned forward stomping to the door, where she looked down at Edrin sprawled on an oddly particulate mixture of mulch, stone, and clumped soil, not only devoid of grass, bushes, shrubs, trees, but of any sort of green aside from a small splash of green on the cap of a looming mountain. While the Zalgyne door was normally two and a half feet from the ground, the tilt of the craft had skewed it to a five foot drop.
"Edrin, do you have any idea where you parked?" Despite the pounding winds, Jezera's voice was so low, and Edrin's so reedy, that they could hear themselves easily.
"More than an idea, sir. I've been here before. This is the Sargan Vos."
Jezera could not help snickering at the irony of the Alsantians calling this wasteland the Garden of Delight, even if it was once a forest paradise. "Before the Ashflowers, I'm guessing."
"When I was twelve, sir, a few had taken root near the lake. Three years later, they uprooted, stomped down main street, and had their choice of dinner."
"So you've seen them--you know how frightening those monsters are. And monster isn't a term that I bandy around loosely."
"Yes, sir."
"And you know that all that's left of your Garden of Delight is that desert of chipped wood, earth, and stone. Not what I'd call a featherbed."
"Yes, sir."
"Then why did you hurl yourself from the Zalgyne?"
"The Zalgyne's on fire, sir."
Jezera could not believe her ears. More to the point, like all ogres, she trusted her nose with her life. Eyes were tricky things that squirmed going over details, while a nose was either breathing or dead, and honest either way. While she need only turn her head to see the damage for herself, she would have surely scented smoke and fire. Edrin was joking. She had heard of the human disposition for black humor in times of distress, that they became ogrish when contemplating their imminent demise.
"Very funny, Edrin."
"I'm not joking, sir."
"Then you're demented, Edrin. It's not on fire."
As if to reassure himself of what he saw, Edrin squinted at the Zalgyne. "Yes, sir. Maybe I hit my head, sir."
Despite his willingness to concede, underneath Edrin's submission was an adamant avowal of his perception, and Jezera could no longer stop herself from turning.
At the sight of fire streaming and smoke flowering into a gusting wind drawing the smoldering fumes away from the Zalgyne's wrecked tail, Jezera's gigantic impact sent Edrin rolling into a curled ball.
When the werewolves and Strelpa landed next in whimpering heaps, Jezera couldn't help snickering, though she was in pain from head to toe from her jarring bellyflop, which blasted her huge shadow into the drifting mulch.
"You told me it wasn't flammable, Edrin."
"Although routine operations are effected by magic, sir, this fire was no chemical reaction, but the Efremian weapon."
"That blinding light?"
"That was my thought also, sir."
When Strelpa staggered to his feet, he looked for a moment like he was going to burst into smithereens, matchsticks, roaches, or moths, or some other verminous or fragmentary debris. "Sir." He drew himself to his not inconsiderable height. For a human, Strelpa was quite tall. "That was an act of war."
"Really, Strelpa? I thought to bake them a cake, and you're telling me to think of them as the enemy. Where's the fun in that?"
"We must tell her majesty."
"We will, Strelpa, if not in so many words. A few choice heads are more eloquent. Since they won't be expecting an attack, let's give them one."
"It's sound strategy, sir," said Edrin. "They'll expect us to lick our wounds."
"Just as they're likely doing this very minute."
"Two of us are wounded, sir," said Strelpa stiffly, clutching his stump.
"Then start licking, if you want," said Jezera. "Edrin. Werewolves. You're with me."
They fell out together, with Strelpa bringing up the rear. While neither included in her command, nor infected with lycanthropy, he was infected with a particularly tenacious strain of evil, and managed both to keep his forearm stump elevated and compressed, and to stumble after them, though he cursed loudly about the shifting mulch of the Sargan Vos.
While the advantage of surprise was already lost, and there was no reason not to sprint full speed ahead, foot traffic in the Sargan Vos was a precarious venture that required a staccato mix of skidding and sliding along the slippery chipped wood and stone. Once you were gliding, any attempt to brake tossed you randomly onto your back, side, or front, and the looseness of the debris would at once prove a cruel deception, smiting you with a blunt, prickly force.
When Edrin proved the most adept at desert sliding, it attracted not only the envy of the ogre, the werewolves, and the moody amputee, it attracted even more unwanted attention.
While the Efremian Zalgyne at first appeared to crash in a grove of stunted, violet-leaved trees, as they neared the wreckage, that small orchard proved to be malignantly circling the craft, gnashing vegetal teeth and shaking manes of alternating green and golden fronds. One hunkered-down beast bobbed its long-ranging neck, wolfing Edrin into its gullet so fast that his bloody, bitten-off calves stood straight up a for a full second before flopping into the mulch.
Jezera felt like kicking herself, for she knew better. While most took for granted that the moons would rise and that trees were immobile, she had been both to Earth and the Sargan Vos, and knew that nothing was certain. Even forewarnings of Ashflowers haunting the wasteland proved no caution to one who contracted from humans the bad habit of common sense. If she had come straight from the badlands of Ghulmarque, she would have never been duped by the Ashflowers. That said, she also would have fought over Edrin's shin bones, lunched on the werewolves, and used Strelpa as her toothpick.
"Stand clear, your highness. They're very competitive." While there was a monotony of mulch as far as Jezera could see, the contours of the chipped soil downswelled into valleys and upswelled into hills, at least until the next breeze turned the terrain inside out and topsy-turvy. As fire-streaked smoke streamed behind the largest mound, the speaker, and the wreckage of the other Zalgyne, were likely on its other side.
Deeming the woman's analysis to be sound advice, despite a face, figure or name to underscore it, Jezera waved the werewolves back to the wreck, then turned to snarl, "it's time, Strelpa."
"Not my time, monster. I regret hiring you."
"Only now? I gave you cause long past. In your shoes--sorry, Edrin--" (here she hissed shamefacedly toward the engineer's spattered shins) "--I would have disavowed your Queen when our roles reversed, lieutenant."
"My position stayed the same, a nuance which escaped your ogrish brain. Meaning when she promoted you past me, it was for no merit of yours, but only to punish me and provide diversion and amusement."
"Very exact," sneered Jezera, "just like you, Strelpa. Such a sharp mind will know nature is a great leveller. As I am ignorant, and you are wise, I need all twelve fingers for counting, while you need only five, and I am honored that nature chose me to preserve the balance. In terms of natural necessity, your great wit is so self-sufficient that you might make do with one finger." Jezera forgot the looming Ashflowers as she swelled to her most hulking bearing, so that her puffed-out chest nearly bowled over sweating, quavering Strelpa. "When I make out your receipt for fingers lost, Strelpa, should it read five or nine?"
"Yours should read one," said the indignant lieutenant, "as that'll be all that's left of you." Strelpa backpedalled, clasping his stump, as the shadow engulfed Jezera.
When the thorny hooks latched on front and back, she was pierced by the constricting clench of the Ashflower's maw, its serrated petals and toothy seeds grinding and twisting in one violent gulp.
While ogrish skin is tougher than leather, and their bones are like flint, Jezera was clasped by the strongest grip she had ever felt, and when it whipped upright in its haste to toss back the swallow, that would also have been the mightiest force she ever felt had she not, ten minutes before, crashed in the Zalgyne. Lashed from sky to earth and back again, even the mighty ogress began to shake.
Unfortunately for the Ashflower, few explosives are more volatile than shaken ogre. Their tendency to explode into a berserk rage makes them difficult to handle during the gentlest amusements, which Lord Caarentul of Ghulmarque learned first hand from her grandmother when he had the misfortune to tread lightly upon her toes in her ballroom, and ended up half in the punch bowl and half in the fireplace.
Jezera's current dance partner had blundered and planthandled her too many ways to count, but she was mainly irate because the Ashflower was such a poor kisser that she found herself inhaled. Landing in a sticky bush of needlelike fronds that were already mincing Edrin, and presumably the doorstep to the Ashflower's cleverly contrived innards, she seized the vegetal fibers and shredded them by the fistful, and when this was slow-going, she elbowed, head-butted and chomped, until she poked her head out of its abdomen without even a shudder from the plant monster.
The other Ashflowers were lumbering away from the wrecks. Perhaps they could only see movement, or were drawn to the sound of the stirring wood and stone chips of this enchanted desert, for they were departing despte a number of human and werewolf morsels on the mulch. In an attitude of perfect stillness, her minions murmured to a sword-armed Efremian clad head to toe in a hooded armor woven from metallic threads, and--she grinned so wide that her taut lips were pricked by her fangs--two of the whelps from Earth.
She sneered in disgust--even if her useless, henhearted subordinates had lost their seldom-used limbs, why negotiate with two children and a flyspeck defender who would need the girls' protection if she was a hand's width shorter?
When the Ashflower lurched backward, its leafy abdomen swung Jezera over the mulch, giving the ogress an excellent aerial view as the creature retreated from the Zalgynes' wreckage. Jezera cursed her luck; now she must choose between losing the advantage of surprise or being carried miles away. Rending the hole wider, she then dangled from the cut fronds to the ground, where she slid a few feet downhill through a slew of wood and stone chips, and the Ashflower froze over her head.
Jezera smiled. What captain worth her salt didn't have the shock and awe of unopposable reinforcements at her beck and call?
As she bounded full speed back to the crash, by dint of pumping her elbows and huffing like a bellows she stomped even harder toward her botched troops and the flyspeck rebels. The violent racket of her charge was drowned out by the monstrous slither of the Ashflower, which dragged itself forward quickly by the nonstop lash of its hooked roots.
As Jezera charged, Strelpa sneered wickedly at the Ephremian and swung his sword. As he was not left-handed—nor, unfortunately, was he right handed anymore—the awkward swing was less of a slash, more of a chop, and diverted with an effortless tap of the armored Ephremian's blade, which twisted in a riposte slicing the back of the lieutenant's hand, producing a gush of blood, an angry gasp, and a wracking spasm of his fingers, which dropped the sword.
When the tiny warrior then turned fiercely, as if powered by nothing but boldness, to meet Jezera's crushing slice, it was repelled by the double crack of the Ephremian's splintering sword and the uncanny armor, which took the blade without a mark while knocking both warriors ten feet from the impact.
When The Ashflower leaned over Jezera, the dazed and prostrate ogress at first thought the screams were her own, until the titanic plant retracted to its starting position with boots kicking from its mouth mid-swallow.
She smiled groggily and rolled to her feet. Goodbye, Strelpa. While she would have liked to see the look on his face, she knew it was him, for the werewolves and the Earth children did not wear boots, and the Ephremian's garb was all of one piece.
When she eyed the uneven battlefield, she felt a wave of satisfaction. While they were a man down, by instinct the Ashflower had weeded their ranks.
The Ephremian bounded to her feet and seized Strelpa's sword. Jezera felt a grudging respect for the small warrior. She should have known it would be a woman who would give her pause in battle, for neither man nor ogre had yet equalled her mettle.
"Do me a favor, Ephremian."
"And leave an ogre owing me? No thanks."
"Stand still is all I ask."
The Ephremian giggled. "Is this an exchange of favors? If so, run into my outstretched sword."
"You're a worthy pest, Ephremian. While I take my time with vermin, I'll crush you with a single blow."
"Is this your idea of respect?"
"Yes," said Jezera. The ogress did not echo the Ephremian's laugh. "I like a good joke, but this is no laughing matter, human. Prepare yourself."
Jezera closed the distance with a gallop, stopped just out of the shorter warrior's reach, then steeled herself for the recoil, so that when the doughty Ephremian parried the ogrish sword, she shot back, driving through the particulate soil in a flurry of chipped wood and stone.
The two Earth children seemed to shrink into themselves as they gawked at their downed protector. When Strelpa's sword clattered on the mulch, the taller girl's eyes darted to it, and Jezera leered, but did not budge from her position. If the Earth girl wished to put up a fight, why should Jezera not encourage the next generation of rebels? It was good for job security. She would not kill the whelp, after all, although Queen Suvani did not specify what constituted an acceptable condition for her captives. Perhaps she would cut off her left hand? Bad luck came in threes, after all, and if she did not want to be the third dismemberment of the day, she should inflict it on this whelp. The ogress felt a pang of pity, for such a handicap might discourage any fighting spirit, if they did not have an ogrish rage.
When the Earth girl lunged for the sword, Jezera even took a step back, politely nodded her head, and strove not to laugh.
"Your thumb's in the wrong place, Earth girl."
When the girl fumbled at the hilt, the heavy sword pulled her forward with a rush of surprise, so that for a split second, both her heels were in the air. Clutching the sword two-handed, she lifted it up and glared at Jezera. Though her eyes were angry, her jaw quivered.
"You're all thumbs, Earth girl. Your hands are in the way. Hold the sword with your back and move it with your legs."
"That makes no sense!"
"Humans are too literal to make good warriors, but I might make something of you. Not a warrior, but perhaps a mousy little assassin."
"Are you fighting me or training me?!"
"Suvani would never allow either."
"Then we're at a standstill."
"No," chuckled Jezera. "You're my prisoner, Earth girl."
"You just said you can't fight me!"
"I'm allowed certain liberties. Unfortunately for you, Suvani didn't say what they are."
"You can't make things up as you go! I'm a princess!"
"Princessess are given everything but do nothing; ogres are given nothing and can do anything. Unless you're going to stop me, princess?"
When the angry girl flung herself forward, Jezera swatted Strelpa's sword, which shattered as the princess was rebuffed with a sickening crack. When she screamed, clutched her arm, and curled into a ball, Jezera sighed; while it was nice to take out her frustration on Strelpa posthumously by breaking his weapon, the girl's plaintive screams were not a loser's but a victim's, displacing the ogress from her comfortable role of monster into the unsatisfying role of villain. Wah, wah, wah, Jezera thought crossly, I'm not a bad guy, I'm a force of nature.
As Jezera rolled her eyes and swallowed her discontent, a ball of fur collided with her neck and collarbone and gnawed and chomped with such berserk rapidity that while her tough skin did not give way, it was worried raw before she latched onto its foreleg and hurled it at the hurt girl.
A fox. Jezera rubbed at her chewed neck. Why didn't the werewolves stop it, she wondered, when two larger furballs clashed on her, gouging her with iron-hard nails and teeth like mace spikes. While a six hundred pound ogress can stand under four hundred pounds of werewolves, Jezera nearly buckled under the thrashing weight, giving the lycanthropes a moment to work their paws and jaws, tearing her ear and scraping her forearm so that she dropped her sword right on her foot.
The fifty pound ogre sword landing on her big toe was not only her worst injury of the day, but the last straw for Jezera, who howled bloody murder, shrugged one werewolf to the ground, boxed the other's jaw to loosen it from her arm, then grabbed her sword.
When the werewolves sprang to their feet instantly—one hobbling on three legs side to side in a kind of drunken taunt, while the other circled rapidly on all four—Jezera took a step back. The Ephremian was on her feet, struggling to suck her wind back in, and the fox licked the brave girl's face. Where was the other Earth girl?
"I won't ask why you turned coat, you lousy, mangy animals. Whether they brought the right dog biscuits or rub your belly the right way matters not to me." The werewolves growled menacingly, but did not advance, for the tough ogress was only scratched and scraped from their onslaught, and they were in no hurry to have their necks broken in the hope of tearing the other earlobe.
Jezera's scorn abated when the Ephremian bent for the dagger sheathed on Edrin's strewn leg. While she was tough, she was by no means invulnerable, and with so many points flying at her, one might find her neck or eye.
"What I want to know is, how will you save your new mistress from the Sargan Vos?"
When the growling werewolves' eyes glowed red, their coats bristled, and they bayed so menacingly that the awful echoes seemed wilder, hairier beasts eager to join the feast. While the advancing Ephremian's dagger was a laugh, her strange armor, which turned her ogrish strength back upon her, was no joke.
"You'll live to regret this—if you live," Jezera sneered. "I've already come out of an Ashflower. You'll never boast the same." Her exasperated bellow concealed a more sincere panting from exhaustion, throbbing wounds, and a pang of fear. In an attitude of laziness and contempt, Jezera slouched as she turned towards the Ashflowers. Though she projected a lack of concern, she steeled herself for attack and did not breathe easy until nothing was behind her but stillness, silence, and shadow.