Eyes swung toward me when my group of creatures arrived to join the other dazed creatures who had gathered around the Circle. I stood out like a sore thumb from all the creatures.
"There she is! It is her!" came another screech. "Bring her here and when she has been punished by the gods, we will be able to continue."
I was busy freeing creatures around me from the influence and so was not paying enough attention. A sharp spear flew through the air and struck me down from the big lizards's back through the shoulder. I lay gasping with pain on the ground and heard Shigure's shout of alarm through our link. He could feel my pain with me.
Slowly, painfully, I isolated my pain from him, freeing him to continue whatever he was in the middle of. My creatures gathered around me in a protective circle and there was a fight. Tribal warriors fought the gathered creatures with skill. The big lizard roared as he fought to keep the warriors and witch doctor away.
I wanted to give the tribesmen the warning, but I could barely draw a breath. The spear in my shoulder was too painful and my trembling hands could not move it from where it had me pinned to the ground.
Then there were guttural words spat in my direction, making my head and heart twist with discomfort. I wanted to cover my ears. I recognised the words spoken as a kind of word with power, but it was not the same as the language of the judges. There was a black twistedness to it. The sound was grating all over. Nevertheless, many of the creatures were felled by those words.They lay on the ground stunned.
They were still alive. I could see they were still breathing. But they were unconscious.
The big lizard reared and roared again, fighting to protect his mind. I tried to help, but he pushed me away. He nearly trampled on me.
The twisted words of power were spoken in that guttural voice again and the big lizard screamed and frothed. I used my mind to act as a barrier for him and to ease his pain. He didn't have the strength to resist me this time. I whispered words of power to him and he finally settled down.
This did not please the witch doctor in the slightest. It became a war of words of power until the big lizard couldn't take it anymore. I suggested it and gave him the permission. He lurched and then raced away, leaving me behind.
With him gone, leering tribal warriors came to pick me up. I recognised no one from my tribe, but did recognise people from the neighbouring tribe. They recognised me and called me the Outcast Woman with No Name. They said I was the reason for the destruction of my entire tribe. I was dragged before the most powerful witch doctor in the tribe who had been fighting with me just now.
He was covered all over in a jangle of broken jewelry, dead animal skulls and twists of paper with scribbles on them. Bones, claws and teeth adorned his neck. His hair was held back with cobwebs. His fingernails were elongated and sharp, like a beast's.
"An apprentice of the noble judges," his clawed fingers gripped a fistful of my hair and he examined my face with his yellowed eyes closely. "Of the Shigure line. One of the escapees from back then," he tossed his head back to an impossible angle to look at one of the other witch doctors who scoffed. "If we kill her, we can drink her blood and receive more power."
"If we keep her alive, we can drink her blood regularly. The last captive died too long ago," replied a witch doctor with a bird skull on his head, licking his lips.
"I'm afraid, we cannot keep her long," said the witch doctor with the cobwebby hair holding me up by the hair. He yanked the spear out of my shoulder making me cry out in pain. His lips slurped at my bleeding wound, licking it. After he had a taste, he tossed me over to another witchdoctor who did the same thing, filling me with disgust.
If only I could move. If only my legs were not broken.
Someone stepped on my legs and I screamed with pain. Fire and lightning and white hot lances shot through me, making the witch doctors laugh.
"She is the one you heard of," someone said in English. "She should be the person you are looking for, according to the pictures you showed us."
The last witch doctor finished drinking my blood and backed away, allowing a man with foreign looks to step forwards. He was putting on the electronic gadgets I had seen the enemy agents wearing during the invasion two years ago. All my mental barriers immediately slammed up into place and I worked on making them thicker and stronger.
A strange electronic, disembodied sensation clawed at my mind, making me sweat profusely with pain. Seeing what was going on, Shigure helped me strengthen my shield.
"Her mind is extremely strong," the foreign man commented, stroking my face, "but she has been recently injured. The injury is not healed yet."
A sharp and honed attack tore at my thinner mental barriers right where the big lizard had previously injured me. I felt Shigure shake with me in pain. We braced for another attack, but this time, I was shocked instead by an evil guttural word of power. In that moment of shock, the foreigner attacked and once again succeeded in shaking Shigure and I. The barrier was weakening. It was my fault, because I was already injured and weak.
How could this man be so strong?
Shigure and I were shocked.
This amount of power was almost the same amount of power as that of one of the area guardians. Unless this was taken from that tortured area guardian while they had been experimenting on her?
I felt the blow of a fist in my abdomen. A hard and angry one by the perverted witch doctor, who smiled at me in a grotesque manner.
"This is for ruining my plans earlier," he hissed and then stomped on my abdomen with a heavy and dirty bare foot. I couldn't even scream. I couldn't breathe. No wonder the Creator said the child would not survive. I couldn't even curl up in pain. I just couldn't move.
The foreigner attacked my mind again, but with Shigure's help, we managed to remain firm.
"There's two of you?" the foreigner tilted his head, renewing his grip on my face, while the witch doctor stomped on me again. "Of course. There are two heroes of the Blue Gulf now. Each as strong as the other. So unfair. In that case," the foreigner flipped a switch, "this won't be too unfair. If one old dinosaur isn't enough, perhaps two are."
Shigure was busy in my mind moving all my important memories, files and information down into our secret, private room. He doubted we'd both be able to hold up against the next blow either. Not if it involved the power of two area guardians.
We braced hard but the blow was too strong. It was not quite as strong as the combined power of the Forest Mother and Desert Father, but it was close. It reminded me of the time the two had pierced through the buzzing to find me when Chad had kidnapped me on the boat in the Tangled Mountains. I thrust Shigure into the private room the moment my defences broke in order to protect him. I chose to bear the pain alone. After all, I had been through it once before.
The foreigner traipsed through my mind with all the gentleness of a drunken bear. He was angry and frustrated at the lack of information that he found, just as he was awed by how much space I had and the size of my vulnerable ability centre.
"A treasure. I've found a treasure!" he whooped and exclaimed.
While he was celebrating, we saw his moment of vulnerability and weakness. Shigure and I intertwined our mental forces into a sharp drill. We attacked.
The man shrieked, jerking back. His electronic gadgets sparked and we smelled burning flesh. He clutched at his face, ripping the gadgets from his face, frothing at the mouth. Shigure and I didn't wait. We struck one more time and the man went still. His eyes and mouth were open wide. His face twisted in an expression of pain. He fell to the ground. Dead.
Then on Shigure's side, I heard a clamour and the sounds of fighting. Shigure didn't have time to spare any attention for me. Something was happening city side.
The warriors, witch doctors and tribal elders all fell silent, staring. The leading witch doctor was the first to react. He kicked me so hard that I heard my ribs crack. I rolled tumbling across the dust of the sacred meeting ground.
I hadn't even managed to give them my warning. I had been attacked first.
I ended up face down in the dirt, unable to move.
"The foreigner is dead. We are doomed," moaned one tribal elder. "How will we receive payment for the work we have done without him?"
"We could sell them this white haired she-devil," someone else suggested.
"No," said the firm voice of the neighbouring tribe's chieftain. "We must at least have a bottom line. She was once of the tribes and she is already dead. We do not sell our own. We have already agreed on this."
Someone rolled me over and I felt a finger under my nose.
"She's not breathing."
"Just toss her body off the Cliffs of the Dead later," someone said.
"What a pity," whispered the witch doctor with the bird skull on his head. "At least we got a taste of her before she died."
"What should we do with the foreigner's body?"
"Burn it. Pretend that we never saw him and that he never arrived."
"The No Name Outcast came riding on a big lizard, together with many creatures. What did she come here for?"
"Who knows? It doesn't matter anymore. She's dead."
"We should have left her alive. A miracle that survived having her name torn from her was worth capturing to be experimented upon even if we didn't sell her."
"Forget it. It's too late to regret now."
"What we must do now is prepare to help the foreigners invade the city and take what they want. We must weaken the city's defences. When they see we have kept up our side of the bargain despite the lack of their missing representative, they will still pay us. We have performed many experiments for them, after all. Imagine how much money we will receive to enrich our tribes and improve our houses afterwards. Hurry up and finish summoning the animals. When we have enough of them, we can send them to attack the city in a beast tide."
I felt my body being stroked by someone and a sharp nail run down from my chin to my neck. A knife blade pricked me and there was the tearing sound of my clothes being ripped and cut open. Someone chuckled at all the bruises they saw on me and felt my body all over, licking and slurping from my shoulder wound all the way across my body. My breasts were painfully assaulted by sharp teeth that nibbled.
Distantly, I felt the animals slowly waking up. I informed them of the tribes' plans to control them to attack the city. Angered, the animals that woke up waited until enough of them were awake and then, they got up to attack the gathered tribes' peoples. The witch doctors were their first targets.
I heard shouting, screams and shouts of pain. Creatures rushed over to guard my body and attacked the man intent on defiling me, even though the tribesmen thought I might be dead.
"Accursed witch!" someone shrieked, thinking that I might have called the animals over, bringing what felt like a big stone down onto my head, causing me to descend into the dark.