Chapter X: Frenzy

I had just enough time to vaguely hear the sounds of Anna calling me an idiot fade away into the distance before the totality of my attention ended up focused on running and fighting. With no idea of where the giant monster was or what it looked like, I was going to have to focus to not get blindsided.

Fortunately, there was little to distract me. The treaty grounds were eerily empty, emptier than I’d seen them since that first day when Sarnai had shown me around, the only sound around being the crunching of my feet in the snow. It must have snowed recently in the treaty grounds; there hadn’t been much snow elsewhere in the valley.

Halflance’s building was a quick shot across from where everyone had gathered up. Having to think about which way to go, weaving through the smaller buildings where the less important people like me had to stay, was probably what saved me. Focusing on keeping my legs pumping, my breath steady, and on figuring out which direction to go, meant that there was no room in my head for thoughts about what I was going to do if I ran into the giant monster or how I was going to get Halflance out of there alive.

When I arrived at Halflance’s structure (house? habitat? lodge? Wasn’t sure what to call it), a quick search confirmed that she was nowhere around. Because it couldn’t be too easy, could it. Unable to get rid of the kinetic energy and feeling about as tired as an Olympic sprinter on the starting line, I circled the International House of Halflance, trying to brain out where she might be. I didn’t get anywhere for at least a minute, until I was interrupted by a sound coming to my left. My first thought was that it didn’t sound like a giant monster, with the second thought following close behind, that second thought being “Well, what the fuck else could it be?!” The sound was like someone was choking on a recorder, or maybe about a million recorders at once, all melting together into a horrible shrieking, honking nightmare of a sound that made your bones shake and your eardrums beg for mercy. It went on and on, long and droning and awful, until it cut out just when I thought it would never end. But it gave me the clue I needed, in the direction where it had come from. 

A bunch of memories shot through my head of particularly boring moments from earlier in the week, when Halflance had made absolutely sure that I knew where everything was. The sound was coming from the dead center of the treaty grounds, the mess hall where most people tended to gather. A perfect place for a giant monster to go, I guess.

I dashed off in that direction as soon as I was able to uncover my ears. There wasn’t far to go, less than a city block in a straight line, though with the densely-packed buildings to make it interesting. I vaulted right over an abandoned wheelbarrow and found myself suddenly in a relatively open courtyard. The mess hall was still there, albeit with a large section of the roof having been caved in, sending a section of wall shattering into splinters below it. The eerie thing was that there was relatively little evidence that anyone else had been around. A dropped crate here, a splatter of blood there, people had been forced to run with little warning. 

There were two people that you could still see around. One was a dead Durkahn, face down in the dirt with her back torn open. I tried not to think about that one, and was mostly successful. The other was Lady Halflance, sitting inside the partially-collapsed mess hall, nursing a very clearly broken ankle from atop the rubble pile that she was using as cover. She didn’t notice me, probably because her attention was on the giant scary monster that had caused all this carnage to begin with. 

It was a bird the size of an elephant, most of its body covered in layers of insulating feathers in midnight blue. Thankfully, it was way too big to possibly fly, so its wings had instead evolved to be covered in wicked-sharp claws to match its impaling raptor beak. The creature almost reminded me of the old dinosaurs rather than birds, stalking around the square on long, featherless legs tipped by feral talons, except for the distinctly birdlike head. 

The only thing more notable than how completely stupid I would have to be to fight this thing was the fact that someone had domesticated it. It had one of those giant saddles on its back like the one they use for elephants, enough to carry four or five people, complete with a dozen straps around its broad torso and a set of reins attached to its face. Attached to its lower limbs and neck by buckles and leather straps were a series of plates of scale armor, giving it the appearance of a beast of war. But none of that stuff had been cared for in a long time; the leather was worn and ripped, and at least half of the straps had broken off to dangle limply against the beast’s side. 

The monster’s eyes, beady and absent-minded, were too big to turn properly in its skull, meaning it had to swivel its entire neck from side to side to scan the area around the mess hall, sending the half-dozen fleshy wattles and combs that adorned its face jiggling wildly with each anxious turn. That also meant that I had about three seconds to take in the whole scene and try formulating a plan before it noticed me. Its beak opened, revealing rows of bony plates inside, and it let out that godawful choking shriek again, this time loud enough to make my bones vibrate.

I started with the revolver, giving myself exactly one second to aim before firing. The shot went true at the exact moment that the elephant bird lowered its head for a bull rush. My bullet left behind a thin red streak on the top of its head as it ricocheted off the skull. There was just enough time after that for Halflance to shoot me a completely dumbfounded look before she completely faded from my attention. The elephant bird charged.

Now, I’ve fought fast things before; Regan Leyrender, the blankwolves, or that inexplicable werewolf I’d met last month at the Archopolid depot. And I’d fought big things, too; Archopolids were nearly twice as large as an elephant, and made out of solid steel to boot. But those things had always had some weakness. Regan and the wolves had both been on roughly my weight class, or at least within an order of magnitude, and Archopolids were so slow and blind that the only way they could have a fair fight was by having a freaking squad support weapon bolted to the side of their head. The elephant bird was not like those, because while it was very large, it was also terrifyingly fast. 

Its talons tore huge gashes in the snow-covered earth as it accelerated towards me at a top speed easily comparable to a horse at full gallop. I clicked back the hammer of the revolver and fired, this time eliciting a fine mist of blood to spray from its outer chest, which it didn’t seem to notice or care about. There was just enough time for me to remember why elephant rifles were invented in the first place before it was uncomfortably close to me, still accelerating. I leapt to the side, collapsing into an awkward roll. And video game characters make it look so easy. 

Speaking of video games, my foolish hopes that the elephant bird would take care of itself by smashing face-first into a building were quickly dashed as it skidded to a halt, drifting across the snow like a sports car, its tail slamming into a wall behind it as it turned to face me. 

I wasn’t on the ground for more than a second, rising up into a crouch and preparing to fire another shot. My revolver was gone, dropped in the panicked dodge. The elephant bird started another charge as I dashed for the gun. It had a head start, forcing me to skew to one side just to avoid a solid disemboweling. The elephant bird missed me by about one body length, but even with its stomping I could hear the metallic keening of a revolver being crushed under tons of heavy bird foot. 

“Fuck,” I said, wasting precious oxygen. I drew my sword, and with a burst of reckless aggression, I charged into melee range with the elephant bird. Through a combination of luck and adrenaline-fueled cleverness, I caught up to the thing just as it was skidding out of its charge, and zeroed in on the most vulnerable target. With the entire force of my body and both arms, I rammed the point of my saber into the thing’s Achilles tendon. Hot blood splattered across my face and poured onto the ground in enough quantity to send up a gout of steam when it hit the snow.

The elephant bird screeched again, this time a more guttural sound of a million twisting and snapping bones. It recoiled, leaping almost entirely into the air and nearly taking my sword with it. The blow didn’t do what I’d expected it to do, which was to send the elephant bird sprawling to the ground; but as it ruffled its feathers and focused both of those gigantic eyes at me, I noticed it was favoring its uninjured leg. That gave me all the advantage I needed.

The next minute or so of my life closely resembled a fight between a chicken and a delicious but surprisingly agile woodlouse, with my fat ass in the role of the woodlouse. It pecked, it clawed, it scraped and stomped, and I deftly threw myself out of the way whenever it came close to me. One hit from that thing would put me in the hospital, I assumed; and the second would put me in a cemetery, the logic went. That put me on the defensive, more focused on evasion than on attack, not to mention constantly terrified that I’d slip up and get turned into chicken feed.

The wounded leg was, I’m fairly sure, the only thing that prevented me from getting completely brained. The elephant bird was off-balance, in pain, constantly having to shuffle its weight to balance mostly on the un-wounded leg. By staying around that leg, I forced the elephant bird to tie itself into knots, its thrashing strikes and desperate sweeps often reaching their limit just before hitting me. Not that that stopped me from jumping backwards at the merest suggestion of something getting near me. 

Bang! the snow kicked up in a puff just by my feet as a lead shot ricocheted off the ground, leaving a scar in the earth.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second, which the elephant bird took as an opportunity to sweep its tail across the field. I noticed it coming just a bit too late, and got clipped across the shoulder. All of my senses muted at the same time, replaced by the sheer blunt force, first of the tail slamming into my shoulder and neck, then a second later by the snow-covered ground rolling across my back and chest. Or maybe it was my back and chest rolling across the snow-covered ground. A cracking sound resonated through my bones, followed a second later by an echoing series of pops.

I was on my back, in a lot of pain yet somehow still conscious. The elephant bird took one hobbling step towards me. Its eyes, big white cueballs that bulged out of its skull, met mine. It reared to make the fatal peck. This was it. Death by a giant bird. 

Bang! and a spark shot off of the bird’s breastplate. Its head twitched upwards, then back to me. Bang! and a chunk of flesh in one of the huge combs dissolved into blood, blood that splattered across my face and sank, steaming, into the snow. The elephant bird looked up and over my back with that twisting-bone shriek of pain and charged. I rolled to the side, its foot missing me by inches.

“Halflance, don’t distract me!” I shouted as soon as I was sure that I wasn’t going to die.

“I found my gun,” Halflance said from the mess hall. “You’re still alive.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“You’re welcome. What the hell are you doing here?”

I groaned as I dragged myself upright, then onto my feet. The elephant bird was still alive, judging by all the screaming and slamming noises, which would be a problem. Wiping the snow off of my sword, I checked myself for injuries. Everything was still working, albeit sore, at least from what I could tell in the five seconds I had.

Halflance was in the same place I’d seen her last, nursing a broken ankle on top of a pile of rubble that had been created when part of the mess hall collapsed. She also had a revolver in her hand, carefully taking aim at the elephant bird. Speaking of the elephant bird, it didn’t seem too happy to have been shot in the face; like a dog trying to climb a pile of ice, it squawked and scrabbled against the rubble, causing progressively more damage to the building’s structure as it desperately tried to reach her. 

“So, do you have a plan?” I said.

“I keep it distracted,” said Halflance, grimacing with pain. “You stab it in a vulnerable spot.”

I nodded. That would be easy enough. Moving quickly but as quietly as possible, I closed distance with the elephant bird, keeping my eyes out for any opportunity. The edge of the remaining wall was unstable, very unstable. And all my time spent examining the Durkahni architecture meant that I could already start to see in my mind what would happen if that beam collapsed into that beam, and so on. 

With the elephant bird still neatly distracted, I snuck around to its left flank, brain working at maximum speed as I picked the best place to put my plan into action. One of the remaining structural pillars had already had a chunk taken out of it, and was leaning precariously toward the elephant bird. With my teeth gritted and my feet planted on the ground, I pushed against the pillar as hard as I could. It creaked.

“Emma, what are you doing?”

“Pinning it down,” I said between gritted teeth. “Rook always told me to make use of the environment.”

Halflance glanced up at the roof then down to me. “Emma, that doesn’t seem like—”

The elephant bird lunged forward, scrabbling up the side of the rubble pile, its huge taloned feet gaining enough purchase to bring it just a foot closer to Lady Halflance. She startled, firing off another snap shot which sank into the elephant bird’s back with a puff of blood and a shriek of pain. Bullets weren’t doing any more to this thing than a needle would. 

I was pushing against the half-collapsed beam with all of my effort, using every muscle group in my body, and to no avail. This tiny frame was not meant for heavy lifting. Glancing up, the elephant bird was making steady progress towards Halflance; I didn’t have much time. Behind me there was about ten feet of open space. An idea hit me.

Kinetic energy, and therefore the ability to hit things really hard, is based on mass and the square of velocity. I may not have much mass, but in a pinch I can pull off a hell of a lot of velocity, which is what I did. Gritting my teeth to prepare for something I knew was going to hurt like hell, I pulled back as far as I could without running into anything, then broke into a sprint. At the last instant, I jumped off the ground entirely, focusing my entire bodyweight into a haphazard shoulder check. 

With a chorus of cracking and snapping wood, the pillar started to collapse. I bounced off, my spine cushioning the fall, and had just a second to smile at my impending success before it all went completely to hell. The pillar slipped out of the joint connecting it to the roof. It continued to fall entirely on its own, bouncing harmlessly off the back of the much larger elephant bird. Meanwhile, the entire segment of roof around me shuddered and sagged while I rolled to my feet. Too late. 

The next few seconds were like getting beaten with a dozen clubs, something with which I already had a lot of experience, and was only going to get more from there. There wasn't so much sound as much as there was the aftereffects of various blows echoing through my skull, and there wasn’t so much an image as there was a total pandemonium of falling wood splinters and flailing limbs.

When my head stopped ringing like a bell and I found that I had conscious control of my body again, I was somewhat surprised to find myself only partially crushed. The fallen beams, with a couple of exceptions, had formed a sort of hollow, leaning precariously against one another like a house of cards writ large. One of those beams had landed on my leg, pinning me down. 

There wasn’t any pain, which made me fear for the worst. I struggled and strained to shift the beam that critical few inches to get it off of me, a task that became much more urgent when the elephant bird figured out what happened. It moved with shocking speed, slamming itself into the edge of the rubble pile, instantly snapping several of the beams and sending a dozen others creaking and complaining with the force of it. It made it up to the shoulder before getting caught, which it reacted to with about as much tact as you could expect from a giant bird, snapping and shrieking loud enough to disturb the dust on the ground as it pushed and scraped to get just a bit closer.

I was almost out of adrenaline, reaching that stage of panicked exertion where, while I was just as strong as ever, I could almost feel myself getting stretched thin. Any longer and I’d either collapse or just have a heart attack. That didn’t change a thing. Rocking back and forth, I found a rhythm with the beam pinning me down, like knocking over a boulder with a long lever, and with a shove hard enough to make my joints scream out with pain I wrenched my leg out and to freedom. It was only then, from the friction and the pulling force, that it started to hurt like hell. What mattered was that my leg worked, which it did, with some protest. 

I picked my sword off the ground, for what good that would do me. The crude net of broken beams shuddered and moaned, giving way by another half a foot. The elephant bird was bleeding from a dozen wounds, little bullet holes on its back oozing while cuts on its legs and feet dripped into the snow. Maybe if it was left like this it would bleed out, though I’m not enough of an expert on giant fuckoff bird anatomy to know if it would heal before that happened; even if it couldn’t, I’d be long dead anyway.

So we stood there, two mortal enemies who’d never met before, looking each other eye to bulging freakish eye. My endurance was being pushed to the limit, but my lungs were still pumping. My muscles were sore and shaking, but I was still on my feet with my saber in my hand. My brain was on fire with terror and panic, but it was also still working crystal clear, running in overdrive to find some plan of attack that wouldn’t get me instantly killed. There was no way to flank the elephant bird from inside a pile of rubble, not when it was looking right at me. Then I remembered an old parkour video that I’d watched about half a year earlier, back on Earth, and my brain appended that critical “unless…”

Not giving the elephant bird a second of warning, I launched forward with as much speed as I could muster. Three long steps was all the space I had, then I was up in the air. Twisting around to get my feet into position. Landed on a projecting beam, only for a second, enough to push off, redirecting force, upwards and in the opposite direction. Like a spring.

Time restarted when my fingers wrapped around one of the leather straps, hanging from the half-broken saddle on the elephant bird’s back. I grabbed the nearest one as tightly as I could, hauling myself up onto it with two hands as soon as the signal hit my brain. Once I felt reasonably secure, I started laughing, tension collapsing from my bones like rust. I had made it around the elephant bird’s lethal beak by bouncing myself off of the freaking walls, and I was going to celebrate that fact, even if only for a second before the monster I was hanging precariously off the side of caught on to what had just happened. 

It did, ripping itself out of the net of rubble, squawking and snapping as it tried to twist its own neck around far enough to reach me. The rubble pile immediately collapsed without its largest and most chickeny support structure. For a short while it was all I could do to hold on as the elephant bird spun and jerked wildly like a dog chasing its own tail, the heavy clacking sound of its beak and that horrible shriek only a few feet away. It left trails in the snow.

I pulled myself hand over hand, stopping whenever the elephant bird tried some new thrashing, whirling spasm of movement to get me off its back. The memory of my climb out of the crevasse up to Nemesis’s laboratory resurfaced in my mind, and the lesson learned of never letting go of my momentum came with it. My arms were on fire, but I was on its back.

I took a fistful of feathers with one hand, rising up into a crouch as I drew my saber with the other. The wind was blowing in my face, as the elephant bird tried the new “sprint around as fast as possible” method for dislodging me, but I was still able to crawl awkwardly forward, two short steps, until I found myself looking at a gap in the armor. Doing my best Wander impression, I shoved the sword into the flesh of its shoulder region with all of my strength, even pulling myself down with the other arm for extra leverage.

The blade sank roughly into the tough flesh of the elephant bird’s back, halfway to the hilt before getting stuck in some deep mass of gristle or bone. I was deafened by that deep, bone-wrenching scream as the elephant bird stumbled and tripped, then fell, skidding across the snowy ground. The sudden stop was too much for my fragile grip, and I was tossed forward like a rag doll, coming to rest against the base of a building.

I had to almost throw myself back onto my feet, limbs heavy and joints not in the mood for movement. Sword was still there, too, which helped when I used it like a walking stick for about half a second before the angry voice of Rook filled my ears, reminding me to respect the weapon. The elephant bird was about ten feet in front of me, if I had to guess, head on the ground and tail twitching. If it hadn’t spent the last several minutes trying to kill me for no good reason, I might have felt sorry for it. It didn’t have the energy left to keen or scream; instead it lay there and bled, twitching and halfheartedly convulsing. Several of its bones had broken in the fall.

I shuffled up to it, struggling to maintain a solid grip on my sword. Those huge, bulging eyes looked up at me, and an idea formed in the frontmost part of my skull, the only part not focused on how shitty I felt. Leaving my fingers together to take the saber in both hands, I pulled back, and with a glacially slow but forceful strike, I drove that tough little saber right through the back of the elephant bird’s eye, through the tear ducts and into the brain. It shivered once, a full-body nerve impulse, then died. I had to put my shoe on its neck to pull the sword back out, at which point I promptly collapsed, using the corpse as an impromptu pillow. As I drifted off to sleep, I half-expected a dwarf to show up and tell me that it still only counted as one. 

Suddenly, something caught my eye, stuck in the feathers around the elephant bird’s throat. I probably would have missed it if the sun were at a slightly different angle; as it was, it shined directly into my eyes while I was trying to rest. With a motion practiced from years of rolling over to turn off my morning alarm, I turned to get a closer look. 

One of the wide leather straps keeping the armor and saddle on the elephant bird wrapped around the front of the chest/neck/shoulder region, like a harness on a horse. This one, on closer inspection, had been partially cut through, about halfway. Right in the middle of the cut was the shiny thing, still lodged in the leather. I took it, pulling it out against some resistance and a rather ugly, squishy sound. The little object was shaped like a saw, or like an artistic rendition of a roaring flame, or maybe a very odd leaf, and carved from a pale and hard material. The pointed tip was soaked in that same dark blood that now covered my entire body. At first I thought it must have been some kind of token or medallion, except that the edge was sharp enough to be used as a weapon; then again, if it were intended as a tool, I imagined that it would have had more of a handle than just a vaguely unsharpened area around the base. 

I turned the little thing over in my hand a couple of times. It looked a little bit like the inside of a seashell, or a pearl, like nacre but not quite. Once I was satisfied that there weren’t any weird runes or hidden messages carved into it, I slipped the object into my pocket. I was too sore to fall asleep, for once, and instead spent the next few minutes staring up at the sky, resting. The sky over the Urcos plateau was so… beautiful, a more pure and clean blue than any place on either world.

Either world… I’d started thinking about Earth and Selene that way at some point. Two different worlds, equally real, despite the fact that I’d lived in one my entire life and only arrived in one nine weeks earlier. Why? How? What even was I, that I’d suddenly been ripped away from everything and everyone and hurled, dislocated, into whatever this was. Was Selene even real? Was Earth even real? Was I even real? And why did I not give a shit? What had happened to me that I didn’t care about everything I’d left behind, and embraced this world of blood and sweat and smoke so quickly that I’d purposefully thrown myself into an even stranger environment, an even more dangerous challenge, purely out of boredom?

That was the real question that circled through my head, once the hardcore solipsistic bullshit had cleared out. What had changed about me? I had almost forgotten everyone from my old life already… my parents, my roommate John, Professor Monroe, that cute girl from book club; Yasmin, her name was. All of that had just been blown away, like fog in front of the light of dawn, by Selene. Something about Selene, or something about me, outshone my entire previous two dozen years with every moment I spent there. Sometimes it felt like the only people I could remember from before were my sister, rotting in the ground, and him, and if I never had to think about his jaundiced face again I’d be all the better for it. 

My existential crisis was interrupted before I could replay the memory again by the arrival of Sir Margaret, Adilet Kurzurnah, and a mixed group of about forty Bluerose and Durkahn soldiers. 

“The monster’s dead,” I said, patting the corpse like you would a pillow. “Unless there’s a second one I didn’t hear about.”

Adilet said something in the Durkahn language, very loudly. Sir Margaret looked over expectantly, and after a rather long and awkward pause, one of the soldiers offered to translate into thickly-accented Cassandran. English. I mean English.

“She says that this is Foresight, one of her own…”

I chuckled. “Oh, Foresight, I get it. Because of the big eyes!”

The soldier translating looked at me weirdly. “No, they’re all like that. This chargerthing was one of Adilet’s personal mounts. She’s rather upset that it has apparently broken out of its harness and gone frenzied.”

“It didn’t break out,” I said, trying and failing to stand up. “Someone broke it out.”

The soldier quickly relayed my statement to Adilet, who responded with several sentences of disgruntled Durkahni. “She says that you don’t understand, and that chargerthings often go frenzied at some point in their lives, which I also know to be true. It is incredibly unfortunate that Farsight’s frenzy was not noticed and controlled earlier, and offers a thousand golden apologies for all the damage that has been caused.”

“Yeah, okay, sure.” I didn’t have the physical strength left to argue the point. I’d look into whatever weird object I’d found later on. “I much prefer elephant bird, by the way; sounds way more elegant than ‘chargerthing’.”

“Sarah!” Margaret suddenly shouted, breaking out of the cluster of soldiers and running around the dead elephant bird.

Lady Halflance chuckled from atop her rubble pile. “I was wondering how long it would take you to notice!”

“Are you alright, darling?”

“Broken ankle,” said Halflance. “Could use help getting down.”

The next few minutes became exponentially more chaotic as people, hearing that the elephant bird was dead, started trickling back in. Doctor Charcharias arrived and pronounced me to be completely healthy and uninjured, and a swarm of Durkahni laborers began repairing all of the collapsed building sections, clearing out the rubble bit by bit. 

There had only been one fatality; a Durkahn who threw a rock at the elephant bird, distracting it long enough for many others to get away. Eighteen had been injured, including Lady Halflance’s broken ankle, though none permanently. All in all, it was a tremendous disruption, and the dead woman would be missed, but chargerthing frenzies had been known to be much, much worse. Halflance, out of gratitude for saving her life and all that, declared that I was now exempt from repair duty. 

I retreated to the cabin that I shared with Anna and Unity, flipping the small, sharp, nacreous object over and over in my hand. Something was going on here. Someone had sent Farsight into a frenzy on purpose. And it was starting to look like it was up to me to find out who.

SaffronDragon

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