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ilonaandrews_blog_feedSorry, a friend needed some emergency feedback on the upcoming cover. Here we go. The song that in part inspired sadrin. Let’s see if the assassin can dance with the queen.
I opened my eyes. Nothing had changed in the tunnel. Bear still napped curled up around me. Jovo’s eyes were closed. I didn’t know how much time had passed, but I wasn’t overly thirsty, so it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours.
I spent years in the gress world. I watched a generation of their young train, grow, achieve their rank, and be unleashed. I knew how they fought. I knew how they thought. I had accessed a layered memory, not just the recollection of a single being, but a collected amalgam of experiences, so complex that they blended into a simulation created in my mind.
It didn’t sit quite right. And I instinctually knew why: walking through the memories of others was a skill, and I was less than a novice. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming need to get back home, I could’ve gotten lost in the gress’ world. The desperation had anchored me. Next time I would have to be much more careful.
And there would be the next time, just not any time soon. The gem had gone dormant. I’d drained whatever psychic battery powered it to nothing. The gem wasn’t gone. It was still there, deep within me, beginning to rebuild its reserves. It required time to recharge – I had no idea how much. There wouldn’t be any visions for a while. I was on my own. That was fine. I found what I was looking for.
The Kael’gress were assassins, killers for hire, who spilled into the galaxy by the tens of thousands, taking contracts from the highest bidder. To their planet, they were a lifeline that assured supplies and survival. To everyone else, they were a blight, motivated by greed and reveling in sadistic cruelty. They weren’t born cruel. They were conditioned into it, and what happened to Jovo told me that the gress waiting for us to enter the anchor room was no exception.
That desire to inflict suffering was a weakness, and I would use it. I needed answers. If I succeeded, I would get them today. If I failed, I would never leave this breach.
Everything I went through until now was training. This would be the real test. Only one question remained: could I hold out long enough?
I rolled to my feet and stretched, working out the stiffness in my legs and back. Jovo uncoiled and bounced to his feet. His eyes were calm and cold.
I pulled out the spider rope, folded it in half, and twisted the middle into a slip knot. I tested the loop on my arm. When I tugged on the rope, my makeshift lasso tightened around my wrist. I loosened the loop again and wrapped the rope around my left arm, holding the end in my hand.
“Ready?”
He nodded.
I reached for the dial and deactivated it. The barrier vanished. I waited for a moment. The gress could ambush us now, but he would not. The tunnel was narrow, and their bodies were fragile. He would wait until we entered the anchor chamber, where he would have plenty of room to maneuver. Attack and avoid, bleed the opponent and bide your time, wear them down and then strike the final blow, that was the Kael way.
The space beyond the tunnel lay empty. The way to the chamber was open.
I dropped the dial into my backpack, and we started forward.
The gress was watching us. I felt his gaze latch onto me. He was out there somewhere.
We passed through the massive stone doorway. Bright lights came on, flooding the big room in harsh artificial sunshine. The anchor chamber was a perfect square sixty-eight yards across. The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were identical, built with huge slabs of yellow stone, weathered and rough. Large clusters of pale crystals shone between the ceiling tiles, leaving no shadows in which to hide. The floor was bare, except for the dark pillar of the anchor jutting from the center of the room.
Jovo ran ahead, unhurried, his movements loose and free of tension. He leaped into the air and sliced the knapsack free of the cord securing it to the ceiling. The lees pulled the bundle apart. Things tumbled out, coins, hooped earrings, a sash… He sneered and tossed it all aside. Whatever he needed to get home wasn’t there.
The sound of stone sliding made me turn. The gress entered through the doorway we’d used to enter, all but gliding across the stone floor. At the other side of the room, the skelzhar padded in through the other doorway, huge and menacing. Behind them, stone slabs descended, blocking the exits.
The trap was sprung. And it was a good one.
The gress studied me. He was seven feet tall and clad in the devourer shroud, a grey, seemingly tattered garment that shifted and moved around him. Neither plant nor animal, it fed on the fluids of his body. In return, it stung anything it touched, applying a powerful paralytic agent and then sucking its prey dry.
The gress were a lean species, with six limbs, two that served as legs, and four that were its arms, each pair with its own set of shoulders situated one under the other. They had evolved to climb their rocky world, and their distant relatives still scurried through the stone burrows on all six legs. The gress were terrible at stabbing but amazing at slicing, and the four blades held in the assassin’s hands reflected that. Narrow and curved, they were sickles rather than swords.
The gress stared at me, his eyes perfectly round, its sclera solid black, with huge dark pupils ringed with narrow purple irises. The shroud left a narrow strip of his flesh bare around the eyes and the lizard-like nose. The skin the color of mustard mixed with a pearlescent powder sagged off his cheek bones, the shroud having leeched all spare fat from his body. He was a skeletal killing machine, a lethal whirlwind of striking blades, and he was about to show me how fast he could cut.
Jovo let out a short, sharp yelp saturated with fury and outrage. His fur stood on end, and for a moment, he’d puffed up to nearly twice his size. I glanced to my right. He was looking at the skelzhar. A strange metal bracelet dangled from the beast’s collar.
The gress had used Jovo’s treasure to decorate his pet. The insult.
The big cat opened his mouth and coughed. It was almost a chuckle.
Beside me, Bear growled. It didn’t sound like any growl an Earth dog should have made.
I slipped my backpack off my shoulder. I’d taught Bear three commands, but Cold Chaos taught her others. It was time to put that training to use.
I pointed at the cat. “Fass!”
Bear exploded into a charge as if shot from a cannon. I spun away, shaping my sword into a long narrow blade, a double-edged katana that could thrust or slice. And then the gress was on me.
I flexed, stretching time. It bought me a split second, just long enough to recognize the pattern of his attack. I dashed away, running backward, my sword in front of me. The sickles carved at me, and I batted them aside, blocking just enough to keep them off me. The metal rang as his blades struck my sword.
He was fast, so maddeningly fast. If one slice of those sickles landed, it would carve through my arm all the way to the bone.
Strike-strike-strike.
I stabbed through a narrow opening between his slashes. The gress withdrew as if pulled back by a rope, widening the gap between us to twenty-five feet, and charged in again.
Strike-strike-strike.
My arm ached from the impacts. A blade slid too close, almost shaving the skin off my forearm. I leaped back, putting all of my new strength into the jump. I cleared twenty feet. It bought me a second, and I ran backward, right past the skelzhar. I glimpsed Bear and Jovo lunging at the huge cat. Jovo leaped in the air, his blades slicing. The skelzhar snapped at him, its conical fangs like the teeth of a bear trap. Somehow it missed, and Bear darted in and locked her jaws on his hind leg.
The gress was on me again, his sickles flashing. I kept running back, around the chamber, blocking as I moved. It was taking all of my speed to keep up. He was relentless. Unstoppable, untiring. He could do this all day.
I could feel myself slowing down. He was a trained killer who spent years honing his skills, and a week ago I had to ask Google how to best debone a chicken.
The gress knew it. His strikes gained a vicious rhythm. He slowed, then sped up, toying with me, making openings that were traps. Sweat drenched my face. Kael’gress were a cruel breed, conditioned to humiliate their opponents. Their lives were devoid of joy, so they became sadistic, getting off on inflicting pain. And I was such a tempting torture target. I escaped the original fight. I led him on a chase through the tunnels. I released Jovo. And now I was proving difficult to kill.
He couldn’t wait to slice me to pieces. He would revel in every moment of my agony.
I stumbled. A curved blade caught the edge of my clothes, its tip drawing a scalding line across my ribs. I shied away, running. Heat wet my skin under my coveralls. The wound was shallow, but it bled as if I was cut with a razor.
Across the room, the skelzhar pinned Jovo down with a huge paw. Bear leaped up and bit into the cat’s ear. The skelzhar howled and shook itself, trying to fling her away, but she hung on like a pit bull.
I kept running, veering left and right. The gress drew even with me. There were ten feet between us, and he was looking right at me, his purple eyes filled with glee.
I stumbled again and stopped to catch myself.
The gress loomed in front of me, so fast his movement was a blur. He leaped, spinning, his four arms rotating like the blades of a fan.
I flexed and saw him fly toward me in slow motion. He had decided I was done. This was the Kael finishing move, brutal and impossible to counter. He knew he would hit me, and his sickles would carve me apart.
Finally.
I shied to the right, putting all of the reserves I was saving into my speed. He hurtled past me and in the instant his feet touched the ground, his back was to me.
I sliced, shaving a wide section of the shroud off his back. It fell to the ground, a writhing, grey mat. The gress’ exposed back gaped in front of me.
The devourer shroud wasn’t a garment; it was a symbiotic second skin, bound to the gress by a myriad of nerves. If I had stabbed through it, it would barely react, but I didn’t pierce it. I cut it off. The moment my blade peeled a chunk of it off of him, every neuron of the shroud screamed in agony, dumping all of that pain into its host.
The gress shrieked as the excruciating pain twisted his limbs and dropped him to his knees.
I yanked the spider lasso off my arm and looped it around his neck.
He lunged away from me. The gress were fast. They were not strong. The spider rope snapped taut, and I jerked him back and onto my blade. My sword carved through his innards.
The gress tore himself off my blade, the ragged edges of the shroud reaching for me and falling short. He tried to spin around, his sickles lashing out, but I pulled him back, stabbing into his exposed flesh again and again and again.
The gress convulsed. I sliced the top right forearm off his body. Then the top left. The other two arms followed. I jerked him off his feet and dragged him across the floor to the pillar. It took me two seconds to tie him to the anchor.
I straightened. In the corner the skelzhar was snarling, bleeding from a dozen wounds, trying to stay upright on three legs. His right hind paw hung useless. His left eye was gone.
Huge angry gashes marked Bear’s back. She didn’t seem to mind, chewing on the other hind leg, while Jovo clung to the skelzhar’s back, sinking his knives into the fur.
I dropped by the gress, sliced the shroud on his chest, and ripped the metal amulet free. He wailed, his voice weak and fading. He thought I held his soul in my hand.
“I’ll be right back,” I told him in his language. “Don’t go anywhere.”
The post The Inheritance: Chapter 12 Part 1 first appeared on ILONA ANDREWS.
Is it Wednesday? Who knows anymore! I sure don’t.
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Gwynne Garfinkle lives in Los Angeles. Her collection of short speculative fiction, Sinking, Singing, was published in 2024 by Aqueduct Press. She is the author of a novel, Can’t Find My Way Home (2022), and a collection of short fiction and poetry, People Change (2018), both available from Aqueduct. Her work has appeared in such publications as Strange Horizons, Worlds of Possibility, Fantasy, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Apex, and Not One of Us.
