The Battle Lord's Lady (7 page)

Where before the belief was that Mutah,
interbreeding among themselves, would create more horrific forms of
the disease, that thought was slowly dying. In recent years new
theories had been brought forth, the most accepted ones explaining
that nature was healing herself. Given time, she would bring back
the plants and trees and animals species initially lost in the
Great Concussion. Given more time, she would do the same to
humanity.

It was predicted that in another thousand
years or so, there might not be any Mutah left. Not because of the
extinction of their race, but because the extra appendages would
slowly disappear back to whatever genetic pool they’d originally
come from. The skin deformities would fade. The animalistic
tendencies would shrink like healed wounds. All the differences
would grow smaller and fainter and less definable until, finally,
mankind would all be of the same ilk as before.

It was a future Yulen D’Jacques wished he
could be a part of. But he couldn’t, so he had to live the one he’d
been given.

He reached the small candle and soap shop
just as MaGrath was coming out.

“Well?”

“No problems so far,” the physician
answered.

“And did you examine her?”

“Yes, I did,” MaGrath nodded his head.
“I saw no signs. No
outward
visible signs.”

“But you swear she’s a Mutah?”

MaGrath’s eyebrows lowered and the light in
his eyes hardened. “Let’s wait until daylight,” he finally said,
his voice tight with irritation. “There’s not much I can glean in
lantern light.”

“How old do you guess her to be?” the Battle
Lord suddenly asked.

The unexpected question seemed to throw the
physician momentarily off guard. “How old? She’s not a child, if
that’s what you’re asking. She’s a fully developed woman. Why do
you ask?”

“It’s not your place to question me,” Yulen
reminded him sternly. Having gotten a somewhat acceptable response,
he returned to his horse to make sure it was bedded down for the
night. Then he found a spot near one of the shops to lay his own
bedroll. In the forest he preferred to sleep with his back to a
tree, thus preventing an assassin from sneaking up behind him.
Tonight he had a sturdy rock wall, a new compound full of fresh
provisions, and a Mutah with an incredible ability.

It had been a good day.

Chapter Seven

Meet

Atty spent the night in torment. Despite the
medicants given to her by MaGrath, and the plaster salve on her
face, a numbed throbbing continued to pulse in her face, behind her
eyes, and in her brain. Yet most of her dreamt terrors came from
her own inner demons which ate away at her like tiny insects
devouring a dead animal one minute morsel at a time. In her
nightmares she saw her mother and sister brutally tortured and
murdered by the same men who had invaded the compound. She saw them
being beaten senseless, then her over-fertile imagination saw a
more horrific ending, including being gutted like an animal.

But because her mother’s mutant traits had
not been outwardly noticeable, Atty continued to hold onto that one
last shred of hope that she had been spared a disembowelment. For
Keelor, though...

A shudder shook her awake. Too late, the last
wisps of her dreams swept through her, and she remembered what had
been in them. Sweet Keelor. Beautiful little sister with the sky
blue eyes, the wayward curls, and the elfin-like pointed ears that
sometimes stuck out like butterfly wings whenever she was in a
particularly playful mood.

“You were only twelve,” Atty murmured as more
warm tears dripped over the bridge of her nose and down the left
side of her face. Her lips were numb lumps of flesh on her face,
totally without feeling.

There was a movement behind her, and a hand
grabbed her by the arm to pull her over onto her back. Someone
raised a shielded lantern to be able to look down at her. Atty
squinted and turned her head.

“You’re awake,” a voice commented. She
immediately recognized it as the one belonging to the person
MaGrath had called the Battle Lord.
Yulen.
If he saw her tears, he made no comment.
Why should he? She was Mutah, and to all Cleaners the Mutah were
below even the filth on their boots. Which was why his next remark
stunned her.

“What’s wrong?”

Wrong?

Atty jerked on the ropes tying her
wrists behind her back.
Why would anything
be wrong
? her subconscious laughed bitterly. A bubble
of laughter made its way up her chest, but by the time it reached
her lips it came out more of a sob. The lantern shifted and drew
back, and for the first time she got to see the enigmatic Battle
Lord without his helmet or face mask.

The first noticeable thing was the deep scar
which ran down the right side of his face from his hairline near
his temple to the tightly clenched jaws. It looked fresh and
painful. Despite the injury, he had a strong face, the face of a
man who bore the burden of leadership like pennants on a staff. His
eyes were deep-set and dark. Atty wondered fleetingly if they were
brown or blue. His hair was pulled back and tied, and what she
could detect in the bad light was that it was orange-ish in
color.

The Battle Lord shoved the lantern beside her
head once again. A large, calloused hand touched the bandage on the
side of her face with surprising gentleness. “Are you in pain?” he
asked her gruffly.

Sighing, Atty closed her eyes. What was the
use? Her life as it had been a few days ago, the only life she’d
known her entire twenty springs, was gone. Her body also felt like
a lifeless husk, devoid of feeling and reason, devoid of thought
and hope. She was a lifeless husk, completely empty except for the
morass of memories and nightmares which swirled now in her
mind.

Again her arms twitched as she unconsciously
jerked on the rough ropes which dug into her wrists.

“Quit struggling,” the voice ordered.
Ordered...but with a breath of worry. Slowly Atty opened her eyes
to find herself gazing back into his dark, hooded ones. She spotted
the silver gleam of a dagger rising above her, and instantly she
struggled to save herself from the plunging blade. The hand that
had touched her face now pressed down hard on her ribs, holding her
as easily as if she’d been a sack of vegetables.

“I said to quit struggling,” the deep voice
angrily whispered. “I won’t hurt you, but if you continue to move
about I might accidentally nick you.”

Wide-eyed, Atty watched as the knife
descended and slowly gnawed at the horsehair ropes which had torn
into her flesh and absorbed her blood. As pieces of the fibers fell
away, the dagger rose again, but this time it stopped a breath away
from her right eye. The hand that had held her down remained
pressed along her ribcage. The Battle Lord held her at arm’s
length. In the soft yellow light his eyes glittered as hard as
obsidian.

“You are my enemy,” he told her. There was a
bitterness to his words, and he almost spat at her. “I will not
hesitate to kill you. Do you understand?”

Atty’s body shuddered unexpectedly. Her
wrists were raw and bleeding with bits of rope still embedded in
her skin. She nodded. “You’ll kill me if I make a move for my
weapons,” she managed to comment.

The Battle Lord grinned. “Precisely. You know
I can place this blade through your eye and into your brain without
a second thought in the time it would take for you to try.”

She nodded again, very slowly. Instead of
looking toward her bow and quiver which still sat propped against
the door on the other side of the room, she glanced out of the
window. The stars were gone from the sky, meaning it had either
gotten cloudy, or dawn was nearing. The Battle Lord noticed the
direction of her attention.

“It should be morning within another hour,”
he told her.

“Why are you here?” she whispered.

“To see how you were doing.”

“Why?”

The question apparently amused him, and he
gave her a crooked smile. Atty noticed the scar seemed to be giving
him trouble, and any undue movement in his facial muscles caused
him pain.

“I’m taking you back to our compound.”

“Again, why?”

“To teach us your tricks.”

“My tricks?”

The hand against her ribs slowly pulled back,
but the one with the knife never wavered from her face.

“I want you to teach my men how to kill with
the same efficiency as you showed us.”

“Why not go ahead and kill me now?” she asked
him. She brought her hands before her face and began digging out
the short shreds of rope from the wounds in her wrists. She had to
get them all or risk infection.

“Do you want me to kill you?”

“Why not,” she snapped heatedly. “You’re
going to kill us all anyway. I won’t teach you or your men a damn
thing, I don’t care what you say or order me to do.”

To her astonishment, the man suddenly slid
the dagger back into its sheath belted at his hip. Atty blinked and
looked up into the man’s face where she could see hard lines
forming around his mouth and eyes.

“I’m willing to make a deal with you,” he
stated flatly.

For some reason, the proposal seemed funny.
Atty gave a half-hearted chuckle. “Oh, that’s just peachy. A
Cleaner making a deal with one of my kind? What kind of trick is
this? How stupid do you think I am?”

“I’m offering the lives of the inhabitants of
this compound in exchange for your knowledge and skills. There.
That is my offer. In full.”

Atty froze. Several seconds passed as she
tried to see through the man’s subterfuge and into the heart of the
truth, but the Battle Lord’s expression never wavered. Her lungs
finally kicked in, reminding her she needed to breathe again. “You
lie,” was all she could manage to respond.

The man shook his head. A lock fell over his
forehead, somehow softening the terrifying visage. “I’m not lying.
Not in this case. In exchange for you teaching my men how to shoot
like you do, I will spare this compound. Furthermore, I will have
my men give your people a few suggestions on how they can better
fortify this holding, and possibly help prevent future exposure to
the outside world. Next time...the next time there may not be
someone like me to grant you impunity.”

She gave him another long look. “How did you
discover us in the first place?”

“The smell of your cooking,” he replied
simply. “First one or two men catch the scent. They tell their
squad. The squad sends a messenger. It was a domino effect.”

“Is your compound near us? Is that how you
were able to get here so fast?”

This time it was the Battle Lord who gave her
a long, searching stare. “No,” he finally whispered. “Our compound
is many days’ ride from here.”

“So you were just on a cleaning mission when
you came across my home by chance?”

“Would you have killed every one of my men if
I had not brought in the rest of my forces when I did?”

Rubbing her watering eyes, Atty surrendered.
“Yes.”

The Battle Lord slowly nodded. “Then my
answer is yes as well.”

“Then what happens?” she asked. “What happens
when I teach your men all I know? Are you coming back here to
finish what you left behind?” Biting her lower lip, she lowered her
voice and added, “Will you let me come back home?”

“You know I can’t let you do that.”

Although she had expected almost those exact
words, the sound of them coming from his lips was too much to bear.
She lowered her face into her hands, pressing the heels of her
palms against her mouth in a vain attempt to stifle her sobs.

Long minutes passed as she began to accept
her fate. When she pulled the hem of her shirt out of her pants and
lifted it to wipe her eyes, she was surprised to see the Battle
Lord still standing in the exact spot. He had never moved while
she’d wept. Neither had he made a sound or made any further gesture
toward her. He had waited until she could regain control of
herself. Once he was sure she was ready to listen again, he
continued.

“Are you Mutah?”

“Didn’t you already ask me that?”

“What is your mark?”

Drawing a ragged breath, Atty lifted her
long, thick braid. “My hair,” she admitted in a tiny voice.

“What?”

“My...hair. My hair is my mark.”

“What of it?”

“Its...its color is...unusual.”

“There are no other marks about you? Nothing
physical? Nothing abnormal?”

“No.” She shook her head. “Nothing else. At
least, not that I’m aware of.”

“And your ability with the bow...” It was a
question left open. A probing sense of wonder laced through it.

Atty shrugged. “To me it’s natural. If you
want to call it mutant, that’s your prerogative.”

“Have you had any training? Any schooling?
Did you have a teacher?”

“No. Nothing formal. We have masters that
teach our men such skills, but because I was a girl I wasn’t
allowed to attend their lessons, so I had to go out in the woods
and teach myself. Sometimes my father would give me pointers. It
wasn’t until last spring that I applied for membership into the
caste of hunters.” She paused, remembering.

“Go on,” the Battle Lord urged.

“There was a lot of arguing about my joining.
Women weren’t allowed to become part of the caste of hunters.”

“Why not?”

She shot him a dark look. “Do you allow your
women to become part of your hunting parties?”