But Reza did not feel lucky when a shadow suddenly detached itself from the canyon floor. With startling speed, it grew in size until it blotted out the sky above, towering before them like a dark, angry mountain.
As Reza opened his mouth to shout a warning, his hand grabbing desperately for the battle ax strapped to his saddle, he felt the impact of the mammoth claw against his chest, a horrendous blow that hurled him from Goliath’s back. Only his armor – now bent and torn like tissue paper – had saved his life. Reza’s ears filled with the sound of crunching bones before his eardrums rang with the monstrous scream of hungry rage that muffled Goliath’s squeals of agony. Reza hit the ground hard, but quickly rolled to his feet. And in a flash of lighting he saw it, standing over Goliath’s struggling form, a nightmare of fangs, horns, and talons.
He gasped in awe at the thing that had transformed itself from mimicking silent rock into moving, living tissue in but an instant. Its head was larger than Goliath’s body, with rows of razor-sharp teeth covered by a scaly lip to conceal them while the creature lay in wait. Horns sprouted from the thing’s triangular head, and its blazing yellow eyes were cold and inscrutable. Its body rippled with strength, from the talons on each of its six legs to the needle-like crystalline tip on the end of its whip of a tail.
It stood above Reza like a colossus, an enormous gargoyle that had suddenly come to life. Before he could turn and run, it lunged down at him, its maw gaping wide, its fetid breath enveloping him with the stench of death’s promise.
In that instant, as Reza watched death come, the mortally wounded Goliath snapped his powerful jaws shut on the genoth’s vulnerable underside, close to its tail. The magthep’s teeth were broad and flat, typical of the Homeworld’s herbivores. They could not rip and tear as could those of the genoth, but they were powerful enough to grind the tough leaves of the hearty suranga’a bush into paste. Goliath’s jaws clamped shut like a vise, crushing the unarmored flesh of the genoth’s underbelly.
The dragon’s teeth snapped together less than an arm’s length from Reza’s face before its mouth opened in a roar of agony and rage at the insolent magthep’s attack. Ignoring Reza, it turned its attention to Goliath, who stubbornly clung like a giant parasite to its underbelly.
Reza whirled and ran to a nearby rock outcropping. Behind him, the genoth made short work of the wounded magthep. With a final squeal, Goliath was silent. Having disposed of its tormentor, the beast turned to reacquire its prey.
It found Esah-Zhurah.
Bearing her fangs in fear and rage, Esah-Zhurah raised her pike toward the creature in what she knew was a hopeless gesture. She had seen Reza get away, but had lost sight of him in the darkness. She desperately maneuvered her terrified magthep around to find him, not thinking of how vulnerable she was while riding her terrified beast. Suddenly, one of the genoth’s forelegs lashed out, flinging her out of the saddle. She landed on the canyon’s dusty floor with a muffled thud before scrambling to her feet, backing away from the apparition slowly, the pike still in her shaking hands. Her magthep, miraculously uninjured, shrieked in terror and fled into the gathering storm.
The genoth homed in on the young Kreelan woman. The animal had acquired a taste for Kreelan flesh over its many cycles, and it had chosen a most opportune time to come from the great wastelands beyond the mountains, through the ineffective barrier that proved little more than a nuisance to its great armored body. Already had it dined on five of the morsels this season, and now two more had come into its territory. Cautiously, for the tiny creatures were quick and could sometimes inflict pain, the genoth advanced on Esah-Zhurah.
Reza breathed a sigh of fear. He had to help her. In Her name, he thought, what can I do against such a thing? The ax weighed heavily in his hand as he moved from his cover of rocks, running in a crouch toward the beast’s flank as it closed in on Esah-Zhurah, boxing her into a narrow cut in the canyon that was far too steep to climb.
Coming abreast of the beast, just out of its range of vision, Reza readied the ax for a throw. He cocked his arm behind his head and tensed his body to send the heavy weapon on its way in what he knew would be a futile attack at this range against such an opponent. But it was all he had.
Esah-Zhurah’s attention was fixed on the beast until she saw the shadow of Reza’s form standing to the thing’s side, ax at the ready.
“Hurry, my love,” she whispered, simultaneously baring her fangs at the thing now towering above her. The creature was maddeningly slow, advancing a step at a time, in no rush to tear her limb from limb, and she was growing impatient. “Throw it,” she hissed at her tresh, though he could not hear her. “Throw it now.”
Her eyes widened in disbelieving horror as she saw Reza suddenly drop the ax to the ground at his feet. With a startled cry, she looked up to see the beast’s slavering jaws descending toward her.
Tesh-Dar was finishing her letter to the Empress when she sensed it. She was so surprised that she dropped her stylus, ignoring it as it rolled across the parchment, spreading ink over her neat script before clattering noisily to the floor.
“Priestess,” Syr-Kesh, who had been awaiting an audience with her, asked, “is something the matter?”
Tesh-Dar merely stared into space, her eyes unfocused, her hands flat upon the writing tablet, utterly still.
Syr-Kesh was about to ask again, concerned that something was seriously wrong with the kazha’s most senior warrior, when she felt it, too. It was a tiny warp in the fabric of the Way, a small voice crying out for the first time like a newborn babe. “It is not possible,” she whispered, her eyes bulging with disbelief.
The priestess’s head slowly traversed so that her eyes fixed the swordmistress like an insect upon a pin. “So have we always believed,” she said slowly. “But so it obviously is possible.” She paused a moment, listening to the spiritual transformation that was taking place, and to which she and all her kind would be witness. She only hoped that it was not too late. The Empress had never before reversed a decision such as She had cast for the human, for there had never been reason to. Reza was still scheduled to die in two days, his blood to be spilled upon the sands of the arena, and Tesh-Dar could not allow that to happen if there was any other way.
She turned to Syr-Kesh. “Fetch my shuttle here,” she commanded. “I must seek an audience with the Empress immediately.”
As Syr-Kesh fled to carry out her task, Tesh-Dar closed her eyes and searched with the eyes of her soul for the one whose blood had begun to sing.
Reza stood perfectly still, momentarily entranced by the prickling, burning sensation that was sweeping his body. Quickly, as if it were water spilled from a breached dam, he felt the fire in his blood crescendo into a roaring cascade of power that washed over his mind and flesh in a surge of raw, primal might.
Suddenly, in a flash of insight as illuminating as the lightning that sought to blind him, he knew what to do. Dropping the more cumbersome ax, he reached for the leather sling that was carefully, lovingly attached to his waistband. He quickly undid it and probed his fingers into the small pouch in which he carried the carefully prepared stones that armed the weapon. He found only two, but decided they would be enough. Placing a stone in the wide cup of the sling, he began to whirl it around and around, moving closer to the genoth.