Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel (2 page)

Loyl spoke to the squad, barely moving his
lips. “We’re outnumbered, but they are out-skilled, I’m sure of it.
Josie and Lars—you both need to make your first kill, and this is
as good a time as any.”

Lars’s heart quickened. His voice came out a
hoarse squeak, “You want me and Josie to take on all of them
alone?”

“Greenhorns,” Hogard said from the back,
brandishing his horns in annoyance.

“Of course not,” Loyl replied. “We’ll thin
them out for you.”

“I can’t do this,” Josie said, her eyes huge
and frightened, her skin washed out like bleached white bread. “I
just can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” Loyl said,
narrowing his slanted eyes. “This mission was your doing, so you’d
better.”

The bandits started down the crest of the
hill.

Loyl waited until they were thirty feet away
before nocking four arrows, fanning them out between his fingers.
Each arrow hit a different bandit—including Redding and the boss.
Lindsey’s gun was out of its holster. She took down four in a row
like wooden ducks at a shooting gallery. The bullets sounded like
musical notes as they twanged over the hill. The bandits
hesitated.

“The red head is witch!” one of them cried
out. “She kills with boom!”

The surviving bandits turned to flee as
Hogard charged, snorting like the wild bull he resembled; he seemed
to be having a jolly good time swinging his spiked ball. He bashed
in the head of the first man, and then the second. It was the first
time Lars had ever seen him smile.

“Don’t let them get away!” Loyl ordered the
squad. “If they have a hideout somewhere, they’ll alert the rest of
their gang to our presence. And we don’t want that!”

Rolf stayed in his saddle chase down a
mounted bandit. He chopped off the rider’s head with one full swing
of his sword. The violence of the act shocked Lars and he
froze.

“Snap out of it, kid,” Dante said. “And I’ll
bring you home with a story to make your father proud... Hey, you
guys, save some for me!” Dante swiped off the arm of a big Commoner
with a potbelly. Then he finished him off with a jab deep into the
heart.

Lars’s heart thumped in his throat. This was
the day he had been waiting for his whole life—the opportunity to
prove that he deserved to be treated like any other man, not
marginalized because of his defective shoulder. It was time to
prove that his detractors had been wrong about him all of these
years. Charging into battle with a rebel yell, he went after the
three remaining bandits.

Lindsey reached for another clip for her
pistol, but Loyl clamped a hand over her hand, shaking his
head.

“Let the young man wet his sword.”

She reluctantly lowered her weapon, but kept
her hand on the trigger as if she expected Lars to falter.

Dante, Hogard and Rolf backed away, leaving
Lars flanked by the last two bandits. The bandits circled Lars
while nervously glancing at his companions.

“Josie,” Loyl said encouragingly, “Get in
there.”

She vigorously shook her head and squealed
like a frightened child.

“Don’t be afraid, little cow,” Hogard joined
in. “You got moves, you got speed, but do you got courage?”

Refusing to look at either of them, she
remained frozen in the saddle.

Lars held his sword in his
left arm—his
good
arm. Calling upon the charisma for increased strength was
tempting, but no, he wanted to do this the old-fashioned way, with
flesh and bone alone—how else would he know his worth? The first
bandit looked to be about twenty-five and the second one was
probably fifty or so.

“Your job is to eliminate the threat,” Dante
said, like a coach giving him a pep talk. “Don’t think of anything
beyond that.”

The youngest bandit stepped toward Lars,
swiping his blade in two swift downward thrusts, forming a V. When
his sword was down to the bottom of the V, Lars swung horizontally
at the bandit’s neck. The blade went through flesh like a knife
through hamburger. His opponent’s blood sprayed across Lars’s
chest. The vibration of metal striking bone traveled through the
blade and into his hand.

Although Lars had lopped through his
vertebrae, the bandit’s head didn’t fall off, but hung by strings
of muscle and sinew. His eyes blinked once and then remained open,
shocked, as if he couldn’t believe his bad luck.

“Behind you, greenhorn!” he heard Hogard
yell.

Lars spun to see a sword above his head about
to cleave him in two.

Without a moment’s thought, Lars ran his
sword straight into the man’s belly. The bandit collapsed into
Lars. When Lars caught him, and peered over his victim’s shoulder,
he could see twelve inches of blade coming out of the man’s
back.

With a yelp, he shoved the body away. It slid
off of his sword, leaving a reddish-black coating of jelly on his
sword.

Acrid bile rose up in Lars’ throat. He had
dreamed of this moment since the first time he held a sword, but
shouldn’t taking a life require more than ten seconds? Pissed at
the senselessness of it all, he heaved his sword as hard as he
could, not caring when it disappeared in the tall grass.

“Whaddaya doing, ya idjut?” Hogard shouted.
“That’s a good way to lose a sword, stupid calf!”

Prince Loyl sent Hogard a scornful frown,
while Dante wrapped an arm around Lars’s shoulder.

Oh, great, Lars thought. My eyes are
watering. They’ll think I’m a wimp that can’t suck up the pain.

“I remember my first kill,” Dante said,
giving him a reassuring pat. “It was shortly after we arrived in
the future—the day King Doyl forced us out of our first
settlement.” Dante glanced over at the prince, who suddenly looked
uncomfortable. “I sliced a Regalan soldier right through the eye. I
threw up in Jo’s lap.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“I thought the Regalans were our
friends?”

“It’s complicated,” Dante whispered,
“Individually, I adore the Regalans. As a kingdom—not so much.”

“Complicated indeed,” Loyl said wryly.

“Josie,” Lindsey asked loudly, almost
gleefully, “why didn’t you fight when there was a buffet of
humanoids to choose from?”

“With Annie Oakley here to shoot helpless
fish in a barrel, I figured my services weren’t needed.”

“Don’t even pretend that moral superiority
is the reason you sat there doing nothing while I helped deliver
justice.” Lindsey patted the gun in her holster. “Admit it, you
were scared out of your friggin’ head.”

Josie’s eyes lowered to the ground. Her face
had whitened several shades. Shame was rolling off of her in a bad
way. Searching for words to comfort her, Lars couldn’t find any
that wouldn’t make it worse.

“Ladies,” Rolf said. “We are not keeping
score here.”

“That’s right,” Loyl added. “Josie didn’t
scream or get in the way, so I count that as a win for the young
lady. Miss Burning, your shooting skills are exemplary. Have you
tried your hand at the bow?”

“No, I’ve never had access to one, but maybe
you can let me handle yours sometime?” Lindsey fluttered her
eyelashes.

“I will do that,” he promised as he turned
away toward the hilltop. “But right now, I want to make sure the
bandits don’t have any friends waiting for us beyond the rise.”

“Can Regalans and humans mate?” Lindsey
asked the others. Lars, now behind Lindsey, pretended to poke his
finger down her throat in hopes of eliciting a smile from
Josie.

“He’s married,” Dante informed Lindsey
sharply.

“What?” Lindsey said as if the information
was news to her. “Are you sure?”

“I’m so sorry,” Josie blurted out tearfully.
“I just froze. I don’t know why. I thought I was ready. I thought I
could do this.”

“Don’t worry,” Dante said. “It happens to a
lot people during their first fight. We were kind of expecting
it.”

“You were?”

“Sure,” Dante replied. “It’s practically a
right of passage. Just don’t let it happen again.”

The prince called down to them from the top
of the hill, “All clear!”

.............................

As they rode into the afternoon, Lars became
convinced that Mother Nature was trying to kill him. Prairie
grassland transitioned into acres of tangled maroon brambles
striped with white lines. A long snake, thicker than Lars’s thigh,
with similar coloring to the brambles, slithered under Bolt’s
hooves. The horse reared up, forcing Lars to grab at the saddle
horn and shove his feet deeper into his stirrups. A few well-placed
hoof stamps set the snake slithering away in a hurry. Up ahead
waited a thick forest of old-growth Lostwood Trees, with trunks
well over twenty feet in diameter. Hogard said that although the
place was thick with a particularly vicious strain of wumpers, some
as large as large as a house, the humanoid slavers were the biggest
threat.

By mid-afternoon, Loyl halted the group for
a much-needed break. While they prepared to eat and relax inside a
circle of trees, Rolf took the horses over to a nearby glade of
towering yellow stalks covered with pearly white seeds. Josie sat
on a tree root away from the rest of the group, picking at her
rations, refusing to talk to anyone. When Lars went over to sit
with her, she got up with the excuse that she had to pee.

“Don’t do that, Josie,” he complained.

“Do what?”

“Sulk over your failure.”

“Aha, so you do think I’m a failure.”

“N-no.”

Josie stormed off into the woods despite
Loyl’s standing rule that only the older members of the squad were
allowed to venture off alone. The overly-protective prince seemed
to forget that both Lindsey and Josie had been foragers during the
exodus to the Promised Land and knew a thing or two about forest
survival.

“Josie just needs time to sulk,” Dante said.
“As her brother-in-law, I ought to know. Give it a few hours and
she’ll be back to her old self.”

Lars hoped he was right.
Stretching out in the grass, hands behind his head, he began to
doze off. In his dream, he stood in a great cathedral. A huge Roman
gladiator with feathery white wings pointed to a pair of arched
doors, one marked,
Good,
the other,
Evil.

“It is the conundrum older than time,” the
gladiator said. “When the betrayal comes, which will you
choose?”

A pain in his ribcage made his eyes pop open
to a pair of horns and a set of watery black eyes. Hogard. The
bastard had kicked him in the ribs.

“The Regalan says it’s time to get
a-moving.”

“I don’t appreciate being woke at the end of
your boot.” Lars rubbed his sore ribs, sending Hogard an angry
glare.

The Bulwark looked down his wet black nose at
Lars and gave an indifferent belch, fogging the air with the smell
of rotten fish. Lars tried to fan the stench away with his hand as
the others gathered around Josie beside the creek in the
distance.

“It’s about time you got here,” Josie said.
In her hand was a golden starburst pendant flecked with green. Its
cord wound several times around her wrist. A glassy blue and brown
stone the size of a walnut served as the centerpiece. “I’m about to
release the Seeker of the Four Winds.”

Lars and Loyl had seen the Seeker in action
before, but this was a first for everyone else. Place a fragment of
an object in the hollow of the stone and it would seek out the
whole from which that fragment came. Just before the squad had left
Galatia, Josie had placed a tiny piece of the Blood Map inside the
stone.

“Release the Seeker,” Loyl ordered.

Pushing up the right sleeve of her army
jacket, Josie unsnapped the leather bracelet that held the
starburst pendant and its stone down. Immediately, they floated
upward like a helium balloon on a short golden cord.

“What is that thing?” Lindsey gasped.

“It’s a homing stone,” Josie said smugly.
Dante Armstrong reached out to poke it with his finger. It swayed,
but returned to pulling in a southward direction.

“Cool,” Lindsey said, taking a turn at
jabbing it. “What’s it supposed to do?”

“If all goes to plan, it will lead us to the
missing half of the Blood Map, saving Galatia. And only I know how
to use it.”

“Your mayor didn’t say nothing about no magic
on this mission.” Hogard’s furry reddish brow bristled with anger.
“Bandits I can bash. Slivens I can smash. But I didn’t sign up for
no magical hooey-blooey.”

“There’s nothing magical about it,” Josie
explained. “It’s an alien artifact—that’s all. This stone, the
pendant and chain, each come from a different quadrant of the
galaxy. There’s no hooey-blooey involved. It can all be explained
scientifically.”

“You speak in riddles, cow,” Hogard
replied.

“Quit calling me a cow.”

“Are you not female? We call our females
cows; I mean no insult by it.”

“The Seeker must have come to Earth with the
Celeruns,” Dante said, clearly interested to learn more. “I bet one
of them dropped it during the cleansing.”

Hogard frowned at the Seeker while slapping
the head of his hammer into his palm as if contemplating its
destruction. Josie snatched the pendant out of the air to clutch it
against her chest.

“Don’t even think about it, Bulwark!”

The prince stepped between Josie and the
Bulwark, using his body as a shield against any possible
aggression. “Hogard, if you destroy it, we might as well all go
home.” Hogard mumbled something unintelligible in response. “Do you
think that the good doctor would send his son on a mission guided
by a magic?”

“Doc is a smart man.” Hogard slid the handle
of his hammer back in its loop across his back. “I s’pose not.
“

“Can I hold it for a while?” Lindsey
asked.

“Carrying the Seeker of the Four Winds is my
sacred human duty,” Josie proclaimed.