Роберт Асприн - Forever After

It had him as easily as a hound would have a hare.

If, of course, the hare decided to stand in one place.

While Tian-shi-sheqi allowed Gar to sympathize with a suicidal lagomorph, he rejected the impulse to emulate one. He, too, was a predator. This creature circled to hunt him, and in doing so it defined itself. Tian-shi-sheqi demanded that it do so, so its death would be perfect.

And Tian-shi-sheqi demanded Gar give it the death it deserved.

As the sorian circled, Gar sprinted forward toward an alley. He heard the sorian scream at him, and he returned an equally challenging and bestial call. Running full out the assassin dashed into the alley. He would have risked a look back to see how close the sorian had gotten, but its cry echoed from the alley’s tight walls, telling him it had closed faster than he had thought it could.

Gar leaped over a small crate that the sorian smashed to splinters a couple of seconds later. Ahead of them, barely twenty feet from where the crate had died, an eight-foot-tall wooden wall blocked the alley, which gave neither hunter a choice. It has to be now !

Gar threw himself forward into a somersault as the sorian leaped at his back. A claw hit his left shoulder, tearing cloth and muscle, but the assassin forced away any thought of pain. Tucking tightly, he rolled quickly and extended both legs as he came around and over. Pushing off with his hands, he launched himself upward, feet first.

His feet caught the sorian where hip joined tail and boosted the beast’s pelvis higher into the air. Screaming out in surprise and terror, the fletched sorian sailed through the air, his foreclaws scrabbling like an ugly chick fallen from the nest before its wings worked. It smacked into the wooden fence face first and destroyed the structure as effectively as it had stomped the crate into splinters.

Gar’s maneuver landed him on his feet and he dashed forward. The sorian tried to turn toward him, but its stiff tail slapped against the alley wall. The assassin leaped above the tail’s return sweep and landed with his knees on the beast’s shoulders. Before it could twist to throw him off, Gar jabbed a stiff-fingered Spearpoint Blow down where the sorian’s jaw joined its skull. The strike found a nerve center and the sorian collapsed.

As he reached down to grab its muzzle and twist its head off, doubt again assailed him. He acknowledged that he had met the beast fairly and had defeated it. Tian-shi-sheqi allowed him to use environment against the beast, and the sorian had hunted in the village before. Moreover, had Gar chosen to run into the surrounding forests, the stands of bamboo would have served just as effectively to limit the sorian’s mobility. He had won fairly, and he had paid in blood for his victory.

Even so, this was a beast out of time and place. Any death he could visit upon it, because it came from a world to which this beast was not native, would be unnatural. Perhaps where it came from, it had exterminated all men. Were that true, its death at Gar’s hands would be the ultimate display of disrespect possible for it.

Tian-shi-sheqi offered Gar a way out of his dilemma. He rose above the fallen beast and studied it for a second, then nodded. Centering himself, Gar touched the beast at the back of its skull and where pelvis joined its spine. As he did so, using kuo-tak techniques, he felt the creature’s life-energy flowing up and down the spine, and he felt the course eddy and whirl around the minute obstructions he had introduced.

Nodding grimly, Gar retraced his steps to the alley mouth. A small knot of people, including Spido and his mother, stood over the dead sorian’s body. Spido’s head came up and concern flashed over his face, but Gar shook his head. He did gently probe the hole in his shoulder, and clenched his jaw against the pain. He contemplated using Anachron to heal himself, but he rejected that idea out of respect for the beast that had inflicted the wounds on him.

The door to the Prince’s Haven opened and a large man stood in the doorway for a moment. Hitching his pants up, he walked out into the central square and, as if he had been a cork pulled from a bottle, a number of young toughs poured from the tavern and pooled behind him. A number of them blanched when they saw the dead sorian, but others let their youth cloak them in invincibility.

Dolonicus said nothing until Gar had reached Spido’s side. “So, the Pariah has come to Torfay. I should be honored that Prince Rango has deemed me worthy of your attention.”

Gar shook his head. “Your attention? I believe you are mistaken. I came to the mountains to do a little hunting. And to watch my companion here kill you.”

“Him? A gobbet from that suetball Gordo?”

Spido stuck his chin out. “I’m a neph-gobbet, I am.”

Dolonicus looked at Gar. “You may be mad, Pariah, but even you cannot imagine this one will be able to defeat me.”

“No?” Gar darted forward and clapped his hands on Dolonicus’s breastbone and spine, prompting a cough from the larger man. “You’re terribly slow. I shouldn’t think Spido will have much difficulty with you.”

Dolonicus waded back into his henchmen. “He has to kill them first.”

“Gar?”

“Don’t worry, Spido.” Gar yawned casually. “They won’t even lay a hand on you.”

Tension filled the square as the dozen toughs tried to stare Spido down. They might have succeeded except for a wheezy trumpet blast from atop a hill to the east of Torfay. All eyes turned toward the sound and, centered on the road leading down the hill into the town, they saw a man whose silhouette eclipsed the rising sun. A horn again sounded, then the figure moved forward and its spherical outline quivered up and down with each step.

“Uncle Gordo?”

With battered horn in one hand, and a knobby club in the other, Uncle Gordo pumped his arms as he trotted down the hill. “For Prince and Family,” he wheezed at the top of his lungs. Each footfall sent tremors through the man’s bulk and increased his speed. A human juggernaut, he thundered down the road and the crowd parted before him.

Everyone watched him, and every thing as well. Looping out along the hillside, the last sorian shook its head and raced in at the running man. Back, belly and flank offered equally inviting targets, but the sunlight glinting from the bronze war horn appeared to decide it for the beast. Voicing a cry that made knees go weak, it closed from Gordo’s right and leaped.

As it left the ground, its heart stopped and its muscles locked up, freezing it into the perfect portrait of a hunter’s hunter in mid strike. Gar laughed aloud with satisfaction as the kuo-tak strike slew it at the height of its power. Gordo’s presence, though unanticipated, made things even more perfect, for such ample and succulent prey the creature doubtless had never hunted before.

Because of his contribution to the sorian’s rapture before death, Gar forgave Gordo the last-minute twist to the right. The horn smacked the sorian in the head, sparking a wondrous cry from the villagers. As the sorian fell, so did Gordo. Tripped up by his own momentum, Gordo tumbled and flipped into the central square. He bowled over a half dozen of the toughs, scattering them like tenpins.

Gordo’s explosive entry into the square broke the tension and the remaining toughs leaped at Spido. One brushed past Gar, nudging the wound in his flank. The pain eroded his control, or so Gar told himself, which was why his right hand flicked out in a Whipcrack Strike that drove one of the man’s spinal disks through his aorta.

Another tough ran afoul of Spido’s mother. Goodwife Blott, Gar noticed with satisfaction, employed a rather crude, unschooled Kneejerk to the groin, then followed it with a Unicorn Strike to the man’s face. Both assailant and victim staggered away from the collision of heads, but the tough went down and Goodwife Blott managed to stay up.