Clayton Emery - Jedit

Bucking, twisting, straining, Jedit dragged down his and the ape's mighty arms. Inch by inch he hauled the ape's face close. Flame-red eyes widened as it saw Jedit's yawning mouth lined with gleaming white fangs. Long strings of saliva had been champed to foam, for Jedit was being strangled from behind. Powerless, now pinned itself, the gorilla began to gibber. With the power of a battering ram, Jedit wrenched the ape close and clamped bone-breaking jaws on its muzzle.

Arriving almost too close, Adira Strongheart shivered as the tormented fiend squealed in terror. Slowly, despite being throttled, Jedit cocked his wrists to trap the ape's paws against his lean hips. Flexing his back, Jedit set clawed toes in the dirt of the marketplace and craned his neck upward. Even Adira, veteran of a hundred battles, felt her stomach chum as Jedit tilted his chin, wrenched the ape's skull out of joint, then broke its neck with a gut-wrenching snap. The ape collapsed like a black rug at the man-tiger's feet. Dark tentacles on its back drooped and died like obscene flowers.

Spitting blood and flexing his paws, Jedit Ojanen fought without even turning around. Adira saw his strategy. Rather than claw to dislodge the strangling hands from his throat, Jedit used them to attack the attacker. Reaching by his rounded ears, the tiger clasped the ape's forearms with mighty paws. Squatting, Jedit tugged the ape forward and off-balance. The hellish creature whipped its tentacles in a pelting storm at the cat's face, but Jedit ignored the stinging, slicing blows. Even Adira could see that for all its fearsome strength, the ape was tiring just trying to strangle Jedit, for the tiger's neck was tough as an oak tree. Now it was too late.

Sinking to his hams, Jedit coiled in a ball. Levering against the ape's forearms, he kicked with sinewy legs. Immediately the ape flipped over the tiger's head. Sucking tentacles ripped fur and flesh from Jedit's head and neck, leaving bloody puckers tufted with fur. The ape's back struck the marketplace. Adira clearly felt the dirt jump under her boots.

Roaring in rage, free of the clutching black talons, Jedit Ojanen sent a fist big as a kettle into the sky and brought it down on the ape's muzzle. Adira grunted as bone and teeth shattered. Tentacles shot straight out as in disbelief. Jedit brought down the other paw and smashed bone again. Probably the ape was dead by then, but the tiger continued to pound the ape into a shapeless mass. Still the cat vented its fury, now slapping with claws that raked furrows in the battered body. The carcass was more a red hash than black, and Adira had to turn away.

Another roar made her flinch. Jedit Ojanen had risen, seared by fire and drenched in blood, amber-green eyes glowing wildly with battlelust. He roared defiance at the world as he cast about for another foe, and just for a second Adira felt like a mouse about to be pounced upon.

She blurted, "Slack your sails, tiger shark! We've won! It's over."

Somberly the pirate and panting tiger scanned the shattered marketplace. The reek was awful, a compound of smashed vegetables, spilled wine, fresh blood, broken cheeses, and the sour, scorched stink of the beasts of Bogardan. Yet only townsfolk and a score of Robaran Mercenaries were standing. Many tended the fallen, covering them in rugs or blankets, laying them on broken carts as stretchers, stanching and binding wounds, or pinning bodies flat to wrench broken limbs aright. Simone the Siren was on her feet, as were all her Seveners. Worst hurt, Adira realized, was Jedit Ojanen, unless Badger lay dead in some alley.

"Johan escaped." The tiger spat blood off his muzzle, both his own and his enemy's. Both ears bled, as did a dozen other rips and tears. "Give me your best scouts to track him."

"My best scouts?" Used to giving orders, not taking them, Adira was both flustered and irked. "My best scout is Heath, but he recuperates in Bryce. Wilemina can track a trail, and so can Jasmine, she claims-"

"Wilemina! Jasmine!" Jedit's coughing bark made everyone in the marketplace jump. "Come! We hunt Johan!"

"Heave to!" snapped Adira. "No one crimps my crew without-"

Adira froze as Jedit's bloody, scarred, fire-singed muzzle bobbed an inch from hers. The tiger's growl chilled her blood.

"Don't refuse me revenge."

Blood-flecked tail swishing, limping on a chewed foot, the tiger trotted down the street, bearing west. Wilemina and Jasmine tripped up to Adira, breathless, asking questions with arched eyebrows.

"Go," said Adira. "Keep an eye out. We'll need him and. more now that Johan's returned, damn his ornery hide. Damn both of them."

"Enemies beset me, yet I escape unharmed. Such is my destiny. Yet again I am cursed by cat warriors!"

Alone, Johan complained as he marched barefooted into a wasteland. Tatters of his purple lizard-skin robe trailed, ragged and wet and collecting sand. His red-black tattooed skin shone like fresh blood on agates.

"Forced to brawl in a marketplace like a common thug, and I've squandered the secret of my return, forfeited the element of surprise to the enemy! Still, perhaps this is best. Adira Simpleminded Strongheart and Hazezon Hamhanded Tamar will lose sleep knowing I plot against them, knowing doom dogs their every step!"

Had he been lucid, Johan might have worried that he sputtered and fumed like a village idiot and stooped to childish insults. Yet he blithered on, more exhausted than he realized. Careless of eating and sleeping, Johan had spent weeks crossing a deadly desert before reaching Palmyra, months before that exploring Efrava, and a year or more before that waging war. The furious battle in the marketplace had spent his resources, both mystic and physical, yet he was unaware and plowed on in a mental fog. Fleeing the fight, he'd waded the River Toloron and struck west, for no other reason than that his enemies would expect him to push north. Shaking his horned head, he'd walked for hours, barefoot, without hat or waterskin, no possessions but the shredded purple robe and a few spellcasting oddments in his pockets. Magic sustained his body but took a toll on his mind.

No one heard the half-mad sorcerer mutter, not even an errant shepherd. The land was inhospitable. A few miles from the life-giving river, the terrain reverted to broken shale, crumbled arroyos of orange sand, and scanty bush. Neither sheep nor goats could graze out here. A desert by a different — name, these Western Wastes. Few entered these barrens. Nomads shunned the area, considering it unlucky, believing from ancient legends that unscalable cliffs blocked the way west. There was no water, no greenery, no iron nor gems, no animals-nothing to serve as a lure.

"Tigers. Tiger-men. Man-tigers. Why?" Befuddled without knowing it, Johan talked as he blundered on west. "The cat warriors are too great a force to ignore, so I must control them. Conquer them. But how? Killing them seems too easy. Yet to break them to harness, render them docile, exploit them… What do we know of them? Nothing. What's their secret? How to decipher animal minds? Fabulous knowledge could be had. Yet so much was lost, smothered and crushed by the Ice Ages or swept away by the glacial floods. Somewhere must be preserved the ancient key to subduing the cats-Hunh!"

Johan halted as if poleaxed. Before him, silhouetted against a flaming desert sunset, wavered a mirage-or a vision.

A beautiful woman in blue layered robes, with startling black hair and golden skin, stood with one small hand poised as if to ask a stranger a question.

Hideous in red skin and black stripes and horns like a dragon's, Johan squinted to make the vision freeze, but the woman rippled and shimmered like smoke on water.

Not wishing to appear ignorant, he stated, "I know you!"

"Perhaps." The vision didn't argue. The woman's eyes slanted upward at the comers. A foreigner to Jamuraa. "I am Shauku. I reside in the west."