Trapped Read online

  Impervia’s Holy Order claimed to be spiritual descendants of the Shaolin monks, those soft-speaking folks who gave the world kung fu. I suspected this claim was false; for one thing, the Shaolins were Buddhist while Impervia was a Handmaid of the Magdalene. (Basically Christian, but with some exotic notions about Mary Magdalene being “purified” by Jesus and thereafter divine herself: the Trinity’s Spirita Sancta.) More likely, the early Magdalenes thought the Shaolin name would give them added credibility, so they invented a fictitious lineage tracing their sect back to China. I judged this more probable than any genuine historical connection...but I never told Impervia I doubted her kung fu heritage. Whether she was true Shaolin or not, she could still kick a bull’s testicles straight through its body and out the ring on its nose.

  This explains why none of us tried to help the good sister as bull-like Nathan charged forward. In fact, we retreated to give Impervia more room. I planted my back against the door of a chandler’s shop across the street and prepared to contribute to the fight by playing referee.

  Impervia met the fisherman’s charge in a businesslike kickboxing pose, fists up, chin down: no showy Cranestance/Dragon-stance nonsense when she had real opponents to scuttle. She wore loose black clothing and black leather gloves—the gloves protected her against winter’s cold, but also against getting her hands carved up in forceful collisions with an opponent’s teeth. Nathan, in contrast, had no special fighting outfit, and attacked like a man who was

  (a) drunk; and

  (b) experienced only in fighting other drunks.

  As a result, he took a single clumsy swipe at our friend: an ill-defined move that might have been a punch, a slap, or an attempt to grab her throat. Impervia sidestepped and smartly tossed a jab to the man’s nose, a palm-heel to his floating ribs, and a full-force stomp on his foot. Not surprisingly, Nathan fell to the cobblestones, with nothing more than a grunting gulp. It was only two seconds later that he began howling obscenities.

  “Why doesn’t she ever try a good hard knee to the groin?” Myoko asked, slipping into the doorway beside me.

  “She says it’s overrated,” I replied. “First, it’s not the guaranteed man-dropper everyone believes—many men can shrug off the pain, especially under the influence of drink, dope, or adrenaline. Second, experienced bar brawlers often stuff their crotches with padding before they go to the pub; they intend to get into fights, so they protect the family jewels. Third, a groin attack is the only fighting maneuver a man can block instinctively. It takes practice to cope with a punch to one’s face, but every male in the world has a built-in reflex to avoid getting kicked in the balls.”

  “What an education Impervia is,” Myoko said admiringly.

  At that moment, Impervia was educating the other two men who’d accompanied Nathan into the tavern. One of these men learned what it felt like to have an ax kick fracture his collarbone; the other came to a greater understanding of how a fist to the solar plexus can paralyze the nerves required for breathing. The kicked man staggered back cursing, but the recipient of the gut punch simply dropped to the pavement making surprised little wheezes.

  Impervia’s speed, skill, and strength also made an impression on the remaining seven fishermen—her flying fists looked like blurs. Then again, even a snail might have struck that group as blurry: all seven had reached the stumblebum stage of intoxication, and I think they knew it. No doubt they still felt obliged to help their friends, but none wanted to be first into the fray.

  While those at the front of the fisherman pack hesitated, I caught sight of a metallic glint somewhere to the rear. The globe-eared Divian had pulled out a big fancy broadsword he must have had sheathed down his back. “Blade!” I shouted. “The alien’s got a sword.”

  “On my way,” Pelinor said.

  Pelinor, of course, had a sword of his own. Pelinor also had armor, though he wasn’t wearing it at the moment—one doesn’t wander the back streets of Simka dressed up for a coronation. If, however, a coronation spontaneously broke out, Pelinor’s room on the far side of town held enough arms and armor to equip a complete honor guard. In his decades of wandering as a knight errant (or more likely, impounding contraband on our province’s border and keeping the best for himself), our school armsmaster had amassed an eclectic assortment of war-toys: everything from curare-tipped blow-darts to a slightly dented Sig-Sauer P-220 autoloader...sans bullets, alas, but still quite splendid for administering an effective pistol-whip.

  Tonight, Pelinor carried a simple cutlass—heavy as a meat cleaver but with a lot more reach...in case you wanted to chop pork from a distance. The pork in question (i.e., the Divian) shoved past his comrades and prepared to thrust his sword at Impervia; but before the blade could strike home, Pelinor’s cutlass was there, slapping away the weapon with a loud metallic clank.

  “A true swordsman doesn’t attack an unarmed opponent,” Pelinor said. “A true swordsman tests his mettle against mi evenly matched foe.”

  The Divian just blinked at those words, his eyelids flicking from the bottom up instead of top down. Perhaps on his home-planet far across the galaxy, nature had never evolved the concept of “fair fight.” His species might be more at home with the “leap from the shadows, stab in the back” school of combat. Still, the Divian collected himself with commendable speed and made a tentative stab in Pelinor’s direction.

  Even I could see it was a graceless attack; the alien held his weapon awkwardly, as if he’d never used it before. Perhaps he was hampered by the decorative fripperies on the sword’s pommel—a profusion of braid and curlicues that must have interfered with getting a good grip. It looked more like a ceremonial weapon than a practical tool in rough-and-tumble situations. A cynic might even suspect the sword had been acquired under questionable circumstances, by mugging a wealthy merchant or drawing a hidden ace out of a shirt cuff. The weapon looked too ornate and expensive for an ET slave to own legitimately.

  But no matter how the Divian got his sword, Pelinor parried the attack easily, exactly the way he did when facing a freshman who couldn’t tell her quarte from her quinte. “Slant your blade slightly upward,” our armsmaster said. “See how easily I can knock the sword down if you don’t keep up the tip? That’s right, just a little tilt. Not too much, though, or I can bap the blade back into your... Sorry, did I hit your nose?”

  Pelinor had clearly ensured he didn’t hit the alien’s nose. He’d given his cutlass an extra twist so the Divian’s weapon would turn and slap with the flat of the blade. This was, after all, a bar fight with drunks, and neither Impervia nor Pelinor wanted to dole out life-threatening injuries. Therefore, Pelinor used some quick flicking strikes to separate the sword-wielding extraterrestrial from the rest of his fellows, making it less likely the others would get accidentally nicked.

  This left Impervia with nine opponents, three of whom were already nursing wounds while the remaining six wobbled half a beer short of passing out. It was now an even contest...barely. Six against one made for hefty odds, even when the six were staggery-sloppily stewed.

  You must understand one crucial point: Impervia was undoubtedly faster and tougher than your average lager lout, but she was, in the end, just a schoolteacher. Not a professional fighter. Not an elite commando. Not even a third-order Magdalene, one of those select women within her sisterhood who were trained for “specialized” assignments. Impervia was only impressive when compared to untrained oafs—against topnotch champions, she was barely an also-ran.

  There is, alas, a heartbreaking gap between the Good and the Best. As many of us have realized to our sorrow.

  Even against drunken fishermen, Impervia was not a surefire winner. She almost never finished one of these Friday-night brawls without an eye swollen shut, a few cracked ribs, or a dislocated shoulder. Twice, she’d been battered unconscious before the rest of us could intervene. One had to wonder why she kept provoking these scuffles when she often got the worst of them; but she’d neve
r opened up about her inner demons, and the rest of us didn’t pry. We simply crossed our fingers and hoped she never truly got in over her head.

  At the moment, it was the fishermen who believed they were out of their depth. The uninjured six stayed bunched together, blearily waiting for someone to make the first move. Finally the man on the ground, Nathan, shouted, “Get going, you fuckwits! The lot of you! Just pile onto her!”

  The fisherfolk looked at each other, then shuffled reluctantly forward.

  Impervia leapt to meet them. The man she reached first went down under a fast jab to the jaw followed by a teeth-cracking uppercut. In other circumstances, he would have toppled back; but his friends were behind him, still moving forward. Accidentally or intentionally, they shoved the man’s semiconscious body toward the good sister, giving it a good hard push. She tried to dodge, but didn’t quite get out of the way—the dazed man thudded into her shoulder like a deadweight sack of flour and Impervia was spun half-sideways, ending with her back to three of the attackers.

  She realized her danger and snapped out a low donkey kick: not even looking at the men behind her, just lifting her foot and driving it backward, hoping to discourage anyone from coming too close. One man groaned, “Shit!” and crumpled, clutching his leg...but the other two blundered forward, one cuffing the back of Impervia’s head while the other seized her arm. She tried to wrench away from the man who’d grabbed her, throwing a distraction kick at his ankles to make him loosen his grip. By then, however, the men in front were attacking too—one with a punch to the face that she managed to diminish by jerking away her head, and one with a fist to the gut that she didn’t diminish at all. The breath whooshed out of her as she was lifted off her feet by the blow. A second later, she flopped to the cobblestones.

  “Myoko!” I shouted, “do something!” But Myoko, still in the doorway by my side, was already on the job: staring at Impervia with intense concentration, her hands clenched tight into fists.

  Unlike Impervia, Myoko didn’t look dangerous. Though she was almost thirty, she could pass for fifteen: barely four foot eight and slender, with waterfall-straight black hair that hung to her thighs, always pulled back from her face with two ox-bone barrettes. At the academy, outsiders mistook her for a student—perhaps the daughter of a minor daimyo, a quiet schoolgirl destined for flower arranging and calligraphy. But Myoko was neither quiet nor a schoolgirl...and if she ever wanted to arrange flowers, she could do it at a distance of twenty paces by sheer force of will.

  Much as I wanted to keep my eye on Impervia—twisting and writhing across the cobblestones as the fishermen threw clumsy kicks at her—I couldn’t help be distracted by the movement of Myoko’s hair as her concentration increased. Individual strands began to separate from the long straight whole, lifting up like puppet strings. In less than three seconds, all the ends splayed out from each other, fanning wide into the air. As a man of science, I assumed the effect came from static electricity; but the electrical charge was created by a source far more esoteric than the Van de Graaff generator we’d used to do the same trick back in college.

  With a sudden lurch, Sister Impervia’s body heaved off the ground and rose into the air. The tips of Myoko’s hair lifted too, curling up like a counterbalance...and I told myself perhaps Myoko’s brand of telekinesis needed the curling hair to produce counteracting leverage.

  What, after all, did I know about the physics of psionics? Nothing. As a scientist, my only certainty was that psychic powers had been foisted on humankind by outer-space hightech, courtesy of the ultra-advanced aliens known as the League of Peoples. Before the League visited Earth, psionics were a myth; after the League had passed through, ESP and suchlike abilities became undeniable fact, easily reproduced in the lab (and on the back streets of Simka). No one knew how or why the League had given one human in a thousand such a gift; all we could do was marvel at its effects...such as now, when Impervia soared aloft on Myoko’s mental hoist, raised high above the mob’s clamoring reach.

  At first, the fishermen didn’t grasp what was happening. One of them actually made a bumbling attempt to leap up and slap Impervia’s legs, the way boys jump to tag dangling store signs as they walk down the street. The man missed and thumped heavily to the pavement...which seems to have been the moment at which he and his companions realized there was something less than ordinary about a woman levitating above their heads. They fell back open-mouthed, staring up at Impervia as if she were some new celestial object, a sweat-gleaming chunk of dark matter suspended in the night.

  “Ahem. Gentlemen?”

  The Steel Caryatid stepped from a doorway five paces down the street. She was pale in the lamplight, the sort of Nordic blonde who looks three-quarters albino...and like many a soreness, she wore nothing but a skin-tight crimson body sheath. If that sounds seductive, you’re too eager to be seduced. The Caryatid was a big-hipped woman of forty, broad, round, and motherly; ninety percent the kind of mother who bakes the best cookies in the neighborhood, and ten percent the kind who has to be locked in the attic and fed bouillon through a straw.

  All the sorcerers I’d known had been that way: a little bit crazy. Or a lot. Maybe it was impossible to learn the craft unless you were slightly divorced from reality; or maybe the things sorcerers did were enough to make a sane person unbalanced. Incantations. Rituals. Attunements. I didn’t believe that sorcery was truly supernatural—like psionics, sorcery started working only after the League of Peoples paid their visit to Earth, so “magic” was another type of hightech in disguise—but even though I knew there had to be a scientific explanation, sorcery and its practitioners could be bone-chillingly creepy.

  “Now that my friend is out of reach,” the Caryatid told the fishermen, “it’s time to say good night. And here’s something to light you to bed.”

  She pulled a match from her sleeve and struck a light on the wall beside her. (The Caryatid possessed an inexhaustible supply of matches; I could almost believe a new box materialized in her pocket whenever an old box ran out.) The match flame flickered in the breeze of the laneway, but after a moment it stabilized.

  “Do you like fire?” the Caryatid asked, as if she were speaking to children at storytime. “I don’t mean the things fire can do. Do you like fire itself? The look of it. The feel of it.” She swept her finger lazily through the flame, just fast enough to avoid getting burned.

  None of the fishermen seemed to realize the match was lasting longer than it should. In fact, the men might have been so stupefied at seeing Impervia float overhead, their brains weren’t questioning anything.

  “I like fire,” the Caryatid said. “I’ve always liked it. Some children talk to their dolls; when I was young, I talked to the hearth. It worried my parents...but fortunately, one of my schoolteachers realized I didn’t have a problem, I had a gift. Something to remember: the right teacher can make such a difference.”

  Far from burning out, the match flame had begun to grow—roughly the size of a big candle now. Off down the street, Sir Pelinor knocked the broadsword from the Divian’s hand and kicked the weapon down a storm sewer drain. “Listen to the lady,” Pelinor told the alien.

  “Fire loves those who love it back,” the Caryatid said. “It’s very warmhearted.” She smiled. I usually liked her smile—it was the comfortable sort of smile you might get from a dowdy maiden aunt—but when the Caryatid had a flame in her hand, her smile could send prickles up my spine.

  She swept her finger through the matchlight again. The flame curled like a cat responding to a caress. “Fire is a wild animal—not tame, but willing to befriend those who approach it the right way.” One by one, she stuck her fingers into the flame and held them there for a full second; one by one, she removed each finger to show a dab of fire on the fingertip. She smiled girlishly at the fishermen. “They tickle,” she said, wiggling the tiny flames. “They’re furry.”

  Several fishermen whispered phrases Impervia would class as ignorant and rude. The words sounded mo
re scared than angry.

  “Would you like to meet my friends?” the Caryatid asked. Without waiting for an answer, she bent to the ground and lowered her burning hand as if she were setting down a pet mouse. Each of the flames hopped off a finger and onto the pavement—five small points of light. “Go say hello to the nice men,” the Caryatid said.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then all five flames bounced into the air, coming down a pace closer to the fishermen. The Divian squealed and bolted. Pelinor stepped aside and waved good-bye as the alien sped past.

  The flames leapt again, another pace closer. Each dot of fire was no bigger than a candle, but the fishermen staggered back, their eyes wide. Three more of them broke from the pack and dashed into the night.

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” the Caryatid said. “My friends just want to meet you.” The flames took another jump.

  That was enough for the remaining fishermen. Clambering over each other, howling in fear, they took to their heels and thundered off down the street...all but one. Nathan, sprawled on the pavement, possibly unable to stand because of Impervia’s stomp to his foot, screamed one last obscenity and drew a gun from his sleeve.

  It was only a tiny pistol, some modern steelsmith’s copy of an OldTech Derringer; half those things blew up in their owners’ faces within the first ten shots. Still, this was no time for taking chances—Pelinor was way down the street, Myoko had to concentrate on keeping Impervia in the air, and the Caryatid’s little flame friends were still several jumps from the fallen fisherman.

  Gibbering with terror, Nathan lifted the gun and took shaky aim at the Caryatid.

  Making it my turn to act.

  My name is Philemon Abu Dhubhai—Doctor Dhubhai, thanks to my Ph.D. in mathematical physics. I shan’t describe myself except to say I was thirty-five at the time and much too inclined to gloomy introspection. Amongst our band of tavern-teddies, Impervia had muscles, Pelinor had a sword, Myoko had brainpower, the Caryatid had sorcery, and I...I had a bulging money-purse. My family was stinking rich; even though I’d put an entire ocean between me and my relatives, they still sent regular pouches of gold so I’d never have to besmirch the Dhubhai name by darning my own socks. Therefore when my friends and I visited the drinking establishments of Simka, I always bought the first round of drinks, tipped the barmaid, and paid for broken windows. My role in bar fights wasn’t as glamorous as my companions’, but it still came in handy. When all else failed, I could throw money at the problem.