The Invisible City by Brian K. Lowe

Author:Brian K. Lowe [Lowe, Brian K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Stolen Future
Publisher: Water Dragon Publishing
Published: 2024-10-16T07:00:00+00:00

27

I Am Caged

Timash, near the window, lifted his nose to sniff the air once more.

“It’s awfully faint,” he reported hesitantly. “They may not be anywhere near here; maybe they just spent the night here or something.”

Marella’s mien was grim, her baton again extended into a sword. “I don’t care if they haven’t been here since the King’s last birthday. I don’t want to be in the same city with them.”

“You can stop worrying so much,” Harros announced with unusual celerity. He stepped into the room holding a ragged bit of something that might once have been cloth — or, then again, it might well have been fur, or something else better not dwelled upon. “This is where the smell is coming from.”

Responding to Marella’s disgusted expression, Harros quickly exited the room, taking the offensive odor with him. Nor did he return for some minutes.

While he was gone, Marella retracted her blade, turning a puzzled eye upon me.

“You know, you did pretty well back there with that staff — but why didn’t you just use the sword? I mean, the quarters were pretty tight — and they were using nets. I may not be much good with a staff, but even if I were I wouldn’t have used it in that situation.”

I had been watching her, and I knew now that she controlled her baton by use of differing hand grips: one made the sword blade extend, another made it retract. Except in these respects, her weapon looked just like my own, and that made me wonder. I held it out and gave her a sheepish grin.

“Actually, I don’t know very much about this thing. I was a librarian before they shanghaied me onto a ship and brought me down here to fight Thorans.”

“You were a librarian?” She cast a glance at Timash. “What was — never mind. You must not have had a whole lot of overdue reading crystals.” Shaking her head, she turned her attention to the staff weapon. “It’s really simple if you know the trick — and it was designed to keep energy weapons out of the hands of the Thorans. Twist like this, and you’ve got a sword; like this, and it’s back to a baton for carrying; like this, and — you’ve got a staff. Here, you try.”

As she had promised, once the basic holds were mastered, it was child’s play to move from one to another configuration, as long as you remembered always to return to the basic “baton” position; you could not switch directly from sword to staff. But, despite that minor impediment, it was a marvelous close-in weapon — or rather, three weapons. Testing the balance of the two, I quickly learned to prefer the sword over the bulkier staff.

Stepping back, I assumed a fencer’s stance. Although my spoken “En garde,” was incomprehensible to Marella, she immediately took my meaning, and just as quickly set out to take my measure.

There was no flash of blades, no singing on metal slicing off opposing

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