The Shaman's Apprentice by B. Muze

Author:B. Muze [Muze, B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wittily Writ Publishing
Published: 2017-12-30T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 23

Killing Games

Darkness. Jovai could not open her eyes. She could not feel her body. Not at first. Voices in a language she had never heard rustled in her head and slowly took form in a space outside of her, at a distance. She remembered the ghost boy and shivered.

Gradually, feeling in her body returned. She felt a stiffness as if every muscle and joint were carved from wood. She tried to open her eyes. The struggle was great, but she managed to lift her lids half way. Blurriness around her slowly took the form of the Gicok sitting in the last light of day against a tall pole that supported some kind of large tent. He was watching her, his eyes dull and unnaturally still. Jovai tried to speak, but it was a while before her tongue and jaw obeyed her enough to form words. Meanwhile, the Gicok watched.

“Wh… what’s… what’s hap…pen…ing?” she finally managed to ask.

The Gicok continued to stare at her, so stilly she wondered if he were dead. Then, stiffly, he jerked his head away. Whatever had been used on her had been used on him as well, she realized. She sat quietly and waited. The wait was so long she thought he would not answer the question, then slowly, he started to speak.

“I take you to the… my people. See if you liar… thief. They… they all… dead… or… Now we… Kolvas… Kolvas kill us… eat us.”

Jovai stared at him confused, not understanding.

“Who killed Gicoks?” she asked, her words still a struggle, but clearer now.

“Kolvas not kill like that before,” he answered slowly. “Not hunt people like that before.” Then he fell silent and would speak no more. She heard his stifled sobs when night’s shadows had hidden his face from her. He had a family to grieve for, a whole people even. She did not intrude.

Through the night they waited. The Gicok finally slept. Jovai listened, her senses keen enough to hear the murmuring of voices, the sighing of sleepers and sometimes even the crying of a child at a distance and the soft shuffling of bare human feet outside the tent, nearby, on guard. In the corner of her eye, she saw movement, like flickering shadows, soundless. She could not move quickly enough to see them straight.

Sometime late at night, the guard fell asleep. It didn’t matter. The prisoners were still partially paralyzed and tightly bound. There was no escape.

Early the next morning five very tall men appeared, of bronze skin and long brown-red hair, some with eyes of green, others blue and others tan. They untied the prisoners from the posts but kept their wrists and ankles bound as they carried them from the tent and through the forest, past the whispering, ghost-filled Gicok camp and into a nearby clearing.

The prisoners were dropped at the feet of a man who, in dress and bearing seemed their leader. He was a well-fleshed but muscular man of middle years, draped in hides of the cunning, killer cats and patched with long braids of hair strung with beads and carved bones.

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