Free Etherwalker by Cameron Dayton Page A

into the Ferrocara, he prepared to lie.
    He dropped his shoulders and looked down, hoping he looked the picture of frightened villager. He had seen the expression plenty of times in his visits to Rewn’s Fork. Voice trembling with what he hoped conveyed the proper amount of fear and misery: Enoch spoke of black beasts, a midnight attack, and his family farm burnt to ashes. Afraid to veer too far from the truth and get caught in his inventions, Enoch spoke of hiding in the trees as the creatures swept through Rewn’s Fork.
    It sounded convincing to him.
    Is all emotion just mimicking patterns witnessed from others?
    The woman smirked.
    “Do you think me a fool, manling? Telling me this nursemaid’s tale as though I were a frightened girl? You claim to be from the land of shepherds, and yet you carry the derech and the iskeyar .”
    A dagger was suddenly in her hand.
    “You will tell me how and why the Rift Queen sends a scrawny Nahuat apprentice to find me. What message do you bear? Speak, or die.”
    Far from intimidating him, her words and his tale reminded him that he was far from helpless. His master had been preparing him. His master had been forging a weapon.
    I killed blackspawn. I slew their beasts and burst their weapons.
    The litania eteria slipped from his bruised lips, and he felt the familiar peace as his subconscious mind took over. The room came into sharp clarity. Somehow the woman sensed this change, and she stumbled backwards with a snarl. Her dagger gleamed in the fire light. In a heartbeat, Enoch was on his feet, and he noted her stance.
    She moves quickly, and there is another dagger in the left sleeve.
    Enoch’s mind measured distances and options as he stepped into the bent-kneed, loose stance of unarmed combat.
    Distract. Delay. Disarm.
    The woman’s smirk broadened into a grin.
    “If you wish to die, then . . .”
    She was cut off mid-sentence as Enoch’s stiff-fingered jab caught her square in the throat. As she staggered back, he slipped into the semprelisto stance. What should have been a crippling blow only stunned her, however, and a second later the dagger was slicing through the air toward his head. Enoch had already dropped to the ground and rolled away, coming up to his feet out of her reach.
    She is not human.
    The thought almost shook him from his trance, but he held on fiercely. The finger jab was a blow his master had taught him to use as a surprise advance. It was painful enough to down even the largest man and end a fight before it began. If done with enough force, it could crush the windpipe.
    But Enoch had not felt the hollow crunch of a broken larynx like his master had described—his fingers had instead encountered solid cords of muscle. Muscle, and . . . something else. Something much more solid.
    She chuckled at his hesitancy.
    “I’m not the picture of feminine frailty you took me for, am I? Have you Northerners so soon forgotten the platabrujas? You no longer tell tales of the Serpent Wives? If you knew half our lore your heart would freeze and crack.”
    Somewhere in the back of Enoch’s mind a memory surfaced of the Rewn’s Fork Patriarch, old Noach Kohn, telling ghost stories around the fire on Midwinter’s Eve. Yes, he remembered the tales—except according to Noach, the Serpent Wives were giant, iron-scaled women with fangs. They spat lightning and gorged on the flesh of disobedient children.
    The real thing may have been less gaudy but was much more terrifying.
    Hold on to the pensa spada.
    After being hunted through the woods by coldmen and their spider-hounds, Enoch had hoped that he would not be so easily frightened. But now he confronted the subject of dimly-lit childhood horrors. Concentration slipped.
    “You’ve been trained in the old ways, I see. There are not many who remember the mind path anymore. Who taught you?”
    At the last word, she launched herself across the room toward him, hidden dagger flashing into her hand. He barely dodged her