Wartorn: Resurrection by Robert Asprin, Eric Del Carlo Page A

stroke. She had tumbled over the battlefield ground, rolling back onto her feet, and everything she saw then was a roaring blackness ... everything except the face of the giant as he clomped toward her. She had snatched a throwing knife from one of her boots and launched it. It entered his gaping mouth, skewered his tongue, and poked its barbed tip out of the back of his throat. She'd never learned who had carried her away from that field. She had woken in a surgeon's tent, her scalp being sewn.
    No beds, no aisles, just mounds. The boy picked his zigzagging way nimbly, into darkness that now only hinted at the human shapes on the floor. She was alert.
    One stirring heap, on her right, blanket rocking back and forth, rhythmically, too steadily—a step away, the boy passing it...
    She pivoted. One boot heel came down on the right upper arm, just above the elbow. She drove the toe of her other boot into the mound's side, a toe reinforced by a wedge of iron under the kidskin. A rib broke under the blanket.
    If it was just another mud-brained addict, the proprietors wouldn't care.
    In the dark, low and ahead, she heard,
"No sword."
Which the hisser evidently thought meant she was weaponless. So be it.
    She delivered another kick, one that would immobilize the lungs for a while, and hopped off. She caught only the vaguest glimpse of the boy vanishing, but where he'd been there was now a charging figure. Blade in fist.
    Brute attack. It might have worked in the daylight, where the victim would see the armed shape looming and lunging and then freeze in fear. It might have worked here, in this stinking dimness, against someone who didn't have a decade of combat experience.
    She snapped her left hand outward, fingers stiff and spread. The sound of sliding metal rang on the
    foul air. The weight of her glove was redistributed.
    Her right hand jabbed forward and punched the hand that held the knife, a hard painful shot, distracting the charger. But it was her left hand, of course, darting and singing a few thin notes of metallic mayhem as it shot through the air, that did the job. The two prongs—fine, solid, as sharp as anything she ever carried—were extended from the back of her fist. They each tore away a patch of her attacker's face. She did all this during another pivot that got her out of the way of the pouncing, bleeding, screaming figure that hurtled past and onto several of the mounds.
    Into a crouch, sinewy legs splayed. Her hooks dribbled. The figure under the blanket to her right was gasping in excruciating pain.
    Noises ahead still. The one who'd hissed 'Wo
sword."
Maybe there were others. Her charger was still screaming on the floor behind her, high-pitched, sounding nearly insane. She must have hit an eye. Stupid Isthmuser.
    Her right hand flipped a blade up from her boot. It was a flat, thin slab of hammered metal, with no hilt. Made for throwing. Her fingers balanced it. She was holding her breath, listening to the dark, waiting to see what followed.
    The boy reappeared, a little grey smudge in the robe he wore, a smooth face that would be inscrutable even in the best light. In some other part of the cavernous room foot-steps retreated, stumbling. The mounds, even those the charger had blundered onto, remained silent, making only their irregular twitches and jerks.
    Radstac slotted the throwing knife back into her boot, but kept her glove's prongs extended. The specialist who had made the contraption had lived in a village nearby her home city of Hynсsy. He was a middle-yeared man, and he was dying, consumed from within by a corruption that ate the meat of him, leaving him a sack of yellowing flesh. He couldn't move about without the assistance of others, and so chose to rarely move from the worktable where he had invented her glove. She had envisioned the device, had struggled to explain it. It had, after all, come to her in a violently vivid dream of combat and so wavered in her mind.
    The man had listened, eyes