Abattoir/Part 9

Alecto woke, stiff and sore, unsure whether it was day or night in the deep dark of the Abattoir, but as she often had these past nineteen years, she woke at once and completely. Pain came with the waking, but she had enough presence of mind to squeeze her eyes shut and suffer in silence until she got it under control. Then she rocked forward out of her tree niche and took inventory of herself.

Her feet and boots had dried and most of the clothing she was wearing was moist at worst, but the good news ended there. The insect bite on her left pinky had swollen; the finger was almost as large as the next two together, and she could only bend it halfway toward a fist without hissing. The wounds in her lower back hadn't reopened, but they ached as she leaned forward. The cut in her palm wasn't bleeding, but it was tender enough that she worried the swamp water had infected it. She tried to plantarflex her left foot and almost screamed. She gasped, and her throat was so dry that even the humid air whistling down her throat burned.

As she carefully relaxed her ankle, Alecto looked at her arm. The leaf had left no marks or welts, so she tugged it from its stem as quietly as possible, sucking the moisture off it and eating it when the surface ran dry. It tasted as bland as green vegetation always did, but she was so thirsty she ate six more and fought the temptation to bend a second branch into reach with the Force. Sharp pains stabbed her stomach, but at least she was hydrated enough to work up some saliva and swallow. The dark air was cool after the swamp; a light breeze caught what was left of her hair.

She grabbed her boots, but shook them on instinct, and watched a long scorpion-like bug fall to earth with a tssssssp! of annoyance. She stuck her right boot into her mouth to bite the leather as she worked the left one on. When she was fully dressed, she carefully stretched out with the Force. Danger remained everywhere, but she could feel the difference in the Anzati. They were near enough to be threatening, but not so close that Alecto had to remain in her tree.

She pressed her left foot against a branch, and even with the boot stabilizing it and the Force to cushion her landing, she knew at once that jumping would cripple her. She dropped and hung, picking her way down hand under hand, using her right foot to stabilize until she was low enough to drop onto it.

Any thought of outrunning the Anzati vanished when she tested her weight on her left; wrapping it had kept it compact enough that she could manage a hobble, but that was as much as she dared. The ferals might not have her Force signature to go on, but sooner or later they would start hunting by smell and heartbeat instead. Alecto was rested enough to use some of her powers if she had to, but she doubted she could Crush one of them before the others were on her, and she still dared not risk more lightning.

She couldn't run, she couldn't wait them out, and she couldn't stand and fight. Alecto squeezed her right hand into a fist, feeling powerless and furious about it. But as she stood there, she remembered her nightmare—remembered a time she had been trapped, unable to flee or fight or wait for help, but still able to fight…

She started off through the trees, the breeze at her back to bear the scent away from her pursuers. The forest was all but black, and even with her eyes adjusted Alecto had no idea where she was going except away from the Anzati. She wanted to snap a walking stick off a tree, but the quiet was unnerving, and she knew the sound would carry like an audible flare. Her left leg was trembling by the time she finally found one lying on the ground, but by then it had given her an idea.

She stumbled through the dark until she caught the sound of running water, skirting around another hunting pack of Anzati. It was barely more than a brook, and she found a narrow crevice only a meter wide. Rooting in the mud, she dug out some tubers, rubbing them on her arm and sticking them in a belt pocket for later; she found a worm too, but when she pulled it out, it flexed a stinging tail on one end and gave a tiny little hsssss from the fanged mouth at the other end. Rolling her eyes, she stretched it out and bit out the middle third, leaving the ends to die.

She had collected enough sticks and started sharpening them with a flat rock when she sensed sudden alertness off in the jungle. After a moment the feral minds turned her way, and she knew they had found her trail. Working quickly, she stuck her sticks in the mud and wedged them into the brook. She only had time to throw a few ferns and a couple sticks over the crevice itself; she ripped the ferns free, no longer caring if anything heard her, but she knew she needed to get clear before they were close. Tossing her stick onto the other bank, she hauled herself up, calling on the dark side before hobbling away into the tree line and veiling herself again.

The ferals did not disappoint. The first leapt the brook in its haste for soup, but the second plodded over the trap and fell, and the third could not stop in time. Alecto heard the second shrieking, but the third was silent. The remainder of the pack turned, circling the stick trap before descending on their wounded fellow. Leaving the snarls and shrieks behind her, Alecto crept away into the dark, limping until weariness demanded she find another tree to rest. She hadn't reacted to the tuber, so she ate one before she passed out.

The second day in the second level, Alecto sensed the Anzati on her trail when she woke. She considered, then tugged a few branches loose from higher in the tree, laying a lattice that might have made a comfortable bed had she thought of it earlier. Her tree was beside an outcropping of rocks; at full strength she might have broken one into pieces with her mind, but the circumstances forced her to telekinetically lift them two- and eventually one-by-one as the Anzati howled in the distance. She loaded the lattice until the branches were straining, then tore off her left sleeve and carefully draped it over a branch.

She could actually hear the Anzati thundering through the brush, so she had to leap, abandoning her walking crutch to catch a vine and swing. She tucked her legs and rolled on a knoll, choking down a scream as she rolled over her left ankle. She heard the scrabble of nails elongated into claws gouging into wood, the crick of a thin branch finally snapping under enormous weight, and several ensuing roars of pain half-drowned by the grating cascade of falling rock. She had the rest of the day to search out a general downward slope, though her ankle forced her to take it far too slowly. She found another brook—or perhaps a second fork of the first—and went with the current until she could plod no more; the thick mud sucked at her boots and tugged agonizingly on her left ankle with every other step.

When she woke the third time, she knew at once that something was wrong. The Anzati were closer than she had expected—actively hunting her. She climbed down from the night's tree and tried a trot, swallowing against the pain and knowing it would cost her later. She made it to the brook, but it was not yet deep enough for her to swim. Thinking quickly, she tore off her right sleeve, charged it with a touch of the Force, made it a little raft of branches, and sent it downstream. Then she dove into the mud, wriggling deep, slopping it over what was left of her red hair, burrowing until she was afraid she would drown herself with it.

If Targere could see her now, hiding in the mud like some swamp creature, he would have laughed the derisive laugh that Alecto always wanted to strangle out of him…and yet, as she heard the snuffling and snarling coming closer, she felt less angry about it now. She hated him still, but she realized she had allowed herself to become an imitation of him. Since ascending to Darth Saleej's council—since Gizer, really, when she had been anointed and escaped Zedum's clutches—she had been growing away from the stealth and sneakiness that had delivered her Arstyn and Shadeez in the first place. Trying to beat Targere and the other indolent lords who were unfit to be Darths at their own game, she had forsaken her own best skills.

The Anzati dove into the creek bed, but to Alecto's consternation they did not immediately follow the river. Instead, they snuffled, pressing their claws to their flared nostrils. Chancing a slight touch of the Force to sharpen her senses, Alecto pulled every available photon of light through pupils so wide she was sure they had half-swallowed her violet irises. She saw half a dozen feral Anzati, teeth bared, blood-colored eyes mad and hunting…and she saw the strands of dark red hair each clutched in its claws.

It took all her self-control not to reveal herself with a gasp of shock or indignation. Had they climbed out of the second level into the first? Possible, but it seemed unlikely; Rassan had seemed confident in his safety up on the ridge. But if they hadn't gone up…

An Anzat snarled, then bounded down the riverbank, its fellows in hot pursuit. Alecto lay beneath the mud for a long time, trembling until a gob of it sloughed off into her eyes. She was running out of tricks as it was, and now she was playing against a stacked deck.

She did not try to clean off the mud when she finally pulled herself out of the earth; let it veil her scent a while longer. Let me hide. Hiding had saved her when she was eight, perhaps it would save her now.

With the predators haunting the brook, Alecto dared not follow it down; she hauled herself up into the grass and crept away into the ferns and trees, trying to keep the babbling water in earshot. Her run had cost her, and before she thought she had even gone a kilometer her ankle was throbbing; before she hit two kilometers it was easier and faster to crawl on her hands and knees.

She was still crawling when she sensed her pursuer. This was not the wasted, savage mind of an Anzat feral; it was cold, deliberate predation. Alecto remembered being stalked that way, and stalking others as her own skills grew. She could not lose this kind of hunter for hours or days on end.

She could make a dozen traps with a knife, but she didn't have one. For that matter, with her lightsaber she could stand indefinitely against the Abattoir's worst even as injured as she was. She recognized the peril of wishful thinking in a place like this. It was easy to feel helpless in this pitiless place; it would be the simplest thing to settle down in the ferns and wait for that stalking presence to find her and give her the sweet oblivion of death.

She dragged herself on through the underbrush.

She felt It too; she had been so focused on the Anzati she had almost forgotten It, and she realized now how fatal that might be. It was closing in too, watching her from a distance that was shrinking with every meter. What was the point of hiding?

She dragged herself on, pulling herself down into a marsh.

She could feel the cool satisfaction in her hunter's mind as he caught the scent of her blood; her knees must have scraped raw again on the ground, or her bare arms had been lanced by the tree bark or pricker bushes. She could almost smell through that wide nose, see through those shining eyes, as the prey-smell grew headier with every few steps…as he closed on her.

She dragged herself on, latching onto bamboo to drag herself forward, arms burning, bamboo stalks bending.

Bamboo stalks snapping off in her hands. Snaps carrying through the marsh, calling to those attentive ears.

He found her hiding behind a rock, directly opposite the boot she had thrown into the muck, which stank of her sweat and the smell of her soup. She saw the cold satisfaction in his smile. "The smell and the Force one way, the smell alone the other…you've played that trick quite a few times now, Darth Alecto. The ferals keep falling for it, but I caught on."

He brushed some swamp ferns aside, shaking his head. "Only five stakes? What did you expect me to do, dive on your boot?  Even if I'd fallen for it, I'd what, scratch my shins?"

"Small victories," Alecto spat. Rassan took a step toward her, and she raised her hands defensively. "Azeroth put you up to this. You are one of his."

He shrugged. "If that's how you see it. You're dying anyway, someone might as well profit from it.  I haven't had Forceful soup in so long…"

He reached for her.

"Touch me and die," Alecto warned.

Rassan laughed in her face as he took her around the neck. She grabbed his wrists, but he punched her so hard that what little she could see turned black. His next blow took her in the diaphragm, hammering her cracked ribs but driving the wind from her so her scream was only a choked whistle. He leaned down and punched her again, apparently just for the pleasure of it.

"Meat's always good tenderized, don't you think?"

She flapped her hands feebly at the hand still holding her neck. If he squeezed, she died. If he got on top of her to suck out her soup, she died. If he hit her much more, her ribs pierced her organs and she died.

He lifted her off the ground instead, and the bamboo stalk she'd been lying on finally snapped free.

Rassan screamed as the sharpened stick she'd stuck crosswise through the end impaled him through the shin. If he fell on her she died, but he staggered away and tripped as he put weight on his maimed leg, falling back onto the five stakes. All five pierced him through the gut, and the way his legs stopped twitching, she knew one of them had gone through his spine, too. He screamed again, shaking hands patting the skewered intestines, tugging at his useless legs. "You bitch! I'll kill you!"

Alecto crawled past him, retrieving her boot and tugging it back on. "No," she rasped. "No, I don't think so now."

It had been so close, so horribly close, and Alecto's rage would not be bound. The dark side had waited long enough; she raised a hand, and two stakes ripped out of the ground and all the way through Rassan's body; they flipped in midair and nailed his biceps to the mud. He shrieked again, trying and failing to grab her as she crept close and pulled items from his utility belt. "I think they sensed the Force by itself," she commented, "but keep screaming if you want, that'll definitely get their attention."

He stopped abruptly, and even in the dark Alecto could see the whites of his eyes. "Don't leave me here!"

"Not as easy to keep the upper hand on them when you're defenseless, is it?"

He had a working comlink and, blessedly, a vibroblade. She ultimately just stripped the whole belt off him, strapping it on as a bandoleer. There was howling in the distance when she stood to hobble away.

"Kill me!"

She paused and looked back.

"They want you to fail!"

"All of them?"

"Azeroth, some of the others, maybe, I don't know! You're an alien!  It's the Brotherhood!"

"And I'm the alien who's going to lead it."

"You're close to the next level! It's not even a kilometer away!"

"Thanks for the tip."

"Mercy!"

Alecto contented herself with imagining the naked fear in his eyes rather than stopping to check; the howls were quite close now.

"Alecto! ALECTO!"

He kept screaming as she made her way down to the creek, following its flow to a rock face.

"No! NO!  AaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWGH!"

There was a door set into the rock face. The system had to be ancient, but it responded to her touch, grating and groaning opening. She sensed the ferals in hot pursuit, seeking a second serving of soup, but the door closed again by the time they arrived. There was a ladder to her right, but she gritted her teeth and hobbled past it into a patch of light.