Tarashana Rachel Neumeier (top 10 motivational books TXT) 📖

I had ordered. I said starkly, “I do not hear Etta now. If my sister has been killed, then perhaps you may be of use to Inhejeriel.”

Raga caught his breath. But Lalani took a breath, let it out, and made her way past me, climbing faster than I could. Terror will show a man, or a woman, unsuspected reserves of strength. And I already knew she possessed every bit as much determination and courage as any Ugaro.

She was soon out of sight. Very soon after that, I became certain that I heard our enemies, very close behind us now, coming fast. In a place where the path passed beneath an arch of stone, I stopped, gesturing for Raga and Arayo to pass me. The place was good. The ledge was not too narrow here, and the archway would force enemies to come one at a time. A small number of warriors could hold this position for a long time, until their strength failed, or their luck, or the favor of the gods.

Desperation poured into me through the tie, so fiercely it was all I could do not to turn and run toward Aras. But the first of our enemies had come into sight, moving in a strange gliding, flickering way that was not exactly like the way a living man would move. Other shadow warriors came behind the first. If we ran now, they would tear us down from behind. It was impossible to do anything but face them.

I took care to keep my voice level and my tone calm. “Arayo, I will depend on you to support me. Raga, I will get you a sword, but until then, stay back and be ready to assist Arayo should any enemy get past me.”

They both acknowledged my words, and then the first of the shadow warriors was upon us. The moonlight poured over him and around him and into him; he seemed nearly featureless, almost as though he were the silhouette of a man, except that here and there iridescent colors gleamed along the line of a cheekbone or glittered across half-seen armor or vanished into the black-on-black emptiness of his eyes. His curved sword and his claw weapon drank in the moonlight as though those weapons were holes in the world.

I lunged through the arch, feinting, then retreated to bring this enemy forward, where his movements rather than mine would be constrained by the stone. I could never have mistaken him for a living man, but the strength in him, in his arm, was certainly no less for that. His sword rang against mine in almost the ordinary way, for all the weapon's strange appearance.

The shadow warrior let me draw him—perhaps overconfident of his own skill, or perhaps, as he was already dead, he had no care for caution. When I feinted again, he tried to catch my sword with his claw-weapon, but I dropped the tip of my blade low and cut his forearm below the armor, then drove my knife into his thigh and tore it upward into the groin. As I had found before, this was both like and unlike striking a living man; the resistance was different, first more and then less, as though the shadow were less solid or less real once I cut through its surface. But when my sword came against his armor, shadow or not, the shock jarred my hand and arm. I tore my blade free, pivoting to throw the wounded enemy past me for Arayo to finish—now Raga would have a sword, so that was good—but the next shadow warrior came at me so fast I barely managed to face him in time to block his attack, and even then I was so badly off balance that the strength of his blow drove me to my knees.

My mistake might have made the battle disgracefully short, but the eagle hurled himself down in that instant so that the shadow warrior leaped back. The instant the eagle touched the stone, he was not an eagle, he was a man, an Ugaro warrior of moonlight and ice, his unbound hair flying, a sword in each hand. He struck twice with blazing speed and ferocity, cutting our enemy into pieces—his weapons cut right through the warrior’s armor—then he threw himself from the cliff and blurred into a streak of moonlight and then into an eagle again, wheeling away into the sky.

I regained my feet, barely in time to face our next enemy.

Above, the eagle screamed, folded its wings, and plunged toward us. When the nearest shadow warriors flinched and looked up, I seized my chance, throwing myself forward, not shouting, but silent, so that my enemies might fail to guard against me for that one instant too long. I took the chance to try my sword against one warrior’s armor, putting all my strength behind the blow, and found my weapon could indeed cut through the glittering black shadow. But, disastrously, I lost my sword because it lodged there, in the strange substance of my enemy. Another shadow warrior struck at me, so that I was forced to let go of my sword and leap backward.

The eagle touched the stone, rose up as a man, and threw me one of his swords. I caught this weapon with a shout and lunged to drive our enemies back. The eagle-warrior’s sword was so much better than my own that, against that weapon, the shadow warriors might as well have worn no armor at all. But even so there were so many I had to fall back again to the stone arch.

Arayo, behind me, said, terse and level-voiced, “Their own swords also cut through their armor better than ours, Ryo—get me one like that if you can.”

“Yes,” I said. I had not realized that. “Good,” I added. I started to say something else. I do not know what I meant to say. Before I