Swords of Waar

  Other books by Nathan Long

  Valnir’s Bane

  The Broken Lance

  Tainted Blood

  Orcslayer

  Manslayer

  Battle for Skull Pass

  Elfslayer

  Shamanslayer

  Gotrek and Felix: The Third Omnibus

  Bloodborn: Ulrika the Vampire Book One

  Zombieslayer

  Bloodforged

  Jane Carver of Waar

  Bloodsworn

  Swords of Waar © 2012 by Nathan Long

  This edition of Swords of Waar

  © 2012 by Night Shade Books

  Cover Illustration by Dave Dorman

  Cover design by Martha Wade

  Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

  Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

  All rights reserved

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-429-5

  eISBN: 978-1-59780-430-1

  Night Shade Books

  www.nightshadebooks.com

  To Edgar Rice Burroughs, for inspiration,

  and for having a sense of humor about it all.

  CHAPTER ONE

  EXILED!

  Cut to a week later, and I was back standing outside that same fucking cave in the hills above Tarzana that had started it all. And standing was the right word, too. I was so petrified I couldn’t go forward or back. Couldn’t move a goddamn inch, which was stupid, considering I’d just hitch-hiked seven hundred miles to get there.

  Did I mention I don’t like tight spaces? Well that cave was tighter than a walrus’s poop chute, and blacker too. I’d been up it once before, so I knew. It might be a quiet afternoon on that hillside right now, instead of a dark night with police dogs and whirly-birds chasing me like last time, and I might have brought a flashlight, but it didn’t matter. I was still froze up like a statue.

  And my claustrophobia wasn’t the only thing keeping me out of that hole. It’s a little long to get into here, but the last time I went in there, I found this weird clock-looking thing way at the back, and when I touched it, well, I went to another planet. Yeah, I know, but I did. Waar, it was called, and while I was there I got mixed up with this spoiled rich kid named Sai-Far, and helped him rescue his sweetheart, Wen-Jhai, from this grinning, grab-ass son-of-a-bitch named Kedac-Zir. More important than all that, though, was that I met Sai’s best friend, Lhan-Lar, a sweet-talking sharpie with a face like a hot-rod devil and a heart of twenty-four carat gold, and I fell in love. At least it coulda been love, maybe, if it’d had half a chance. Our first night together sure went like gangbusters, but before we even had time to wake up and have our first morning sex, I got drugged by a bunch of sneaky little orange-robed priests and dragged away. No goodbyes. No nothing.

  Next thing I know I’m wakin’ up in a cave in Monument Valley with Lhan’s smell still on my skin and good old Earth gravity crushin’ me to the ground like an elephant sitting on my chest.

  All I wanted to do as soon as I realized where I was was to get back to him, and fast—who knew what those fucking priests mighta done to him after they 86ed me—and the only way I knew how to do that was come back to this cave and touch the little doo-hickey again, which should have made me as eager as a bridegroom to push back into the dark, right?

  Yeah, well….

  Other things had happened on Waar, too, and some of ’em didn’t sit well. I’d killed a guy. Lots of guys. And not by accident, either. I’d chopped ’em all up with a big-ass sword. It was that kind of place—guys with swords killing other guys with swords, giant centaur-tiger dudes tearing each other to pieces, creepy priests kidnapping people. I’ve been a biker chick since I got kicked outta the army. I’ve seen plenty of brawls, but Waar was just a whole ’nother level. Did I want to go back to that? And what about the really bad stuff? People owned slaves there. Lhan owned slaves. How could I love a guy who owned slaves?

  So I stood there, thinking about all the things Earth had that Waar didn’t. Rock and roll, Texas barbeque, Harley-Davidsons, equal rights—at least in some places—air conditioning, dive bars, Marlboros, guys bigger than me, blue jeans, leather jackets. But Earth also had cops, jails and a warrant for my arrest for killing that dumbass dude outside the Fly-By Nightclub—even though that had been an accident. And it didn’t have the one thing that really mattered. Not anymore. Big Don was a rusty smear on the highway somewhere east of Sturgis now, and without him around, all the rest of it seemed kind of bland and washed out. Waar, on the other hand, had wide open spaces, wimpy gravity that let me run twenty feet a stride, no extradition to the US, and a chance to start again—at everything.

  With a grunt, I shoved into the cave and worked my way to the back. It wasn’t easy. My mouth got drier as the walls got narrower, and I’d completely sweated through my t-shirt by the time the flashlight finally found the opening to the back cave. It was a little hole halfway up a knife-cut wall, and so tight I didn’t know how I got through it before.

  I put the Maglight in my teeth and climbed up, then looked through. I knew it opened out again, but forcing myself to put my head and shoulders into that sphincter was as hard as reaching into a full toilet after a diamond ring. It made me shudder just to think about it.

  I thought about Lhan instead, wondering if he was okay, wondering if he’d escaped the priests who’d grabbed me, if he was even still alive. That pushed me through, and I rolled onto a layer of sand, then pulled my legs in after me. I was in the little tent-shaped chamber where the dogs had found me and where I’d fallen back on the clock-thingy—and out of the world.

  I flashed my light around. I didn’t see it. Panic squeezed me like a python. Had the cops taken it? No, wait. There was a little mound of sand at the back. I crawled to it. It was surrounded by paw prints and boot marks, like it had been covered in a scuffle. I brushed it all away with the sleeve of my hoodie and saw metal underneath. I breathed a sigh of relief, then immediately tensed up again. The doo-hickey was there, but I didn’t see the glow. When I had found it before, the headlight-sized gem in the center of it had been glowing—a kinda weak, lemonade light. Now there was nothing. I turned off the Maglight, just to be sure. Still nothing. I swallowed, afraid now that something was wrong, and turned the light back on. I still had to try.

  I reached for it, then stopped an inch from the gem, all my misgivings coming back. Did I really want to go? I thought I did, but… Well, what the fuck. It wasn’t going to work anyway. I slapped my palm across the gem.

  Nothing happened. I was still in the cave.

  And yeah, I know. I’d just said I knew it wasn’t going to work. I wasn’t exactly surprised.

  I cried anyway.

  ***

  I hadn’t planned for after.

  I walked back down the hill to Ventura Blvd. with just the clothes on my back—my hoodie, some dusty jeans, some dustier Vans and seven dollars—all I had left after the dead-run sprint I’d made from Monument Valley.

  The race had started six days back when a couple of Arizona Park Rangers had caught me trying to hitch-hike buck-naked down US 163 and wanted to know what the fuck I thought I was doing. I’d been so cooked by sun stroke by then I think I told them the truth, which needless to say they did not believe.

  Anyway, they took pity on me, gave me some clothes, a meal, and a lift to Flagstaff. I was desperate to get to LA as quick as I could, but I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere without a little traveling money, so I made some the old-fashioned way. No, not that old-fashioned way. That way doesn’t work with girls as big and beefy as me. Instead I went and stood with the Mexican guys outside a Home Depot until a truck came by, and I made eighty bucks humping roofing tiles up ladders for two days.

  Three days and six hundred mil
es of hitch-hiking later I got dropped off in the parking lot of a Ralph’s supermarket on Victory Blvd; and spent my last intact twenty taking a taxi up to the top of Vanalden in Tarzana. I’d told the cabbie not to wait. I hadn’t thought I’d be coming back.

  Now that I had, I needed a plan, ’cause finding another way back to Waar might take a while—like the rest of my life maybe—and I was gonna have to make a living while I looked. I was also gonna have to avoid being arrested for murder. I squinted in the sun as I reached Ventura Blvd. and looked for a bus stop. Fortunately I knew a place where I could lay low while I figured shit out. At least I hoped I did. All I had to do now was figure out which buses to take to get there.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THUNDERSTRUCK!

  “Well I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch. I thought you were dead.”

  Eli hit the kill switch on the lathe and stared at me through his safety goggles as the thing whined to a stop. He pulled off his gloves.

  “Nah. I just look that way.” I ducked under the half-open roll door into Sun Valley Engineering, Eli’s machine shop, and looked around. It was the same grimy little place I remembered, with a greasy film of three-in-one and metal shavings all over everything, and posters of girls with tattoos and betty bangs bending over low-riders on the walls. Eli specializes in reboring pistons, and there’s always an assortment of bikes, hot-rods, lead sleds and trucks crowding his parking lot, but he also makes other, shadier, things on the side—lock picks, slim jims, gas tanks with hidden compartments. He could make a fortune if he was willing to pack and bore silencers, but he draws the line at accessory to murder, so he has to settle for being comfortably well off.

  He tugged his goggles down to his neck, exposing his bifocals and a pair of bushy black eyebrows as he came around the lathe and spread his arms for a hug. Eli is in his fifties, with wild, greased-back gray hair, a face like a dry creek bed, and the dress sense of an Arkansas moonshiner—bib overalls, no shirt, tattoos from neck to wrists, and unlaced combat boots.

  I crushed him to me and leaked tears on his tats as I sobbed like a school girl. After a while, when I’d petered out to sniffs and snorfs, he pushed me back to arms’ length and gave me a once over, then squeezed my biceps.

  “Well, where-ever y’went, it toned you up. You do a stretch?”

  “Nah, I…” I wasn’t ready to go into all that just yet. “Just went out of town.”

  Eli grinned. It was like brown paper folding up. “I’ll bet. Last I recall, your face was all over the TV for killing some drunk hoopty outside a bar. You get that all cleared up, or are you still flyin’ low?”

  That was one of the reasons I came to Eli. He wasn’t the type to call the cops on a gal for a little error in judgment—not without hearing her out anyway. He’d been one of Big Don’s oldest friends—like since the navy—and had set me up with the construction job in Van Nuys after Don died. A true-blue guy, no matter what else he did on the side.

  “Still on the lam, and guilty as charged.” I swallowed as Polaroids of that night flashed through my head. I still felt bad about that guy.

  “He put hands on you?”

  I squirmed. “Not so much that he deserved—”

  “Save it. It’s good enough for me.” He pulled a pack of Marlboros from the chest pocket of his overalls, lipped one, then shook another out toward me. I waved him off. Weird, I know, but I really didn’t want one. Guess going cold turkey on Waar had worked. He shrugged and lit up. “So whaddaya need? Money? A bike? A fake ID? A lift over the border?”

  “I—I don’t know yet.” I wiped my nose with the back of my hand, like I was the world’s biggest five-year-old. “I guess if you could manage somewhere for me to sleep tonight? I got a lot of thinkin’ to do.”

  He looked at the beer clock over the compressor. It said four o’clock. “Go lie down in the back for a bit. You look like you’re gonna curl up and blow away. I got a job I gotta finish ’fore I close up, then we’ll go out to the house and get some supper. Delia’d love to see ya.”

  ***

  I lay down on the old green couch in Eli’s office, but I didn’t sleep. For one thing, it smelled a bit too much like moldy towel. For another, my mind was stuck on the spin cycle. I couldn’t stop it.

  How was I gonna get back to Waar? I didn’t even know where to start. Did I spend the rest of my life snooping around in caves looking for little green glowy things? Both times I’d been teleported it had begun or ended in a hole in the ground, but that didn’t guarantee any other caves had teleport gems. Hell, I didn’t know if there were any more at all. I could have used up the only one on Earth!

  That hurt too much to think about. There had to be more. There had to be! I couldn’ta lost Lhan forever. That just wouldn’t be fucking fair! But where should I look? If they were just lying around, people would have found ’em long ago. They had to be hidden somewhere.

  So where did I start?

  By the time Eli came back to the office a little after five, I’d fallen asleep from all the walking in circles my mind was doing. It was a relief when he woke me up. I’d exhausted myself.

  ***

  Eli’s place was as rag-tag and rumpled as he was, a dusty redneck compound north of the 210 freeway with a dried out ’50s ranch house up front, and various sheds, garages and stables out back. There was a horse carrier, an old tractor, a rusting Airstream trailer, a few dogs and chickens running around, a dozen vintage cars and bikes in various states of repair, and his daily driver, an old Ford pick-up with a “Keep honking, I’m reloading” bumper sticker on the back window.

  Inside, the house was pretty much the same, a jumbled mess of mix and match furniture, old tin signs, a coffee table made out of an old door set on an engine block, more dogs, a kitchen with a half-built Moto Guzzi propped by the back door, and on every wall, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, double stacked with battered old paperbacks—mostly sci-fi and fantasy, but with some spy and detective stuff mixed in.

  Maybe that was another reason I went to Eli. Of the few people I knew in LA, he and Delia were the ones who just might believe me when I told ’em what had happened to me. If I told ’em. I mean, I was dying to tell somebody, but at the same time I was, uh, kinda shy about it too. Over the years I’d had people tell me plenty of times they’d seen a UFO, or been visited by angels, or lived a past life as Catherine the Great, and I knew how I’d acted. I’d given them the glassy smile and the noncommittal nod, the “Huh, whaddaya know,” and the quick change of subject, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to be on the receiving end of that kind of treatment—not without a six pack in me at least.

  Eli passed me beer number one. “So, you decided what you wanna do yet?”

  I was sitting at the kitchen table while him and Delia got some dinner together. Eli was pan-frying some steaks while Delia stirred up a salad made with mushrooms, tomatoes, and greens from her little garden out back. They looked like a pair of tattooed apple dolls pottering around the kitchen—both brown, greying and desert-hard. Delia was half Indian, half black and half Irish, and let her wavy iron-colored hair hang loose down her back.

  I pulled on my beer. “I’m still not sure, but I guess it’d be good to skip town for a while.”

  Eli nodded. “I made a couple of calls while you were asleep. Some Mongols I know are goin’ down to Tijuana on business this weekend. They could get you across no problem.”

  Mexico was a good idea. Easy to lay low down there. Easy to make a buck if you weren’t too particular about the work, or the company you kept. But did I want to go? All I really wanted to do was hunt for a way back to Waar, but who was to say I wouldn’t find it south of the border? Whoever sprinkled those teleporters around probably didn’t give a damn about international boundaries.

  Eli read my hesitation as reluctance. “Well, you got a couple days to think about it. And I’ll see what else I can come up with. Let’s eat.”

  He flipped the steaks on some plates with black beans and rice on the side and set ’
em on the table as Delia dished out her salad. They sat down and Eli raised his beer.

  “To safe returns.”

  Delia hoisted as well, but I hesitated. I knew he meant me coming back after six months, but all I was thinking about was getting back to Waar. Well, I’d drink to that.

  I clinked their bottles. “To safe returns.”

  Delia had never been chatty, and I think Eli was giving me some space, so for a while there wasn’t much to the conversation except, “Pass the salsa,” and, “Another beer?” But finally, after second helpings and a lot more beers, Eli got out the tequila while Delia put some coffee on, and we all moved out to the back deck to watch the sun go down over the San Fernando hills.

  “So,” said Eli, and left it at that.

  I knocked back my shot and held out my glass for another. He filled it and I settled back in my lawn chair, looking up at the stars that were just starting to come out overhead. One of those little lights might be where Lhan was. I didn’t know which one to wish on, so I wished on ’em all. Take me there now. I need to go back.

  Nothing happened. I downed the second shot and sighed. “You’re not gonna believe me. It’s National Enquirer kinda stuff.”

  “Try me.”

  I opened my mouth, but I still couldn’t get started.

  Delia put a hand on one of mine and squeezed. “I believe all kinds of things. Go on, sweetheart.”

  I nodded. “Well, I’ll start from the beginning, then. The part you know about—punching that guy outside the Fly By Night.”

  So I told it. How the cops had chased me up into the Tarzana hills, how I’d hid in the cave, how I’d touched the stone. I could see them tense up a little bit at that, but I was drunk enough now that I just kept going, and when I told them I woke up on Waar, I could see the nervous smiles start to form on their lips, but they let me go, at least until I got to the part about the Aarurrh—the big tiger-centaur guys that captured Sai and me almost as soon as I got there.