Kingmaker (25 page)

She circled around, then, as he reached for her, tried a chain-punch.

She'd learned the technique in a seminar once, back on earth—the skill fine-tuned by Bruce Lee before he'd become a movie star had helped him uncover one of the truths behind all martial arts. Each punch became a block, clearing the way for the next punch to land.

She got through his guard, bloodied Breca's nose, and landed a hard punch to his unguarded throat. But Breca danced away before she could do more damage.

"Fancy,” he grumbled. “Going to have to hurt you."

"You can try."

He approached her more slowly, using big arms and legs to protect his sensitive areas, backing her away as she threw technique after technique.

"Breca is bigger than me, stronger than me,” she lectured Lart and the other leaders. “He thinks he's winning because he's advancing. He thinks he's tiring me out because I'm using my energy on kicks and he's conserving his."

"If that's what he's thinking, I'd say he's right,” Lart said.

"The Rissel and Sergius will be like that when they come after us. Big, strong, and confident. But that's what opens them to defeat."

She exhaled, released volition, let her body control the fight. Her body, honed since babyhood by training in her father's studio, knew more about martial arts than her conscious mind could remember. Without the throttle of conscious volition, her strike came faster, harder.

She wasn't hurting Breca, yet, but she surprised him. He took an awkward step back.

For a split second, his legs crossed.

It was a mistake. Breca had probably never faced an opponent quick enough to make him pay for it and so he didn't recognize it.

Ellie jumped. She connected with a roundhouse to Breca's kidney, a second to his windpipe, then, using her kicks to physically climb his body, she wrapped the first leg around the back of his throat.

She linked her ankles, then pressed both knees against Breca's thick neck cutting off the flow of oxygen to his brain.

After about three seconds without oxygen the brain starts to shut down and Breca knew it. Rather than wait for unconsciousness, he threw himself at the ground, trying to land on top of Ellie.

She'd been counting on that move. She twisted as he fell, added her own weight to his.

If she just wanted to win, she could have shifted a knee to his throat. His own weight would have crushed his windpipe and ended the fight.

But Ellie wasn't all that confident about her ability to perform an emergency tracheotomy, or about Breca's chances of surviving the almost inevitable infection that would set in if he suffered a serious injury in this disease-infested camp.

Instead, she caught the hand he reached out to catch himself and slow his fall.

He was so strong, she wouldn't dare pit even her entire body against the strength of his left arm. Instead, she pressed the heel of her palm against his thumbnail, driving it straight back into his hand.

He'd been counting on that hand for a breakfall and their combined four hundred plus pounds of weight didn't quite knock the wind out of him, but it did jar him for the instant she needed to crank down on her grip.

He waved his arm, trying to get it away from the painful hold but she used his thrashing to reposition her legs around his neck and cranked down once more.

He tried to roll, but she pushed harder on his thumb.

He collapsed, but even then he hadn't given up. He heaved in a second effort Ellie wouldn't have believed possible.

This time, he succeeded in rolling over. But it wasn't enough. Her legs were still in position, squeezing down on his throat and carotid artery.

One second, he was fighting for everything he was worth. The next, his entire body went limp.

Ellie released the pressure and rolled to her feet. She didn't take her eyes off the man—she didn't think he was faking his unconsciousness but she couldn't be one hundred percent certain.

He moaned, pulled himself up on his elbow, then sank back to the ground.

She turned back to the council. “Winning isn't just a matter of being strong, although that is important.” She forced herself to speak slowly, smoothly as if she wasn't suffering from an adrenaline overload and didn't feel like joining Breca on the ground panting for breath. “Winning is a matter of applying pressure where the enemy doesn't expect it, of using misdirection to keep the enemy off balance, and of continuing until your enemy admits defeat.

She'd never know whether she heard something behind her, caught a flicker in one of the councilmen's eyes, or whether some sixth sense of martial artists kicked in but she reacted, shifted her weight and spun around.

Breca's knife cut a silver arc through the air as he drove it in.

She'd thought she'd found in him another martial artist, someone whose appreciation for the art transcends the narrow question of win or loss. Unfortunately, she'd been wrong. She'd failed in the lesson she was trying to impress on the council. Breca hadn't admitted his defeat and now he was trying to kill her.

She edged to her left, grasped Breca's rapidly descending knife hand and, instead of the hopeless effort of blocking his strong attack, added her weight to his, accelerating his knife into his own thigh.

The sharp knife cut through his leather pants, through fat and muscle, and lodged deep in the bone.

Breca gave her a disgusted look, then collapsed.

"What do you think? she demanded. “Has he learned his lesson or should I let him die?"

The council was anxious to hear her ideas.

She smiled at the talk about gold, but she kept steering the conversation back to their goals. What kind of world did they want to leave for their children?

With her guidance, they thrashed out a list of demands. No imprisonment without trial. No peasant should be forced to work in a noble's estate without pay. No villager should be killed for the crimes of a neighbor or family member. A man could only be accused of treason for speaking against the current King or government, not by his words from before that government came into being. The practice of allowing a nobleman to have sex with any peasant woman in his domain must end. Monasteries shouldn't be landlords. Their lands should extend no further than the monks themselves can work them.

It shocked Ellie that most of their demands were so reasonable. She insisted that they add freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and a parliament of the people to be elected with the power to establish taxes and control spending. No taxes without the people's consent. If the nobles wanted to add a house of lords, that was their issue. She wasn't especially sympathetic.

The council shook their heads, certain that they were working on a crazy wish-list that had no chance of fruition.

When they'd run out of steam and started listing more earthy goals like free beer and shorter winters, Ellie cut it off.

She found some sheets of vellum, wrote up the demands, and made three copies. She and the council signed them, then Ellie returned to her blankets, set the documents in the midst of the magical stones, and cast.

One of the parchments would be delivered to Sergius in his royal palace. One would find the Rissel ambassador wherever he might be. Ellie kept the third because she suspected they'd need it.

"They'll never agree."

Ellie was still a little dizzy from her casting, but she grinned at Lart. “First, we show them how reasonable we are being. We're demanding things that anyone would want: things only an arrogant fool would deny his people. Second, we show them how painful it can be if they ignore our requirements."

They started drilling that afternoon.

It takes a decade to make a swordsman. When her father had given her Ellie's first Wakizashi, he'd made her spend an entire year simply learning how to draw it.

She didn't have the time to turn this mob into a Samurai class.

Some, though, already had some swords training. Of those, she found about a third who had been sneak thieves, burglars, or pickpockets. They'd be her guerillas, her special forces, her ninja.

In ancient Japan, the ninja had been low-class, low prestige mercenaries. She didn't tell her young proto-ninja that. Instead, she gave them the legends about ninja breathing through reeds for days while waiting for a chance, helped them cut down oversized swords into something practical for a sneak attack, and supervised the design of all black ninja-style uniforms, masks, and split toed slippers.

Over the next few weeks, more and more families wandered into the camp, driven from their homes by the Rissel's increasingly brutal efforts to capture Ellie. From a group of fewer than a hundred bandits, they swelled to several hundred fighting-age people, and a couple hundred children.

It doesn't take genius or years of training to make a pikeman. That's why Holland and Switzerland had briefly turned into martial powers during the renaissance. And it would have been easy enough to equip the several hundred fighting-aged peasants, those who still had the full complement of arms and legs, anyway, with pikes. But Mark's experiment with Sergius's army had abruptly changed the nature of warfare in this world. A couple hundred underfed and poorly trained pikemen were going to be sure losers against Mark's fast-firing bayonet-equipped musketeers.

With no gunsmiths and only a few ancient hunting pieces scattered through the camp, Ellie resorted to using weapons from everyday life. The short staff, improvised nunchaku, and a sai-like aeration device became the main implements of her warfare.

After all, she was training a guerilla army rather than a stand-up force. And a guerilla army needs to make do with the weapons at hand, and needs to blend into the people they spring from. Agricultural tools blend. Pikes and muskets would stand out and call attention to their owners. Fatal attention. Still, some day they'd need to add firepower. She made her stick-drills imitate the requirements of the musket and especially the bayonet.

She wished she'd paid more attention to a high school history teacher who'd often gone off-track and reminisced about his stint in Viet Nam when he'd had to face pajama-clad irregular fighters. Because pajama-clad irregulars was about all Ellie had to bring to the battle.

After a week, she implemented a military-style hygiene system with assigned pits for refuse and human waste, mandatory washing for both clothing and persons, and somewhat more regular cooking schedules to reduce food poisoning from a constant occurrence to an occasional outbreak.

She figured that she could have the decent beginnings of a guerilla cadre in about six months.

But she didn't have six months.

For the first two weeks after her escape, Rissel patrols forced their way through the forest where Ellie and her bandits were hidden. Without magical guidance, and without cooperation from the locals, they had little chance of finding anything.

The next week, though, regular forces from Sergius's army began to supplement the Rissel. Pretty obviously, that was the answer to the demands she had sent Sergius. It also meant they would have to move.

Although she hadn't thought Sergius would cave in to her demands, especially with his uncles pressuring him, she wouldn't have guessed that he'd be so willing to cooperate with the Rissel. Perhaps Sergius's decision to sell her to his enemy had sealed an alliance. And perhaps, now that Sergius had returned to his capital, the life of indulgence was starting to look attractive once more.

Either way, it seemed that getting the people a decent government was up to Ellie. It was the kind of thing her parents would have insisted upon. She was a little tired of being the princess of prophesy, but abandoning the peasants and running back to Earth seemed too much like abandoning her parents. This was their world, after all, and she owed it to them to make it better if she could.

The pressure of enemy magic became a continual drain on Ellie's energy. They threw mages at the barriers that she'd constructed to hide their camp in an almost continual surge. If she slipped, even for a moment, they'd mark the location and their armies would march. Even if she kept her energies focused, though, the combined patrols of Rissel and Sergius cut their mountain hiding places in an increasingly fine search mesh. Their current location, protected by magic or not, was too hot to hold.

"We're going to have to move,” she told Lart after she and the ninja trainees had returned from ambushing a Rissel patrol that had wandered within a mile, almost within sniffing distance of their camp.

Lart shrugged. “How? Some of us are sick. And if we move, we're more likely to run into their patrols. Besides, we have no place to go."

It was all true, of course. It was also true that if they stayed, they'd all die.

"We need to get some supplies, better weapons, some transportation for the sick, and create a distraction."

"Doing that would be real magic."

It would take far more magic that Ellie possessed. “We're not going to use magic, we're going to use our army."

"We don't have an army."

Lart was right about that, but that wasn't the way Ellie wanted them to be thinking. “They may not look like much, but they'll have to do. Or not. We're out of time."

As the children's game of hide-and-seek had it, ready or not, here they came. Ellie had to hope that the Rissel were even more unready. Because, ready or not, she'd run out of time.

The proto-ninja went in first.

Their target was a fortified military camp just outside a town in Rissel-occupied Lubica.

It was a risky move. Ellie had wanted to ignore the Rissel and concentrate their small force's efforts on Sergius. She was certain that the king was key. Once they forced him to admit his mistake, the country could unite against the Rissel. Until then, though, any efforts they wasted on the Rissel were subtracted from the real fight.

Lart had unanimous support from the council when he insisted that they'd never be more than bandits if they attacked Sergius first. After Sergius's victories against his uncles, the myth of his being the return of the Fell Prince—and a patriot—were strong.