Jane Carver of Waar Read Free Page A

feet from my hiding place. They weren’t coming for me after all. They were too busy fighting each other.
    Now I could sort all the parts out. It was a bunch of purple guys swinging swords and riding big, two-legged birds. Sure, why not. Happens every day.
    Except for being purple, the guys weren’t quite as weird as I’d first thought. Their funny-shaped heads turned out to be funny hair-cuts: sumo top-knots, mohawks, braids and fancy shave-jobs. What I’d thought were giant, mutated right arms were actually thick sleeves of scaly, bronze-looking armor that covered their sword arms. Besides that they were nearly naked. Just the sleeve and a few other scraps of armor covering their groins, shins and knees, all held in place by leather harnesses like something out of an SM club. Capes of red or gold flapped around their shoulders, and they waved around long thin swords with lots of curly metal bits protecting the grip. Most of the swords were red with blood.
    Their mounts were like emus on steroids, shaggy monsters with gray and black feathers, and powerful legs that ended in heavy claws big enough to close around my chest. They had useless little wings almost hidden under their saddles, and mean-eyed, turtle-beaked heads as big as air conditioners. And to make them look even more like a cross between a T-rex and an ostrich, they had shrunken little arms dangling from their chests like broken doll parts, as weak and pointless as their wings.
    Men and birds were kicking the crap out of each other, claws slashing, beaks snapping, swords clashing. It took me a second to make a guess at what was happening, and by then it was almost over.
    The guys in the red cloaks were protecting a fancy coach drawn by four of the massive birds. The guys in the gold cloaks were trying to stop the coach, and were handing the red-cloaks their collective asses. There were more of the gold-cloaks, and they knew their stuff, turning their big birds on a dime and tagging the poor red-cloaks at will. I looked back the way they’d come. Dead red-cloaks all the way to the horizon. No gold.
    I turned back in time to catch the big finish. The coach’s four harnessed birds, panicking in the middle of the brawl, turned too sharply. The coach heeled over on a big rock and slammed to the ground on its side. The wooden tang holding the birds to it snapped and, still harnessed together, they ripped free and sprinted for the horizon.
    After that it was a slaughter. The gold-cloaks weren’t going to let the red-cloaks off with just a whipping. They rode down every last one of those poor bastards and chopped them to pieces. It turned my stomach. They might have been purple aliens, but their screams were plenty human.
    While his riders finished mopping up, the leader of the gold-cloaks, a square-jawed superhero with a pencil-thin moustache, a flopped-over mohawk, and two pigtails hanging down in front of his ears like a yeshiva boy, climbed onto the coach. You could tell he was the leader. One, ’cause his guys ducked their heads whenever he gave an order, and two, ’cause his shit was flashier: zigzag designs on his cloak, gold sleeve armor instead of bronze, jewels all over his sword.
    When he got to the top of the coach—which was the side, if you see what I’m saying—he wrenched open the door. A little long-haired purple guy in white popped up like a jack-in-the-box and flailed around with a dagger. Square-Jaw hardly blinked; a casual backhand with his sword and Long-Hair dropped back into the coach with a thump.
    Square-Jaw grinned. His teeth were as white and straight as a row of sugar cubes. He reached down into the coach and lifted somebody out by the wrist. For a second I thought it was Long-Hair again, ’cause this one had long hair too, but when square-jaw lifted her a little higher I saw there were one or two differences.
    She was your standard-issue hot babe, except in purple. Not exactly my type. When I go for gals, which ain’t that