Love as a Form of Binding Ch. 20

Grrta didn't want to burden Brinack with her troubles, but the general was gently insistent, so after some reluctance, Grrta spilled it all.

To her surprise, Brinack smiled then. "Of course I can understand the way that you feel. Who wouldn't feel like that under the circumstances? Before you were captured by the goblins, what was it that you used to do?"

"Well I used te work leather," Grrta said, "Some the sort that ye'd want fer te hang on te a sword better with, and some was just things that y'ed put on yerself, like thongs or simple jewellery, or, ... " She looked down, noticing something on the general's ankle.

She looked away toward one of the slayers who'd accompanied them.

"If ye don't mind me askin', General, ..."

"Please, Grrta, the commander smiled, "call me Brin. I have to swim all day up to my chin in General this and Commander that. I'd like a rest from it once in a while. What were you going to ask?"

Grrta pointed, "I keep noticing these thongs that ye all wear. Well not all, but a lot of ye. What are they for?"

Brinack shrugged, "It's a little bit of fashion these days and a lot of superstition Grrta, but originally, these were charms to protect us. They have to be leather to stand up, but originally, many of them had stones woven into the leatherwork, the type of stones were said to be something that the spirits of our ancestors lived in."

"How dya mean, 'originally'?"

Brin shrugged, "The art of it is lost to us now, mostly. None of us can craft and weave leather anymore. The old ones who did this are gone now and none of us have the ability or the time to devote to learning it. What you're seeing on some of my people are heirlooms, priceless family relics."

Grrta was wearing the beginnings of a little smile now. "Dya think your folks would pay te be able te have new ones made? Do they have any money?"

Brinack saw it then and began to laugh. "Of course! But where would you get the stones from?"

Grrta chuckled, "Unless I'm wrong, Brin. What I see ye wearin' is called granite here and half the planet's made of it. I just need te get a bit of leather and my tools from down in the hole where I was livin' wi my mother before all this began. That's if they're still there an all and there's no tunnel beasts down there now."

Brinack saw a worried expression cross Grrta's face for a moment. But before that, she saw Grrta look happy and it also seemed to her that she was developing a plan. She decided that she liked that look on Grrta's face better than this one.

"I can't give you any slayers right now," she said, "We're deploying so quickly that I can't keep track of the individual units anymore without looking at my list. But come with me. I think I know someone who might help."

They walked up to the main hall. As they strode across it, Grrt looked up, "Dya think that many of yer people might want something like I could make?"

"I don't see why not," the general said, "The ones who still have these things wear them proudly. To a lot of them, it's like taking your ancestors to battle with you and asking them to look out for you. And there are all the thousands of them, aren't there?"

She winked at the smaller one who stopped suddenly. "Pick me up, Brin."

Brinack was surprised, but she picked Grrta up and looked at her curiously.

Grrta threw her arms around the warrior's neck and hugged her tightly, "Thanks fer this, Brin. I'm feelin' a bit hopeful now, and that's not a little thing te me."

A little later, they walked into a large area that was now used a little for training. There were ten slayers in the room of various ranks and abilities. Mother stood off to one side looking amused and there were two others there; a pair of rather young-looking demons.

Grrta tried not to stare, but she'd never seen a more attractive pair in her young sixty-two year life. She also saw that the floor was littered with pieces of wood.

One of the slayer officers snarled a little angrily, "AGAIN!"

Things became interesting after that.

Five slayer troops took up a diamond pattern and began to advance on the smaller demons, who only smiled a little and waited. Grrta noticed that they held staves of wood in their hands like swords.

In the blink of an eye, the pair stood at the other end of the chamber, looking as though they'd just walked there. They were looking away as though nothing had happened, but the staves in their hands were broken and shattered. The slayers stood in a loose group, their formation broken and ragged-looking.

Two of them appeared to be slightly injured.

Mother looked strangely pleased.

The officer looked almost apoplectic.

"What's goin' on?" Grrta asked Brin.

She sighed, "The same thing all morning.

Slayers are demons. Demons can sense other demons whether they are visible or not. Slayers do not need to see their opponents to kill them. What those ones there used were the same tactics which have always worked for us anywhere. Every time, those two defeat and get past my troops. And they are stronger than they look by far. This began with thirty troopers .We are down to six now. I am thankful that we didn't allow live blades here."

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"What are we doing here?" Thiery asked as they looked around, making their way down a long hall and peeking in every doorway as they went. But Zele only held up her hand, indicating that she wanted quiet. The two understood and their footsteps became as inaudible as hers. The smells of the place around them carried only the hint that it had been occupied by large numbers of beings who were now absent; the slight odors cooling to the nose like the way that a barn can plainly tell that it has been used, but after a month, the smell is cool and fading.

She paused at one intersection and led them that way until at last, they stood in a fairly large chamber where water could be heard as a quiet backdrop and the air was warm and humid.

Zele told them of Ulfr and what he was to do in this place. Zele said that her presence was not to be known by Ulfr but that she was there only in the extreme case that he needed help. "Illa and Thiery are to make them welcome and not say a thing about Zele. There will be a human with him and she will be afraid, so Zele wants you to try to make it better for her.

But say nothing of Zele," she whispered, "and always think that an old enemy of Kerry may come – if he is not already here somewhere. Zeles goes to look now. Remember; as quiet as you can be. Zele needs her little loves to be very quiet now, and not argue and bicker."

The nodded and she hugged them before she stood and walked off. Thiery looked at all of the food they'd brought, some of the meat still very warm from the hall's ovens.

"That's not for you or me – at least it isn't tae start with, Thiery my love," Illa whispered as she looked over his shoulder at the chamber behind him. "There's a great fire pit there behind ye. I think we'll be needin' it lit for a start, not a great roaring thing, mind, just a quiet bit of light and some heat.

He nodded and saw her smile as she spoke her next thoughts. "But I think we've a bit of time yet," she smiled to him softly as she began to fondle him very gently.

"And my little place is needin' te be filled again." She put her free arm around his neck and she kissed him softly as she felt his hand begin to toy with her lips. She moved her feet apart to help and she sighed. "I love what ye give te me and how I can feel it when I walk or do anything after. But it canna stay long where I want it, Thiery. Can I have a little more?"

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Brinack whistled and waved everyone over. Mother wore a slightly proud look.

"Alright," Brinack said, "How?"

"They are not as young and inexperienced as they appear, " Lily said, "that is one thing which misleads the others here.

They are small and quick as well," she said, "remarkably so. Yet though they are less than half the size of a slayer, they are very nearly as strong. The rest? Even I don't know. I could stop them, but it would be outside what was agreed upon for rules and they'd be dead."

"We can help," the female said, "You're not seeing it correctly, Aunt Lilitu."

Lily nodded, "I see the air elements that you use. I expected that, but – "

"We're cambions," the male said, "It gives us an edge and makes it hard to sense us. We know what these fighters will do before they do it. Before they think to do it, we're already moving."

"And we're drudes," the female one smiled, "You see us fade and even expect that. These opponents do the same. But we split off from ourselves then. This time, five were ordered to attack us. They were fighting six of us. It can only end this way."

"How many of you can there be?" the officer asked.

The pair shrugged. "We don't know," the male said, "The most that we've ever tried to drive was ten between us. We've never needed more than that before."

"Just tell me one thing; Are there any more of you?"

"Exactly like us? No." the girl said, "None that we've ever met or heard of. We've seen other cambions, but most are just wrecks; unfortunates who live their lives just trying to find something to eat. A lot of them are just, um, very simple because no one takes the time to help them learn anything so they just stay empty. We think it has a lot to do with the demon parent. Drudes are pretty rare these days."

She stopped speaking then, noticing that the male was looking elsewhere. She looked as well and joined her brother in staring at Grrta, who stared back. It only lasted a moment and then all three looked painfully shy.

Brinack saw it and had to look away. When she did, she found herself looking at Liliy, who looked as though keeping back her grin would be the death of her until she forced it down. She did manage it though. She just wondered at the way that her niece and nephew seemed to be affected this much. From the little that she knew of them, they never had an issue over being shy in any way.

"Did you find out what you wanted to learn?" Brinack asked Lily, "I'd say that they can more than look after themselves, and I don't want to put more people in pain to prove a point," she glared at the officer, "long after it's plain.

If you're not satisfied yet after the whole morning at this, Trontag, then I'd suggest that you try to take them on yourself."

She spoke to Lily about Grrta's idea, but that she felt nervous about going to look for her leatherworking tools. As they spoke of it, the two cambions walked to where Grrta stood cursing her shyness and plain looks.

She couldn't help herself. She had to look again.

She blinked then, not comprehending. The two were still walking toward her –

But she could also see them just as they had been a second ago, standing and listening politely to Brin. They still were doing that. Way the hell over there.

"What's your name?" Isis asked as though the effort was the most daring thing that she'd ever attempted.

"I'm Grrta," the goblin-ish female mumbled.

"He's Aram, my stepbrother and cousin and, ... well he's a lot of things to me. And my name's Isis."

Aram looked as though he didn't have the nerve to say very much. He just stood looking as amazed at Grrta as Isis. "He usually talks more, though."

If Grrta could have felt her attraction to them any more strongly, she'd have been a puddle. It confused her. All of her life, she'd just been someone whom another person might have been attracted to on a sexual level for as long as they could force themselves on her, but other than recently, it hadn't ever been with her feelings in mind. These two were out of her league to have even a slightly naughty thought about, she told herself. She just knew that she wanted to be near them.

In fact, she'd never been more than someone who – at best - had accepted and acquiesced with Lewis and the smaller ones. The most overt thing that she could remember doing – unless it was in the pitch darkness of Illa's bed had been to reach out shyly to hold and caress Lewis until it was clear that she could use her mouth because she'd felt so thankful to him.

But she knew what she wanted to do with these two. Her mind filled with possibilities and hopes that she was surprised to find herself having.

She wondered if she ought to be feeling a little guilty over it. Her thoughts seemed that foreign to her.

A young female slayer ran up to Brinack and passed a message. She asked a few questions and the messenger nodded. Brinack looked at Lily, "It is time."

Outside, above them all, it wasn't a fit night out to walk or even stand. So there were no humans standing out there in the wind and snow.

Had there been, however, they'd have seen the darkness of the long exodus of large bodies as slayers ran out from the lower hall out into the upper one and from there to the outside, taking flight to their staging areas.

They stayed fairly low, most of them, the weather not much of a factor to them. There were groups which climbed to get above the storm, however, and these ones, ...

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Another sigh and Pamela reached for the phone again. This freak storm wasn't helping her throbbing head, mostly because some of the staff hadn't been able to get in yet and the ones at their stations stayed on to provide the coverage required.

"Hi Robert," she smiled a little tiredly, "please tell me that all you have for anomalies now is one slow-flying sleigh piloted by a jolly fat elf dressed in red, a little late on his way home."

She heard him sigh, "Sorry Pam. I've got traffic. Loads of it on screen, none of it announced or scheduled, none of it responding to radio calls, and I could really use coffee and a little help diverting the scheduled traffic around whatever this is."

She put her hand over the receiver and muttered a curse and Robert chuckled. Pamela heard it and walked over, since his station was just outside the glass door to her office. She asked and he moved his boom microphone away from his face.

"We've known each other a long time," Robert said, "That's the first time that I've ever heard you say that word – other than as a request to me."

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Minutes later, the three smaller creatures were walking together as Grrta led them to the entrance to the section where she'd been born and grew up. Mostly, it was an underground wasteland. If one thought of the whole of the underground there as a city, which it had been to a degree, well Grrta came from the Kobold Quarter; where the lower ones lived. But centuries of abuse and oppression had reduced them to only a few dozen by the time that Grrta had come to be spawned and the culinary desires of the goblins had caused her to be the last.

There were no more kobolds here. All that were left were people with varying degrees of mixed blood, and none lived here.

Nothing lived there now. It was a ghost town far underground.

All three could see in the dark well, needing no real light for it, but down there, well, they'd taken torches along.

Other than a few half-starved rats and some large head-sized spiders, there wasn't anything there and it was mostly just a long walk in the dark for them. Whatever had lain there decomposing had done that long ago. Grrta found her mother's little hiding hole and it took her only minutes to gather her tools, a little rusted and pitted, but mostly everything was fine.

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She opened her eyes and found that she was wet.

More correctly perhaps, she was alone, lying on a low stone bench in a rather dark, warmish and somewhat humid chamber.

She was wet and cold; shivering a little in her dress which clung to her, being soaked through. She thought for a moment, trying to remember the sequence of the last events which she could recall. She was thinking that she must have been wrong somehow. She wiggled her toes.

This wasn't the way that she recalled things, though she supposed that she'd prefer it if she were wrong – though she knew that she wasn't.

The last thing that she could recall was being in terror of a large demon, and her state of dress at that point had been that she ... um, hadn't been.

Dressed, that is.

She wanted to groan, wishing that none of it had happened, but it quite plainly must have, for her to have been on fog-covered Staffa one minute and then awoken here – wherever this was, the next. She might not have awoken in comfort, but she was here and dressed. She was even wearing her hiking boots by the feel of things and she even knew by the way that they felt to her that they were not laced up. She also felt that they were wet on the inside and she wanted to groan, but didn't dare to make a sound yet.

She remembered why it might be that her boots could be wet on the inside.

She looked around for a moment, using only her eyes and the range of motions allowed by her head and neck movements. This was a large place. She couldn't even see the walls, any of them. She saw the way that the dim light flickered a little and by turning her head in the direction of the glow, she could see a small fire there not more than ten feet from her. By the light, her sense of smell, and her hearing, she learned several things.

There was water in this chamber - a lot of it and some of what she saw gave her the notion that this place was a sort of steam bath, though she saw no steam in the air. She couldn't see far because it was dark.

She also learned that she wasn't alone.

There was a pair of ... individuals, for lack of a better word, some distance from her. She had to revise her thoughts a second later. She couldn't really make them out clearly, but she now knew that they weren't as far away as she'd first thought. They were perhaps twenty feet distant from her. It's just that they weren't large and she couldn't make out a lot of details.

But she knew what they were doing.

It was easy enough to tell, by the sounds they made; the quiet sighs and soft speech between them and the slow and soft slapping noises. She sat up very slowly, not daring to make any noise, since she wanted to get a better look at this.

Her first impressions were of the man's back – and he had to be a man, because she'd never imagined muscles like that on a boy. She doubted that it was even possible. The next detail she noticed was his blonde hair and the way that it was held in a thick braid. The one thing which gave her a slight impression of a boy was his bottom, but that impression had to be revised in her mind almost as soon as she'd formed it. Lying next to the pair on the stone floor was an obviously well-used fighting axe.

She couldn't see much of her, but the female was even more intriguing. She could make out a very pretty little face when the male's head was beside hers. She saw long black hair and the blissfully closed eyes as she smiled a little in her joy said a lot. These two were obviously lovers and that soft smile, ...

She began to stare, thinking it a trick of the poor light. That smile showed teeth, long teeth which were very easily visible for the two or three seconds that they were shown. Her legs were wrapped around her mate tightly. That detail had taken a little time to come to her because there had been a blanket, or a ... a cover which sometimes appeared for a few moments to wrap around them and then it was gone once more.

She couldn't understand a lot of what she was seeing. She had to look twice and three times when she'd seen what looked like smallish horns on the female's head. She was sure that had been a trick of the light as well.

"No trick," She heard a quiet voice say out of the darkness beside her in a soft whisper.

She almost jumped off the bench and she peered around with a gasp. She could see in the direction of the sound for more than ten meters, but the sound had seemed to have come from a lot closer than that.