Four: la demoiselle et la détresse
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The world folded and unfolded.
Teela stumbled, then righted herself, her heels thumping down on hard stone, one-two, in an instinctive fighting stance. Even as nausea twisted thickly through her guts and her vision doubled and blurred, she tried to take stock of her new surroundings.
Because they were new. She wasn't in a cavern anymore, being menaced by Evil-Lyn or rescued by He-Man. In fact, she'd never seen anything like this place in her life.
She was at the foot of a large, stepped dais. At the top was something – a throne, a table, an altar, she wasn't sure. Identical stone faces, mouths open in silent snarls, looked down from the circular walls. Everything glowed with a deep, bloody light… and everything hummed with malevolence.
Standing directly before her, as if they'd all been having a conversation only a half-second earlier, were two women. One of the women had long black hair, a red dress, and what seemed to be a gaudy red festival mask pushed back on top of her head. She looked about ten years older than Teela, wasn't armed, and didn't carry herself like a fighter.
Not much of a threat, in other words.
The other woman was approximately Teela's own age. She had on a sensible uniform of white shirt, red vest, and dun leggings, her black boots gleamed, and her blonde hair was pulled into a short, no-nonsense braid. Both women had a large red emblem on their clothes – something like bat wings. But while the black-haired woman was blinking at Teela dumbly, the blonde was sizing her up.
The blonde girl had a blaster on her hip and a sword on her back. She narrowed her eyes at Teela. It wasn't a friendly look.
Teela went for her snake staff.
Blondie went for her blaster.
Teela's fingers plucked her weapon free a fraction faster. She expanded the staff and swept the snake-head through the air, knocking the blaster out of Blondie's hand. It went sailing, then clattered to the floor, spinning to a stop some distance away.
Not waiting to see the blaster land, Teela had already brought the other end of her staff around, hoping to connect on the follow-through. Blondie dodged with a neat, economical movement – which allowed the staff to strike the black-haired woman squarely in the temple.
The mask was knocked askew. The woman yowled and staggered, grabbing Blondie by the arm and throwing them both off-balance.
Teela turned and ran.
It wasn't cowardice; it was instinct. Every fiber of her being howled at her to get out.
Something evil and powerful lurked in that red room, and she needed to get as far away as possible, as fast as possible, before it took notice of her.
Luckily, the nearest exit was hard to miss: there was a grand archway right ahead of her, holding a set of mammoth doors. Also luckily, one of the doors was standing ajar. Teela dove through the gap just as Blondie retrieved her blaster and fired off a shot. It struck the door at head level – exactly where Teela's head would have been, in fact.
Teela rolled out of the dive and came up to find herself on a wide platform, high above the ground. Spread before her was a massive sprawl of a fortress, all stone and smokestacks and… glistening black bones?
Cozy.
Much closer at hand was a man wearing dull gray armor, helmet tucked under his arm, and – even better – a sky sled sitting beside him.
The man turned, plainly startled, revealing a red bat-wing emblem on his chest. He never saw Teela's staff coming, and by the time he realized she'd hooked his ankle with it, his back was slamming to the stone surface of the platform.
"Sorry!" she said brightly, not sorry at all, and hopped onto the sky sled.
Well, it looked like a sky sled, at least. Up close, the markings were in a different language, and some of the controls were slightly off, but she didn't have any problem starting it up.
As she cleared the platform, Blondie burst through the door, blaster in hand.
Teela banked hard around a smokestack, pushing the sky sled to its limits, and barely avoided another shot. The next two shots were too far for any kind of accuracy, but Blondie was making a point. Teela got it.
She also understood that now would be a really good time for a miracle.
After all, she had no idea where she was, what was waiting for her on the other side of the distant, encircling walls, or how many soldiers she could expect on her tail once Blondie or the other woman sounded the alarm.
Which… yup, there it went. A siren shrilled and echoed from all corners of the fortress.
And one of her questions was answered when soldiers, bat-wings blazed in crimson across their gray chestplates, began pouring from every archway in the place. Some of them rushed towards sky sleds. Some of them rushed to platform-mounted guns.
"Elders!" Teela said, not sure if it was a curse or a prayer. She looked around quickly for the best escape route. Black bones and smokestacks everywhere, with wires and pipes lacing the air between them. Fantastic.
Then – she glimpsed an immense, wide-open gateway in the fortress wall, showing a desolate desert plateau beyond it. Red sand, red rocks. Lots of room to make an escape.
Now she just had to get there.
Before they closed the gates.
A straight approach was out of the question, especially because a barrage of blaster fire began raining down from the nearest gun platform almost as soon as she spotted the gates. She veered sharply left, then right as she saw a squadron of soldiers bearing down on her.
Okay. She could do this. She'd raced Adam through the forest plenty of times, right? She was an expert at dodging around trees and vines and so forth. And there was no difference between trees and smokestacks, or vines and wires. Right?
Yeah. Right.
A squadron formed up behind her; Teela could tell because they started shooting at her. In a way, that was a relief, because she quickly realized that, despite their crisp armor, they were terrible shots.
Or… they had been ordered to miss.
Less of a relief.
"One problem at a time!" she told herself. The priority was getting out of the fortress; then she could worry about the marksmanship of her enemies.
She twisted and weaved, doubling back, circling around, trying to put some obstacles between her and the squadron without losing sight of the exit. She got herself on a reasonably straight approach again, then had to drop lower to avoid a series of pipes running horizontally between some of the smokestacks.
Too low. She caught a flash of something hurtling at her from a mid-level platform: blue-black fur, rippling muscles, gleaming claws and fangs.
Not the biggest cat she'd ever seen, but big enough to rip her throat open with one swipe of a paw.
And it was wearing a mask. A gaudy red festival mask.
This place was weird.
Teela jerked the sky sled hard to starboard and dropped speed by half. The cat twisted in midair, planted its hind feet on a pipe, and pushed off again – changing course to intercept her.
It was going to.
Teela accelerated hard, making the engine whine in complaint, and aimed the nose of the sled down. Maybe gravity would help her out.
Nope.
As she reached the gate, the cat landed on the front of the sky sled, claws digging into the metal and finding a perch there. It was ludicrous; the animal was half again as big as the sky sled. And of course the vehicle wasn't designed to carry that much weight. It started losing even more altitude immediately.
The cat snarled and spat, raking at Teela's face.
She managed to dodge the first swipe, then dove from the sky sled. The cat gave an angry roar and leapt also, though in a different direction. Then Teela stopped paying attention to the cat, because the rocky desert ground was rushing up at her.
She tucked and rolled into the impact, drew her staff as she came up onto her feet, and turned to face the cat. It had landed well, and was standing alert, tail lashing, muscles coiled, but looking over its shoulder at the gates.
Teela had the distinct and unpleasant impression that it was waiting for reinforcements.
Well, that would be why the gates were still standing wide open, wouldn't it?
Time to go.
She ran.
The fortress was positioned near the edge of the plateau – maybe two hundred yards before the rocky wasteland ended in a sheer cliff. The lowlands beyond seemed to be mostly forest, a few meadows scattered throughout, and a river gleaming in the strong afternoon light.
Behind her, the alarm finally stopped blaring. Against her better instincts, she looked back.
Two squadrons of soldiers, one on the ground, one in the air. Blondie was on a sky sled; the cat was loping along with the ground forces.
Oh good.
Teela ran faster, forcing herself to ignore the stitch growing in her side and the ache in her knee – Elders, when had she hurt her knee? She came to a skidding stop, breathing hard, a few paces before the cliff's edge. It looked like a sheer, dizzying drop… and a long one, too.
Teela looked over her shoulder. Yup. Soldiers still closing in.
She looked at the ground below her feet. Yup. Still a cliff.
If she tried to jump down, she'd die. If she tried to climb down, she'd be an easy target for Blondie and any bat-wing soldier with half-decent aim.
And if she stayed where she was, she'd be captured for sure.
Teela collapsed her staff. She swung herself over and started descending as quickly as possible – jumping from ledge to ledge where she could, grabbing hand- and footholds where she had to.
You can make it, she told herself. It was a lie, but a comforting one.
Sky sleds whirred overhead. Also descending.
She refused to look up.
"Stop where you are!" a woman's voice called out, ringing with authority. Blondie. She and her air squadron were hovering a reasonable distance away from the cliff, keeping even with Teela and boxing her in – just in case, presumably.
Teela shouted back, "No!"
"We'll fire!"
Every instinct urged her to turn and fight, but Teela kept climbing down. "Go ahead!"
As far as communications with the enemy went, it was right on a level with six-year-olds squabbling over marbles in the palace courtyard.
About as effective, too. Blondie ordered, "Fire!" and blaster fire peppered the cliff face all around Teela.
The soldiers were still missing spectacularly, and Teela still didn't trust it. She swiftly looked for a better position than "clinging like an idiot to an exposed rocky surface" and saw a ledge jutting out – barely – several yards away and down.
She didn't hesitate. She pushed off the cliff face and jumped for it.
"Hold!" Blondie yelled. The blaster fire stopped.
Teela made the landing, somehow, and turned to face Blondie with one hand on her staff.
The girl had her blaster drawn and aimed squarely at Teela. "Surrender," she ordered, cool and steely. She didn't say the or else. It was implied.
Teela looked at Blondie, the squadron of soldiers, and the hundred feet of air between her boots and the ground.
The fight's only over when you're dead, she reminded herself; as long as she was alive, she had a chance.
Teela reluctantly raised both of her hands in the air. The words tasted sour: "I surrender."