Dazed and upside down, Dashyl couldn't focus on anything that was going on around him. Overhead, an incredible jumble of razorwigs whizzed by, their bodies blocking out the sky until it seemed like thousands of lights were flashing before the boy's eyes. The noise was deafening, like he was about to be caught in the sharp, grinding gears of some dangerous machine. Dashyl closed his eyes and tried to move, but his body felt numb and tingly. He squeezed his eyes tighter and waited for the noise to stop roaring above him.
As quickly as the swarm had crashed over him, the last of the razowigs leapt over the ditch. The full light and sudden quiet cleared Dashyl of his confusion. He could see Fretly hiding behind his igwaza as it bit into the segmented body of a razorwig that must have fallen into the ditch. The igwaza easily crunched through the creature's exoskeleton as it became lunch for the runner. Beyond this fracas, Soern smashed at what must have been multiple razorwigs around him. The carapids were soon exterminated and Fretly ran to Dashyl's side.
"Dash, are you okay, oh my, are you okay," Fretly asked as he knelt next to Dashyl. At that moment, Dashlyl felt his heart beating hard in his throat and he had trouble moving his jaw. All he could do to answer was shake his head.
"Soern," Fretly yelled. "Dashyl is hurt. His neck has been slashed open and he is bleeding a lot."
"I am checking on my runner. Find some kind of cloth and apply pressure to his wound," Soern shouted back.
"Forget the igwaza, you dumb kirzan, Dashyl might be dying here," screamed Fretly.
Soern rummaged through his pack and retrieved a few strips of cloth and a pouch. He handed a piece of the cloth to Fretly. "Here," he said, "take this and apply pressure. He will be okay. Just don't let him bleed out." Soern changed his focus to Dashyl. "You'll be okay, son. Try to be calm. I've got to attend to my runner. If he has a broken leg, then its no use mending him. But if I can help him, we need him to cross the plains. The other igwaza are not big enough to carry me." "Besides, I can't afford to replace this igwaza," he muttered as he returned to his injured runner.
"Whatever you say," Fretly snorted as he held the cloth firmly against the gash in Dashyl's neck. "Your left cheek is cut pretty bad, too. Your chin is scraped up and your bottom lip is busted open." Fretly squinted as he continued. "I thought you would have seen us bolt for the ditch. We would have waved you down."
Soern came over and took Fretly's place tending to Dashyl. "The leg wasn't broken and I don't think there were any ligament tears. I sewed up the wound and he should be able to run again just fine. Now let's look at you." The kirzan held Dashyl's face with one of his big hands. "I'll have to sew up your neck and cheek. It's going to hurt. On the bright side, the razorwig's legs are so sharp that the wounds heal up with with hardly any scar. You'd never guess that I've been sliced up more times than I can count by razorwigs. Well, you might guess that I've been sliced up, but you'd never tell where the razorwigs got me."
Soern pulled out a needle and some threadlike material from his pouch. "Here we go," he said as he threaded the line on the the needle. "This needle is from the proboscis of another type of carapid. One carapid slices you open and another carapid closes you up. Isn't that life on Rynaga, eh?"
Dashyl didn't have time to consider an answer as he felt the needle bite into his flesh. He couldn't open his mouth to scream, so he screamed and hyperventilated through his teeth.
"Hold on, Dash," Fretly consoled. Dashyl calmed down and clenched his jaws tight. Once his neck was finished, he hardly felt the cheek being worked on, the numbness had reached the top of his head.
"Soern, look," Fretly called out as he pointed farther down the ditch. Three razorwigs were leaping down the ditch in their direction.
"Leave this to me," Soern said, grabbing up his hammer. The hefty kirzan waited calmly as the slashing carapids raced towards him. At just the right moment, he twirled his hammer in his hand twice then brought it down on the head of the lead razorwig. Wasting no time, he jumped into the air, spun around and smashed the other two hapless creatures with one great arcing blow.
Soern turned around, let his hammer fall to the ground and stood with his arms in the air and his face beaming. "Ha ha," he laughed, "I've still got the moves!"
"Oh yeah? What happened to your beard," Fretly asked, cracking a bit of a smile.
"What..." Soern asked as he frantically grabbed at the area under his chin where the majority of his beard used to be. "Blast, one of those confounded beasts sliced off my beard," Soern said before sputtering out a long stream of kirzan curses.
The old warrior trudged back to where Fretly was continuing to clean up Dashyl. "Here, let me feel your jaw," Soern said once again taking Dashyl's head in his immense hands. He rubbed Dashyl's temples and felt where his bottom jaw connected to his skull. Pain shot through Dashyl's head and he winced. "Hm, you might have broken your jaw or damaged your skull. We'll have to wait until the swelling goes down. Dashyl nodded and just tried to relax and not think about the pain that draped itself over every part of his body.
"Oh, I may still have the moves, but it takes more out of me." Soern let out a long, loud sigh and collapsed on the ground next to Dashyl. "Time to rest," he said. "Then we need to think about our next move."
No comments:
Post a Comment