Infinity Blade 01- Awakening

“That is not good, not good, not good.”
    “Can you help?” Siris asked desperately.
    “Must I?”
    “Yes!”
    “Bring her over then, out of the water, out of the water. Yes, yes. Something metal, let us see, and thread I should imagine . . .”
    Siris lifted Isa and splashed through the water to the bank, watered-down blood seeping out of the wound. He set her on the rocky bank as the creature—a golem of some sort—shucked its robe, revealing a puppetlike body of thin wood.
    Bamboo, Siris thought. It’s made of bamboo .
    “Yes, yes,” the golem said, inspecting the wound with thin fingers. “Your shield. I need your shield.”
    Siris fetched it. What else could he do? It didn’t seem the time to ask questions. When he returned with the wet shield, the creature was absently reaching out to touch its fallen robe. Its hand, then arm, unraveled.
    Siris froze. The creature’s body was turning to thread, the transformation running up its arm.
    “Excellent, excellent,” the creature said, waving with the hand that was still wooden. “Bring it, please. Please, yes.”
    Siris knelt, setting the shield beside Isa. She was still breathing, but had her eyes closed. She looked so pale.
    The creature touched the shield with its wooden hand, and that hand fused to the steel, transforming and becoming metal. This transformation ran up its other arm, turning half of its body to metal.
    Then the creature broke its arm free, splintering its entire body. The fracture was precise, and from the heap of metal emerged a smaller version of the creature, perhaps one foot tall, with one half of its body made of bunched up thread and the other half made of slender, silvery steel.
    It walked up and prodded Isa’s wound with fingers that were now very fine, like needles. It cut away the clothing near the gash—its fingers were sharp on one side.
    “Clean wound,” it said, the voice now much softer. “Cut very sharply. Good, but yes, much work to do. Must be quick! Lots of blood. Not good, not good.”
    The creature pushed its way into the wound, burying its arms—one of silvery metal, the other a pile of thread that moved like muscles—into her abdomen. The creature began to hum, using one spindly finger like a needle, threading part of its own body through and beginning to sew on the wound.
    “It’s going to be all right,” Siris said to Isa. I think. I hope.
    “Too much of a coincidence,” she whispered.
    “Hush,” he said. “Don’t—”
    She opened her eyes. “It was following us. That thing, whatever it . . .” She grimaced in pain and took a few panting breaths. “It must have been followed us, Siris. That’s why it fell into the ambush. It didn’t catch that we’d split off to go the long way around.”
    Siris looked at the creature, which was working quickly, humming to itself. In just a few minutes, it finished with its work on Isa’s innards and moved to sewing up her outer gash. Its fingers were a blur, and the stitches it made incredibly tight and small. It pulled the final stitch tight, then tied it off and snipped.
    Isa was unconscious by then, but still breathing. Siris felt helpless. Why had she refused to use the healing ring? He slipped it from her finger. Perhaps she’d just been addled by the wound, the fight. If she came to . . . when she came to . . . then she could use it.
    “Thank you, creature,” he said.
    “Hmmm. I obey, as instructed.” The creature inspected its handiwork, then fell backward.
    Siris started as the creature melded into the rock behind it, its body transforming to match the stone. A second later, a larger version of it—five feet tall now—ripped free of the ground, now made of river rocks and mud. He could still see its former body where it had melded into the large stone at the thing’s chest.
    It opened gemstone eyes in a vaguely head-shaped stone on its shoulders, and when it stepped, rocks ground against one another. It picked up the robe.
    “What are you?” Siris asked.
    “TEL,” the creature said. “Transubstantive Entity, Lower-class.”
    “And were you following me?”
    “. . . Yes.”
    “You serve one of the Deathless, don’t you?”
    Another pause. “I do.”
    “Which one?”
    “I have been commanded not to respond to that question,” TEL said happily. “Oh my. This is probably not a good place to be having a dialogue. I do believe that other bands of Q.I.P.-mutants may inhabit the area.”
    Siris looked down at