Galactic Mage 4: Alien Arrivals by John Daulton Page A

flowering lily with broad, flat leaves. She went to it and bent one of the leaves between her fingertips. It was as thick and supple as it had appeared to be, a sturdy jungle variety. She folded the leaf, bent it back and forth, even tried to poke her finger through. It tore, but not without a good deal of force.
    She glanced around for signs of movement nearby. Nothing. She tore off a quarter of the leaf, a span of it a little wider than the palm of her hand and twice as long. She folded it over once, then hunted around for a stick or pointy rock. She found one right away, and soon had poked holes in two places through her leaf at the longer ends. She threaded her homemade cords through the holes, one at each end, and secured them with simple square knots. When she was done, she held up what she had made: a sling, not much different than the one she’d used so many times at home. The one the elves had taken from her the moment she’d arrived.
    She spent a few more moments looking for suitably sized rocks, gathering a dozen of them into a pile. With a last check on the security of the knots, she gave her new weapon a try.
    Dust, splinters, and bits of bark flew out from the tree where the rock struck, barely a hand’s width above the oozing flow of sap. A second, right after, blasted away more wood and nicked the top of the sap, cutting a wedge across the rubbery flow. The third stone knocked the little bulb of goo right off the tree, stone and sap both rolling off into the dirt.
    Smiling and feeling like herself for the first time since arriving on this island, Pernie loaded another stone into her sling. This shot, like the last, was perfectly on target, and with it, she concluded she had the feel of her new weapon.
    She loaded another stone, and then gathered up the rest, tucking them into her waistband, her boot tops, and anywhere else she could find, given that the elves seemed opposed to stitching pockets in their hunting clothes.
    Tipping her head back, she looked up into the tree, looking for signs of something yellow, something that would give away the location of the mantis hiding up there somewhere. She found it straightaway. Three spans up, in a cluster of leaves. The play of dappled sunlight made it blend in perfectly.
    Pernie saw it watching her, saw the angled lines of its massive piercing spikes, the edges of each serrated like crocodile teeth, another thing she was all too familiar with these days.
    She spun her sling in ever-faster loops; round and round and round it went, the air whistling as the weight of the stone passed. With a hiss, the stone flew away, followed by a dull thunk . There came a rustling, then the snapping of twigs, and down came the mantis in a rain of leaves.
    It hit the ground with a heavy thud, and for a time, its legs still moved, opening and closing the angles at its knees. It looked as if it were trying to run in slow motion through the air and back up into the tree. But the eyes didn’t move. Not this time. There was a hole punched through one of them, and green fluid seeped out into the dirt. And not long after, even that stopped.
    Pernie thought about taking one of its spiked forelimbs for a weapon, but she had no knife to cut one off, so she had to satisfy herself with the sling. But her recent success suggested perhaps it would be enough for what she needed to do next. It was time to go back to the fern meadow and face the giant centipede-like things.
    Once more she made her way carefully through the trees, again braiding a length of cord, though much longer than before and this time stripped from the fibrous insides of bark pulled from a variety of long, ropy vines. She pressed on for quite some time, hopping several streams and recalling which way she had to go with her practiced woodsman’s sense. It was the work of an hour’s walk to find it, but finally, as the sunlight piercing the canopy came through in nearly vertical lines, Pernie climbed a narrow rise and found