The tree line, three hundred paces away, was spotted with amber outlines. Edrea concentrated and focused.
“There must be four dozen bloodtrackers there.” She turned a full circle. “I can’t say where they’re thinnest, but they’re thickest in the copse of trees on that knoll.”
“Then we know where not to run,” said Horgash.
“No!” said Lynus. “We know exactly where to run.” He pointed at the knoll. “If somebody is controlling this beast, they’re right there, surrounded by bodyguards while casting beast magic, or Wurm-will, or some such.”
“That’s not an escape, that’s an assault.”
“And a fell caller doesn’t run from a fight,” Lynus said. “You’re a warrior, a leader of warriors.”
“I used to be.”
“You can’t sing, and you can’t shout, but these trollkin can still hear you. Lead them! Get us onto that knoll, and we will save this village.”
Edrea was stirred by Lynus’ speech. Chronicler indeed.
“They are going to rain spears and arrows on us before we’re halfway there,” Horgash said.
“Then we need thicker skin,” said Edrea, weaving fheyissa, the fortress sigils, with both hands. She clenched a fist and swept the resulting ring of runes into a girdle about her waist.
“Stay within about eight paces,” she said.
“How many does skin-spell work on?” asked Kinik.
Edrea thought about that and reached into the weave to test it. “As many of my friends who stay within about eight paces.”
Horgash began shouting in Molgur-Trul. Edrea winced. It sounded like he was hurting himself.
“We take the fight to the hill! I need axes and shields at my side! Warriors of the kriel, to me!”
Were there any warriors here? Edrea had watched with despair as the spar-bearers fell and fled. The kriel was in disarray, and the wurm wrought a winding path of destruction through it.
But several older trollkin came running, battered shields and ancient axes in hand.
“Grindar requires Gelfas’ aid!” Horgash shouted.
Edrea thought she recognized the two names from Trollkin history.
“But in this tale,” Horgash continued, “Gelfas has no full-bloods, no warbeasts at his side. He does not need them, because he marches with the Grey Champions!”
Edrea had never heard of the Grey Champions. Horgash was improvising, spinning a new tale around an old one.
Horgash pointed across the glade at the knoll. “The enemy commander hides in those trees. We go to cut him to the ground, and the trees with him if they stand in our way!”
Edrea was startled by the full-throated, robust cheer that followed. These old trollkin, decades past their prime, were ready to live up to the legend, and write a new one.
Horgash pointed forward with his right sword and shouted, “For Grindar, for Gelfas, for Jata and the Glade!” and spurred Greta into a slow run. The trollkin formed a phalanx around and behind him. They all began to lope across the clearing.
Horgash shouted back over his shoulder at Edrea. “Keep up with us, lass! I like what you do for my old hide!”
Edrea sprinted into the midst of the trollkin phalanx, slowed to catch her breath, and smiled to see Lynus at her left and Kinik at her right. Then arrows began to drop into the group, and she bent her smile into a determined grimace.
She leaned into her stride and focused on her breathing. Simultaneously maintaining vossyl liumyn and fheyissa was difficult, and doing so while running was even harder. Her pulse pounded in her ears, audible over the cacophony of a dozen pairs of feet, Greta’s hoofbeats, and the rumbling progress of the gorgandur through the village to the rear.
The hail of arrows intensified around her. The Tharn archers had decided she was a threat, the spinning runes of her weave no doubt calling attention to her. Kinik, running to Edrea’s right, moved closer and raised her arms. What was she doing? Edrea couldn’t see through the ogrun, could only make out the clump of amber outlines on the knoll.
Kinik grunted, and her coat seemed to sprout half a dozen arrows. The ogrun faltered for half a pace, but then steadied back into her position. Edrea felt the weave flutter, the fortress of fheyissa rippling in response to the volley. It began to slip away from her. Her lungs were hot, her heart hammered in her chest, and the weave itself developed a pulse, a rhythm.
Edrea stutter-stepped, adjusting her pace to run in time to that pulse. Kinik shot her a concerned glance, and then looked back to the battlefield.
The pulse of the weave, the pounding of her heart, and the pace of her feet were all in sync. Not the unison of marching soldiers, though. This was a rhythmic counterpoint, like a drum circle, and with each bar, with each measure of contrapuntal hammering, she grew stronger. With each refrain she felt greater ease in the exertion. What had been painful cacophony was now exhilarating. Edrea reveled in power fueled by the glorious music of the weave.
But Kinik was still taking arrows on her behalf. Edrea wove again, swiftly. Alyshh rhya, occlusion and self. A third ring of runes spun into the air around her.
Lynus saw a third ring of runes appear around Edrea, and then all the runes shimmered and vanished. Edrea herself almost vanished with them. She wasn’t invisible—not quite—but he couldn’t focus on her, as if the new magic she was spinning forced his eyes to look away.
The next volley of arrows was spread wider. The Tharn had lost Edrea and were now picking different targets. Arrows dropped amid them, and a few struck home, thumping deep into the shoulders of the trollkin, but most bounced off.
With that thought something struck Lynus in the head, so hard he could hear a crack. He put his hand up to his head, expecting to find blood and brain matter, but both seemed safely contained within his skin and skull. Thank you, Morrow, for Iosan magic, he thought. It occurred to him that this was probably horrible blasphemy to an Iosan, but there wasn’t time to ask Edrea who he should thank. Besides her, of course.
Looking ahead he could now see figures on the knoll. They wore animal skins, rough leathers, and bones, including animal-skull masks and horned headdresses. Men and women, all filthy, caked with mud and blood, and armed with bows and spears.
None of them looked like Lynus imagined a beast-handling warlock might look. Or maybe all of them did.
“I’ve got the big one!” shouted Horgash. “I’ll break the line; you break necks.” He dug his heels into Greta’s flanks, and the bison sprang forward, surprising Lynus with her speed.
As one, the blue-skinned, grey-quilled phalanx leaned forward and began a sprint, running faster than Lynus thought possible for aged warriors. He leaned into his own run but quickly fell behind. His sword, his armored greatcoat . . . it was all so heavy.
Edrea and Kinik kept up with the group and pulled ahead of him. Lynus sucked air and steadied his pace. He couldn’t run that fast, but he wouldn’t be too far behind.
Greta and Horgash entered the trees with a raspy, gurgled battle cry and a resounding crunch, followed by screams in at least three languages. Through gaps between the trees, Lynus could see that Horgash had charged the largest of the Tharn, an axe-wielding monster of a man Greta gored and flung left like a giant rag doll, knocking down several of his fellows. Horgash, meanwhile, leaned far to the right side and hacked deeply with his off-hand sword, smashing through a Tharn shield and shield arm.
Then the trollkin phalanx arrived, and the wooded knoll erupted in chaos wrought of spears, blood, axes, gore, and the limbs of both trees and men.
Lynus couldn’t make sense of it. There was too much going on. Then motion caught his eye in a still part of the copse, off to the far left, well beyond the fray in the trees. There stood a heavily bearded northerner dressed in dark robes—a Skirov, perhaps. He held aloft a curious bladed staff and was ringed by spinning, glowing runes.
“There! THE LEFT!” Lynus screamed, pointing with his sword.
Edrea dropped to one knee, whipped her rifle up to her
shoulder, and fired.
The Skirov spun to his right, and a spray of blood erupted from his shoulder. But instead of dropping or clutching the arm, he shrugged, and with no flash of magic, no change to the runes spinning about him, his shoulder was healed.
At that same instant a giant, inhuman scream sounded from the village.
Perhaps, just like the farrow warlock Rorsh, this Skirov could push his own wounds onto the beast via some magical bond, Lynus thought. He shivered to think that this warlock might be impossible to kill. He wouldn’t die until the gorgandur did, and the gorgandur was sixty feet of armored horror.
Unless . . .
He had no time to shout instructions. Kinik had heard Edrea’s shot and turned to charge at the warlock. Edrea, still kneeling, reloaded.
Lynus wouldn’t need to shout instructions. Either this warlock was effectively immortal or the magical ability to push wounds from himself onto the wurm granted Lynus, Edrea, and Kinik a narrow, treacherous path through the monster’s otherwise impenetrable scales.
A gap in the armor.
Kinik lunged, her aim as true as Edrea’s had been. The war cleaver tore deep into the warlock’s belly and out the back and side, tearing flesh, bowel, and cloth in a single stroke that nearly cut the man in half. Then, fast as an eye-blink, his flesh was whole and Kinik’s blade unbloodied. Again, a howl sounded from the village. At least, Lynus hoped it was howling. The wurm might also be reveling in its repast of defenseless trollkin, he reflected.
Kinik stopped, stunned by the magical erasure of her work. The warlock raised a rune-wrapped hand, grinned wickedly, and pointed at her. Lightning sprang into the air between them.
The single flash seared a long path in Lynus’ sight, connecting Kinik’s right arm, her war cleaver, and two of the nearby trollkin. The lightning was so fast Lynus didn’t even see it arc from one victim to the next. There was just a flash and an afterimage spotting Lynus’ vision as three of his allies fell to the ground.
He blinked away the spots and kept running. He passed Edrea as she fired a second time, and the fact that the carbine’s report didn’t startle him at all testified to how bright and loud that bolt of lightning had been.
“Eight paces!” Edrea shouted from behind him.
Lynus slowed. He did not want to face this warlock without her support.
Edrea shouted something in Iosan. A bolt of blue-white fire seared past Lynus and struck the warlock squarely in the chest.
Runes pulsed around the man, and the gaps in his tattered, scorched robe revealed unblemished, unwounded flesh. Again, the great wurm howled from the village.
The warlock turned to face Lynus and Edrea and pointed at them as he’d pointed at Kinik. Another bolt of lightning seared Lynus’ vision. He gasped in surprise when it didn’t strike him.
Edrea gasped in pain.
Lynus’ skin tingled briefly. Edrea’s magic was gone from him.
“The greater threat dispatched, I can now chide you for fleeing a rare honor,” the Skirov said in thickly accented Khadoran. He reached out toward the village with his right hand, his left held before him, comfortably wrapped around the haft of that wickedly bladed staff. Runes swirled around the outstretched hand, and Lynus thought he sensed power accumulating there. He stood, uncertain, and brought his sword in front of him for defense.
The point bobbled and dipped.
The warlock raised an eyebrow and waved his left hand in the direction of the melee to Lynus’ right. There was an explosion, closely followed by the screams of trollkin and men. A scattering of soil rained down upon Lynus.
“The Devourer would embrace you, and yet you come here, to me? Where your death will mean nothing?”
Lynus shivered, and the point of his sword dropped farther.
“I didn’t come up here to die,” he said in passable Khadoran. He tried to mean it, but his voice quavered. He let the point drop even more, exaggerating the weakness he felt.
“Alas, I am afraid you—“ and then the warlock lunged.
Lynus brought the point of his sword up, and the warlock’s left arm glided along the blade. The man hissed in pain and stepped back, barely retaining his grip on his staff. Lynus swept and swung as hard as he could, burying the sword deep in the warlock’s right shoulder and jarring Lynus’ hands as the blade struck bone.
There was no exaggeration this time. His grip failed, and he let go of the sword. It fell free of the naked, unharmed shoulder. A howl of monstrous pain and rage rose from the village.
“Feigning weakness is effective, but only if it is, in fact, feigned, child.” The Skirov adjusted his grip on the wickedly bladed staff. “But that is the last of the lessons you will learn in this life.”
No rifle, no sword . . . Lynus fumbled with the sample kit at his left hip. One of the little bottles had a mild acid in it. His fingers closed on the slim handle of his scalpel, its blade barely the size of his thumb.
The warlock lunged again, and for the tiniest moment Lynus envisioned a series of cuts arranged in sequence before him, an unorthodox dissection plan for a very dangerous, quickly moving cadaver.
He turned to his left, presenting his right shoulder, where the blade of the staff glanced and caught in the heavy leather of his greatcoat. The shock numbed Lynus’ right arm. He spun back to the right, stepping close to the warlock, and with his left hand he traced the short scalpel blade in a long, deep path: up the inside of the staff arm, along the brachial artery, across the pectoral group, and up the jugular, laying arteries wide.
The warlock screamed as blood erupted from the long, smooth cuts in two major arteries. He staggered backward, and Lynus despaired as the wounds closed.
Another roar of bestial anguish burst forth from below, the gorgandur echoing the warlock’s own scream of agony as analogs of opened arteries and severed muscle were instantly, magically inflicted upon it.
The roar ended abruptly, not even a quarter the length of the creature’s previous screams.
The warlock’s eyes went wide, the wound in his neck reappeared, and blood poured out over his scorched and shredded robe. He staggered forward as if to lunge again with the staff, but he dropped it before he could finish the movement.
The runes whipping around him winked out, and he fell forward into a heap.
Lynus stared. That was far worse than a dissection. Focus on the process. What’s next? Right. He wiped his scalpel clean and sheathed it. He bent down and retrieved his sword, then picked up the staff. Behind him he heard Horgash roar in triumph, a cry taken up by several other trollkin. The surviving Tharn were fleeing into the woods.
He looked back at Edrea and Kinik. Edrea sat up, leaned to her left, and retched. No blood, so she wasn’t bleeding in at least three of the dozen internal ways that could kill her.
“I think we won,” Lynus said.
Edrea nodded weakly. “I woke up, so that was my conclusion.”
Kinik groaned, and Lynus moved to crouch beside her. Smoke rose from her right arm. Her right hand, still clutching the haft of her polearm, was blackened and ruined. It would have to come off. And that would take more than a scalpel.
“You’re going to be okay, Kinik. Can you walk?”
“Walk, yes.” She looked down at her arm and groaned. “Not carry.”
Horgash hobbled over using a tree branch as a crutch.
“Horgash!” said Edrea. “You’re missing a foot!”
“On my way back through, one of the Tharn got in a good swing and took me off Greta. She stomped him to a pulp for his trouble.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the carnage, where Greta chuffed and paced. Five of the eight trollkin were up, picking through the battle-torn copse for trophies, or perhaps missing digits.
“It was too ragged to try reattaching it,” he said. “I’ll just need to keep well-fed this winter so I can grow a new one.” He stooped a bit, bending down to look Lynus in the eye. “I’m claiming the rest of the expedition’s bacon. With your permission, Chronicler.”
Chronicler, Lynus thought. Chronicler. If Pendrake was dead, it might fall to Lynus to write the end of this story.
“We need to get down to the village.”
Jata met Lynus and the others at the gate. They were a ragged, limping band, but Jata . . . patches of her skin were blackened, her quills were broken, and the quitari pattern cloth she wore looked as if it had been used to smother a fire.
Yet for all that, she wore a smile that threatened to split her face in two.
“You,” she said, looking at Lynus. “You will never be able to write this tale in a way that others will believe it.” She pointed back into the village, where a man sat on a stone block that had once belonged to a house.
The man was shaped like Viktor Pendrake, but black as pitch from head to toe. A pair of young trollkin were splashing buckets of water on him. The water that pooled around the man was blackened with whatever covered he, but he did not grow noticeably cleaner as Lynus approached.
“Professor?”
“Yes, Lynus. In the flesh.” Pendrake sighed, his exhalation heavy with exhaustion.
“What happened?”
“I did a very foolish thing.”
Lynus said nothing.
Pendrake drew another deep breath and continued.
“The gorgandur spit sludge only that one time. I guessed the stuff might be mostly gone. But I know mostly isn’t the same as completely, so I grabbed those horse ointments, slathered them on as thick as I could, and fed myself to the wurm.”
Lynus stared, slack-jawed.
Next to him, Edrea let out a gasp. “Professor?”
“Many large creatures swallow their prey whole, relying upon interior gastric mechanisms to manage what their teeth do not. The sludge seemed just such a mechanism, and it gave me hope that there would be no chewing.
“It was a tricky jump, but I didn’t get bitten in half or crushed by those jaws. Then I was inside, and I started stabbing everything within reach. And from inside, everything is within reach.” He chuckled weakly.
Horgash laughed. “I don’t think the boy should have told you the tale of Muthgar Preymaker.”
Extraordinary Zoology Page 12