Poops glanced once at the massive Insectoid, then back at the bovine foe that was bearing down on Thorn. The dog made a decision and darted into the cavern as Clytun the minotaur stepped out from the opening.
Thorn, who had already sunk the Glaive of Gladiolus’s tip deeply into a gap in the minotaur’s lower leg plating, was disheartened. The magical blade hadn’t discharged its healing power to rend apart the cow-man like it was supposed to, and now the crazy dog had fled down the tunnel. Thorn didn’t give up, though; he rolled and spun, and even though he took a nasty glancing blow that rendered his left arm limp and bleeding freely, he continued to fight the giant, armored monster.
Vanx wasn’t faring any better. He had managed to slice into the scorpion tail behind the stinger, but not deeply. Then, as he stepped to dodge its viper attack, he found one of his feet being wrapped, by what?
He looked down to see that what originally appeared to be spider legs, were more like the tentacles of an octerror, with tiny gripping cups. One of these had wrapped his leg completely now. He was falling backward, his legs pulled from under him. His breath left his lungs when his body slapped into the wall, and as he gasped to get precious air back into them, he saw the stinger coming down at his chest. He had dropped his sword when he impacted, and he knew he couldn’t throw up his arms in defense against that vile, venom-dripping spike. In a final effort to save himself, he called out to Sir Poopsalot through their link, but to his great shock and surprise, his familiar had shut him out, or worse.
Chapter
Seventeen
Her kiss was like a candle flame,
and it burned him when she touched him.
When two days passed and it still burned,
he knew she’d gave him something.
– A sailor’s song
Chelda watched a little blue-green sprite as it landed on Captain Moonseed’s shoulder and spoke urgently into her ear.
The new surge of fairy troops from below had helped drive the troublesome rats from the Shadowmane, but the huge, thick-skinned beast the fae called Skryker was still there trying to tear the tree apart.
Skryker absolutely hated the touch of Chelda’s blue blade and was just agile enough to avoid it most of the time. The two of them were circling around the Heart Tree now, keeping it between them, while they gathered their breath for another clash. Under the blue light, the once lush, green sward was now a thick, muddy expanse of blackened gore. Scores of rats and dozens of fairy folk had been killed or trampled.
The fae had forced the fight back out into the forest, but a few had remained in the Shadowmane and were working in teams in concert with Chelda and Skryker’s slow revolutions, to drag those wounded out of the way and back into the Underland.
Those who were beyond help were quickly and mercifully dispatched. First Captain Moonseed was performing this duty herself, which spoke volumes of her sense of duty. Most commanders would have passed such a gruesome task onto a subordinate.
She let Lieutenant Barflower, the wounded leader of a sprite troop called the Glittering Hornets, take care of the tinier beings, but only because her blade was too big to dispatch them cleanly.
So it was when the little glittering sprite came spiraling in and found Captain Moonseed’s ear.
The captain listened intently, then found Chelda and hurried over to her. The big turtle-headed monster, Skryker, was warily keeping the tree between it and the bright blue sword, but it could rage into another attack at any moment. Moonsy spoke quickly and purposefully, knowing that the respite might end in a split second.
“There is a beastling called Gallarael. Do you know such a person?”
Chelda’s shoulders fell, but she waggled the blue blade at her foe.
“She fell from the cliffs and died when the serpent set upon us.”
Chelda assumed that some fairy patrol had found the body after Vanx had told them where to look. It didn’t register that the captain had asked her if she knew Gallarael.
Chelda’s response was all the confirmation that Streak needed. The little finger-sized man began chirping and squeaking anxiously into the captain’s ear.
“Keep Skryker busy!” Moonsy gave the redundant order and charged off to give other orders while rounding up every healthy elf and pixie she spotted.
Chelda thought she heard Gallarael’s name spoken, but her attention was soon redirected back to the long-bodied, grey-skinned monster as it lunged at the tree, feigned its attack there, and at the last moment came around it to lash at her with a three-clawed paw.
Skryker had apparently thought her lapse in movement and her slack-jawed expression meant she was worn out and had let down her guard. He was only half right.
Chelda had let down her guard, but she was far from exhausted. Her recent snack of adrenalseed loaf and battle berries had her muscles humming. Now that she had air back in her lungs, she was ready for more.
Her lapse of focus resulted in a gashed bicep and a hard tumble. She recovered well enough, though, and darted in to give the big, awkwardly moving creature a jab in the inner foreleg with her searing blade.
Skryker roared out but didn’t retreat this time. His mother was in his head now. The Hoar Witch was urging him from afar; her giddy cackling gave him strength, and her fetid presence gave him the courage he needed to brave the touch of that painful sword.
Chelda spun and tried to roll under the thing’s body so she could test those softer-looking shell plates underneath, but Skryker rose up on his hind legs so that her upthrust met only air. When he came back down, he reached with his large forelimbs for the trunk of the Heart Tree, but fell short. As his long, heavy upper limbs came crashing down, they sheared limbs and branches with large, crackling pops. Several of the falling limbs came down on Chelda as she was rolling to her feet at the base of the Heart Tree. Skryker saw this, and his next pouncing leap was directly where she had been smashed by the falling debris.
By all rights Chelda knew she should have been crushed, or skewered, or both. The downward-facing limb that stopped the heavy branch from crushing her body had speared the bloody earth between her arm and her ribs. It scraped some flesh away, but it stopped the main bulk a few feet off the ground above her.
Wincing at the pull of her skin from the bark, she rolled away just as Skryker’s foreclaws came crashing down into the whole mess.
In a whirling move that she’d seen Ramaton Tytak use during Vanx’s battle for passage into the gargan lands, she dropped and spun on a knee and made a deep, hacking chop into Skryker’s lower leg. Unlike the Rammaton, she didn’t pull the blade in at the last moment.
To her great surprise the momentum of her swing sent the sword deeply into Skryker’s gristly ankle joint. When he jerked away, the wound geysered forth thick, black blood. Part of the appendage hung at an awkward angle with what little muscle and tendon remained attached.
The beast roared out in pain and rage and hobbled back away from Chelda and the Heart Tree. The paw was all but severed from its forelimb and he couldn’t put weight on it lest he push the stump into the ground. Skryker snapped his head down on his long turtle neck to keep Chelda at bay while he made his retreat out over the thorn wall and into the woods, but he couldn’t keep her from nearly ruining his other forelimb. As the freakish beast backed out of the Shadowmane, a heavy squishing thing smacked Chelda’s shoulder and sent hot, fizzing liquid splashing across her face.
Rot melon! She cursed herself for letting the retreating monster draw her back into range of the melon-hurling trollamonks. It was all she could do to stumble over to a group of medika huddled very near the gateway that lead into the Underland.
The rats forced the hulking great wolf hyena hybrid called Vrooch off of Gallarael. Had they not had the power of Pwca behind them, Vrooch would have been snapping them up and crunching them in his jaws to keep them from the meal he had just run down, but all of the Hoar Witch’s beasts were wary of the little devil. It wouldn’t do to anger him, for that would an
ger the Hoar Witch. It wounded his pride to let Gallarael’s leg go and leave her to the filthy vermin, especially since most of his pack was out in the woods, watching, waiting to seek vengeance for the pack mates she had killed.
Gallarael felt the rats scurrying all over her. She felt them scratching and biting at her thick, armored hide, but it didn’t hurt. They couldn’t seem to puncture it with their tiny claws and teeth. What hurt was her leg. The big, wolfen beast had gotten its fangs in good, and those first few violent shakes of his humongous head had twisted her knee joint and laid open the wounds. There the rats were going into a blood frenzy trying to get the rends in her changeling skin to open further. They were having a hard time of it, though, and Gallarael was lying face down fighting the pain while still heaving in the breath she’d exhausted from her flight. She could handle the needling little gnaws on her calf a few moments more, for she had no choice. She doubted she could run, but she was sure she could hobble and hop to a nearby tree.
“Yes, Vrooch,” the Hoar Witch cackled gleefully. She was leaning over her viewing pool clutching the crystal at her neck as if it were a lifeline. “Go to the Heart Tree, take your pack and overrun the barbarian bitch while she is down. Murkurl and his trollamonk goons will keep the changeling from fleeing until Pwca arrives.”
Her pack leader’s frustration wasn’t lost on her. “You and your mates can feed on the barbarian bitch, my child. She’s twice as big and far meatier than the changeling girl.”
Aserica studied the heaving body under the writhing mass of Pwca’s rats. They couldn’t puncture her hide, and Aserica decided she had to know what the elemental composition of such a skin was. The leg could have been chugged down Vrooch’s gullet by now, but by the way the rats were thrashing and flinging around it, it was barely bleeding.
Movement at the edge of the pool’s vision gave her a moment of pause. That little elven bitch that the pixie queen had blessed was coming to save the changeling girl. This sent a tendril of fear snaking up Aserica Rime’s back, but her concern evaporated like a wisp of smoke when she saw Pwca and the rest of his tiny hoard bearing down on them.
For a frantic moment the Hoar Witch searched the table and shelves to find a device she could use to communicate with the little devil. He wasn’t one of her blood-bonded beasts, and the crystal was useless for talking to him, but she did use it to order her pack of trollamonks to go right to the Heart Tree and strip it bare of leaf and limb while Vrooch and his mates feasted on the gargan.
Finding her device, she called to Pwca, who quite unnervingly crawled from the back of his rat mount in the scene on the surface of her reflecting pool. He moved right to the edge of it, climbed up and stood there dripping before her.
“Bring the changeling girl to me, Pwca, before your squeakers devour her. I need her as whole as possible, not chewed to the bone.”
“That will be our last bargain, Aserica Rime,”
The devil hissed through a dark grin that was entirely too large for his little slimy head. He went to cast the spell that would consummate the deal, but before he could finish, Clytun’s bellowing roar came echoing up from the dungeons.
Panic-stricken, for the minotaur’s yell had sounded more of a cry of pain and surprise than a battle call, Aserica shooed Pwca to the side and made to shift the scene on the surface of the pool to her favorite.
Pwca snorted and dove into the liquid’s shimmering surface, leaving only the slightest of ripples. The image was frozen except for the little devil that swam down to the rat mount with a little grin. Suddenly the image jerked back into motion.
He would protect the changeling girl for Aserica, but not deliver her. The deal hadn’t been struck. The spell had been left incomplete.
Aserica Rime cursed the little devil as she shifted the images on the surface of the pool to show what was happening with Clytun below. Pwca’s rat lashed its tail up to stir the water as it turned away. Now the well-illuminated image of Sissy bearing down on the warlock with her wicked stinger while Clytun dived wildly toward him was fractured and distorted and almost impossible to make out. Why had Clytun cried out so? Why was he diving to save the warlock if Sissy already had him in her grips? The Hoar Witch let out an angry hiss and willed the pool’s surface to still its wavering, but by the time it had, the cavern had gone dark.
Chapter
Eighteen
It’s nights like these that make me feel
like I’m the king of this whole world.
You could be my queen and I would
cover you in diamonds, gold, and pearls.
– A Zythian bard’s song
The stinger thumped hard into Vanx’s sternum and he knew he was done. He heaved for a breath that wasn’t coming while he waited to feel the hot poison pulsing into his chest. He rolled his head to the side in hopes of seeing that Thorn and Poops had gotten away. In that brief glimpse, what he saw instead was defeat. Poops was nowhere to be seen, and the hulking bovine fighter had his heavy, steel-shod boot on Thorn’s chest and one of his black blades was coming swiftly down to end it.
Vanx also saw a pair of glittering demon eyes, low to the floor and jostling up and down. Whatever they belonged to was charging out of the tunnel behind the monitor, but before he could see what it was the lack of air caused him to fade from consciousness.
Thorn jabbed relentlessly at the minotaur’s lower leg, but the heavy monster refused to lift his boot. The elven general saw his death blow coming then, and said a quick prayer to Babd, the fairy god of battle and war.
Even in defeat, Thorn appreciated the chance to die valiantly fighting against evil. As his eyes clenched shut and the minotaur’s sword came arcing toward his neck, he heard Babd laugh back at his death prayer.
A savage growl and a heavy crash of snapping teeth and clanging armor caused Thorn to open an eye. The blade that should have cleaved his skull from his body made a shower of sparks as it impacted just a hand’s breadth beyond him. The weight lifted from his chest when the minotaur was knocked forward into a stumbling sprawl.
It took Thorn a moment to realize his savior was Sir Poopsalot Maximus. Vanx’s magical orb was losing its power, but when Thorn heard the minotaur’s anguished roar and turned, he could clearly see that the dog had done more than just save his skin. He’d saved Vanx’s skin as well.
The stinger should have punched right through Vanx’s chest, but its point hit directly on the gleaming charm he wore on his necklace. The creature pushed harder, trying to break through it, but only managed to keep him from gasping in a breath. His strength ebbed and his magical light started to fade away.
As soon as Vanx stopped struggling, it brought up its tail spike and sent it stabbing down a bit lower.
The minotaur stumbled. The weight of his heavy armor and great horned head carried him into a headlong sprawl. He landed hard on Vanx’s body, nearly crushing his rib cage under all the substantial weight. It was then, in the near darkness Vanx’s fading orb was leaving behind, that he saw the terrible stinger come down again. It must have punched right into the struggling minotaur because the huge, horn-headed thing suddenly arched back and rolled away.
The minotaur’s roar was horrendous, but the other creature didn’t pull its stinger away. It was far too late for that. It unhooked its tentacles from Vanx’s legs and wrapped them around the minotaur. Then as quickly as it had come, it scurried back up into the heights of the web, hauling its struggling new food supply with it.
As soon as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Thorn found Vanx’s side. Poops was already there, licking his familiar’s face with frantic urgency.
“What?”
Vanx heaved in a huge breath, and then another. His head slowly began to clear. “What happened?” he finally asked.
A glance down at the charm his Goddess had given him told him half the story. It was dented in the middle as if someone had slammed a dirk into it with extreme force, but it was otherwise intact. Thorn filled him in on the rest as he help
ed him to his feet and got them all moving into the rough-hewn passageway from which the minotaur had come. Vanx cursed himself for being stupid. He assumed the medallion on his neck would somehow create some magical force field or transform into a shield to protect him, or maybe even give him extra strength, or inject some insight into his brain at the right moment, but it hadn’t.
His Goddess had said, “It will protect you in your time of greatest need.”
He’d discounted its value when the glow had subsided earlier and now he felt a fool for it. It had truly saved him at a time when he had imagined no need greater than a barrier between his guts and that venom-dripping spike. The white gold-dipped leaf, or silva tree cutting, or whatever it was, had saved him, plain and simple. Vanx vowed to give thanks to the Goddess and beg for her forgiveness for his doubt just as soon as he had the chance.
The passage began ramping upward and arced into a crudely carved stairway that turned a slow radius as it corkscrewed upward. They passed several barred gates that opened away from the passage. But the huffing, chittering, grunting, and in one case, the unnatural silence, behind the cell doors dissuaded them from trying to unlock them. Farther up, the glow of wavering torchlight filtered down to dance and flare along the cold, lichen-covered walls.
As they crept as silently as possible up into the light, a shadow, or maybe two, eclipsed the torchlight. Then came the creak of unoiled hinges and the sound of shuffling feet.
“Come on, Vanx,” a kindly old woman’s voice said.
“Come to Grandmamma and let’s have a look-see at you.”
Vanx gave Thorn the finger-across-his-lips signal for silence and motioned for the elf to hold on to Poops. He then eased up around the curve of the stair. There was a small landing in front of an iron-banded wooden door with a hissing torch burning in a sconce beside it. The door was half open and a wrinkly, old, wart-faced, gray-maned witch peeked her head out and gave him a creepy, gap-toothed grin.
That Frigid Fargin Witch (The Legend of Vanx Malic) Page 11