NOW, THE BLOOD
That fucking eagle.
It tore up to the sky as soon as it was unleashed.
Esme swore she’d killed it, but she knew it was the same animal that had killed her by the pulpy mess of flesh around its eye.
It chortled, its voice choking out of a beak overcrowded with jagged teeth.
Saliva like pitch dripped from its maw. The creature was larger than it had been before, but its body was now twisted, its head too large, its waist longer and thinner than it had any right to be.
Its chest of blood-flecked feathers heaved and Magic curled from its beak with every pant.
In the north, the horse bulled its way through the maze, running down the walls when it refused to maneuver around them.
Despite being the least dangerous creature, it rushed for the men with bloodlust in its glowing red eyes.
A row of spines rippled down its back, each one sure to stab deep.
It was double the size of the biggest stallions in the royal stables.
When it finally caught up to the man lagging farthest from the group, it snatched him with its teeth and thrashed him from side to side, slapping him against the maze walls until he left bloody streaks down the wood.
When he stopped fighting, the horse spat him out and trampled him.
To the south, the rat was also having a grand hunt.
It was as large as a carriage, and the world shook below its paws as it bounded through the maze.
Bloody whiskers twitched as it deftly navigated the course with more finesse than the men scrambling for their lives just a few feet ahead.
When one of them ran blindly down a dead end, Esme’s stomach dropped.
The rat raised its head, whiskers jumping like it could scent the terror off the trapped man’s skin.
It darted for the dead end, finding him in seconds.
Just as the beast leapt for its meal, Esme shut her eyes.
The screaming didn’t stop. Not until there was a tearing squelch so penetrating she felt it like a hand wringing her gut.
When she pried her eyes open, the man’s middle was gone, and the rat was licking bits of intestines out from between its claws.
Esme retched and tore her eyes to the last slaughter, only to find the opposite.
The man with the gag wandered the maze like it was an art exhibit dedicated to wood.
He maneuvered himself smartly. At least, Esme thought so, until he walked himself into a dead end.
There, he rubbed his chin and turned just in time for the lion, with pale tusks begging for a bloodbath, to gallop into the clearing.
At the prospect of a second evisceration, the crowd brayed.
Esme even heard some people shouting praise at the beast.
The man and the beast circled each other. Esme reached out at him with a shadow, but his glamour was thick, a boiling syrup on his skin. When his eyes flicked up to hers, a flare of heat blasted by her.
His cheeks bunched under the gag. He was grinning.
The man sank to the ground. Then, after making sure Esme was still watching him, he leapt at the lion.
It did exactly what she and the rest of the arena knew it would: it bit down on his head.
Esme’s own skull throbbed as the beast’s teeth crunched on the man’s iron gag.
The metal squealed but stayed locked around his head.
Unimpressed with his luck, the massive idiot grabbed the lion’s jaws and pried them wide with his bare hands.
His glamour rippled, and Esme swore a haze of black swept across him like a storm.
With the lion’s saliva dripping onto his cheek, the man forced the animal’s jaw down on his own head again.
Both the lion’s teeth and the gag cracked under his might.
He did it again, forcing a million pounds of pressure down on his own skull.
This time, the iron clattered to the ground as a heap of gnawed iron bits.
Once he was done using the monster as a nutcracker, the man threw the beast into a wall at the other side of the dead end and stood at his full height.
The man turned over his shoulder to lock eyes with Esme again, and this time he swiped away that honey-thick glamour to reveal ridged, bone-white horns that jutted from his forehead and half-lidded eyes redder than blood, the color of burning villages and smoldering cities.
His nose was long, rounded and close to his face, the kind of nose one could sculpt a million times and fail, each time, to capture perfectly.
His full lips opened slightly to let a curl of smoke dance across his defined jaw.
Esme knew he had fangs, as if all of him was a promise of spilled blood.
Twin streaks of starlight hair sprouted from his widow’s peak; the rest was so black that it swallowed light, floating around him in air hot enough to ooze like liquid.
A swarm of black smoke brewed under his skin, a moving tattoo that stormed at his right shoulder.
He was a bolt of divine lightning scorching unworthy ground.
Then, just like that, the man slathered his glamour back over himself. Esme rushed out a breath she didn’t even know he’d stolen.
The man wiped a splatter of monster blood from his cheek. As the lion stumbled around trying to figure out how someone had just used its mouth as scissors, the man puckered his lips and whistled. The tune was not of notes, but of fire.
Smothering Magic dripped down from the sky like oil.
The walls lit up instantly, flames eating wood and then subsisting on Magic alone.
The other men in the western group shrieked as a wall of flame rose before them, and they split in opposite directions.
Then, the wall faded. From Esme’s vantage point, she could see that both groups were now running in opposite directions, away from the center. She guessed he’d done that on purpose.
Esme knew at once who he was. Calamity. Massacre. Tyrant.
The lion lumbered up to its feet, leveling a starving look at the man, who raised his hand to offer a suggestion.
Behind the beast, the walls burned to nothing, leaving a magical-lion-sized path back to the gate from which the lion had been released.
There, the panicked soldiers who’d wrangled the beast into the arena struggled to lower the gate again as it was too hot to touch.
The lion looked back and forth between the man who was not a man and the tasty group of soldiers.
It chose the soldiers.
Wet screams flooded the arena, and blood gushed into the maze from the gate. The lion re-emerged with a femur wedged between its teeth. The monster plopped down in the puddle of blood and licked its paws.
The man took off while he had its cooperation.
In the east, Bal tripped through the maze, slowed by the caramelizing heat.
The eagle swooped down on his group, snapping up the man just ahead of Bal and eating him whole.
Unfortunately, the creature hadn’t gotten any dumber since Esme had carved it up in the pit, and it cut off Bal and his group at every turn, deftly corralling them away from the center of the maze.
Bal and his men ran up to a fork in the path. To the left, a dead end. To the right, the path was only a few twists from the center. Bal looked up to the stands for help. Some were telling him, “Left!” giddy to see entrails. Bal’s eyes swept the audience until they hooked on Esme’s.
“Right!” she screamed, pointing. Bal grabbed the man closest to him and sprinted right, only for the eagle to dive for them.
One of Esme’s shadows yanked Bal down by the hair just in time for the man behind him to get a chest full of claws. The eagle shook his body free from its talons, dropping him onto a flaming wall.
Bal slid to a stop, eyes wide at the place the man behind him had just been. He’d been the only one to have followed Bal to the right. The others had run back the way they’d come.
Bal took one look at the sky, then another at his friend’s body. He pulled his sword out of his belt. “Hey!” he barked into the sky. The monster’s head snapped to attention. “You still got something in your fucking eye!”
With that, Bal took off to the right. The eagle gave chase, but when it tried to cut off the next turn to the middle, Bal skidded into another dead end.
He whirled on the creature and swung his sword just as it barreled for him.
His swing connected—but so did the monster’s talons, snatching him into the sky by the arm before dropping him one wall over as it squawked in pain.
Bal’s sword was still stuck in its leg, deep enough to need wrenching out.
Bal jumped to his feet, weaponless, blood weeping from his forearm.
The bird hovered above him, its wings whipping up a windstorm and its massive body blotting out the sun.
Its shadow stretched over Bal like a yawning maw.
His eyes widened and, for just a second, Bal was not a general or an heir or anything so bold.
He was a man about to die, eyes lit by terror, blood turned cold dripping from his wounds.
The eagle shot into the air and then slowed its flapping until gravity turned it on its head and sent it plummeting like a comet right over Bal.
The general took in three massive breaths.
He didn’t pray; he didn’t shut his eyes.
Just as the monster cackled above him, he turned and found Esme’s eyes.
Fear and fury swirled there, then transformed into something so potent that Esme could hear his command ringing in her ears.
He opened his hand and Esme sculpted a sword of night in his very palm.
When the eagle was a foot from his head, Bal ducked to the right and put a world of rage into Esme’s shadow sword. A wave of sweltering heat and the suffocating sensation of being plunged into rot-thickened blood washed Esme as if she’d been the blade itself.