Chapter Thirty-One
I shoved the guttering remains of my whip into the creature’s maw because I couldn’t think of anything else. Or think much at all with its teeth trying to bury themselves in my flesh and its blood splattering and hissing against my armor. All while ?subrand hacked at it with no effect from that impressive-looking sword.
He finally realized that and paused, looking at his weapon in confusion while the creature’s insides burned, its eyes became even more fire-like, and the golden light I was shedding poured out from under the scales that covered it. Until I ripped my acid-etched armor out of its mouth, its saliva hissing and dancing on the surface as it fought to consume me, even as the creature it had come from writhed helplessly in the mud. And then I grabbed a foolish fey prince by the leg and shifted .
Or rather, I tried.
But several more somethings had just torn through the air, leaping down on top of us. I could feel claws raking me even as we started to disappear, could sense them opposing my spell, trying to throw it off, and could tell when my already tenuous concentration started to wobble. Which would be bad since I didn’t think I had enough juice to try this again.
I wasn’t even sure I had enough to finish this spell, not carrying two—including the idiot who was currently fighting me! He didn’t understand that I was trying to save his stubborn hide, and I didn’t have the strength to explain it right now. I didn’t have the strength for anything, which was why my spell started to falter, the thread beginning to vanish like smoke in my hands without enough power behind it—
Until someone sent me some.
Pritkin must have re-engaged Lover’s Knot because I felt a hit of energy flow into me through the bond. It wasn’t much—I doubted he had much—but it was enough to tip the balance. The spell caught, flinging us across the lake to the concave side of the far wall.
It was deeper than I’d thought, arcing far overhead like a frozen wave of dirt. But it cast a shadow so dark that even ?subrand’s silver magnificence couldn’t be seen. But he could damned well be heard if he didn’t shut up .
I shoved him face-first into the mud at the first intake of breath, then managed to get a hand over his mouth. So, of course, he bit me and put enough force behind it that I could feel it through a dragonscale gauntlet. I hope you break a tooth! I thought right before he got me in yet another chokehold because he was a bastard, but he could fight.
Only not well enough to defeat the things that were hunting us. Something he must have finally realized because he stopped moving as a dozen more shadows leaped down to the spot where we’d just been. And started savaging the creature I’d disemboweled, heedless of the fact that he was still alive and one of theirs.
It was over in seconds and probably could have been even faster considering how quickly some of those things moved. But it seemed like they were enjoying the carnage and their former ally’s desperate cries more than the meat. Blood, viscera, and body parts went flying, and the sounds, the horrible, laughing, gobbling sounds, were enough to make me dizzy.
They must have affected the haughty bastard choking me the same way because he made another mistake.
“Pah,” he exhaled, barely a breath on the air.
But that was enough.
A few of the creatures looked up, having locked onto that tiny sound despite all the noise they’d been making. One of them had huge, bat-like ears that stood up from its head and turned this way and that while it sent out weird little clicks in all directions from its bloody maw. Clicks I could feel as a tangible force as they swept over us—
And bounced back.
The thing’s head turned, eyes redder than Bodul’s looked straight at us, and it started screeching, loud and piercing and echoing through the night.
And then they were coming.
“Here!” I heard Pritkin yell just as something hit me in the face.
It was dirty and scraggly and I didn’t know what the hell, just that it had come from above. As if the rest of our crew had somehow managed to find a way up there, not that it mattered. Because the creatures were as fast as a blur.
?subrand, the complete madman, shoved me behind him like he hadn’t just been trying to kill me a second ago. And like that was going to help! But that might, I thought, as somebody suddenly appeared in front of what had been the great waterfall.
They must have been small since the embankment still blocked my view, even at this angle. But the sickly green illumination they shed cast a hell of a light shadow on the cliff face behind. It extended almost the full height of the towering slope, painting it in leaping shadows that were monstrous enough on their own.
But then some ungodly screeching began emanating from it, like rusty hinges magnified a hundred times over, until I thought my head would burst or my heart explode.
It was the worst thing I’d ever heard, and the creatures hunting us seemed to think so, too. Because they paused, turned, and snarled, their attention momentarily diverted. And a moment was all ?subrand needed.
He looped what I’d vaguely decided was a woody vine around his arm and grabbed me, all in one fluid movement.
“Pull!” he yelled because it was the only way to be heard over all that.
And he was, both by those above us and the creatures down here, who realized that their prey was about to get away. Which was why, as we were dragged through the air and up the clifflike side of the embankment, the snarling, furious pack was leaping across the lakebed. And jumping up, screaming defiance as fetid breath blew over my feet, as my heart tried to leap out of my chest, and as I did my best to climb up ?subrand’s body while more claws raked over our dragonscale.
I glimpsed some of the shapes below as they tried to drag us back down. One had fur but was bird-beaked, with a body that didn’t make sense, but mercifully, none of the tangled-up limbs seemed to include wings. Another looked like a giant amoeba, formless and hairy with grasping, pale, sliver-like tentacles longer than my body that shot out from its edges, trying to wrap around us.
And that took ?subrand’s boot repeatedly to what I guessed was its face instead. And when that didn’t work, the prince snarled, “Hold on,” at me and pulled his sword again. He carved his way through half a dozen whipping white strands, including four that had grabbed his foot and tethered us in place.
The white goo they contained splattered us in the process and burned like phosphorus, glowing in pale patches on our armor and eating through his sword blade, causing him to curse and drop it. But the goo was defeated by our dragonscale, although mine had to build up my breastplate to keep it from getting through. Causing my gauntlets to disappear, as their strength was needed elsewhere.
And that was just one monster!
Others were down there, but my brain was too freaked out to register them as anything but claws, strange appendages, and teeth. I realized I’d started giving off some half-strangled screams, which would have been stupid, except they already knew where we were. And it would have made me feel pathetic if ?subrand hadn’t been doing it, too.
The perfect fey prince was making what he would probably describe as manly grunts if we survived this, but which sounded more like the shrieks of a little girl. And I was not going to say a goddamned thing about it, not if I lived to be two hundred, which was looking freaking doubtful. Because he was shrieking and fighting, and I was just shrieking.
I couldn’t do anything else as I was dead out of power, except to hope those things couldn’t leap this high!
And they couldn’t, maybe because six-foot-deep mud is a crap launching pad. Or because this side of the little lake was taller than the other, making it a big jump. Or because Pritkin and whoever was helping him were pulling like their lives depended on it, or at least like ours did.
We finally topped the rise after what felt like hours but was probably only seconds, and I found myself snatched up and thrown over Alphonse’s beefy shoulder. The light was a little better here, allowing me a quick flash of some ruined stone steps, cracked and broken and vine-strewn, of a dilapidated raised platform that looked like the one the musicians had been using but obviously wasn’t, and of a single, rusted sword, lying on a step and half buried in dust. And that was all I saw, as Alphonse was motivated .
I didn’t know if Pritkin had had time to tell him what was back there, but he certainly ran like all the demons in hell were after him.
“To the right!” Pritkin called as the strange green light went out, and a pack of braying somethings tore around the side of the lake—the rest of the bastards who hadn’t jumped in, I guessed. But now, they were after us.
“I will hold them off,” ?subrand said because he apparently had not been paying attention.
“Yeah, for half a second. You’ll be eaten!” Alphonse snarled, and I nodded vigorously.
It was all I could do, as the bastard had half choked me.
“You have a better idea?” the prince snapped.
“Run faster,” Pritkin said grimly, and they did, with magic enhancing their already impressive speed to the point that we were practically flying. Only that wasn’t as easy as it sounded.
There was stuff in the way everywhere: a mountain of tumbled rocks and dirt where it looked like an avalanche had descended from the heights above; pieces of wood from the nicer seating for the nobles, or whatever it had been used for in this time, which was half tumbled down and had a single ragged banner blowing in the breeze; and vines growing everywhere and covering the half of the lakebed closest to the water source, which looked like a dark jungle.
Even worse, some of the vines had climbed the surrounding stone pillars and hung in festoons, draping themselves between columns. And while many were as thick around as my arm and easy enough to see even in the darkness, others were deadly little rope-like things that could catch a neck if you weren’t careful and, at this speed, hang a person in mid-air. Like that, I thought, as one snared ?subrand, who was saved from decapitation by his gorget but who lost his footing, tumbling to the ground.
Pritkin pulled him back up while simultaneously sending a fireball ahead of us. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t send it the other way, and then I realized that it was too small to do us much good on offense. But it could burn through the hanging mass ahead, clearing a path.
And it did a pretty good job. Vines went up in garlands of fire before crumbling to dust, while others on the peripheries continued to burn, lighting us up for our pursuers. However, that hardly mattered now that they had our scent, and at least we could run. Only I didn’t know where to until I spied something up ahead that looked familiar.
“We’re headed . . . back there?” I croaked. “To the tunnels?”
“It’s Bodil’s fiefdom,” Pritkin reminded me. “She said she could hold it.”
Well, I damned well hoped she was right! Although it didn’t look like we were going to find out. The creatures chasing us moved like the wind and were almost on top of us already, prompting Pritkin to yell, “Go! Get her out!” and turn back around.
And me to start fighting, and Alphonse to start cursing, and ?subrand to spin on a dime to join a helpless cause because they could not win this! Or even buy us enough time for their sacrifice to matter! And they couldn’t have, at least not alone.
But they weren’t alone; they were on the territory of a seriously pissed-off demigoddess who had decided to show what she could do. And I guessed that all those tunnels Pritkin and I had fought our way through must have been directly beneath all this. Because suddenly, it was as if they were trying to come out of the ground.
All of them.
All at once.
What felt like an eight on the Richter scale hit, causing the dirt to crack and the massive stone pillars to calve, splinter, and break. And topple over to meet the cascade of boulders bouncing down the surrounding cliffs to join the fun. Only it wasn’t.
It wasn’t fun at all.
Alphonse fell into a fissure that opened under his feet and only grabbed the edge at the last second, allowing him to launch us back out again before a pillar slammed into it, filling it up. ?subrand flipped over a boulder almost as large as he was, dodged another, and was nearly taken down by one of the creatures until a rock the size of a car crushed the life out of it. And Pritkin must have found and enchanted some more discarded weapons because a sword and a wicked-looking knife were now fighting a rearguard action on their own.
None of which would matter in a moment because the mountain was about to come down on our heads!
Or go up, I thought, blinking, as a mass of stones and dirt took that moment to erupt from the newly created fissures, spewing multiple stories into the air. And making me wonder how the hell this was supposed to be helping us, Bodil! Only it was.
I wrenched my abused neck half off, looking behind us, and saw something that resembled a beaded curtain explode out of one of the longer fissures. Only those weren’t beads. They were jagged pieces of rock blasting outward at bullet-like speeds, and they took a toll on our pursuers, the leaders of which foolishly tried to run straight through.
Limbs were slashed, bodies were pierced, and although these things healed quickly with demon magic behind them, it wasn’t quick enough. Not when the leaders had just run into what was essentially a meat grinder, although how Bodil was doing this, I didn’t know. She wasn’t supposed to have earth magic!
And then I understood when the rock eruptions suddenly changed into something else. I realized it wasn’t the tunnels causing the explosions after all but muddy geysers flooding through every fissure with enough force to send the soil and rock above them flying. And then came the water, in sparkling vertical rivers that were clean now and shooting up twenty stories or more into the air from the immense pressure behind them.
I felt spray hit me from the rain created when all that water started pelting back down, and it was hard enough to sting. But I barely noticed through the cracking sounds going on everywhere, the boulders falling from the cliffs above and bouncing around us, and the leaping, scale-covered thing that came at us from the side, screeching. Only to encounter a razor-thin fissure that opened up beneath its feet—
And cut it in half.
It fell neatly into two horrible pieces, and my mind started gibbering. Shut up! I thought because this was no time to lose it. Not with blood and rain falling everywhere and thin blades of water spurting up without warning, doing what steel could not and slicing and dicing through the horde behind us.
But they didn’t slice enough. Or maybe there were just too many creatures back there. Despite the roar of the water and the rumbling of the stone, I could hear them howling, chittering, and screeching from all directions as more came running.
Not that they needed more, as the dozens pursuing us had barely broken stride, ignoring their losses and staying on the hunt.
The moon took that moment to come out from behind some clouds and flood the scene with light. Giving me a clear view for the first time: of toppling black pillars, each larger than the biggest obelisk, shattering against the ground; of shooting silver geysers, now spearing skyward all around us; of what looked like every demon in hell being slammed by the first and bisected by the second. And in one case, shot straight in the face by a geyser that erupted sideways from the cliff face and sent something with scales and bat wings flying over the lakebed, like a belt from a giant’s fist.
And yet, it still wasn’t enough. They kept coming, dodging, twisting, and trampling the sundered bodies of their kind as if they were just more debris on the field. We were almost to our goal, but suddenly, we were out of time.
Until a crazy redhead jumped out of the mouth of the tunnel that Pritkin and I had escaped from and threw up a shield.
It was a shitty one because she was drained, and it had to cover a lot of territory. So it didn’t repel the thousand jagged pieces the cliff was shedding or the bodies slamming into it at top speed. It trapped them instead, leaving them to punch inward at us like a bunch of heavyweight boxers fighting through a cloth.
But it was heavy-duty cloth, and Alphonse was an old hand at dodging blows.
He ducked and whirled and danced through the line-up and then threw the two of us into the tunnel entrance and utter darkness, so hard that we tumbled halfway down the incline before I managed to free myself and start back up. Because Pritkin was still back there! Only to have that son of a bitch grab my ankle.
“Let me go!”
“Make me.”
Goddamnit!
But then everyone was coming, Enid running past with her long hair streaming out behind her, looking like a gray ghost in the eerie light from outside. Pritkin supporting ?subrand, who was bleeding from a head wound but somehow still alive. And then a crap ton of dirt, rubble, and larger stones came bouncing in behind them, enough that they had Alphonse throwing himself over me as what felt like the entire mountain finally did what it had been threatening.
And came down on our heads.