Chapter 23 #2
The Oathmaiden did not pause, reaching down to scoop Fern up with one hand. In another two strides, she reached Bucket, tossed the rattkin over his back sideways, and seized his bridle with her newly freed hand to wheel him around.
Fern scrabbled frantically for the loose straps of leather still buckled to the horse and found herself staring into Kell’s shocked gaze for a surreal split second, his maul forgotten in both hands.
Zyll landed on Bucket’s back beside her with a puff of breath and an angry, “Luffing shunks!”
Then they were moving, plunging through the thickening snow. Astryx tangled her hands in Bucket’s mane and wound her boot into the remains of his cart harness, dragging herself up so that she clung alongside the barrel of his chest.
Fern looked past Bucket’s head and the fog of his heavy breath. Tullah waited on the bridge before them, the top of her ruined axe still in hand, her face set in a snarl.
The horse shifted to pass the orc on her left, and as he did, Astryx pressed herself away from his side with a knee, slipping the blood-slick Elder Blade from under her arm. With no time to turn him blade-first, she drove the starburst pommel left-handed, directly at Tullah’s shoulder.
The combined force of Bucket’s gallop and the Oathmaiden’s strike spun the orc off her feet and face-first onto the snowy stone. The elf grunted and almost lost her grip on her horse’s mane, but held on.
And they were past, speeding over the last strides of the bridge and into the heavier snow beyond.
Fern felt Zyll drop away, snatching Breadlee from the bookseller’s nerveless fingers as she did.
“What are you doing?” she cried, struggling to look back the way they’d come.
“By the fucking Eight,” snarled Astryx.
It was the first and only time Fern ever heard the elf swear in Territories.
With a cluck of the tongue, the Oathmaiden brought Bucket to a skidding halt and struggled to untangle her boot from the wreckage of his tack.
Fern worked herself up to a sitting position, using her tail for balance as she watched the goblin dash back through the snow directly toward Tullah, her pocketed coat flapping behind her like the Territory’s ugliest flag, Breadlee clutched in one hand.
“Hey, hey, you’re going the wrong way!” wailed the knife.
The orc had found her knees and was staggering upright just as Zyll dropped to hers on the stone of the bridge. Breadlee flashed as she held him high, blade pointed down, then she drove him with all her might into the crevice between two massive blocks of stone.
He plunged in up to the hilt.
The goblin dug into a blue pocket with one hand—improbably to the elbow—then withdrew a long-handled metal soup ladle.
Tullah paused in absolute confusion as Zyll cocked the ladle back, then hammered the knife’s hilt with it, producing a resounding, ear-bruising SPANG.
The sound that followed was loud, out of all proportion to what should have been possible, with a harmonic resonance buried inside it that seemed to build and build and build, reverberating between the peaks.
Tullah found her scowl again and began to advance.
Another arrow whistled through the air, blown off course and missing Zyll by only inches.
Kell and Marv both tried to catch up to Tullah, sprinting and stumbling respectively.
Then a terrible crack thundered through the canyon, and everyone stopped moving at once.
Snow sifted down in ragged curtains from the two towers at the end of the bridge. White powder suddenly seethed along the blocks of stone nearest the knife.
Zyll yanked Breadlee free and backed away, just as a long, dark line appeared horizontally in front of her feet.
From edge to edge, a section of the bridge three strides long dropped several inches as though it had been hammered from above by an invisible sledge.
Tullah began backpedaling, then turned and sprinted flat out.
The stone fell away all at once with a sound like an avalanche. Blocks the size of lockboxes tumbled into the chasm amidst snow and crumbled granite as their end of the bridge collapsed.
The far side, which Tullah and her crew still occupied, groaned as grit dribbled and blew away from its underbelly, held aloft only by one pillar still supporting the midpoint.
Fern watched in amazement as Zyll hurried back toward the horse with Breadlee in one hand and her mouth set in a line of grim satisfaction, red eyes blazing.
Another arrow buried itself in the snow just short of them.
Along the ragged gap in the bridge, Tullah paced back and forth like a thwarted cat, fury in every line of her body, while her crew gathered at a safer distance from the edge.
As Zyll arrived, wading through snow up to her knees, Astryx stared down at her. The elf’s right hand was wrapped around her belly to hold her bloody side, and her left used Nigel’s crimson-streaked length as a crutch.
They regarded each other for a long moment marked only by the wind in the mountains and the ghost of a metallic whine.
Astryx opened her mouth to speak—
—and then her fingers slipped slowly off the Elder Blade’s hilt, and she collapsed in the snow.