Chapter Sixteen. The First Monster.
Sixteen
The First Monster.
Merc’s got to be dead by now.
Hot with alarm, I’m pacing at the pool’s edge, as if any movement of mine can help him. It’s been too long, far, far too long. Even though I’ve always nervously avoided water, I know that breath is limited, and that’s before you add in the effort of arms and legs—
A bubbling sound gets my attention, and I pivot to the water.
Air is escaping from somewhere and rising to agitate the surface, and I think of that day a man horrifically fell off the moat bridge.
He was immediately captured by a balas in a thrash, rolled under the water, and then … nothing but bubbles.
I crouch down with my little knife, and tell myself to dive in.
The waves come next, the pool coming alive with—
A two-headed monster explodes up in a tidal rush, coming right at me.
With a scream, I leap out of range, and it’s as I slam into the slimy wall that I decipher the churning, twisting mass before me.
Not a two-headed beast, no. Merc and a balas are in mortal combat, their bodies locked against each other, the snapping jaws of the animal looking for purchase, the man’s arms bulging with muscle as he attempts to control the fight.
They land in a tangle at my feet and the balas begins to roll, the thick, spiked tail thrashing and slapping as it attempts to get Merc on the bottom.
Later, I’ll wonder what threw me into action, but in the moment, I swear to the crescent moon that there are no conscious thoughts.
I jump around them, stash my useless knife, and go for Merc’s broadsword.
With the knobby, tough hide of the balas, the only hope we have is something as heavy, as sharp, as that weapon.
The sickening sounds of solid mass slamming into the tunnel floor spur me on, but I’m unprepared for the sword’s ungainly weight.
The thing is heavy as a mountain, and all I’m trying to do is get it out of the holster.
Sinking down into my thighs, I throw my back into the effort.
The hilt’s textured grip bites into my palms, and nothing shifts.
At first. The instant the blade starts to give way, I stamp a foot on the strapping and yank, yank, yank—
The broadsword bursts out of its leather cage like a beast released, but I can’t straighten, the weapon tethering the upper half of me to the ground—and the folly of my impulse becomes clear as the balas pins Merc once again.
The animal’s black and mucky green scales eat the torchlight, and when I heave at the weapon, I end up tossing myself right into the thrashing tail.
My legs are swept out from under me and I land on my shoulder—
The balas’s craggy head turns on me and its jaws snap with a terrible sound, the fence of enormous yellowed teeth locking shut—
“Give … me … the … sword…”
Merc’s own teeth are like his attacker’s, gritted in the midst of his fierce battle to kill another living thing before he himself is done in. Jumping to my feet, I do my best to drag the broadsword closer, but I’m dodging rear claws and that vicious spiked tail.
The balas’s fangs flash back and forth between us, and every time the jaws open, I focus on the pink meat of its mouth. If Merc lets go to grab the hilt, assuming I can even get over to him, he’s going to be a meal—
The beast bangs him into the wall, then throws him at me. As Merc lands at my feet in a crumple, his body goes lax—and without thinking, I look him square in the face.
I don’t meet his eyes, for they roll back into his head.
The balas lets out a hiss of triumph and focuses on me, opening that maw.
Between one blink and the next, I see what to do. My hands release the broadsword’s handle, and move carefully to the sharp blade itself. Taking it flat between my palms, I wedge the hilt against a catch on the floor, tilt the sharp tip upward, and get the angle right.
That beast is going to lunge at me with its mouth open.
And I’m going to feed it one hell of a dinner.
“Come on, you bastard! Bite me!”
The ripple up its spine announces the moment of attack, and as I scream at a high pitch, I find a flow of energy, and do my best to hold steady. My control isn’t going to last long, and if I get the angle wrong—
Our eyes lock, and my lungs jerk an inhale as those oblong pupils suck me in. The moment of the balas’s death imprints on my mind—
Not how it dies. Not with me and the broadsword.
As the vision overtakes me, the weapon slips free of its catch on the tunnel floor and clatters off to the side.
The balas has an expert predator’s sense of space and timing, and comes right at my head—but as I’ve been pulling back on the weapon, when it goes out, so do I, my momentum to the rear carrying me off my feet.
Those jaws snap closed on thin air—
My hard landing stuns me and my vision dims. When it returns, Merc’s somehow back in the fight. He’s got hands under the balas’s lower jaw, his arms vibrating as he holds off all those teeth again while trying to get the beast away from me—
My little knife finds my hand, and I jump to my feet, the vision I just witnessed laying clear my strategy: Two running leaps. Then like a varthig, I am airborne and full of vengeance. Now I know exactly what I’m doing.
The little blade knows, too.
The moat’s beast and I are suddenly face-to-face, and just as my premonition showed me, the tip of my knife pierces the balas’s left eye.
My trajectory along with my propulsion does most of the work to drive the blade deep into the socket, but somehow, I manage to flip my body around and straddle its nape.
Pulling back with both hands, the hilt of the knife becomes the pommel on a saddle as the balas lets out a roar of pain and rears up.
Ducking, so I’m not knocked out by the ceiling, I ride the monster’s knobby body, while beneath us, Merc’s arm stretches out.
The broadsword finds home in his palm as if called.
With what must be the last of his strength, he hefts the impossible weight, and his expression is one of pure vengeance as he stabs the balas through the throat.
Instinctively, I release my hands and leap free. I don’t know if the broadsword can come out the back of the skull, but I don’t want to find out—
Crack!
The sound is as loud as an axe splitting dried hardwood, and for a heartbeat, I have no idea what could have made such a noise.
Then the pain in my head registers and all I can do is lie where I land in a heap, an odd numbness replacing the feeling in my limbs, my stomach flip-flopping, my eyes shifting over to the balas while they struggle to focus.
Merc is still under the gruesome blanket of the beast, and he turns his head slowly to me. His black hair is a tangled halo around his face, which is flushed from effort and stained with green and red blood, what is leaking out of the balas mixing with what’s in his own veins.
As I barely remember to avoid his eyes in time, I have a thought that I’ll recall this scene always. Assuming we get out of here alive—
It dawns on me that his lips are moving like he’s speaking to me, and I try to respond.
I don’t have any idea what’s coming out of my mouth.
Then my lids grow too heavy to hold up, and everything starts to dim, what I see, how I breathe, what pain I feel, as if the numbness is an infection taking over my flesh.
The last thing that registers as I lose consciousness is the two blades: my smaller one in the beast’s eye, the tip of Merc’s far larger weapon extending out the back of the head.
It’s exactly what I saw as I stared into those oblong pupils for that moment, and I know that Merc would have died without my effort.
It’s satisfying to think even a mercenary could be helped by someone as insignificant as myself.
We’re a good team, all things considered.