Chapter 28
The excrescences had been driven deep, the north side of the mountain now scarred with at least two mineshafts full of poisonous cold iron. In the close fungal-scarred tunnels they festered; he moved through methodically, reaping a harvest of death.
Their defense was truly desperate before the highly flammable spawning grounds, but not nearly enough.
Mistform was peculiarly suited to this manner of extermination—it could not properly be called a battle, so very one-sided, and neither could it be named a hunt for he took nothing from them but their half-vegetable lives.
The peculiar blue flame needed for cleansing was mildly dangerous to fledglings, a nuisance to elders, and almost an afterthought for daywalkers. It was said an Archon could dance across lava at bright noon and take no damage, and some part of Lukas wondered if he would ever try such a thing.
Unlikely. And yet.
Though they spent the majority of their time below, the greiben were sensitive to solar cycles—torpid during the day, more active at night.
Dusk arrived as he was in the deepest part of the warrens, the last spawning field exploding in noisome liquid spatters as piled, green-glowing eggs popped, flooding the flames with fresh mucus-thick fuel.
Nearly formed greiben-nymphs writhed, dead before birth.
The only problem was keeping a specimen of proper size alive, since both juveniles and elders were reckless in defense of the eggs.
Victory was a foregone conclusion, though a messy one, and he had to make a final circuit of the spawning ground while holding a desperate, nearly roasted greiben by its skinny scruff, ignoring its scrawny windmilling limbs and attempts to crack its own spine, twisting to bite the intruder despite mistform’s refusal of such maneuvers.
An occasional shake to settle the hissing, desperate thing sufficed.
Perhaps he was a little more savage than necessary, but better that than the alternative. And the battle might even have fractionally blunted the rage burning in his bones, both the thrall and his own temper increasingly uneasy.
The more he mulled, the more irritating the entire situation became.
Finally he swept upward in mistform, every sense scanning for lone survivors.
Only two had escaped his dive into the netherworld, one far less charred than what he held, so he killed the hapless extraneous with vicious efficiency, taking his new hostage up with a warning shake.
Rising, rising more, smoke and the terrible rumble of a sanguinant’s killing rage reverberating in every cavern, along every large or oozing-thin passageway.
Now all he had to do was hope she had not rid herself of the greisoul, and this little green rag would sniff her out no matter the hour. If Lukas was wrong, he would simply have to hunt her at night...but why would she flee so far northward unless she meant to make a visit in this vicinity?
Let me be right. Let her be safe, and whole.
And nearby.
The excrescence’s struggles intensified as the surface approached.
Lukas did not throttle his own growl; bouncing, overlapping echoes would warn him of any twitching survivors, just as mistform’s sensitivity to living heat would catch those too wounded to flee yet still clinging to some manner of existence.
He had done his work thoroughly, and in good time.
He wheeled through a pillared forest of stalactite and stalagmite, cathedral-crafted over geologic ages by dripping water—a process close enough to calcification as to slightly unnerve him.
The stiffness was already invading, mentally and physically; with a bonded leman’s absence from their sanguinant, the ossification returned swiftly, galloping where before it had crept.
A flutter of acceleration, the greiben struggling with the enhanced strength of a creature which knows its own survival deeply in question, and he searched the higher tunnels swiftly, finally coalescing in the throat of a vast worm-hole chewed into the rock.
The stink was immense, titanic, and he ignored it just as the struggles of the lone survivor.
Outside the warrens, the wind had mounted. At the end of this tunnel, past a tangle of confusingly braided dead-end passages meant to trap outside creatures and alert the greiben to their presence, was a familiar black mouth half-hidden in shrubbery upon the mountain’s southern slope.
Lukas listened for a few moments, predatory instinct alive with warning, and finally decided he had fully cleansed the infection. Thin runnels of caustic smoke would solidify into poison char or escape the warrens in shreds through entrances like this one, vanishing into the maw of a winter storm.
He was about to shake the struggling, scrawny child-sized creature into quiescence and give it to understand its task, but a soft, almost-inaudible note intruded upon the sough and groan of moving air.
A sweetly familiar rhythm, indeed.
No. Not possible. Once more he was luckier than any soul upon the tired earth could possibly be—or creeping age had decided to swallow him whole, and he was hallucinating after a last paroxysm of violence.
The whispering speed impelled him to the heart of the trap-passages, and a single breath of clean, fresh outside air swept past, pushed by some vagary of atmosphere or physics.
And upon it rode a trace of lovely warm fragrance, musk and tenderness, silken hair and large, mistrustful gold-threaded eyes. A hint of burning, a splash of cold rainwater, and the wicked warm honey of arousal, whether fear or something else.
He burst from the entrance into a tangle of vines, underbrush, and trees tossing their arms as the night combed a dark, gorge-ridden mountainside.
A convulsive movement broke the greiben in his hands, for at the edge of a small clearing a familiar shape stood, head upflung like a startled doe, her curls lifting in a bewitching, shining mass and a green gem upon her breast.
Her scent burst upon him again, stripping away creeping numbness. Lukas was suddenly aware of half-frozen water sluicing from the sky, the mountain whistling and rushing as it bathed.
Beatrice’s lush, tender mouth moved slightly. The Gift burned in her, the grace and control of sanguinant merely polishing what had existed before. She whirled, plunging into the trees, a dryad surprised in primeval forest.
Lukas dropped the crushed rag of last, hapless greiben, and bolted after her.