40. Cut by Cut
Cut by Cut
The gryphon was a few feet behind him as Kain went back up the slope. He could see the cliffs looming above, and two things came to him at once.
The thing couldn’t change direction well. That was one. The other was that he had more tools waiting at the camp.
As he came up to the nearest of the cliffs he heard it coming at his back. He put on what he had left, and threw himself sideways at the last step. The gryphon smashed straight into the stone. Cracks burst up the cliff face.
A few large stones came down. One took the gryphon on the back. One caught it across the head.
It staggered, and Kain went in and put the edge of his sword into the brisket. The thing howled and lashed out, and the claws caught his leather breastplate.
The armor held. Just barely.
The blow knocked him backward and he felt it in his ribs, the old place. The gryphon shook its head and stalked toward him, hissing.
Ghost came up from the side, teeth bared, and cut its angle just before striking, staying out of reach of the beak. The beak snapped shut on empty air, and Kain had his opening.
He lunged in. He took the side of the gryphon’s neck with the edge, then pulled himself back out of reach.
The beak nearly caught him on the way. He was an instant ahead of it.
Ghost did the same trick again. And again. Kain landed another cut across the front leg, and another along the chest.
None of it was slowing the thing down much yet. But cuts were cuts, and they added up. He had done harder jobs cut by cut before.
He set his jaw and gave ground as the gryphon began to stalk him slow.
It stretched its wings, trying to make itself bigger, the way a thing does when it wants you to give up.
The left wing only opened part way. Shorter than the last time it had tried it.
The poison Sasha had given him was getting on with its work.
Kain watched it. It was moving slower now, but not from the poison. It was measuring him.
It had tried more than once to kill him by now, and a thing like this wasn’t used to a man who wouldn’t stay killed.
It reared and threw itself. Kain went sideways into the dirt, came back up, and ran for the pines.
It came after him snarling. It tore through the branches like they were paper as Kain wrapped around the side of the ridge toward his camp.
His foot slipped on pine needles and he started to fall. He caught at a low limb and dragged himself under the nearest pine. The gryphon turned and snapped at him, and the beak took a branch as thick as his arm clean through.
So it could sever a limb. Holloway’s book had said as much. Good to know.
Kain came out the other side of the pine, scrambling, and the gryphon tore at the tree behind him, going through it in a temper. The whole trunk came down with a crash. The thing leapt the ruined tree, found him, and came on.
He was close to the camp now. He needed an instant of empty woods. As the feet hammered behind him he caught a trunk and swung himself the wrong way from the camp.
The gryphon went past at speed and began to wheel that way, looking for him.
He dropped, slid behind a low patch of brush, and slipped back across into the trees on the other side. He heard the gryphon snarling and tearing the forest apart, looking. It didn’t find him.
He came on the ring of boulders and dove inside even as he heard the thing starting to come his way.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s be quick about this.”
He took up the flint and struck a few sparks. The tinder he had laid caught at once, and the small fire grew under his hands.
The gryphon slowed as it came up to the boulders. Its feet thudded against the ground. It growled, low.
Kain stayed where he was as it brushed up against the stone. A wing tip showed over the top, and it snarled again.
Then he heard it sniffing.
It knew something was wrong. It didn’t know what. The fire grew, and Kain set a torch into it.
The dry oily wood caught, and he rose, torch in one hand, sword in the other.
The gryphon let out a roar and spun. Claws drove into the rock, and it hauled itself up to the top of the boulders. It looked down at him, and Kain came up with the torch.
The fire burst into the gryphon’s face in a flare of sparks and smoke. It shrieked and threw itself back, and Kain pressed out of the camp after it.
He thrust the torch again. The thing scrambled away.
Ghost came in low from behind. The gryphon screeched and beat its wings. It rose a few feet off the ground and stumbled, and Kain went in with the torch a third time and put the blade into the left leg.
The steel went deep, and the poison rode it down into the wound. The gryphon’s scream came out of the gut and not the throat.
The beast spun, and its haunches caught Kain square across the chest. The world went up and his back hit a tree. He slid down it to the ground.
The gryphon limped around to face him. It hissed, and the jaws snapped.
“Come on,” Kain said. His whole body ached. Not a piece of him wanted to stand. “Move.”
He drove himself up as the gryphon struck again. He went sideways. The beak slammed into the trunk with enough force to crack it through, and the tree came down.
He thrust the torch out. He tried to.
There was no torch in his hand. He must have lost it when the haunches took him. The gryphon swung around, and Kain set his stance with the sword.
It snarled, and charged. He went sideways and slashed as it went past, and he couldn’t tell if he had hit.
He came up to find the thing on top of him, raking. Talons hammered the ground around him.
Something caught him in the leg. It glanced off the armor, but the force of it ran up into his hip like the leg had been broken clean.
Ghost snarled and leapt. It sailed over Kain’s head and locked its teeth into a wing, and hung there a long moment with its weight pulling the wing down.
The gryphon spun and lashed out and flung the wolf clear. Ghost bounced off the ground and rolled, and came to rest about thirty feet off.
Kain got his feet under him. The gryphon turned for the fallen wolf, beak opening, and Kain set his teeth and charged.
He raised the sword and brought it down into the haunches of the thing.
The edge scored deep. The gryphon wheeled, and this time he was ready and rolled clear.
Blood went out across the ground in a dark splash. The thing hissed and shifted its weight off both rear legs at once.
Kain looked over to Ghost.
The wolf didn’t rise. It didn’t move.
He would have time to grieve later. There was a job to finish.
The gryphon stamped its feet and held him with its one eye. He had no count of how many passes they had made at each other by now. It was bleeding. So was he.
Smoke came on the air.
Kain looked sideways. The torch he had dropped had caught the undergrowth, the pine needles and the dry leaves and the dead branches, and a small fire was racing along the ground.
The lead flames were as high as a man’s knee. The sun had gone down on the other side of the ridge while they fought. He hadn’t noticed. The fire was lighting the trees up now in a way that said how much it had darkened around them.
He turned and ran for it.
He went straight through. A fire of that kind would burn a man for an instant, but if he could take that instant, he came out the other side.
He landed on the charred side and turned.
The fire was between them now. Smoke filled his lungs and burned at the back of his throat.
The gryphon stamped its feet and drew back from the flames. It opened its wings part way, sizing the line, weighing whether it could clear it.
It knew the same thing he did. It was hurting.
“Come on,” Kain said. “Take the chance.”
The gryphon hesitated. Then it began to walk uphill along the line of the fire, looking to come around it.
He couldn’t let it take that turn.
He went forward and put a kick into the leading edge of the blaze, hard, the way a man kicks a banked drift. The fire was crawling on dry needles and dry leaves, and the kick took a heap of burning matter into the air.
The flurry burst into the gryphon’s face and made it close the eye it had. Kain put the sword across the side of its neck.
The cut went deep. Not deep enough. Blood ran down the feathers and into the fire and hissed.
The gryphon, blind for the moment and full of fury, came forward through the kicked flames. Its shoulder struck Kain in the chest. He went back through the fire and hit the ground on the other side and rolled, and slammed against the trunk of a pine, and stopped there.
The fire ran above him along the slope, growing. The gryphon stood in the middle of it now and shrieked and screeched. Its wings came up.
Kain set his teeth.
“No,” he said.
The wings beat down hard, two beats, three. Burning leaves and burning needles lifted off the slope and went out into the trees on the wind of them. They came down where they came down. Small fires sprang up in a dozen places.
The dry forest took the gift.
In short order the slope around them was going up.
The gryphon backed and shook its head, set back by what it had done. Kain forced himself up. His body wouldn’t stop telling him what had been done to it.
He picked up a length of burning branch off the ground.
With what he had left, he came up the slope at it.
The gryphon was wild now, with smoke in its lungs and fire all round, and it turned its head and found him. He thrust the burning branch out in front of him. The thing snarled and came around.
Both wings flashed wide. A wide-range sweep. He tried to drop under it.
Something caught his left arm. Hard.
The blow lifted him off his feet and sent him sideways through the air. He hit and rolled, and slammed into something harder, and the world went black.
It took him longer than he wanted to figure out that the world was black because his face was in the dirt. He pushed at the ground.