40. Cut by Cut #2
Pain came out of his left shoulder and his left arm together, and dropped him back down. He kept the sound of it behind his teeth. He worked his right hand under his chest and pushed up that way.
The left arm hung at his side. The joint of it had come out. The wing had taken it clean.
He didn’t look at it. He lifted his eyes to the creature instead.
“It’s time to end this,” he said.
「Combat Readiness: Engaged」
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The gryphon stood maybe fifty feet off, still inside the ring of fire. By now the fires were one thing along the slope, a moving wall of light and heat where the trees had been.
Kain came to his feet slow. The world tilted once and steadied.
The ground ahead had burned through already, where the flames had passed and the embers had cooled enough to walk on. Black under his boots. The smoke was thick.
He coughed once and kept moving.
Reaching for the bow on his shoulder, he came on the small problem.
His left arm wasn’t doing anything.
The bow went onto the snapped fork of a branch sticking out of a charred tree, where he could find it again. No sense in carrying what he couldn’t use.
Two bamboo arrows came out of the quiver instead. Both still in their full coats of Sasha’s compound. He held them tight in his right hand, points forward, the way a man holds a knife.
The gryphon was through the crackle and the smoke. The flames in front of him hid the sound of his step. He went through the last of them at a run.
The gryphon spun toward him as he came through. The good eye locked on him. The other side of its face was a dark mess and a broken stub of shaft, slick with blood and smoke.
He drove both arrows up into the soft of the neck, just under the beak, with all his weight behind them.
The scream that came out of it was the same tearing sound it had made when the first arrow took the eye, only worse. He pressed the arrows deeper. The beak swung down and took him across the shoulder.
The blow knocked him sideways. He went off his feet and hit the ground hard, jarring the left arm where it hung.
The pain came up through the joint and through his teeth. He kept the sound behind them.
The beak struck the dirt where he’d been. He was already moving.
The sword came across his body, drawn with his right hand. The grip was good.
Coming up, he scored the side of the gryphon’s face that didn’t have the shaft in it, and gave ground back into the smoke.
The gryphon screeched. It tried to follow, beat its wings once at the air, found smoke and nothing to lock on, and stamped its feet.
Kain ducked behind the trunk of a burning tree and went around it the other way. The smoke and the dark would hide him for a while.
The gryphon couldn’t see well on the best of days now. The smoke had taken its scent too. Sight gone. Scent gone.
The beast thundered off in another direction, snarling.
He watched it go.
Out in the dark, away from the fire and away from anything he could use as a tool, the gryphon would have it back. Night was its element.
Most of it was bird, and birds owned the dark of their own forest the way men didn’t.
Letting it get clear wasn’t an option.
Kain went after it, his body telling him every place it had taken a hit since the sun was up. The adrenaline of the last hour was leaving him in pieces.
That was going to be a problem.
He followed the trail. The gryphon wasn’t trying to hide. The branches it had broken hung the wrong way along its path, and the ground showed where its talons had gone in.
Easy enough to read, the way a hurt animal is.
Something cold hit the side of his face.
He stopped, looked up, and felt it again. Then a third, on the bridge of his nose. He hadn’t been watching the sky.
He’d been busy.
Rain.
He looked up through the dark of the canopy and could just make out, where the smoke hadn’t closed it off, the lower edge of cloud. The first heavier drops were coming down out of it.
They hissed when they hit the burning trunks behind him. Where they landed on the embers along the trail, a small puff of steam came up, no larger than a breath.
The forest was about to stop burning. The forest knew it before he did.
He kept moving.
Ahead of him, the gryphon had come to a stop in a clearing.
It had turned and put its back to a stand of saplings and crouched there, the way a wounded thing does that doesn’t want to be flanked.
The moon wasn’t up yet, and what light there was came in orange through the trees from the slope behind, and the first pale edge of moon coming through where the cloud was starting to break.
Kain stepped off the trail.
He picked up a stone the size of his fist and tossed it underhand down the path behind him, off into the brush.
The clatter of it brought the gryphon up. It came forward at the sound, claws gouging the ground, head turning to hunt the source.
As it passed where Kain had stepped off, he came in low and drove the sword across its ribs.
The blade glanced off bone. He opened a long line down the side of it just the same.
The thing was thin under the skin, more thin than he’d thought it would be. The cuts had been doing work he couldn’t see.
The gryphon spun, lashing out. He went backward, caught a heel on a log, and went down on his back with the arm folded under him.
The blow he’d been waiting for came over him instead of into him. The gryphon leapt the place he’d been standing and crashed into the trunk of a tree past him, wings shattering the lower limbs.
The beak took a hand-thick branch through and tore a chunk of wood loose. The trunk groaned, leaned, and came down past Kain’s head into the wet leaves.
Its rear claws planted in the dirt next to his ear. He could see the inches of black talon there, the curve of them, the way they would go through a man.
He raised the sword.
The point drove forward into the gap behind the rear claws. Into the cord that runs down the back of the leg between the heel and the meat above it.
He didn’t know what the bookmen called it. He knew what it did when it went.
The point went in clean. The gryphon leapt forward to get at him, and it did the cutting for him.
There was a sound from inside the leg, not loud but distinct. The kind of sound a bowstring makes when it goes.
The gryphon staggered, the leg under it gave, and the thing stumbled out into the clearing and went down on its side, howling.
Rain was coming harder now. The drops were finding the gaps between the smoke and the canopy.
They hit the gryphon’s open wing where the membrane was already torn and ran through. They hit Kain’s face and ran down the back of his neck under the collar.
He got back to his feet.
The gryphon was thrashing in the clearing on its side, kicking with the leg that still worked, beating at the dirt with its wings. The leg with the cut cord wouldn’t hold weight.
It tried it once, and twice, and the third time it lay still on its side and screamed at the trees.
Kain set the sword down at his feet and drew another bamboo arrow.
No bow to string it on. He held it the way he’d held the first pair, point forward, and took two steps in past the kicking wing, then drove it down hard at the place where the front leg ran into the shoulder.
The arrow hit and stuck. Not deep. He’d no bow behind it. Maybe an inch of point in the meat.
It looked thin and useless there.
Then the gryphon, in its thrashing, rolled half onto it.
The shaft drove. The body weight took it in. By the time the gryphon rolled the other way a foot of bamboo was inside the shoulder, and the snap of the shaft breaking off at the skin was its own small sound.
Kain picked up the sword.
The gryphon went still for a moment, breathing hard. Its head came up. The good eye was wild and the lid of it was pulling back.
It looked at him without seeing him, then past him, and lifted itself up on its front legs and twisted its head left and right, hunting through the rain.
He stood still while it looked. It didn’t find him.
Something came through the trees behind it.
He heard the sound before he saw the shape. The low gait of something running on four legs through wet pine needles. Then he saw it, a low grey shape coming through the smoke from the side, head down, ears flat.
Ghost.
He’d been telling himself for some part of an hour that the wolf was dead. It had been the kind of telling-himself a man does to keep moving.
The wolf wasn’t dead.
It came in fast and low and took the back of the gryphon’s good leg, the one that still worked, in its teeth.
The gryphon kicked. With the cord cut on the other side, the kick had nothing under it.
Ghost rode the leg, hung off the muscle of it, and dropped clear before the second kick. It went out wide, low and silent, working a circle around the thrashing thing, looking in for the next opening. Not howling. Just the work.
The gryphon screamed again and tried to gather itself onto its wings.
It worked the wings against the ground a few times, finding the rhythm of them slow. Two beats off. Three beats off.
Then one full beat that lifted the body half an inch off the dirt.
Kain took a step forward.
It got the next beat, and then the next, and the body came up off the ground a foot, and two, and then a hard sweep of both wings drove it up clear and into the air.
Kain set his teeth.
It rose. Ten feet. Twenty.
“No,” he said.
If it cleared the trees it would be gone, and a wounded thing in the dark and the rain wouldn’t be hunted again easy. He couldn’t run it down across country. Not one-armed. Not the way his body was.
Then the left wing folded.
It went the way a leg goes under a horse when the leg gives. Not a slow buckle. A break.
The wing the eye-shot had taken the depth-judgement away from, the wing arrows had been in and out of all day, didn’t catch the next beat. It dropped, and the rest of the body followed.
The gryphon came down sideways.