Chapter Five The Mysterious Masked Men
Chapter Five
The Mysterious Masked Men
I raised my arms in a futile effort to ward off the attack, and I was bracing myself for the agony of fangs piercing my flesh when a masked man in green grabbed the leaping spider wolf by the leg and slammed it into the ground.
It yowled. Or at least it did until he followed that up with a punch to its head that resounded with the sharp crack of breaking bone.
My mouth dropped open, and I stood there blinking in shock.
The man’s flame-red hair and pale skin, visible below the green domino mask, put me in mind of my brother-in-law, Liam. Who was this? Where had he come from?
“I could use some help here!” he shouted into the woods as another spider wolf jumped onto his back. Four pairs of claws ripped through his shirt, drawing blood.
“Can you hold it still, Sam?” another voice called out in reply. Both of them had accents like Liam’s, too. “Clem almost has a shot!”
“Hold it still,” the man in green muttered. He twisted around to make a grab for the monster’s body. “Maybe I should wrap it up and put a wee bow on it, too.”
Its fangs snapped at his face. They missed by only a fraction of an inch.
His muscles bulged with strain as he struggled to hold the creature off.
This was a beast capable of ripping the heads off my bone-solid, enamel-coated guards.
I had trouble believing any ordinary person stood much of a chance against it.
Nonetheless, he somehow managed to wrap his arms around it. He kept it pinned long enough for an arrow to come whistling out of the woods and bury itself in the monster’s ear.
In the meantime, I had done absolutely nothing but stand there, astonished. I pulled myself out of my paralysis as he dropped the creature to the ground. Behind him, another spider wolf poised to spring.
“Hey, ugly!” I shouted, scooping up a pile of rotting leaves and needles from the forest floor.
It whipped its head around, and I hurled them at its face.
It flinched back, dirt and detritus showering its unblinking eyes.
That distracted it sufficiently for my rescuer—Sam, I supposed—to grab it around the throat and squeeze.
“Thanks.” He flashed me a brilliant smile. The spider wolf thrashed beneath him.
“I should thank you!” I winced as its claws pierced his flesh. The green shirt was rapidly darkening with blood. I cast about for a better weapon than a pile of leaves—a rock, a fallen branch, anything.
Several other spider wolves were lying prone and bloodied nearby, most of them pincushioned with arrows.
Two more masked men in green backed toward me, one with a sword at the ready and one with an arrow nocked in a bow.
Both were as redheaded as my rescuer. Between the masks and the hair, I was having difficulty telling them apart.
The swordsman walked with a slight limp.
One leg of his breeches was streaked with fresh blood at the knee.
I picked up the biggest stick I could find. The remaining spider wolves—more than I would have liked—prowled in a wide circle around us, weaving between the trees. They slunk low, crawling in twitchy fits and starts in their unsettling insectile way.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Keekin’ at us till we bolt,” said the one with the bow.
“I’m sorry, what?”
“They’re waiting for us to break and run,” explained the one with the bloody knee. “We’ll be easier to pick off that way. We’ve seen them do this before.”
I bit my lower lip in worry. That wasn’t promising. It might mean the creatures were as intelligent as they were vicious.
Sam dropped the spider wolf he’d been throttling and joined our small group. “Where’s Harry?” he asked, his eyes on the circling monsters.
“He’s aff tae git th’ ithers,” his bow-wielding friend replied. “They’ll turn up soon. Mibbie.”
“No matter how fast he runs,” Sam said, “it’ll take too much time.”
“Do you have a weapon?” I asked, prepared to offer the stick I held clenched in my shaking hands. He was likely to do more good with it than I would.
He shook his head. “No. But I’m brilliant with my fists.”
“If you’re sure.” I was dubious. He was clearly strong—inhumanly strong if he was able to wrestle these monsters and win—but he wasn’t invulnerable. I glanced at his shredded, bloodied shirt, wondering how much longer he could last.
One of the spider wolves ventured closer and was nearly beheaded for its trouble when the swordsman took a swing at it. It retreated, growling.
“Should we try to pick off a few?” Bloody Knee asked, dropping into a readied stance.
The bowman—Clem if I’d heard right—grimaced. “If they git crabbit enough, they’ll a’ charge in at wance.”
“Maybe so,” Bloody Knee said. “But they’re going to do that soon either way.”
Sam turned to me. “Can you even the odds? That piece of wood—what can you do with it?”
“Hit them on the head?” I said, puzzled.
“Could you maybe…turn it into an enchanted spear?” he asked. “Or make it fly and fight on its own? Or transform it into a wooden man, with mighty oaken fists?”
I took a half step back in sheer surprise. The answers were, in order: no, definitely not, and maybe—if I had a year’s time and a lot more luck animating plant matter than I’d ever had before. I narrowed my eyes. “What makes you think I can do any of that?”
“You’re a sorceress, aren’t you?”
I was about to reply that I wasn’t a very good sorceress and ask how he knew I was a sorceress in the first place when I was cut off by the twanging of a bow. Another of the beasts had prowled closer. Clem’s arrow had pierced its vitals before I’d noticed it was coming.
Who were these people?
Clem took no more than a moment to survey his work. “Sam,” he said, “she cannae dae it. She’s nae th’ princess.”
“Of course she is,” Sam argued back. “Who else could she be?”
“Princesses dinnae travel alone, oan foot, wi’ thair locks a’ in a fankle.”
I wasn’t sure what a fankle was, but I didn’t think he was giving my hair a compliment. “I’ve been on the road a long time,” I muttered. “And it’s been a very hard day.”
“We can figure out who she is later,” Bloody Knee said tightly. “Although if she’s the savior who’s supposed to rescue Tailliz from peril, I’m guessing she’d have done more than throw a few wet leaves.”
If I was the what who was supposed to what?
“We have,” he continued, “more urgent matters to deal with.”
He motioned his head toward the spider wolves.
They had given up on trying to make us run.
Instead of circling, they crouched down, the joints of their spidery legs sticking up above their backs.
Dozens of gleaming black eyes fixed on us.
A low, constant growl came from all around, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
Clem loosed an arrow as they lunged for us. “Och, bugger m—” he began, but they were at our throats before he could finish.
Everything became a dizzying frenzy of motion.
One of the monsters stumbled and dropped, an arrow in its throat.
A sword flashed to my right, trailing dark blood as it carved deadly arcs through the air.
Sam was suddenly in front of me, snatching two spider wolves out of the air midleap, one in each hand, and smashing them to the ground.
A third sailed past him, though, its jaws wide and aimed at my face.
Inside its mouth, sharp, chitinous ridges clicked together in anticipation.
I shoved the branch down its throat.
Black liquid bubbled up in its mouth. It made a strangled gagging noise as it crashed into me.
Its momentum carried it forward, knocking me flat on my back.
The air was forced out of my lungs. I struggled to breathe while the hairy limbs at the sides of the creature’s muzzle scrabbled at my face, and its four front paws raked my shoulders and sides, ripping gouges in my flesh. Then it shuddered and lay still.
The end of my stick was poking out of its skull. It had been driven through by the creature’s own immense weight. The weight that was, at that moment, pinning me to the ground, making me an easy target for the next one to come.
As I strove to wriggle out from under it, something lifted the monster off me and tossed it to the side. I looked up to see Sam smiling. He reached a hand out to help me up.
“Thanks,” I said, hauling myself to my feet. “Again.”
“We’re making a habit of rescuing each—”
The rest of what he was going to say was lost in a pained bellow as Sam went down under a torrent of fur and claws and fangs. I screamed. The attacking monsters were a tangle of limbs. How many were there? Four? Five? This time, I didn’t even have a few wet leaves.
As I flailed uselessly at one of the beasts with my fists, I saw a blur at the edge of my vision, like a flaw in a clear glass window.
Before I could blink, the blur reached Sam, stabbing a spider wolf in one of its huge upper eyes.
The beast shrieked and snapped at whatever it was, but the blur was never where the spider wolf expected it to be.
It shifted out of reach with a speed that my eyes couldn’t follow.
A stiff wind blew out of nowhere, nearly toppling me over again. While I fought to keep my balance, I heard an odd crackling sound below me.
Frost spread across the ground like a cascade of spilled milk, turning the black leaves white.
Someone grabbed hold of my arm, keeping me upright. Sam had somehow gotten free from the pile of spider wolves. He was covered with blood and nearly unrecognizable; I only knew it was him because he didn’t have a sword or a bow.
For a moment, I thought the monsters attacking him had vanished, but then I saw them rolling away, blown aside by the wind like so many tumbleweeds. Sam braced himself against a tree to keep us from tumbling right along after them.
The wind abated as abruptly as it had arrived. Bloody Knee rushed in, slashing at the dazed monsters. The blur zipped from one to another, leaving death in its wake. Within moments, the creatures besetting Sam had been hacked to pieces.
I looked around at a scene of unimaginable carnage.
I was surrounded by slaughtered spider wolves—peppered with arrows, stabbed, or killed in far less natural ways.
A few of them had been frozen in place mid-snarl like some strange new kind of taxidermy, their fur iced over.
As I watched, a final one plummeted from a tree branch, crashed into the leaf litter, and lay still.
To my great surprise, we seemed to have won.