before him hissed, and shrank into their holes. But those on the sides only tensed and twitched, as though ready to spring.
Then Vadu laughed. He held his knife at arm’s length, and over the tiny nub of bone the ghost-blade flickered. Suddenly a great shrieking hiss went up from all the creatures, and they whirled about and disappeared into their holes. A brief sound of scurrying rose from the depths. Then nothing more. The travelers looked at one another in shock.
“I told you I had power to keep us safe,” said Vadu.
“Let us go on,” said Hercol.
“Counselor Vadu?” said Pazel suddenly. He startled everyone, beginning with himself, but he knew what he was doing. “Let the ixchel go. We’ve come too far to turn back anyway.”
Vadu glanced down at Myett and Ensyl, clutched against his chest. He laughed again. “It is not enough that I obeyed a human, for a time. Now I am to take orders from a human underling, a servant boy!”
Pazel swallowed. “I think-”
“That is open to question.”
“-you’re going to need that knife for something else.”
Vadu started. His head wobbled as he looked at the holes, the massing vultures, the distance yet to walk. Then, with a jerky motion, he thrust the two ixchel into Pazel’s hands. “I release them,” he said. The women gasped suddenly.
“Quiet!” said Pazel, in their own language. “Don’t shout! You were enchanted. You’re free now, but we’re not safe.”
Both ixchel began to shake. Her eyes closed, Myett whispered, “Who did this to us?”
Pazel was about to answer when he noticed that Vadu was still staring at his knife. The look of rapture on his face made Pazel think suddenly of the Shaggat, gazing with adoration at the Nilstone that had almost killed him. Vadu raised the knife above his head, and as he did so his hand cleared the shadow of the mountain. Sunlight touched the last, minuscule bone-shard upon the hilt-and with a slight quaking of the air, the shard was gone.
Vadu lowered his arm. “It is over,” he said. “I released them, and the Blade released me. That was its final act. The end was closer than I dared hope.” He rubbed his face, his neck: the twitching had finally ceased. Joy welled suddenly in the counselor’s eyes. Before anyone realized his intention he turned and flung the hilt across the lava flow with all his might. “I am free!” he cried, and with that all bedlam erupted.
Fire burst from holes far and near. A roaring filled the earth. A dog howled, and from the larger tunnels the flame-trolls began to emerge: first their long fingers, ash-white and clawed; then their mighty arms; then their heads, large and powerful as the heads of horses, but with the spreading jaws of wolves. They were hairless, and the flames of the depths licked over them, as though their very pores exuded some combustible oil. Their eyes wept fire; the spittle in their mouths was fire. The first to emerge was nearly nine feet tall.
It made to leap but Hercol moved first, and before Pazel knew what had happened the troll was waving the stumps of its hacked-off limbs, and its foul blood was spattering them all.
“Run!” thundered Hercol. “Turachs, sfvantskors, to the vanguard! Men of Masalym, stand with me behind!”
No one questioned his orders now. The party charged for the forest with weapons drawn. Pazel ran with Thasha at his side, and Neeps just behind. He bore his sword in one hand, Myett and Ensyl in the other, curled to his chest. They were ahead of the trolls, that was clear. The creatures were bursting forth in greater numbers, but always a step or two behind. As though their footfalls were guiding them, waking them. And he remembered suddenly running along a hollow log back in Ormael: a log that housed a great, drowsy hive of bees. He had felt them stirring under his feet, but had gotten away without a sting.
Then he saw the red-faced creatures, swarming out of the fumaroles dead ahead. They squealed piercingly, and the trolls rose in answer, cutting off the party from the trees.
The sfvantskors met them first, slashing at the flaming arms, the spitting heads. The Turachs did their part as well, hacking and stabbing alongside their old enemies. Three or four trolls died before they could escape the tunnels.
But right and left the creatures were gaining their feet and leaping to the attack. Suddenly all was carnage, terrible and blindingly swift. Cayer Vispek jumped over a troll’s groping hand, then killed it-killed it-with a savage kick to the head. A Turach drove his blade straight into flaming jaws. The dogs killed the rodent-beasts with swift efficiency, shaking them, flinging the carcasses away. But their muzzles were burning; Big Skip’s shirt was burning; a dying troll spat flame in Vadu’s face. On Pazel’s right a dlomic soldier beheaded a troll just rising from the earth, and a second troll caught his arm and wrenched him, headfirst, into the fumarole. He never managed a scream.
“On! On! Stop for nothing!” Hercol was bellowing. And somehow they did go on, right through the fire, over the twitching bodies, the arms still reaching from the earth. They ran with the red-faced creatures dragging from their ankles; they ran not knowing which of them, what part of them, was burning.
“Pazel, stay with us! Protect them!” Thasha shouted, waving at the ixchel. He ran with her on one side, Neeps on the other. Together, as though maddened by danger, they charged a huge troll with broken fangs. The beast lunged at Thasha; she parried with her sword and stabbed it through the hand with her knife, and turned her head before its fire-spittle could scald her in the face. Neeps managed only to graze the creature before it raked him with the claws of its free hand, sending him sprawling. The troll snapped at him, tore out a mouthful of hair. Then Pazel and Thasha lunged together. His sword pierced its chest; Thasha’s tore its belly open. It toppled sideways, dying; the three of them were past it-and then Pazel felt it sink those teeth into his calf.
He fell flat atop the ixchel; the troll’s claws were shredding his pack and clothes, seeking his flesh; then from the corner of his eye he saw Neeps make a desperate upward thrust, and blood from the troll’s severed throat washed down his leg.
The corpse fell burning atop him; Thasha and Neeps somehow moved it in a matter of seconds, and to their clear amazement Pazel leaped up and ran at their side. But the burning followed him, enveloped him; and still more trolls slavered at their heels. He felt that his run was an extended fall down a black cliff, faster and faster, his feet somehow staying under him just enough to fend him off the lava, and then suddenly he was on thinner lava, crumbled lava, then earth, then leaves, and the hooting, howling pursuit went on into the forest, and he smashed through vines and palms and thorns and flowers and brush, his arm over the ixchel’s faces, his own flesh torn, and then Praise Rin and His host there was the river, a blessed short muddy bank and then in, down, the fire in his clothes hissing out, the ixchel coughing and choking as he lifted them clear, trod water, kicked out into the water among the other survivors, while on the banks behind them twenty or thirty flame-trolls stood screaming their hate, and fighting over the corpses already roasting in their grasp.
The Ansyndra here was wide and shallow; they bobbed along with it gently, the dlomu helping the humans stay afloat, until they rounded a long bend and left the creatures behind. Then they dragged themselves ashore. Three of the eight Masalym soldiers were gone, and one Turach also. Two dogs limped onto the sand, and a third, nearly hairless, came whimpering from the forest.
“Sit down!” said Thasha to Pazel, catching him by the arm. “We’ve got to take care of that leg. Damn it all, the packs, our medicine kit, our food-”
“How did we do it?” Pazel gasped. “How did we get away?”
“Hercol,” she said, “and Vadu. I know it looked like there were trolls everywhere, but most of them were behind us. They held them all back. Vadu can fight, by Rin.”
“Hush, Thasha,” said Neeps, looking past her shoulder.
The surviving dlomic warriors were laying Vadu in the grass. He was hideously burned, his face unrecognizable, the lids barely moving over the silver eyes. His hands were so blistered and torn it was hard to tell where one finger ended and the next began. “I don’t think he can move,” whispered Neeps. “They floated him downstream like a log.”
But Vadu could move, for he was raising one hand, weakly beckoning. It was Hercol he wanted. The swordsman drew close and knelt at his shoulder.
“Now I pay,” said Vadu, his voice faint and rasping. “For all my folly, and a life of borrowed strength.”
“You have been paying for years, son of Masalym,” said Hercol.
Vadu shook his ruined head. “Not everyone who touched a Blade surrendered to it. I gave myself to the eguar, and lost my sanity, my soul. You alone had no fear to say so, to my face. Human, warrior human. I look at
