scurrying into the water, sent her purple fellows shrieking with collective fury. ‘
At that moment, Gariath decided he liked her best. She would be the last, he told himself, the one to give him his beautiful death.
It was only out of a fleeting sense of fading loyalty that he scanned the melee for any signs of pink flesh. Amongst the fluids and metals exchanged, the humans were nowhere to be seen. Perhaps they had fled, or perhaps they were already dead.
The thrum of bowstrings was an insult to the glory of personal combat, and its sound annoyed Gariath. Quickly spying its source, a trio of the longfaces loosing jagged-headed arrows into the throng, he narrowed his eyes.
Cowards would serve as decent preludes.
They did not deserve to be made aware of his presence, he knew, but for this death to be true, they would have to. His chest expanded, his roar was a flash of thunder, coursing over the melee and lost in the sound of battle. The rearmost archer turned to regard him curiously, no trace of fear in her white eyes.
He smiled at that; he had forgotten what such a thing looked like.
Honour was satisfied. His presence was announced. Whether the females realised it or not, the time for fighting had come.
He lowered his head and rushed towards them, salt kicking up behind him, eyes alight with fury. His intent was unmistakable; a cry of warning went up, a clumsy arrow flew over his head. He fell to all fours, another pair of arrows shrieked towards him, one sinking into his shoulder.
He did not feel it. He did not hear their threats. There would be time for pain later. There was time for fear never. His horns went low, glittering menacingly. More arrows flew, nicking his flesh, kissing the stones.
By the time they were throwing their bows down to draw swords, he was already laughing.
The archer at the fore was met in a violent burst of crimson. His horns found a hard, purple belly and dug in. His laughter grew to be heard over her howling as his head jerked upwards, his horns grating against her ribcage. He rose to his full height, the female kicking and shrieking like some macabre living hat.
With a great snap backwards, he sent her flying, then skidding, leaving a smear of red upon the stones.
His remaining foes were painted red in his eyes. Their horror was momentary, replaced by expressions that seemed to vaguely resemble jagged smiles. With eager glee, they kicked their bows aside and drew hard iron.
Gariath had to fight the urge to shed joyful tears.
The more eager of the pair rushed him; no shriek determined to intimidate him, no scowl to mask her fear. There was nothing on her face but a hard smile to match her iron. There was no sound from her but the thunder of her boots and two words tearing themselves from her lips.
‘
He caught her chop in his hand, feeling the metal bite into his palm. His grasp had tasted blades before; he did not flinch. Snarling, he tore it away from her as a stern parent takes a toy from a petulant child. Tossing it aside, he snapped both hands out to wrap around her throat.
It was almost disappointing to feel the weakness with which this one fought back: not quite as firmly as the one on the beach, but equally as fierce. There was no confusion in her milk-white eyes as he had seen in the eyes of humans, no unspoken plea, no desperate murmur to a God suspected to be merciful. Instead, she spat into his eyes as he hoisted her from her feet. Her hatred was unabashed, her fury pure, her fate sealed.
With another snap of his arms, he brought her crashing down to the stones. Bones shattered, salt water sprayed, and the longface still twitched. He did not laugh as he seized her by the hair and forced her to kiss the rock once more; he owed her that much. And in return, she did not scream, did not beg, did not put up a pathetic struggle.
When he rose, he did not see a wretched corpse, a dead coward. He had taken that from her, leaving only a good death.
Even if she wasn’t quite as strong as the one on the beach, hers would be a death better than most. The same could not be said of her companion. He glared over his surroundings; nothing but the clash of battle and the sound of carnage. Wherever the third one had gone, she apparently had found a better way to die than at his hands.
‘Coward,’ he snorted. Just as well, her death would have given no satisfaction.
His ear-frills pricked up. The sound of whirling metal was faint, but distinctive enough to be recognised between the sound of someone grunting behind him and something sinking into his back.
He jerked forwards, his own growl more angry than painful. Something gnawed at his flesh, worming its way in deeper on jagged metal legs with every twitch of his body. Far too concerned with who had thrown it, he ignored the sensation of warm liquid trailing down to his tail and turned with anger flashing in his eyes.
This one’s smile was not eager, but haughty. It was the breed of grin reserved for a weakling who believed themselves to have struck a decisive blow through cowardice.
Gariath could not help but grin back; he had always enjoyed the mess of teeth and gum such grins inevitability became. If the longface saw her fate in his teeth, however, she did not show it. Instead, she slammed her spike against her breastplate in a challenge.
‘You pinks should pay more attention,’ she spat through her teeth. ‘Bites hard, doesn’t it?’
Gariath had no reply that could be voiced with words. He merely stalked forwards, his grin broadening as she took a cautious step backwards. In two quick strides, his claws were outstretched and he opened his jaws wide to offer his answer.
There was little about Gariath that surprised Asper any more. That hardly made him any less pleasant to be around, but while she might never grow used to his style of solving problems, she wasn’t prone to go running and screaming from him any more.
Though, she had to admit, when she pulled herself into Irontide to find him standing over a trio of corpses, a leather-bound handle jutting from his back, chewing what vaguely resembled a piece of jerked meat well,
In light of that, the concerned pair of words she uttered was a reasonable response, she thought.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Good eyes, stupid.’ He spat something red and glistening onto the floor, licked his chops. ‘Better hope they don’t get cut out, otherwise your only use will be as food.’
Asper looked past him, to the thundering melee. Her first thought was not for the chaos raging in the hall, the bodies falling, the metal flashing, but rather for the pulsating sacs that hung from the pillars, the ceiling, that bobbed in the swiftly draining water. Amidst the bloodshed, they seemed disturbingly placid, like fleshy, throbbing flowers in a red-stained garden.
Occasionally, a longface broke free from the melee to dig a sharp implement into one of them. The frogmen shrieked in response, turning attentions away from other opponents to descend upon the assailant in a hail of spears and daggers.
The longfaces fought with equal vigour, welcoming the attacks with an upraised shield and a cruel smile, warding off their web-footed foes as their fellow females hacked into backs with spikes and jagged blades. The fight seemed scarcely even to Asper, with only five longface corpses on the ground and many more standing, against the quickly piling heaps and shrinking throngs of frogmen.
It was just as she had turned her attention back to Gariath and his new, metallic growth that the stones shook.
Heralded by a great, choked roar, they came pouring out of the fortress’s orifices: great, white serpents of salt and spray, churning the waters ivory in their wake and kicking up bubbling clouds as they swept towards the battle.
As titanic dead trees, their bodies glistening onyx, their eyes vacant and expressionless even in fury, the Abysmyths exploded from the water. With gangly, ungainly grace, they swept towards the throng, heedless of the
