sound. Whit came bounding up swinging his crossbow, and Dag thought to whisper, “Don’t cock that thing till I fire my first shot. Noisy ratchet.”
Whit nodded understanding. Except for an occasional faint clink of gear or snort from a horse, Dag’s makeshift patrol was moving in proper uncanny silence. Now he had nothing to do but find a good line of sight from the cover of the rocky rise, hunker down, and wait for things to go wrong.
18
The malice stopped barely two hundred paces off, a little to their right where the road started to bend around the outcrop. It seemed to sniff the air, swinging its great hairless head back and forth. Seven feet tall at least, and Dag guessed from its livid, mottled skin that its initial lair must have lain among gray rocks, which didn’t narrow it much; thousands of dells, cracks, caves, and overhangs lined this valley. The malice looked quite odd, standing out naked in the sunlit green space.
It belonged hidden in cold shadow, where spring didn’t reach and ice lingered and its monstrousness might be concealed.
Dag didn’t know how much those glittering too-human eyes, lurking under brows like their own little limestone overhangs, could see in this light. He prayed the other patrollers had their grounds furled as tightly as his own. Shielded Whit would be an ambiguous glow in its groundsense, a smudgy something, alive yet elusive. It could likely sense the horses by now, growing uneasy behind the rocks.
It certainly sensed something, because it snorted, and a dozen of its mud-men left the road and began to wade through the waist-high scrub toward the outcrop. Even the mud-men flinched from last year’s thorns on the dry blackberry canes, which crackled as they fought through them. The angle between Dag’s position and Barr and Tavia’s was not as wide for crossfire as he would have liked, but their elevation was excellent.
Yes, that’s perfect. Come closer, you suffering brutes, yes.
Dag held his steel-headed arrow loosely nocked and waited some more. Whit was watching him, crossbow clenched and bolt at the ready, with his eyes going wider and wider, as if to cry, Now, now… now?
Dag knelt up leisurely, taking his first and last chance for a perfect shot. He would try for an eye on that approaching… possum-man? Or it might once have been a rabbit. The peculiar relaxation overcame him that occurred when all decision making was over, as when an arrow had been released but not yet found its target. Speaking of which…
He drew. Settled. Released. “Yes,” he hissed. Brain-shot; the possumman squalled once, fell, thrashed, and went still. Dag nocked and drew again while the wild cranking of Whit’s crossbow mechanism stuttered beside him. His second arrow flew just before Whit’s first.
Dag’s brows twitched up at the thwack-crack of Whit’s heavy bolt striking a mud-man’s arm. A belly or brain shot would have been better, but he could swear that bone just broke. Within its short range, the weapon’s projectiles packed an impressive punch. From the corner of his eye he saw more arrows dart out. Two hits, followed by roaring and howling. The mud-men boiled forward, crunching madly up the slope, which was just fine as long as the arrows lasted.
Whit’s next ratchet-and-thrum resulted in a clear miss, but after that was a hard hit that knocked a looming tuft-eared fox-man backward down the slope. Dag was not yet out of arrows when the few mud-men remaining on their feet began to turn tail, or at least withdraw toward their master. Dag didn’t bother counting the ones down, just the ones still up. Some had arrows sticking out of them at odd angles, and shrieked in pain, but they weren’t stumbling nearly enough to suit Dag.
The malice had actually knelt down, its vast gut resting on the road between its spread knees, but it wallowed upright again as its dozen remaining guards drew back around it. Dag let his bow arm swing down out of the way and drew his war knife. “All right. It won’t get any better.”
Out of bolts, Whit started to let his crossbow fall, but Dag said, “Hang it on your back. You might get the chance to collect a few of your misses. Or hits.” Whit shrugged the carrying strap across his chest and took up the ash spear he had borrowed from Sage. The boy yelled once in excitement as they began to run, noticed that everyone else was advancing in dead silence, and clamped his mouth shut. Dag let him plunge ahead and spend his eagerness threshing a path through the thorny scrub, for which the waving spear proved unexpectedly useful.
Barr and Tavia wove down the slope to his right, with the sharing-knife threesome close behind them.
They spread out around the malice; its mud-men responded by throwing rocks, with which this country was only too well supplied.
Their whistling power was nasty, but fortunately the aim was mostly bad, though Remo yelped as one bounced off his shoulder. The malice turned around and around, roaring horribly, but did not retreat. Closing and careful, Dag expended two of his last four steel-tipped arrows putting mud-men down to stay. Another pair lurched toward them; one ran up on Whit’s spear, ripping it from his hands but then falling over its impalement in a tangle. Dag’s war knife opened his mud-man from groin to breastbone. Whit paused to yank back one of his bolts from the fallen creature’s leg, shaking it free of gore.
A cudgel-waving mud-man charged toward Rase, bowling Barr over; swiftly, Dag sent an arrow after it as his threesome kept trying to circle behind the malice, who kept rotating to face them. Inspired, Whit raised his bow and shot his retrieved bolt at the malice. It thwacked hard into the creature’s left shoulder. And vanished.
The malice screamed and heaved its awkward body around. On its left breast, its gray skin parted; from that mouth, the bolt spat into the malice’s up-reaching hand. The skin rippled closed again while the malice was winding its arm back to throw the bolt like a dart. It would not miss; Dag stepped in front of Whit, who was gibbering, “Did you see that? Come flyin’ out just like a watermelon seed! Should’ve gone through its heart…!”
Even through his tight veiling Dag could feel the malice reaching out to ground-rip his tent-brother. The power of it would pry open Whit’s shield like a mussel shell, given enough time. Which of course was also true of ground veiling. The huge arm bunched…
Whit’s shot had been futile as a blow but perfect as a distraction.
In the malice’s momentary and terrible shift of focus, Rase, face gone white, darted up behind it, shut his eyes, and thrust out the pale blade of his sharing knife.
The faint crack as the bone split and released its hoarded death into the malice was the sweetest sound Dag could imagine.
The malice’s scream shot upward in pitch till it felt like hot needles thrust into Dag’s eardrums. Whit clamped his hands over his own ears and bent, mouth opening and closing on words Dag could not make out.
Rase, Neeta, and Remo all stumbled backward; Rase, grazed by the malice’s deathly aura, was curling in on himself and starting to vomit already. Slowly, starting at the top of its ridged skull, the malice began to fall apart, pieces flaking off and spinning away in a stinking cloud.
Destruction spiraled downward, faster and faster, yet slowed when it reached the out-thrust torso. The remains of the creature-god, man, monster, or some clot of all three-slumped in a pile in the middle of the road, several hundred pounds of slimy rubble. The sudden silence was a blessing beyond imagining.
Dag eyed the great formless lump, drew Crane’s primed knife from the leather sheath hung at his throat, and advanced cautiously. He was going to have to open his ground just a hair to check this, and then he was going to regret it. The smell was bad enough. The lingering wrongness blasted through Dag with the force of a bitter wind in a Luthlian winter; his belly knotted and his mouth watered uncontrollably. But the new malice body forming inside the old one was dead, too, or never alive. Dag clamped his ground and his jaw shut again, put the knife away, and swallowed hard against his late lunch demanding instant escape.
Whit was shaken but standing. Barr was sitting on the ground holding his bleeding head; Tavia, with a bright red mark on her face that was going to be a dark blue bruise soon, knelt beside him trying to pull his hands away to check the damage. Rase was now on all fours, emptying his guts, with Remo bent beside him in concern and Neeta watching warily.
“Whit, Neeta,” Dag called. “We’re not done yet. Got to clean up all the mud-men within reach.”
Easy reach, at least. Only a couple of the creatures had escaped across the road, trying to find concealment in
