captor’s back ankles; she twisted and kicked air, dragging her mud-bat closer to the ridge, which seemed to rise below them. The gray rocks looked bony and lethal, the trees like pit-trap stakes. Could Dag force a similar descent without being dropped or falling? Once they wobbled across the high line, the ground would fall away again. Best chance.
If he could somehow get rid of the mud-bat holding up his right boot, the other would not be able to support his weight. He kicked, without effect but to elicit some nasty hissing and a tighter grip that hoisted his right leg higher at a more awkward angle.
How close was the malice? The mud-bats strung out ahead seemed to be aiming to clear the next ridge as well, a good four miles off. At least that far. Dag dared to ease open his groundsense, reaching upward into the mud-bat bodies as he would examine a distressed patient. Their thin-walled chests heaved, their big hearts pounded with their exertion.
Their grounds were a horror, but he ignored that. He focused on the second mud-bat, closer up and deeper in, deeper in… The ridge was coming up fast. There was no time for-there was no time.
He organized a projection, reached in, and ground-ripped a pinhole in the great artery exiting the mud-bat’s heart. Three straining flaps, three thumping heartbeats, and the vessel split asunder. The mud-bat’s mouth opened on a pained roar, its eyes rolled back, and it fell away, its clutching claws tearing loose from Dag’s boot. It tumbled into the trees. Dag’s remaining mud-bat lurched in surprise, redoubling its efforts.
Owlet’s mud-bat turned and swooped nearer, calling in confusion, “Come, come!”
It’s this or the poor tad is malice food. Dag had once been partly groundripped by a malice; as painful deaths went, there wasn’t much to choose between that and plummeting onto rocks. Dag reached again, at his fullest stretch. This time he went for the big vein entering the heart.
A touch slower to take effect, maybe…? He felt the pop, withdrew at once. Owlet’s mud-bat shrieked, choked, flapped more slowly… began spiraling down… crashed into whipping branches. Owlet’s screams stopped too suddenly.
Dag’s mud-bat was falling, too. It released its grip on his hook, tried to shake him off. But the release gave Dag back a weapon. He clawed upwards, catching and ripping skin from the creature’s short rear legs, tearing tatters in the lower edges of the leathery wings. Blood spun out like a shower of raindrops, bright red.
The branches of a beech tree came up around them with a whoosh and crackle. The mud-bat’s twisting wings caught, jerked loose, caught, jerked; together, mud-bat and prey descended in a neck-wrenching stutter and a shower of leaf bits and twigs. Just when Dag was figuring that his next greatest danger would be the mud-bat falling atop him, his sweaty grip was yanked loose from the bloody ankle, and he plummeted.
He tried to take the impact on bending knees, rolling, but lost everything on the steep slope; a looping root, strong as a hawser, caught his right ankle and wrenched it violently. But it stopped him tumbling tail over teakettle down the mountainside.
Then the mud-bat landed on him. Snarling.
In a world beyond pain, Dag fought his way out from under the choking black envelope of those wings. His hand closed on the first stout weapon he could find, a broken branch. He swung it high and began beating in the creature’s thin skull with frantic strokes.
On the third swing, he caught his first close look at its big brown eyes, blinking up at him. “Ow,” it said, in a miserable voice. “Hurts.” A human voice, an animal’s eyes, a child’s bewilderment as to why these terrible things should be happening to it.
The mud-bat shuddered, choked, and died.
Dag, chest heaving for air, bent over and heaved in truth. There wasn’t much in his belly. Small favors.
Oh, absent, absent gods. He folded in a boneless heap. He supposed, from the wet and slime on his face, that he was crying, although some of it might be blood. He didn’t care. He put his arms over his head and bawled.
–-
His regained control of his breath and wits in a few minutes. Overwrought didn’t begin to describe his state of mind. And body, which shuddered like Grouse in the throes of his ague. He lifted his right hand and found the wedding cord wrapping his left arm, and gripped it through the torn fabric of his shirt. Alive, Spark’s alive. She needs you. Start with that. Upon that foundation, he could stand.
Or at least… sit up. His wrenched ankle was throbbing under his boot. He eyed it with disfavor, turning his groundsense upon himself, although it sent another wave of nausea through him. He was fairly sure no ankle was ever supposed to fold as far sideways as that one just had.
He unlaced his boot and, with difficulty, extracted the bent steel knife, staring at it in wonder. There’s why my anklebone’s not busted clean through.
Not exactly the way he’d pictured that knife saving him, but it would do. He re-laced the boot for support before the joint could swell further.
Ripping the mud-bats had left a greasy stain in his ground-Arkady would doubtless disapprove-but hadn’t larded him with poisonous black blight like the time he’d ground-ripped a malice. The contamination would render him unfit for gifting ground reinforcements for weeks, which was likely all right, as he was more wishful just now to receive some. At least he hadn’t traded a swift death for a slow one. Yet.
In the distance, somewhere down the hill, a child began crying.
Weak, muffled. Dag went still. Opened his groundsense, reached out.
Alive. The tad had survived his fall!
Dag felt around himself, found a long, stout stick, and stripped side branches from it with his bent knife. With it, he levered himself onto his feet and began to make his way down the hillside. As swiftly as he might with due care, because he didn’t think another tumble would help much. The shadowless light was graying, concealing detail, although the sky above the leaf canopy was still luminous, shot with pink streaks of high cloud. The crying grew louder as he skidded from tree to tree.
There.
The black shape of a fallen mud-bat lay like a discarded cloak, half wrapped around a hickory trunk. The weeping was coming from underneath the folds. Dag leaned his stick on the bole, reached down, and heaved the carcass aside to reveal Owlet, curled up and shaking. The little boy looked up at Dag and burst into howls.
Dag’s groundsense flicked out anxiously. No broken arm, leg, head, neck, or spine. Both eyes still blinking. Lungs clearly in working order.
Scratches and gouges in plenty, though, a torn ear, and tumbled bruising.
Dag lowered himself with a pained grunt. The child flinched away.
A memory flashed in Dag’s mind of the second time he’d met Spark, in a rough rescue from a violent assault; too dizzied to tell friend from foe when she’d been flung at him, she’d tried her level best to scratch his eyes out. “I guess I’m not a very reassuring sight,” he said ruefully to Owlet. “But I do mean well.”
The howls stopped, perhaps in surprise. Then started up again, though not as loudly.
“Absent gods,” hissed Tavia’s voice. “Can’t you shut that child up? It’ll have every mud-man for a mile down on us. Up on us. Whatever.”
Tavia descended the slope, lurching from sapling to sapling, and fell to her knees beside Dag, winded. No broken bones there, either, clearly; but bruises, cuts, branch-whipped wheals, red-brown braid undone, a hank of hair torn out and her scalp oozing blood. Copper-brown eyes wide and wild and pulsing. Dag suspected his were, too.
“Welcome back down,” he murmured. “Glad you made it in one piece.”
“Absent gods,” she said. “Nobody ever said the north was full of giant bats.” She glared at Dag as if this were somehow his fault.
Dag stifled the impulse to apologize. “Surprise to me, too. What happened to your mud-bat? ”
“When it couldn’t clear the ridge, it scraped me off in a mess of dogwood scrub and got away.” Her jaw set in frustration. But she seemed to have made a softer landing than his, fortunately.
“And, um… how are you with tads? ”
“I was the youngest in my family,” she returned at once, eyeing the crying toddler with alarm. “I don’t know anything about little children. Farmer or otherwise.”
“Ah.” Dag sighed and extended his hand. “Here, Owlet.” The child recoiled farther. “Eh.” Tavia was right about the noise. Reluctantly, Dag opened himself and shaped a persuasion for the shocked boy. It’s all right now. I won’t hurt you. You want to come to Dag and let him make it better. He left the beguilement in, too, for good
