False Covenant

advanced as he “ate,” and when he allowed the body to fall, he was finally near enough for the ambient moonlight and the nearby flickering lanterns to illumine the face and figure beneath the flopping brim. “Will you also taste of magic, little girl? Or was this one a special appetizer?”

His features were, other than being grotesquely emaciated, human enough at first glance. The skin was pale; the icy green eyes and ivory teeth gleamed even in the night, as though reflecting a light whose source she could not see. Hair of a filthy, stringy black hung limply from within the hat, the brim of which was stained with a glistening grease.

Her second glance-the one in which she noted the figure's cheeks and jaw rippling, as though something moved just beneath the flesh, attempting to distend his mouth in ways it was never meant to flex-was quite sufficient to put the lie to any sense of humanity.

His hands were even worse. His thumbs were relatively normal, perhaps slightly longer than they should have been, but every other finger was hideous. The shortest was a foot long, and all of them were narrow, pointed, twitching, bending in ways and in places they should never have bent. Widdershins couldn't help but think of them less as fingers than as the legs of some monstrous spider.

And that, in turn, stirred up memories in the farthest reaches of Widdershins's mind, the faintest recollections of childhood. But whatever those memories were, they refused to surface on their own, and she wasn't about to take the time and effort to dredge them up now.

“Gonna need everything you can give me, Olgun,” Widdershins whispered.

His response was a ferocious urge to run.

“Oh, no.” Much as a very large part of her agreed, Widdershins stood her ground. “I don't want that thing at my back! Besides, you're the one who pushed me into this in the first place, remember?”

Olgun might have responded to that, had their inhuman enemy not beaten him to it. “And who do you talk to, in the silence, in the dark, hmm? You cannot see my friends, so you invent one of your own? How very silly of you.”

Widdershins didn't even bother asking how he'd heard the words that she'd barely even formed on her tongue, let alone spoken aloud. “Why don't you step closer, and I'll introduce you?”

The creature's shoulders hunched, his head lowered, his impossible fingers twitched. “I think…I would like that.”

The unseen children cackled, and the two opponents-one blessed by a god, one utterly ungodly-hurled themselves together in the center of the roadway.

Any observer (and there may or may not have been one; Widdershins had no idea if the man she'd stabbed remained conscious or not) would have seen little more than a blur of movement. The creature advanced in a series of dancing steps and graceful twists, almost pirouettes. Each step should have taken him in a different direction from every other, yet somehow he glided toward Widdershins in a perfectly straight line.

For her own part, Widdershins simply charged, propelled by Olgun's energies beneath her pounding feet, carrying her far more swiftly than her steps alone.

Even as they converged, those impossibly long fingers swept through the air, clutching at the young thief's body, but she wasn't there to be hit. An arm's length from her foe, Widdershins dropped to her knees, allowing her momentum to carry her onward. It should have been an impossible slide, across the rough and muddy cobblestones of the street, but she felt the hum of Olgun's power in the air-a power that allowed her to “coincidentally” hit the slickest, smoothest stretch of stone, that smoothed over the worst of the bumps and crevices. Her knees were scraped raw, portions of her hose shredded, but it was enough to carry her beneath her enemy's attack and past him, thrusting her rapier into his thigh as she went.

Or rather, she tried to thrust her rapier into his thigh. Despite the swiftness and unexpected angle of her attack, the creature jumped back a fraction of a second before the blade struck home. His leap carried him clear to the nearest wall from which he now hung-again, by his fingertips only, which were stretched out behind him. Despite the sudden acrobatics, his coat and hat remained as immobile as ever. His eyes first went wider than any Widdershins had ever seen, then narrowed into glinting green slivers.

“Godly!” It somehow emerged as a high-pitched growl, improbable as the concept might seem. His chorus of children began to wail as though someone had just stepped on their favorite toys.

Widdershins flexed her legs and sprang to her feet, ignoring the pain in her knees. “Noticed that, did you?” Not much use in trying to deny it at this point…“How'd you enjoy that, you creepy critter?”

“I don't think you're fun anymore.”

A flex of the fingers sent him hurtling once more across the roadway to land before Widdershins. For several long moments, the air was filled only with the swooshing sounds of blade and digits. No matter how swiftly she attacked, no matter at what peculiar angles she held her rapier, Widdershins couldn't strike fast enough to land a blow. Each and every time, the creature danced nimbly aside or, on occasion, parried with a single finger against the flat of her blade.

For his part, he hadn't laid a finger on Widdershins, not due to her speed-even with Olgun's aid, the inhuman thing was far faster than she-but because the god kept interfering in other ways. A tingle in the air, and her opponent, despite his unnatural grace, skidded briefly in a thin layer of wet mud. A hum that only Widdershins could hear, and her rapier just happened to be in precisely the right spot to block an attack that she never would have seen coming. It was very much an evenly matched contest.

For about half a minute, give or take. At which point it abruptly became clear that Widdershins and Olgun were reaching the limits of their combined endurance, and their opponent was very much not.

Widdershins slowed, just a heartbeat; her luck faded, just by a hair. And that was enough.

Four of those fingers dragged across her, starting at her left shoulder and running across her collarbone to the neck. She heard a terrible scream, and failed to recognize the voice as her own; heard a ragged tearing, and was scarcely coherent enough to recognize the sound as coming from her clothes and her flesh both. The fingers didn't cut, didn't shred, not exactly. No, they simply fastened to her skin through the fabric, much as they must have fastened to the walls the creature climbed. And when they pulled away, they peeled away narrow strips of flesh with them. Blood coursed down Widdershins's chest, and what tiny portion of her mind remained capable of thought grew nauseated at the sight of tiny banners-made up of twisted strips of skin, strings of muscle, and cloth-that wiggled cheerfully from her attacker's fingers.

She felt the rough cobbles beneath her palms, pressing into her knees, and only then realized that she'd fallen. The film of mud across those stones was mixing slowly with the blood that leaked from her frayed wounds, as well as a small puddle of vomit that she must have coughed up as she stumbled.

“But our little girl cries!” She heard the foul voice, sensed the presence looming over her, and could barely crane her neck enough to look up. The creature was slowly running the stolen strips of flesh-her flesh-across its tongue, leaving nothing but dry, wrinkled sticks of leather that it casually tossed to the earth. “Where is her god, to wipe away her tears? Shall I kiss them better, little priestess? I have such comforting kisses. I swear to you that, should you but allow me, you'll never cry again. Never, ever, ever, ever…” The figure began to bend, wriggling fingers reaching, reaching…

“Olgun…”

The tiny god's power surged, flowing through her chest, her shoulder, tingling in the wounds like cold water. It barely helped; far less than it should have, for Olgun had, in the past, relieved the hurt of worse wounds than these. Indeed, the pain surged anew each time it faded, a stubborn, unnatural tide that refused to bend to Olgun's will.

But it helped enough, just enough, that Widdershins could still move-and move far faster than her assailant could possibly have anticipated.

With a hoarse cry she struck, wincing at the sound of steel on stone, and then she rolled upright and ran, staggering and stumbling over her own feet. Laughing maniacally in its dual voices, and joined by the ubiquitous chorus of giggles, the creature began to pursue-only to be yanked abruptly to a halt.

Widdershins hadn't missed, no. She couldn't possibly have slain the creature even if she'd hit it, not with a single weakened stroke. Instead, she had plunged her rapier through the hem of her attacker's coat and wedged it