The edge of its outside claw caught Anhuset on the side, hurling her off her feet to slam into Serovek. He hit the ground in a cloud of blinding sand and an explosive exhalation that emptied his lungs of air. He heaved a gasping Anhuset off him, caught the edge of her dropped shield and raised it just in time to block a strike from the powerful tail. The barb slammed into the shield and through it, driving it toward Serovek's chest. Splinters of pain shot through his bones as he strained to hold the shield away from his body and watched a drop of venom pearl at the barb's tip, hanging there like a deadly raindrop.
He caught a flash of movement from the corner of his eye before another jarring shock juddered up his arms. He was slung to the side, the venom drop splattering in different directions. “Fuck!” he shouted as a sizzling heat blistered its way down his side. The world somersaulted in his vision as the scarpatine's tail, still stuck to the shield whipped one way, then the other. Serovek let go of the shield, waiting to drop and roll away as fast as he could.
Instead, his shackles clacked as they slid down the scarpatine's tail, taking him down as well. When he'd raised the shield to block the creature's strike, the chain connecting his wrists had looped over the tail, trapping him as surely as the shield still trapped the barb. The edge caught him hard in the shoulder twice and almost in the head once as the tail flailed and whipped, trying to arch over the insect's back so the pincers could grab what the tail had caught.
For all its size, the scarpatine wasn't strong enough to fling its heavy prey over its back. Serovek twisted the chain even tighter on the tail and dropped to his haunches, bent his knees and dug his heels hard in the dirt beneath the flyaway sand. “I have the tail down!” he shouted to Anhuset, who battled the pincers with the crow's beak he'd dropped. More venom splattered in a wide arc. “Climb it! Climb it!”
He didn't know if she heard him. The crowd's screaming nearly deafened him to everything except the skittering noise of numerous legs scrabbling through sand, the hard clicking of pincers, and the grating sound of insectile double jaws sliding across each other.
The muscles in his back, thighs, shoulders, and arms cramped as the scarpatine dragged him across the ground and tried to raise its tail. Its back was a landscape of square plates as hard as any armor he'd ever worn, protecting the creature's vulnerable insides. Beyond the view of Anhuset dodging the pincers, he saw the people standing in their seats, faces almost bestial in their zeal for the fighting. Anhuset suddenly swung out of sight only to reappear with a leap and stand on the insect's back.
She slid to one side, nearly losing her balance when the scarpatine arched, its body rippling under her feet in a roll of smooth armored plates. The movement threatened to wrench Serovek's shoulders out of their sockets and pull him to his feet. Anhuset widened her stance and held her balance. In one hand she gripped the crow's beak, in the other the leaf-blade spear. “Hold that tail,” she barked at him.”
“Not going anywhere,” he shouted back.
Her trust in his abilities humbled him, for she turned her back on the barb still impaling the shield. She almost lost her balance a second time avoiding the upward swing of the pincers as the scarpatine tried to reach its unwelcome rider while protecting its head. Serovek imagined her furious expression as she belted out expletives that made even his ears turn hot with a blush. Using the hook side of the crow's beak, she wedged the steel into the sliver of space between plates and jerked upward, exposing a patch of soft insides. She raised the arm holding the spear, slamming it down and at an angle, driving the spearhead past the steel and up the spear haft. Black liquid spurted out of the wound in a smoking, viscous sludge, the smell so foul, it made his eyes water. No savory scarpatine pie ever smelled this bad.
Anhuset leaped off the scarpatine's back but not before the sludge splashed across her greaves and the top of her boots. The scarpatine's legs collapsed, its body dropping flat and the heavy tail falling hard enough to knock Serovek onto his back under its weight. It no longer so much as twitched. The champion had won, and judging by the crowd's ecstatic cheering, all knew it.
She suddenly loomed over him, without the spear but still holding the crow's beak. “How did you manage to get yourself in such a bind?” Sand dusted her perspiring face, and she squinted hard in the unforgiving daylight.
“I seem to enjoy embracing things that can easily kill me,” he said and grinned. The urge to laugh soon followed, no doubt fueled by the miraculous fact they were both still alive to jest with each other.
Instead of severing the tail to free him, she shoved it aside to hack away enough of the shield with the ax side of the crow's beak, allowing him to slip the connecting chain of his shackles carefully up and over the lethal tip. He grasped her offered hand and gained his feet. She didn't let go when he stood to face her. An obvious expression of relief flitted across her face when his shadow spilled over her to block the sun's brightness.
“You're smoking,” he said, watching as gray tendrils of smoke wafted off her
