newborn, pressing the stained cloth against her cheek.
“I hear you,” she said. “All the little ones.” She looked up at Chanoch. “My thanks.”
“We have to move,” Ashok said.
“Go,” Vedoran said. “Ashok, stay by Ilvani; the brothers will back you up. Chanoch and I will lead the way.”
Chanoch moved to the front to join Vedoran. He didn’t look at his leader.
They ran back through the tunnels the way they’d come, but Ashok could tell immediately that something was different. The voices had quieted. There was no longer the sound of reckless shouts and the screams of dying shadar-kai.
“They’re mustering,” Ashok said. He pointed to where the passage widened into the long tunnel. “Once we get to the last stretch, they’ll have gathered. We’re too late.”
Vedoran kept on running, his gaze fixed on the distance ahead. “We’re not stopping,” he said. “Kill as you run.”
“Kill as you run,” Skagi agreed, and Cree and Chanoch’s wild shouts echoed in the tunnel.
Ashok looked down at Ilvani, who ran unsteadily beside him. Her long confinement had taken all her strength. Ashok gripped her elbow when she stumbled, but she pulled away as soon as she’d righted herself.
“Don’t,” she said. Short and sharp. Ashok nodded.
The group hit the tunnel at a dead run, and there they were. Warriors had gathered to cut them off from the entrance. Ashok didn’t see any of his brothers, but there were plenty of faces he knew.
“Keep going,” Vedoran ordered, but he needn’t have bothered. All of them knew what fate awaited them should they be captured.
Luck stayed with them, and they took the first group of shadar-kai by surprise. Vedoran and Chanoch cut through the lead two warriors with their blades and didn’t break stride. Plunging into the next group, the brothers fanned out beside Ashok and Ilvani, protecting their flanks. Together the group was a rolling gauntlet, but the wide space was a blessing in more than one way.
Ashok whipped his chain above their heads and let it fly at the warriors that managed to teleport into the midst of the group. Instead of scattering them, the warriors appeared to stinging strikes from Ashok’s chain. Over and over he sent out the spikes, and each time they returned to him bloody.
“Stay at my back!” Ashok cried to Ilvani. The witch moved behind him without looking at or acknowledging him. In fact she appeared oblivious to the battle, or to any fear of its failure. She clutched the green satchel against her chest and ran along with them, stumbling often, but always picking herself up.
They fought on. Ashok tried to gauge where they were in the long stretch, and when he realized they were not even halfway near the entrance his heart sank. No time to rest. The warriors who survived their initial pass were starting to fall in and attack from behind them, forcing Skagi and Cree to the back to protect Ilvani.
A shadow appeared in front of Ashok. He had just enough time to bring his chain up before the warrior solidified in front of him and attacked with a dagger in each hand. Ashok blocked the first dagger, but the second got through and found a slit in his armor. Still moving, Ashok didn’t immediately feel the pain.
He raked his chain down the warrior’s arm. The shadar-kai cried out and took a step back onto Chanoch’s waiting blade. The warrior dropped to the ground, and Ashok stumbled over the body. Forgetting her protests, Ashok hauled Ilvani forward over the obstruction, and Skagi and Cree bunched up against them both. Vedoran and Chanoch didn’t see this and kept running, creating a huge gap in their protective wall.
“Wait!” Cree yelled after them, but it was too late. Five shadar-kai teleported into the gap and split the group in two.
“Go left!” Skagi told his brother, and he angled right to cover the far ends of the tunnel. They each picked off a warrior and pressed forward, out of reach of Ashok’s chain.
Ashok had no time to marvel at the brothers’ skill or strategy. He took advantage of the open space to swing his chain in an arc, striking the ground in front of him to slow the charge of the three other oncoming warriors. Two men and a woman, they tried to dart in to form a circle around Ashok and Ilvani, but Ashok snarled behind his mask and snapped the chain at their legs, catching the woman in the thigh. A bright spot of blood welled up through her breeches.
“Get down,” Ashok said, and Ilvani crouched and moved a safe distance away. Ashok calculated he only had a few breaths before more warriors closed in from behind them. By that time he hoped Skagi and Cree would be free to cover them again.
“Not hounds, but you’ll stand in just as well,” Ashok muttered under his breath. He remembered that day on the plain, crouching in the kindling tree. So long before, but the desperation that coursed in his blood was the same. He drew it in with each breath, fed on it, reminded himself over and over that he was alive.
He thought of the nightmare, of riding the beast through the paddock, blazing bright fire licking off his hooves and mane. The images were so clear in Ashok’s mind-he held onto them all, grasped the end of his chain, and bore down on the three shadar-kai.
His body became a blur before his own eyes and those of his targets. The chain coiled around Ashok’s body and then flew out like an extension of it. He barely guided the motion with his arm. A black, writhing aura snaked up the chain, settling among the spikes like lengths of silk. The chain ripped a long gash in the woman’s side. Ashok yanked the weapon free and carried on to the next enemy. He moved too fast to assess what he left in his wake.
He caught one of the men in the neck. A hard leather collar only partially absorbed the blow. The spikes dug into the shadar-kai’s ear and ripped it off, along with a sizable portion of the his cheek. The man screamed and clutched his face, losing his weapon in the process, but even that Ashok did not celebrate. His third target, the other man, was close enough for him to smell, but he had one stroke left in him, and he used it to rip open the man’s thigh.
The black aura surged once, as if feeding, then it peeled away from the chain, and absorbed back into Ashok’s own body.
Ashok turned to check on Ilvani and saw the witch crouched several feet away, watching him intently. She stood when he beckoned to her and followed him back to where Skagi and Cree were finishing off their opponents.
Ahead of them, things were much worse.
Vedoran and Chanoch were surrounded and bleeding liberally from multiple wounds. Vedoran’s cheek had been sliced open. The flaps of skin and the shadar-kai’s burning, unfocused gaze as he hacked at the line of enemies were ghastly to behold. Chanoch’s hysterical cries to Tempus filled the tunnel.
Ashok shot a glance at the brothers and saw the fatigue in their faces. Their guards wavered; he knew they wouldn’t be able to hold their weapons up much longer, let alone fight the lines of shadar-kai still before them.
He gazed up the tunnel. They’d passed more distance with the last surge than he’d thought. They were over halfway out.
So close. Ashok looked down at Ilvani to see if she realized how desperate the situation was. But she merely stared blankly ahead of them. The mob of shadar-kai could have been a swarm of insects for all she knew.
“You’re a witch,” Ashok said. “Do you have any magic that might aid us?”
Ilvani blinked and tucked her satchel close to her neck. She glared at Ashok. “Do you want to talk to them?” she said. “You think they have a care for what you say?”
Defeated, Ashok could only shake his head. Skagi and Cree had waded in to try to relieve Chanoch and Vedoran, but there was a long distance between them. It would be where they would make the last stand, Ashok thought. He had no dagger to give Ilvani to do away with herself, when the time came. Perhaps, if he wasn’t cut down, he could do the deed himself.
Ashok put his body in front of the witch and prepared to wade into the fray. Up the tunnel, in the distance, a cry rang out. Not the warrior screams of the shadar-kai, or the death cries, but something much more horrifying, magnified a hundred times by the cave.
The sound caused the line of shadar-kai in front of them to fold. They went to their knees and clutched their ears against the sound, their faces twisted in agony. Never had they heard a sound such as that, a scream that would invade their deepest nightmares long after the cry had faded away.
Ashok had heard the sound before; he knew it intimately. And in its wake only he, Ilvani, and the rest of his
