its middle.
Cerise dashed to him. Behind her the Mars charged at the Hand.
Emel grunted like an animal. His hands clawed the air.
Shapes burst from the peat, huge hulking forms of skeleton and rotting flesh. Too big, too broad for human corpses. Thoas, the dead of the moon people.
The first of the Hand’s agents reached Emel. Cerise lunged, flashing across her blade, and stepped back, as the top half of the agent’s body slid from the torso and crashed into the mud.
“Thank you.” Emel brought his hands together and exhaled sharply. The dead thoas ripped into the agents.
“Thank you for helping.”
“Of course. We’re family. You go. I’m well protected now.”
She sprinted into the thick of the battle.
The thoas tore into the agents with all the wrath Emel could muster. Three of them hung on the white-haired giant. He tried to push them off, but they clung to him, taloned hands ripping, rotting teeth biting. He slammed his back against the cypress and knocked one of the corpses loose.
A grunt of pain made Cerise whirl. She turned just in time to see Mikita go down. A furry creature leaped onto his prone body with a triumphant shout. Before she knew it, Cerise was running, running desperately fast across the slick sludge. She was ten yards away when the furry beast bared needle teeth and ripped out Mikita’s throat.
THE pack halted before the mouth of the path, breaking against the hillside like a brown deluge. Kaldar tried to stop and slid, waving his arms to keep his balance. His hand grasped a sapling, and he caught himself, avoiding a collision with the dogs.
A single form detached from the pack and sailed over their backs in a mighty leap. It landed next to Kaldar. Nightmarish eyes glared at him from a wolf’s face.
Something was wrong.
Kaldar pushed to the front. The hill on one side, deep swamp on the other. They had to pass through a narrow stretch of ground about twenty feet wide. The ground looked freshly raked. Traps, Kaldar realized. Many, many traps.
“A bet. I need a bet or I can’t make it work.”
The pack growled. A brindled dog moved before him and dropped a dead swamp rat at his feet. Cold sweat broke on his forehead.
“Fresh kill. Good bet.” Kaldar swallowed. He picked up the rat. The tiny body was still warm to the touch. Closing his eyes, Kaldar moved into the path.
He felt the magic coalesce above him. That was his talent, his own personal power. It had pulled him out of many scrapes before, and he counted on it now to lead him through the field of traps.
The shivering current hovered above him and plunged through the top of his head, through his spine, through the rat corpse in his arms, into his feet and the ground beneath him. The surge nipped at his entrails with sharp hot fingers. It guided him to where it wanted him to go and he obeyed.
WILLIAM saw Karmash go down beneath a roiling mass of thoas corpses. The agent had managed to secure the lines before they dragged him down, and the Box hung suspended above the water from the branches of the cypress.
Good time to jump in.
William leapt to his feet and ran along the crest of the hill. The first agent never saw him coming. He slashed the man’s throat, spun about, and sliced the other agent to pieces.
Below him the fight raged. The Hand’s agents had recovered from the initial assault and struck back. He saw Seth’s pink tentacles close about a body and release it a second later, limp and twisted, like a cloth doll chewed by a dog.
William turned and ran to the cypress. If he sank the Box now, they wouldn’t get it out a second time. He had to get down to the cypress and cut above the block and tackle, or the lines would snap and take him with them.
Ten yards to the cypress.
Eight.
Spider burst from the thick of the fighting.
William sprinted.
Spider jumped unnaturally high and scuttled up the cypress, landing on the hill in front of the tree.
William halted, his knife out. “Spider.”
Spider grinned and pulled a curved knife from his sheath. “William.”
William bared his teeth.
“Is this really where you want to die, William? In this awful place?”
“No, but it’s good enough for your grave.”
“Are you working for the Mirror now? It’s nice. We must be winning if the Adrianglians are desperate enough to hire your kind.”
William bared his teeth. “They hired the best.”
Spider smiled. “I see. So tell me, is it business or pleasure? Are you doing it for the girl or for your country?”
“Both. Are we going to finish this or do you want to chitchat some more?”
Spider bowed with an elaborate flourish.
William snarled and charged.
TWENTY-NINE
THE magic jerked, nearly sending Kaldar to his feet. Something was wrong. Kaldar opened his eyes. He was almost to the end of the path. Through the gap in the hill he saw the battleground and clumps of fighters tearing at each other in a chaotic frenzy. To the left and above Aunt Murid stood on the slope, her hands a blur as she spanned her crossbow and fired, sending bolt after bolt into the fray. Above her something shivered on the edge of the greenery. A long pink tentacle snaked out from the brush, rippling with reddish eno fire.
“Murid! Look out! Murid!” Kaldar ran. Something popped under his foot with a dry click. He kept running, too late realizing that he had stepped on a mine, and it had failed to detonate.
The tentacle slivered forward, dragging a thick tangle of appendages free of the bushes. They squirmed like a nest of grotesque snakes. A human torso rode in the midst of it all, topped by a bald head glaring at the world with solid black eyes.
“Murid!”
She kept firing.
Kaldar jerked his shotgun and fired. The shot bit into the creature.
The abomination hovered on the edge of the cliff and plunged down. Murid vanished beneath the squirming mass.
Kaldar screamed.
His legs carried him to the creature, and he hacked into the writhing mass with his knife and kept screaming and screaming as blood and tissue flew in a salty spray from his blade. Tentacles raked his back but he kept slicing, oblivious to the pain. He carved his way to the torso and plunged his blade into the human stomach. Tentacles flailed, and the monster’s human mouth hissed. Kaldar jerked his knife free and stabbed again and again and again …
CERISE kicked a body off her blade. All around her the fight raged: reanimated corpses jerky on their feet, huge dogs, the Hand’s freaks, furry, scaled, armored, clawed, fanged, feathered, and the family, all clawing at each other in an insane race to kill. Blood spilled into the sludge, and lives were torn from the still-warm bodies.
