Amris didn’t bother stopping or turning. The whip cracked against his breastplate with bruising force. An uncanny chill spread through the metal and across Amris’s chest. Both were easy to ignore under the circumstances.
He swung overhand while the whip was still out. Bone split beneath his blade, and the end of the whip went flying off to the side. The dalhan opened its mouth, showing a pair of long fangs in the middle of churning blackness, and roared with anger, then charged.
That was well.
Amris braced himself as the monster rushed toward him. It raised itself up on its back legs at the last moment, stretching out its huge front claws to grab him.
He lunged and slashed. A twist of his hips added to the strength of his arms, propelling the sword in a short, powerful horizontal arc that split bone and sliced flesh in a clean cut through the dalhan’s torso just where it narrowed to join the legs.
For a moment, the thing still clawed at him, talons seeking purchase on his armor. Then they fell away. The creature’s body slumped, then toppled away from the legs. Amris retreated quickly as blood hissed on his gauntlets.
The last dalhan standing didn’t stand for long. By the time Amris could see the pair of them clearly, Darya had put slashes in many of its limbs, deep enough that it was moving unsteadily and unable to lift its whip. As he watched, she danced in past an erratically flailing claw, plunged Gerant deep into a spot near the base of the monster’s torso, and slipped back out of reach while it collapsed.
Are you all right?
Having no breath, Gerant couldn’t sound breathless. The voice in Amris’s mind was weary nonetheless, and gave the distinct impression that Gerant was recovering himself in some fashion, even if not by panting and wiping his brow.
Doing the first and regretting that helmet and gauntlets prevented the second, Amris gave himself a swift inspection before he answered. The dalhan’s blood had left a few pits in his gauntlets, but they appeared to be getting no deeper. His chest felt no worse than bruised beneath his armor. The cold, as clammy and oddly seeking as it had been, had vanished.
“Thank you, yes,” he said. “And the pair of you?”
The wording came easily from his mouth. Battle had left him still too focused to think of the implications.
Gerant was silent, though, and it was Darya who answered, stepping carefully around the pools of black blood and hacked white bodies toward Amris. “Not too bad, thanks. I don’t think we’ll want the rabbit anymore, though.”
* * *
“So. Dalhan?” Amris said.
He spoke quietly, and cleaned his sword while he did it, but Darya saw how his gaze kept flicking back to the bodies, the blood, and the way the plants were dying around them. It wasn’t horror exactly, or not all horror—she thought he’d seen things as bad as she had, or worse—but an attempt to fully understand a new threat.
The storms and Thyran’s summonings left weaknesses in the world,said Gerant.Demons took advantage of that. Gods know there were enough bodies for them to construct their own vehicles, even the lesser ones.
“They’re soul-eaters,” Darya put in, feeling that she should contribute to the more practical end of things. “Probably soul-harvesters in this case. Wizards—if they’re also sons of bitches—use them like that from time to time. They usually only can manage one, though. And dalhan don’t hunt in packs naturally.”
On their own, the things didn’t attack each other, but they didn’t share territory either. One of them tended to leave the land pretty unappetizing for the others, after all.
Amris spoke the thoughts she didn’t want to have. “Then there’s more than a slim chance they’re in Thyran’s service, or the service of his magicians.”
“Yeah.” Darya wanted to kick one of the bodies, but she liked her toes. “The Twisted, the living ones—if you can call it living—don’t want them around, though, for obvious reasons.”
“Sending them ahead would make all the more sense, then. As an advance force, they’d be out of the way of the normal troops and the scouts alike, and positioned well to weaken any resistance they found, or simply send back power from lower sources if they didn’t meet with intelligent life. Can they do that?”
They can do that, said Gerant.
“I wouldn’t mind if you stopped being right about this sort of thing,” said Darya, resheathing Gerant now that the blood was off his blade. “For the record.”
“It’s one of my dearer wishes as well. Still—” Amris squared his shoulders, armor clanking. “These will give their masters no more power. There’s some comfort in that.”
It was, in fact, a cheering thought. “Does he do that a lot?” she asked Gerant.
A great deal.
“I’m not complaining,” she added, starting back toward the path. “I’m just waiting for you to reassure me that I’ll find us another dinner.”
“I have nothing but faith in your skills, Sentinel.”
Chapter 14
