In other ways, it was more so.
Danger stirred the blood. The body had no conscience. The rawest recruit learned both, and quickly, and with other company Amris would have been untroubled by the awareness of Darya’s body and her scent, the tingling warmth where they touched, or the stirrings of his body. Such things happened, even when one’s immediate partner wasn’t a supple woman with gleaming hair and an intriguing curve to her lips.
That she was Gerant’s partner, and Gerant was to some degree in both their minds… That had him gritting his teeth and staring fixedly forward. If the spell had revealed his arousal to Darya, or if Gerant had sensed it, neither of them reacted. Certainly they both would know, as he did, how little such things meant in their situation, but still he cringed, and thought hard about cavalry maneuvers.
Then he didn’t have to.
Danger might excite, but the sight of the creatures coming down the path would have quelled the ardor of a sixteen-year-old in a tent of dancing girls.
* * *
The two on the korvin were twistedmen, creatures Darya had seen and fought before. Six feet high and roughly man-shaped, they were stretched, their limbs, neck, and faces all too long for their bodies. Each had a pair of outsized hands, with gnarled fingers tipped by three-inch talons, and close up, Darya knew, each would have three rows of black, razor-edged teeth.
What most people would notice first was that they looked skinned. Or they were skinned, but stayed alive without being in constant pain, or were in constant pain and that was why they hated normal people—the debates got lengthy. Darya had mostly ignored them. She knew that the twistedmen were bloodred, that she could see the ropes of muscle shifting as they moved, and that the same unlucky bastards who saw the teeth could likely glimpse veins running through and around their bodies.
Every so often, one would raid farms, stealing small livestock and children. Less often, a band of four or five would kill and eat larger prey. It always was a matter of eating—animals didn’t like them, and she’d never heard of a horse tolerating a twistedman as a rider. Thus the korvin, she guessed, though she’d never seen twistedmen bother with riding beasts before.
The korvin was a blanched-white worm, eyeless as far as she could tell, with tiny legs sprouting from each side. The twistedmen perched on a saddle strapped between a couple of pairs of the legs. Each twistedman had an ax strapped to its back, and a couple of knives at its side. They glanced around occasionally as they rode, but generally took it easy, lingering well behind the two riders in front.
Those two went on horseback, though the horses themselves weren’t what Darya was used to—their fur had an oily sheen, and their hooves looked sharper than normal—and she saw no sign of Ironhide.
Like the twistedmen, the riders had two legs, two arms, and heads. They also had skin, but it was leprous white with gray splotches, and while their arms were too long for men, their legs were comparatively short—ape stock, Darya thought, and then saw the flat, wide-mouthed face of one, and thought there was likely a bit of frog in there too. As the twistedmen did, they wore leather armor, but Darya saw no obvious weapons, save for more knives at the belt.
Those are an innovation too, said Gerant, distant and dry but still obviously horrified.Whoever Thyran left in charge, they’ve kept themselves busy in his absence.
* * *
Immediately Amris started making a mental list: all the wizards capable of such creation, or all those that had been alive and free when he’d gone into stasis. It was a short list, and an alarming one.
It was also pointless just then. He knew not how that battle had ended, and had no chance to ask what Gerant knew of the people involved; neither of them knew what apprentices those living might have taken over the years, nor which other wizards of such inclination might have come up with the frog-mouthed scouts on their own. There was no good in such an organization of thoughts, save that it distanced himself from the things on the road.
No matter how often he’d fought Thyran’s foot soldiers, they made his skin crawl, and they were the least—and least horrible—of his creations. Gerant and others had debated whether the horror was intentional, or whether the result of turning flesh against itself was always horrible. Amris had simply met the consequences and slain them with none of the vague sorrow that had usually come with a human opponent, only a sense of relief when a thing that should never have existed had at least stopped moving.
He didn’t know if the new creations were worse.Worsewas a word that quickly lost its meaning when the Twisted were concerned. They were unfamiliar, and that would have been a bad omen, even if they’d had the beauty of the gods themselves.
Breathing as silently as he could, holding absolutely still, Amris waited. The creatures below spoke a few words to one another in squelching voices, but they were too quiet and too distorted for Amris to make out at his distance. He glanced over to Darya, and she shook her head.
They kept riding. That, above all, was paramount. The new creatures, the ones on horseback, vanished into the tree line. As the korvin and its occupants followed, Amris followed every step of its legs on the path. The twistedman at the front made some jest, and its companion laughed, a sound like ripping flesh.
Amris had spent years fighting them, and still the noises they made sank claws into the back of his mind and pulled. They weren’t called twistedmen for their shapes alone.
But then they, too, were gone. The forest swallowed the last of the korvin’s legs and its sting-tipped rear.
Darya held up an open hand, then began to fold down her fingers, one at a time: give them time to move on. Take no action they might hear.
The hoofbeats, the wetter sounds of the korvin’s legs, and the occasional laughter of the riders faded very slowly. Birds began to sing again. The other sounds of the forest resumed. Through the spell, Amris and Darya each felt the other’s tension—the strain of holding still, the anticipation and the dread.
Before Darya closed her hand entirely, Amris knew enough time had passed. She didn’t relax, truly, but he felt the sharpest edge of her awareness easing a trifle. He stretched his legs, preparing to rise.
The leaves above them rustled, too heavy for a creature of the forest. A shape dropped just in front of Amris; before he could do more than see it, long fingers had closed about his neck with the strength of iron. The monster in front of him grinned, mouth peeling back to the sides of its gray-white head.
“I smelled your blood a league off, meatling,” it breathed at him.
From his other side came the sound of a blow and a grunt from Darya. Amris got a hand around the hilt of his belt knife, but the hands at his throat were already turning his armor against him, crushing the metal into his windpipe and the great vessels of his neck. The strength was already going out of his arms as he drew. His first strike, he feared, would be his last, and even that most likely in vain.
Chapter 19
Cold passed through him. It came not as a wind from outside, but upward from his guts and his heart, drawn along his spine. Then it was gone in the final desperation of his lunge.
