Naturally the twistedmen knew of Amris’s approach well before he reached them. As Darya had said, he was a “big shiny target,” and a large man in plate could never run with anything approaching silence. By the time he saw meat-red flesh and the blanched white of the korvin up ahead, they’d already turned to face him.
Awareness was fine. Suspicion wasn’t. Amris froze in his tracks, then pretended to stumble backward, giving his best impression of a man who’d fled from the frying pan and only now saw the flames licking around him.
“Whatareyou?” he gasped, a bit of bad theatrics that also helped him catch his breath.
The twistedman closest to him laughed in its flesh-shriveling way. “Look,” it said around its mouthful of teeth. “One of them got away.”
Amris barely caught the motion behind it, and was fortunate he had. The flash of steel in the air would never have been enough warning. As it was, he sidestepped just enough that the knife tore through his trousers, cutting the skin beneath but doing no worse.
A proper hit would have skewered his knee. The twistedmen hadn’t lost their taste for games with their prey, it seemed.
The knife-thrower hurled a second blade, aimed higher. Amris ducked and spun sideways again, heard the clang as it bounced off his pauldron and felt the impact as a blow to his shoulder. Rising, he saw the twistedman vault from its seat on the korvin.It pulled the ax from its sheath and started charging; its fellow dug a pair of spurred boots into the worm beast, which shrieked protest but squirmed forward with the same uncanny speed that had been the doom of many infantry during the first few battles.
Amris set his feet, raised his sword, and prepared.
The arrow streaked from the trees and into the unmounted twistedman, hitting just between shoulder and neck. If the monster had been unarmored or human, it might have been a fatal shot; as it was, the head sunk deeply into the leather and likely into the meat beneath. Force and pain stopped the twistedman in its tracks. It screamed, a sound as horrible as its laughter.
Amris dashed toward it. The armor would make him pay later, but he’d learned to put off such prices, especially in the maelstrom of battle, and the edge of his blade swept down into the whole side of the creature’s neck before it stopped howling. Neither howling nor the neck lasted long: the twistedmen had thicker skin and stronger spines than mortals, but Amris was familiar with both and knew their weak spots.
He was spinning before the thing’s head had finished falling, needing no noise to tell him the korvin and its rider would have changed direction as he did. With the edge of his sword, he caught the twistedman’s ax in its downward swing. The korvin gave the low buzz that was its cry of alarm, and reared backward, away from Amris’s return stroke. He saw a few arrows stuck in its hide, but the beast didn’t pay them any mind.
* * *
Stupid giant worms: too many legs and hides like leather, or maybe just no vital organs to speak of. Darya might as well have been shooting a hay bale for all the good her arrows did after she hit the twistedman.
It was time for a change of plan. Shouldering her bow, she sighted down through the trees once more, noting the positions of beast and rider and Amris. This time, though, it was no arrow she was aiming.
She dropped through the branches and onto the korvin with bared steel and a scream that came from the bottom of her lungs and echoed through the forest. Only part of it was her deliberate attempt to throw the twistedman off guard. The rest, despite everything, was exhilaration.
The sound caught even Amris by surprise. He was too good to let it throw him off guard, though. His face saidwhat the hellclearly, but he was still moving when Darya landed, using the moment to dash forward and lop off a couple of the korvin’s legs.
Meanwhile, the twistedman got its ax in the way of her sword rather than its neck, like she’d intended. Darya’s blade bit hard, but the thing didn’t die or even stop fighting. It halfway turned in its seat, spine far too flexible, snarled, and took a swipe at her with its free hand. Talons tore across Darya’s chest, not fatal but still painful.
“Pissoff,” she snapped back at it, whipped her sword around, and took its arm off at the elbow.
Drop hands, promenade forward.
She didn’t actually drop Gerant, but she didn’t try another swing because the range was too close. While the twistedman was holding up the bleeding stump of its arm and shrieking, Darya slipped a knife out of her sleeve and into her hand, then shifted her weight forward. She was inside its guard now, and while Thyran’s creations were well protected, his foot soldiers had the same setup in their necks that humans did.
A quick snap of her wrist, a spray of blood that she narrowly avoided getting in the face, andthatjob was done. She scooted forward and knocked the dying creature to the side with shoulder and hip—she’d stopped hoping for dignity five years back—then kept moving up. “Where’s the brain on this thing?”
“It has none!” Darya couldn’t see Amris, and his voice sounded muffled, but then the korvin reared again, remaining legs pawing the air. She grabbed at the saddle, holding on tightly as the thing crashed back to the ground.
It went still. She blinked, clearing her vision, and saw Amris withdrawing his sword from the monster’s side.
“The heart,” he added, “is the vital spot.”
Chapter 20
“He’s all right,” Darya repeated.
She was wiping blood off her sword, and Amris, unsurprisingly, was watching her while trying to look like he wasn’t. “The deadly blessings, they’re like casting spells—though the sword-spirit doesn’t have to have been a wizard in life, and Gerant says there are other differences.” Darya waved a hand, bloody rag flapping with the gesture. She’d known what the power of her sword could do, and what happened after. That had always been enough for her. It’d have to be enough for Amris, at least until Gerant woke up again.
“But they take the same sort of effort, though the caster has no body left?”
“More or less. I can’t explain it, but then, it’s not as if magic uses anyone’s muscles to begin with. And they don’t sleep, Gerant says. They go…not to Letar’s halls, but elsewhere, or to a different part of this world, a place that’s not a place. I’m sorry… I wish I’d listened more.”
“No blame attaches to you, or no more than ever did to me. In such conversations as these, Gerant would resort to drawing figures for me more often than not.” Amris got on with such cleanup as he could manage, and really did sound reasonably casual when he asked, “How long will he be so away?”
