As a battle-cry, it left something to be desired, but they were just dumb beasts.
Her shout rebounded off the bluffs to the east, and when the echoes died away, there was only silence.
They strained for any sign from the yawning mouth of the burrow.
“You sure they’re in there?” hissed Gallina, popping her head up a little higher.
Then the first spineback exploded from the darkness.
Its body was lean and wolflike, ribs like slats, back scaled with rank upon rank of stony spikes. Its eyes were white, gem-like, and its jaw hung low, crammed with teeth like broken fence palings.
Viv brought Blackblood around in a flat arc, catching the thing mid-leap. The stone on its back shattered with a terrificcrack, and it was flung upslope, folded nearly in half. Its jagged, chuckling roar faded like rocks tumbling down a ravine.
She was dimly aware of a blue glow to her right as Satchel did… something. The fragments of bone in the dirt began to shiver, as though the ground were quaking.
There was no time to think about that, though, as two more spinebacks burst into view. Gallina dove toward one, dragging a knife along its ribs, the other plunging for its belly.
Viv grinned wildly, already bringing the greatsword back into play on the backswing, heaving up to take the other spineback in the chest.
She was so committed to the swing that when a blur of motion caught her eye from the left, there was nothing she could do but grit her teeth and fling up an elbow.
She only had time to think, with detached annoyance,There’s another gods-damned exit to the burrow.
The elbow saved her ribs from the spineback’s teeth, cracking its jaw closed, but did little to arrest its momentum. It barreled into her and sent her sprawling.
Though her original swing was fouled, it still caught her first target. The spineback howled and tumbled past, ripping Blackblood from her grip and rolling end over end in a tangle of limbs and teeth.
Then Viv was on her side, breath blown out of her, twisting, bringing both hands up to scrabble for the windpipe of the one on top of her. Its jaws snapped inches from her face, breath rank, spittle spraying her cheeks. She got her fingers around its throat and squeezed, bracing to heave it off her, but the angle was all wrong.
She heard Gallina distantly shouting, and a gathering hum and rattle somewhere above her head. An incandescent flashof blue made her squint, and then the air was filled with the sound of a hundred wasps.
The spineback squealed and shivered as it was struck from every direction at once. Viv was sprayed with something wet and hot, and the creature seized, twitching galvanically, then slumped all at once.
She rolled and tossed it to the side, staring in bewilderment.
It wasn’t even alive enough to breathe its last.
Uncountable fragments of bone had punctured it from every conceivable direction.
Viv made it to her knees and stared at Satchel, the blue glow ebbing from the inscriptions along his limbs. His eyes were white hot, already subsiding.
“What the shit?” said Viv.
Gallina staggered up to them both. “Eight hells. You just—” She waved a hand through the air and made a whooshing noise.
Satchel shrugged, and Viv thought he looked embarrassed. “Bones,” he said.
“Well, this is a gods-damned surprise,” puffed Gallina. “When you said you served your Lady, I gotta say, I thought you meant, like… tea.”
Viv dragged all four of the corpses side by side and examined them. “Something’s wrong,” she said.
“They stink, that’s what’s wrong,” replied Gallina, making a face.
“No. They’restarving. Look at them.”
Spinebacks weren’t beautiful creatures by any stretch of theimagination, but these four were pitiful specimens indeed, their ribs stark, their hides patchy. Gaunt.
“The bones here are many days old,” observed Satchel, toying with an osseous shard.
