She lowered her face, expecting to see blood spewing, her insides coming out.
Only four faint red lines marked the pale unbroken skin of her belly.
“Drop her!” a hoarse voice roared from her right.
The malice’s face turned, its eyes blinking slowly; Fawn turned too. The sudden release of pressure from her shirt took her utterly by surprise, and she fell to the cave floor, dirt and stones scraping her palms, then scrambled up.
Dag was in the shadows, struggling with three, no, all five of the mud-men.
One reeled backward with a slashed throat, and another closed in. Dag nearly disappeared under the grunting pile of creatures. A shuffle, a rip, Dag’s yell, and a mess of straps and wood and a flash of metal thudded violently against the cave wall. A mud-man had just torn off his arm contraption. The mud-man twisted the arm around behind Dag’s back as though trying to rip it off too.
He met her eyes. Shoved his big steel knife into the nearest mud-man as though wedging it into a tree for safekeeping, and ripped a leather pouch from around his neck, its strap snapping. “Spark! Watch this!”
She kept her eyes on it as it sailed toward her and, to her own immense surprise, caught it out of the air. She had never in her life caught—.
Another mud-man jumped on Dag.
“Stick it in!” he bellowed, going down again. “Stick it in the malice!”
Knives. The pouch had two knives. She pulled one out. It was made of bone.
Magic knives? “Which?” she cried frantically.
“Sharp end first! Anywhere!”
The malice was starting to move toward Dag. Feeling as though her head was floating three feet above her body, Fawn thrust the bone knife deeply into the thing’s thigh.
The malice turned back toward her, howling in surprise. The sound split her skull. The malice caught her by the neck, this time, and lifted her up, its hideous face contorting.
“No! No!” screamed Dag. “The other one!”
Her one hand still clutched the pouch; the other was free. She had maybe one second before the malice shook her till her neck snapped, like a kitchen boy killing a chicken. She yanked the spare bone blade out of its sheath and jammed it forward. It skittered over something, maybe a rib, then caught and went in, but only a couple of inches. The blade shattered. Oh no—!
She was falling, falling as if from a great height. The ground struck her a stunning blow. She shoved herself up once more, everything spinning around her.
Before her eyes, the malice was slumping. Bits and pieces sloughed off it like ice blowing from a roof. Its awful, keening voice went up and up and higher still, fading out yet leaving shooting pains in her ears.
And gone. In front of her feet was a pile of sour-smelling yellow dirt. The first knife, the one with the blue haft that hadn’t worked, lay before it. In her ears was silence, unless she’d just gone deaf.
No, for a scuffle began again to her right. She whirled, thinking to snatch up the knife and try to help. Its magic might have failed, but it still had an edge and a point. But the three mud-men still on their feet had stopped trying to tear the patroller apart, and instead were scrambling away, yowling. One bowled her over in its frantic flight, apparently without any destructive intent.
This time, she stayed on her hands and knees. Gasping. She had thought her body must run out of shakes in sheer exhaustion, but the supply seemed endless. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering, like someone freezing to death.
Her belly cramped.
Dag was sitting on the ground ten feet away with a staggered look on his face, legs every which way, mouth open, gasping for air just as hard as she was.
His left sleeve was ripped off, and his handless arm was bleeding from long scratches. He must have taken a blow to his face, for one eye was already tearing and swelling.
Fawn scrabbled around till her hand encountered the other knife hilt, the green one that had splintered in the malice. Where was the malice? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I broke it.” She was sniveling now, tears and snot running down her lip from her nose. “I’m sorry…”
“What?” Dag looked up dazedly, and began to crawl toward her one-handed in strange slow hops, his left arm curled up protectively to his chest.
Fawn pointed a trembling finger. “I broke your magic knife.”
Dag stared down at the green-wrapped hilt with a disoriented look on his face, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “No… it’s all right… they’re supposed to do that. They break like that when they work. When they teach the malice how to die.”
“What?”
“Malices are immortal. They cannot die. If you tore that body into a hundred bits, the malice’s… self, would just flee away to another hole and reassemble itself. Still knowing everything it had learned in this incarnation, and so twice as dangerous. They cannot die on their own, so you have to share a death with them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain more,” he wheezed, “later…” He rolled over on his back, hair sweaty and wild; dilated eyes, the color of sassafras tea in the shadows, looking blankly upwards. “Absent gods. We did it. It’s done. You did it! What a mess. Mari will kill me. Kiss me first, though, I bet. Kiss us both.”
Fawn sat on her knees, bent over her cramps. “Why didn’t the first knife work?
What was wrong with it?”
“It wasn’t primed. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. In a hurry. A patroller would have known which was which by touch. Of course you couldn’t tell.” He rolled over on his left side and reached for the blue-hiked knife. “That one’s mine, for me someday.”
His hand touched it and jerked back. “What the… ?” His lips parted, eyes going suddenly intent, and he reached again, gingerly. He drew his hand back more slowly this time, the lunatic exhilaration draining from his face. “That’s strange. That’s very strange.”
“What?” snapped Fawn, pain and bewilderment making her sharp. Her body was beaten, her neck felt half-twisted-off, and her belly kept on knotting in aching waves. “You don’t tell me anything that makes sense, and then I go and do stupid things, and it’s not my fault.”
“Oh, I think this one is. That’s the rule. Credit goes to the one who does, however scrambled the method. Congratulations, Little Spark. You have just saved the world. My patrol will be so pleased.”
She would have thought him ragging her mercilessly, but while his words seemed wild, his level tone was perfectly serious. And his eyes were warm on her, without a hint of… malice.
“Maybe you’re just crazy,” she said gruffly, “and that’s why nothing you say makes sense.”
“No surprise by now if I am,” he said agreeably. With a grunting effort, he rolled over and up onto his knees, hand propping him upright. He opened his jaw as if to stretch his face, as though it had gone numb, and blinked owlishly.
“I have to get off this dead dirt. It’s fouling up my groundsense something fierce.”
“Your what?”
“I’ll explain that later”—he sighed—“too. I’ll explain anything you want.
You’re owed, Little Spark. You’re owed the world.” He added after a reflective moment,
“Many people are. Doesn’t change the matter.”
He started to reach for the unbroken knife again, then paused, his expression growing inward. “Would you do me a favor? Pick that up and carry it along for me. The hilt and the bits of the other, too. It needs proper burying, later on.”
Fawn tried not to look at his stump, which was pink and lumpy and appeared sore.
“Of course. Of course. Did they break your hand thing?” She spotted the pouch a few feet away and crawled to get it. She wasn’t sure she could stand up yet either. She collected the broken bits in his torn-off sleeve and slid the intact knife back into its sheath.
He rubbed his left arm. “Afraid so. It isn’t meant to come off that way, by a long shot. Dirla will fix it, she’s good with leather. It won’t be the first time.”
“Is your arm all right?”
He grinned briefly. “It isn’t meant to come off that way either, though that bear-fellow sure tried. Nothing’s broken. It’ll get better with rest.”