"Kamahl! Are you okay?"
The barbarian waved Chainer off and dropped the rest of the way down to the ground, trying to evade the pollen. With his face half-buried in mulch, Kamahl coughed the pollen out and tried to suck clear forest air in.
Chainer hesitated. He didn't want to leave Kamahl in the dirt, and he didn't want to face the grendelkin without support. The huge monster took a step forward and casually snapped the top off another tree. It used the tree as a crude club, and it shambled forward, slamming into the ground and other trees with each step.
"Poison," Kamahl choked. His eyes were wet, but he had stopped coughing and was struggling back to his feet. "There aren't any poisonous plants in this part of Krosan, Chainer. We're being set up."
Thirty yards behind the pair, a long, legless wurm slithered onto their tracks. It opened its square reptilian head and hissed, displaying the foulest and most jagged set of dragon's teeth Chainer had ever seen. A huge, burly centaur with spotted markings and a crude wooden club trotted out from behind the grendelkin, and a crimson night tiger growled from the trees above, its brilliant red hide almost glowing under its black stripes.
"All they've done," Chainer said, "is line themselves up for us." From above, a screaming wolf- monkey dove at Chainer. It became fouled in the censer chain, tearing it out of Chainer's grasp as the monkey itself sprang away with the chain tangled around its leg. Chainer sent a sharpened weight screaming after the retreating monkey but missed by a hair's breadth. The dementist glared at the mandrill with awful fire in his eyes.
"You're mine," he said darkly. "You are all mine." He kept his eyes locked on the monkey as he bent to retrieve the censer. A long vine whipped out of a nearby tree and wrapped itself around Chainer's wrist, and he felt an uncomfortable tingle. Moss was growing across his human hand, spreading outward from the vine. Chainer slashed his wrist loose with his dagger and scraped off the moss before it could spread any farther. The dagger took off the top layers of skin along with the moss.
"This is spellcraft." Kamahl was on his feet, standing behind Chainer. He had drawn his sword and stood with a weapon ready in each hand, his eyes darting from the copse to the wurm to the centaur to the tiger.
"Druid magic?"
Kamahl nodded. "Someone's pulling their strings." He blocked another lashing vine with the flat of his blade and chopped the offending tendril off with his axe.
"That copse of trees seems to be the center of it." Chainer flexed his bleeding hand, testing it. "Somebody's setting its pets on us. Kamahl, I want those monkeys and the grendelkin. The rest can burn, for all I care." He smiled at Kamahl and picked up his still-smoking censer. "You ready for some burning?"
Kamahl coughed the last of the pollen out of his lungs and spit. "Right now, I'd torch all of Krosan just to clear a pathway out of here." His eyes kept traveling back to the centaur. Chainer thought his friend looked disturbed, distracted by something other than the pollen or the attack vines or the platoon of wild beasts that had gathered to kill them.
"Start with the biggest one?" Kamahl asked. Chainer nodded, and the two of them charged forward dodging vines and screaming monkeys.
"Okay if I kill a few of these screaming, hairy buggers?" Kamahl shouted. A wolf-monkey had pounced on him and was resisting his efforts to throw it off.
"As many as you need to," Chainer said. He didn't even make a chain, he simply reached out and crushed the monkey's skull with his metal hand. The body shimmered and disappeared into Chainer's arm. "I've got the one I need." His eyes were black, and he touched his clenched fist to his forehead. "For Skellum."
Another monkey threw itself at Kamahl. The barbarian chopped it in half with his broadsword without breaking stride. He turned and channeled a blast of fire through his blade at the wurm. The legless dragon screeched in pain, but the blast did little more than singe its skin. It held its ground however, unwilling to risk another blast from closer range.
Chainer rolled away from the centaur's club and whipped a collar around its neck. The man-horse reared up and jerked the chain out of Chainer's hand, and the collar faded as soon as Chainer lost contact with it. Chainer sprinted past the centaur to engage the grendelkin as Kamahl was keeping the tiger and the wurm at bay with blasts of flame. The man-horse galloped after Chainer as fast as the underbrush would allow, with his club raised high overhead.
Chainer had a bigger problem with a bigger club, however. The grendelkin would not move away from the edge of the copse, and he was waving his tree trunk like a scythe in front of him. Chainer couldn't get in under the tree to attack, and the centaur was bearing down on him from behind.
Chainer jumped as high as he could over the grendelkin's next wild swing and latched himself onto the end of the tree with a collar chain. The grendelkin waved its club with Chainer trailing behind it like the tail of a kite. At the apex of the grendelkin's swing, Chainer sent a sharpened weight into the organic seam between two of the armored plates on the grendelkin's back. Chainer let go of the chain that linked him to the tree, and hauled himself onto the grendelkin.
"Eat this," he snarled at the centaur, and unleashed the death bloom directly into the back of the grendelkin's skull. The monster choked in mid-roar and froze with its hand poised to crush Chainer like a stinging fly. Except for the monkeys, who were in constant motion and never stopped screaming, every sentient thing in the area stopped and stared at the dead grendelkin, waiting to see which way it would topple.
Unfortunately for the centaur, Chainer's plan of letting the grendelkin fall forward worked perfectly. Killing the grendelkin removed Chainer and Kamahl's main adversary. Letting its body fall removed five more as the centaur, the tiger, and three of the wolf- monkeys were crushed by the three-ton carcass.
Chainer rode the grendelkin through all obstacles as it crashed to the forest floor. He spiked a short chain into the top of the creature's spine, shuddered, and the giant corpse disappeared up into Chainer's body like liquid through a sucking straw. Instead of falling, Chainer floated, surrounded by a whirling cloud of dust and black light. He felt a bomb go off in his head, and he felt a body-wide sensation similar to when the justicar fried him. Chainer screamed.
Kamahl had blinded the wurm with his broadsword and was preparing to behead the floundering thing when Chainer cried out. He hesitated, then brought his sword down and leaped away from the thrashing coils. As Chainer continued to float and scream, Kamahl felt something angry shift inside the copse of trees. A half-dozen wolf-monkeys still howled on the battlefield, and the trees themselves were starting to move, stretching their branches down and reaching for Chainer and Kamahl. From inside the cluster of trees, a bald human figure came forward. The chanting druid held a crude pine torch in one hand and a thorny bough of red berries in the other. He was painted with bright yellow markings, and a crown of ivy spread from his head down past his shoulders.
As the first tree limb touched the nimbus around Chainer, his scream grew higher and more shrill, building to a crescendo of transcendent agony. Inside the cloud, Chainer turned his black eye sockets toward the encroaching branch. He crossed his arms over his chest, then snapped them down his sides and thrust his head back.
A half-dozen chains leaped from all parts of his body, each lashing straight into the throat of a jabbering wolf-monkey. With his body rigid and his eyes unseeing, Chainer brought all of the monkeys together in front of him with a nauseous splat. He leveled his eyes at the horrid sight he had created and smiled.
The six wolf-monkeys were mashed together like soft clay figurines. Limbs, tails, torsos, and heads were all bent and mashed together, merging into one giant gob of flesh and teeth with no dis-cernable top, bottom, inside, or out. The ones with functioning mouths wailed piteously. Chainer's smile grew savage and cruel under his hollow eyes. Then the entire mass of monkeys burst like a balloon and disappeared in a puff of smoke.