A broken sigil. Any mystic power the emblem had contained must have dissipated, for Johan recalled how he himself had driven a dagger through the buckle and into Jaeger's hide. That, he hoped, would put an end to the cursed cat who dogged his trail and haunted his dreams. Yet here was another such animal-man poised to take his life.
"My father's emblem," rumbled the cat man, still with one hand curled to strike.
Johan flinched as realization struck in the tiger's mind. Quivering all over, like a geyser set to explode, Jedit muttered, "You could gain that symbol in only one way! You did kill my father!"
"Kill him!" screamed Simone, not ten feet behind.
Blind with rage, Jedit lashed out with both paws.
Fear gave Johan wings. Wrenching backward in desperation, the magician lost more robe as sweeping paws ripped the air before his nose and chest. Johan crashed to the ground painfully and kicked backward like a crab. His shoulders bunched in cloth and table legs as market items clattered and clinked on his bare chest and legs. Still the battle-mad tiger lurched to rip him apart, and Johan had no place left to retreat.
Better die than surrender, thought the mage. With no other hope, he reached into distant memory and plucked forth a spell once glimpsed in an arcane book so horrid he'd suffered nightmares for months. There were many places among the infinite planes of Dominaria so frightening that even to imagine them drove seasoned mages insane with horror. One land was so volatile that even to breathe its air would blister a man to ashes. Yet desperate times called for desperate measures.
"Unleash," Johan gasped, already recoiling from horrors to come, "the beasts of Bogardan!"
Flaming hell descended on Palmyra's marketplace.
Chest-high, the creatures were part goat, part hellhound, and part dragon with twin rows of scales down their spines. They carried part of Bogardan with them, for flames licked at their nostrils. One second Johan was crawling like a half-naked crab through the dust of the marketplace, about to be torn to flinders by a raging man-tiger, and the next instant thirty-odd beasts appeared in a circle around the mage and stampeded toward anything that moved. Nor were the goat-beasts the only creatures to escape Bogardan, for a flock of long-winged bats circled and peeped and dove at folks' heads with ivory teeth seeking blood. Most fearsome were two black beasts like great apes. Tentacles whipped the air behind their shoulders, and red flame shone in mad eyes.
As dawn lit the Palmyran marketplace, panic followed on the heels of war. People cannoned into one another and ran headlong for cover as the beasts of Bogardan ripped into them like wolves into sheep. An urchin carrying candlewood was attacked by two goat-dogs. Flaming fanged jaws snapped off a foot and hand before the child could even scream for help. A milkmaid was grabbed by a tentacled ape and squeezed so hard her back broke and ribs punctured her lungs. She died with blood bubbling from her lips. An old cobbler was knocked flat by three stampeding beasts, then had his liver ripped out before he died. Flittering and squeaking, bat-things flocked over two rug merchants, smothering them in smoking-hot flesh, so their screams were drowned out as razor teeth slashed skin and rasping tongues lapped up spurting crimson. Many more people were attacked from all sides, as well as from the sky. Running, screaming, or standing their ground, a score were immediately pulled down and savaged by coal-black beasts from an infernal pit.
Johan was saved by the onslaught of the hellish beasts. Jedit Ojanen, Sister Wilemina, and Simone the Siren found the fight of their lives.
The women jumped back to back and filled their fists with steel, Wilemina with an archer's leaf-blade sword and her ornate bow, Simone with a cutlass and dagger jutting point down. Immediately they were attacked, for the beasts showed no fear of weaponry. As a pair of beasts lunged for Wilemina's legs, the oaken-armed archer rammed her blade straight into one flaming mouth and rapped her stout bow atop another beast's skull. The throat-pierced beast died in blood, but not before it leaped higher on the blade and snapped at the archer's fingers, skinning them to bone. For the other, Wilemina yanked upward to tangle the beast's bearded chin between string and ivory while she ripped her bloody sword free of the dying beast's mouth. Whirling in a frenzy, she slashed at the attacking beast's eyes. The orbs also flamed, and oddly the archer wondered how the fiend could see. The goat-dogs stank of burned metal. Her sword blow knocked the beast sprawling, but it scrambled on four crooked legs and leaped again. Flaming breath licked at Wilemina's bare legs hot enough to raise blisters.
She wailed, "They're hard as Arcades's armor and hot besides! What shall we do?"
"Fight or die!" snapped Simone, busy with her own troubles. "And hope the other Seven pick up their feet!"
A flame-mouthed goat-dog jumped and snapped at Simone. The black pirate punched straight-armed with her sword to spear its nose, then chopped diagonally to cut the thing's foreleg out from under it. She scored, slashing the beast above the hock, so the blade lodged in bone, but if she expected the Bogardan denizen to whimper or cave in, she was disappointed. It ignored its wound and attacked anew. A belch of fire gushed from its nostrils and set fire to the sleeve of Simone's blue silk shirt. Mad as the place that spawned it and unmindful of pain, it clamped naming teeth on Simone's dagger blade. The pirate cursed and grunted as she beat the thing to the ground with hard sword blows. Meanwhile a dozen more beasts cavorted nearby, as eager to attack armed fighters as screaming townsfolk.
Jedit Ojanen saw no one else's plight. Closest to the fallen Johan, the tiger was swarmed by five coal-black brute-dogs. Toothed mouths brimming flame latched onto his striped tail, onto his thighs, his belly ruff, his forearm. A thousand pounds of forge-hot fury hung on the tiger's mighty frame even as sharklike teeth tore furrows in his bright orange-black hide. Yet Jedit proved just as savage and heedless of pain. A beast clinging to his right thigh, the tiger-man hammered straight down with a fist like a sledgehammer. With a sound like a tree splitting, the beast's neck broke. Only reluctantly, dying, did the goat-dog slacken its jaw. Another creature latching onto Jedit's forearm like a leech received a slash from black claws, so half its neck was shorn away. Blood sprayed from a severed throat where red froth bubbled. Even then Jedit had to dig claws into the beast's snout and pry open jaws like a steel trap. Some of his orange fur stayed lodged between the wicked incisors of the dead goat-dog.
Hung with dog flesh, Jedit half-turned and lashed out with a big clawed foot, for another creature gnawed on his thigh. The first kick, hampered as the tiger was, bounced off the beast's brisket. Crouching, snarling in berserker rage, Jedit kicked hard enough to break down a temple door. Four claws like flint spearpoints rammed into the goat-dog's belly, so blood welled onto the dust of the marketplace. Growling, Jedit kicked outward, straightening his leg with the power of a battering ram. Sinew and tendons parted, yet the Bogardan fiend refused to lose its hold on Jedit's thigh, and finally it was torn in half, hips ripped away from its spine. Jedit flicked his leg, bloody to the knee, and sent the lower half flopping to the dirt. He caught the goat-dog's head, where the flame in its eyes smoldered and flickered out, and wrenched a half-circle to pry loose the beast's jaws.