At some faint clink or whisper of a weapon drawn from a sheath, a guardian’s head turned toward them; it lifted its snout, sniffing suspiciously.
Now.
Dag did not cry his command, just yanked out his war knife and plunged forward, weaving around stumps. His thoughts narrowed to his task: slay the mud-men, get his knife-wielders past them and up the tower as fast as death. Faster. Dag took on the nearest mud-man to hand, ducking as it brought up a rusted sword stolen from who-knew-where and swung violently at his head. Dag’s return stroke tore out the creature’s throat, and he didn’t even bother dodging the spray of blood. Arrows from patrol’s archers whispered fiercely past his head to sink into the chest of a mud-man beyond, although the shafts didn’t drop it; the mud-man staggered forward, roaring. Mari, her sharing knife clenched between her teeth, reached the tower and began to climb. Codo darted past her around the tower’s corner and swung himself upward too. Another patroller reached the tower, and another, all in that same intent silence. The rest turned to protect their climbing comrades. Dag could hear them engaging new mud-men reaching the clearing, as yet more came crashing up the hill yowling in alarm.
The dark shape at the top of the tower moved, standing up against a cobalt sky scattered with stars and luminous with moon-washed cloud. The four climbers had almost reached the top. Suddenly the figure crouched, leaped—descended as if floating the full twenty feet to land upon its folding legs and spring again upright. As if it were light as a dancer, and not seven solid feet of corded muscle, sinew, and bone. It wheeled, coming face-to-face with Dag.
This malice was lean, almost graceful, and Dag was shocked by its beauty in the moonlight. Fair skin moved naturally over a face of sculpted bone; hair swept back from its high brow to flow like a river of night down its back. Its androgynous body was clothed in stolen oddments—trousers, a shirt, boots, a Lakewalker leather vest—which it somehow endowed with the air of some ancient high lord’s attire. How many molts must it have gone through, how quickly, to have achieved such a human—no, superhuman—form? Its glamour wrenched Dag’s gaze, and he could feel his ground ripple—he snapped himself closed, tight and hard.
And open again as Utau, sharing knife out, staggered with a sudden cry. Dag could sense the strain in Utau’s ground as the malice turned and gripped it, starting to rip it away. Frantic, Dag extended his left arm and stretched out his ghost hand to snatch at the malice’s ground in turn. Out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Mari, clinging to the tower side, drop her sharing knife down in a pale spinning arc to Dirla, who had temporarily broken free of mud-men.
As a fragment of its ground came away in Dag’s ghost hand, the malice turned back to him with an astonished scream. Dag recalled that moment in the medicine tent when he’d snatched ground from Hoharie’s apprentice, but this time it felt like clutching a live coal. Pain and terror reverberated up his left arm. He tried to cast the fragment into the earth, but it clung to his ground like burning honey. The malice reached two-handed toward Dag, its dark eyes wide and furious. Dag tried again to close himself against it, and failed. He could feel the malice’s grip upon his ground tighten, and his breath locked at the surge of astounding pain that seemed to start from his marrow and strike outward to his skin, as if all his bones were being shattered in place simultaneously.
And Dirla lunged forward onto a stump and plunged Mari’s sharing knife into the malice’s back.
Dag felt the dying enter his own shredding ground, cloudy and turbulent as blood poured into roiling water. For a moment, he shared the malice’s full awareness. The world’s ground stretched away from their center for miles, glowing like fire, with slaves and mud-men moving across it in scattered, blazing ranks. The confusing din of their several hundred, no, thousand anguished minds battered his failing consciousness. The malice’s vast will seemed to drain from them as Dag watched, leaving blackness and dismay. The irrational intelligence of the great being snatched at his own mind, hungry above all for understanding of its plight, and Dag knew that if this malice took him in, it would have nearly all it needed, and yet still not be saved from its own cravings and desires. It is quite mad. And the more intelligent it grows, the more agonizing its own madness becomes to it. It seemed a curious but useless insight to gain, here at the end of breath and light.
The malice screamed again, its voice rising strangely like a song, wavering upward into unexpected purity. Its beautiful body ruptured, caught by its clothing, and it fell in a welter of blood and fluid.
The earth rose up and struck Dag cruelly in the back. Stars spun overhead, and went out.
Fawn shot awake in the dark and sat up in her lonely bedroll with a gasp. Shock shuddered through her body, then a wash of fear. A noise, a nightmare? No echoes pulsed in her ears, no visions faded in her mind. Her heart pounding unaccountably, she slapped her right hand over her left wrist. This panic was surely the opposite of relaxed persuasion and openness, but beneath her marriage cord her whole arm was throbbing.
Something’s happened to Dag. Hurt? Hurt bad…?
She scrambled up and pushed through her tent flap into the milky light of a partial moon, seeming bright compared to the inky shadows inside. Not stopping to throw anything over her sleeping shift, she picked her way across the clearing, wincing at the twigs and stones that bit her bare feet. It was all that kept her from breaking into a run.
She hesitated outside Cattagus and Mari’s tent. The night was cool after the recent rains, and Cattagus had dropped the porch flap down. She slapped it as Utau had theirs on the dark morning he’d come to wake Dag. She tried to guess the time from the moon passing over the lake—two hours after midnight, maybe? There was no sound from within, and she pounded the leather again, then shifted from foot to foot, trying to gather the nerve to go inside and shake the old man by the shoulder.
Before she did, the flap moved on Sarri’s tent, and the dark-haired woman emerged. She had paused for sandals, but no robe either, and her feet slapped quickly across the stretch between the two tent-cabins.
“Did you feel that?” Fawn asked her anxiously, keeping her voice low for fear of waking the children. And then felt utterly stupid, for of course Sarri would not feel anything from a marriage cord wrapped around someone else’s wrist. “Did you feel anything just now?”
Sarri shook her head. “Something woke me. Whatever it was, was gone by the time I’d gathered my wits.” Her right hand too gripped her left wrist, kneading.
“Razi and Utau…?”
“Alive. Alive. At least that.” She shot Fawn a curious look. “Did you feel something? Surely you couldn’t have…”
She was interrupted by a grunt from the tent. Cattagus shouldered through the flap, tying up his shorts around his stout middle and scowling. “What’s all this too-roo in the moonlight, girlies?”
“Fawn says she felt something in her cord. Woke her up.” Sarri added, as if reluctant to endorse this, “I woke up too, but there wasn’t…anything. Mari?”
The same gesture, right hand over left, although by putting on an expression of exasperation Cattagus tried, unsuccessfully, to make it not look anxious. He shook his head. “Mari’s all right.” He added after a moment of reflection, “Alive, at least. What in the wide green world can all those galloping fools be about over there at this time of night?” He glanced west, as if his eyes could somehow penetrate a hundred and more miles and see the answer, but that feat was beyond even his Lakewalker powers, a fact his dry snort seemed to acknowledge.