With a heaving snort, Shim abruptly wheeled around. Mala clung to his back, her expression a mask of disbelief and astonishment. She touched her cheek.
Suddenly she laughed and looked to the sky. “Vela!” she shouted. “I would appreciate those ten thousand warriors now!”
Kavik grinned but couldn’t respond. Another revenant was upon him—what had once been a cow. Grunting, he swung through its thick neck, and the next was already lunging. He greeted it by shoving the point of his blade through its eye.
He glanced back. Mala had crouched over Shim’s neck again. They were gone.
A chorus of shrieks and howls warned him before he saw the pack of revenants coming. His grip firm upon the handle of his weapon, he moved closer to the wall, made sure the stone was at his back.
As much sweat as blood dripped into his eyes when he could pause for breath again. Where was the demon? He hadn’t heard its roar since Mala had come through. If it had passed through the village, then there were only revenants left. And no more of the creatures had come for him yet—the slaughtered pack had been the last, and he’d taken at least fifteen breaths since.
Was it done?
Kavik listened. The only roar was from the nearby fires, the loud rumble of roofs and walls collapsing, the snap and crack of heated stone. Animals bleated outside the walls—probably those that had escaped through the south gate and were running loose. A distant shout.
He started in that direction as another sound carried across the distance—Shim’s enraged, trumpeting neigh.
Kavik bolted toward it. Smoke burned his eyes and throat. The thick clouds obscured everything past the reach of his sword. Obstacles appeared almost the same moment he was upon them. He vaulted over a cart abandoned in the road and landed on the lump of a body. A revenant. Mala’s work.
Icy dread filled his chest, squeezed at his lungs. She was another strong foe.
But she was on Shim, fast and mobile. By the time any revenants were drawn to the others she’d slain, Mala would already have been gone.
Unless she’d come upon a pack, too. One might have slowed her down.
Heart pounding, he raced south through the village, faster than he’d ever run. The smoke thinned. The roaring of the fires dimmed. And he could hear them now, the shrieks and howls. He followed the noise through a courtyard and abruptly saw her.
They’d swarmed her. Four or five dozen of them. With Mala still astride him, Shim had backed up against the stone wall of a cottage, and they fought together as if one. Mala’s blade and axe protected their sides, and Shim’s tearing teeth and striking hooves guarded their front. Every revenant that leapt at them was driven back or slain. Given much longer, or a single miss, they might have been overwhelmed—but not yet. And not now.
Kavik didn’t howl to announce his presence this time. The revenants did not know what was coming behind them. Mala saw him, and he saw her fierce grin.
Then he saw his end.
Vela had not said it would be his death. But it mattered not. This was the same.
An oxen revenant charged through the pack. Mala’s axe fell upon its skull but couldn’t stop the thrust of the heavy body behind it. The creature slammed into Shim’s shoulder at the same moment the stallion reared to strike at a revenant. The impact whipped the stallion around, hind legs swept from under him. Mala flew from his back and into the middle of the swarm of revenants. She disappeared beneath them.
Red filled his vision. Kavik roared, charging the swarm, and his heart was a shredded thing, the agony growing with every beat. Shouting her name, he began hacking a path toward her through the mass of revenants. The nearest creatures turned toward him then, but he didn’t see them anymore, his gaze fixed on the spot where she’d vanished. She was still fighting. Through the swarm, he saw the flash of her sword. The fall of her axe.
And the demon tusker silently coming from around the cottage behind her.
“Mala!” Desperately Kavik tried to reach her, his sword swinging, but the mass of revenants pushed him back. He couldn’t get to her.
But she must have sensed the huge demon, or realized the revenants behind her had scattered, or felt its hot breath. She spun to face it.
The demon swung its head. The blades of its tusks swept into her like a scythe.
“Mala!” He screamed her name, then there was nothing, nothing but the blood and agony and the fall of his sword. He had to reach her.
With a final swing, abruptly he was through the mass of revenants, and he knew the madness of battle was upon him. Or simply the same madness that had befallen his father after he’d lost his queen and his sons.
Ahead, Mala was still standing. Feet braced, her jaw tight with effort, she held the edge of the tusks away from her stomach, as if she’d instinctively caught the ivory blades and tried to stop them from cutting her in half.
The demon screeched. Rage filled that shriek, and its own powerful legs were braced. A spasm shook its head.
Not a spasm, Kavik realized. It was trying to shake her off. To move her.
He wasn’t mad. She had captured the tusks in an unbreakable grip. An immovable grip, as if she weighed more than the demon tusker could lift.
Kavik had felt an unbreakable grip before. But no silver light filled her eyes. Her skin didn’t shine.
This was Mala. Only Mala.
A revenant slashed at him from behind. Still staring, Kavik swung his sword in that direction, and still didn’t look away even when the stamp of hooves sounded beside him and the revenant’s brains splattered his boots.
The demon roared, its terrible jaws opening wide. Nose wrinkling, Mala closed her eyes and turned her face away.
“By Temra’s fist,” she breathed. “It smells worse than revenant.”
Kavik’s wild laugh broke from him. She laughed, too, then shook her head.
Determination set her face. “I still don’t know if we can kill it. But perhaps I can make it easier to try.”
Adjusting her grip on the tusks, she looked back at the demon. Slowly, she began to twist. The demon screamed, its head turning to the side.
A crack split the night. Not the demon’s neck. The tusks. Gritting her teeth, Mala drew back her fist and swung it down hard against the flat blades. Those tusks had rammed through stone, had withstood sharpened steel.
They didn’t survive the hammering of Mala’s fist.
All at once they snapped, the long blades coming away in her grip—and releasing her hold on the demon tusker. Kavik shouted and rushed at her. With a roar of pain, the demon charged. Stumbling back, she desperately swung the long bladed tusks.
The ivory cleaved through its neck even as Kavik slammed into her, yanking her out of the demon’s path. Its charging body tripped over its own head and fell, plowing into the ground. Still moving.
Mala pulled out of Kavik’s arms. With a ringing battle cry, she stalked forward and shoved the blades through the demon’s chest, through its heart.
The body tried to get to its feet. She stared at it, chest heaving.
Suddenly laughing again, Kavik suggested, “The head?”
Shaking hers, she stalked toward the body and slammed her foot against the end of the bladed tusks. The ivory splintered. She ripped one away, a shard as long as a sword, and stabbed it through the demon’s eye.
It fell quiet.
They waited, watching. Still nothing. Mala murmured, “It wasn’t ten thousand warriors.”
Kavik looked to her and she met his eyes, hers wide and disbelieving.
“It wasn’t ten thousand warriors,” she said. “That’s not what she promised me. I assumed it would be. But it was the strength of ten thousand warriors.” She looked at her hands. “The durability, too. Those blades should have cut through my hands.”
“And the weight,” Kavik said. “It couldn’t move you.”