I was out and up for about one second before the Necromancer hit me again.
Back into the well, now with visions and sensations to go with all the fleeting images. A small village, desolate, in the midst of a dense forest, with a screen door attached by only one hinge, caught by the wind so it slammed incessantly against the doorframe. Every sensation was raw, as if the place laid every last nerve bare. Something, I was pretty sure, lurked in the woods.
A festival. A crowd of Others and lost souls, bumping and jostling, leering, cheering, screaming. Here and there, the screams were real, as someone failed to keep up, lost strength and showed vulnerability near the wrong partygoer. The buildings that framed the narrow street had no windows, entrances or exits, more like tombstones than any place people lived.
I fought my way free.
My fingers caught the wire fence, and I heaved myself forward and to one side, almost bouncing off the fence in my haste to move to one side before he could hit me again. Not the sort of movement I might have been able to do if my strength wasn’t disproportionate to how light my body was. Not that I was that strong, but moving around was easier than when I had first arrived.
The benefit of causing fear? Feeding, for lack of a better word?
I stepped close, faster than he might have expected.
He stuck his implement out, trying to touch me with the crystal-encased skull, and I thrust the Hyena at him.
I was just a little more adroit than he was. The Hyena went into his chin, stabbing upward, through the bottom of his mouth.
I grabbed his wrist before he could stick the ball in my direction again. Using the leverage of the broken sword through his chin, I twisted him around, forcing him to stumble to my right, acting as a living shield between me and Bearded Guy Two.
Leaning closer, I murmured, “I wonder why Joyce thought you deserved to die?”
I saw his eyes widen a bit.
“Did you say or do something, that she needed to save Gail from you? She was willing to betray her family to get rid of you.”
The eyes widened further.
I twisted the weapon, then dragged it out of his neck, not pulling it free, but cutting out to one side, off to the corner of his chin.
As he staggered, I kicked him.
“Dolhu, vbreg!”
As the Necromancer went down, something caught him, and he was thrust in my direction, through the flames that still burned atop ice, clothes igniting on contact, carrying the fire forward.
I hopped up and back, my thighs resting on top of the fence. In the doing, I just barely avoided having a burning body fly through my kneecaps. The bleeding Necromancer crashed into the fence, instead.
I went backward, put my feet under me, and ran, putting a shed between me and him before I went over a fence and into another backyard.
That damned beard guy. He was chaining effects, there was a rhythm there. Something like something-fist, fist-fire, fire-something, something-fling. I didn’t know the language, and I didn’t know the rules. There were particulars, but I didn’t know how to exploit them or combat it.
Almost like a dance, one step leading to the next. I could imagine that practice and care were making each word act like a rune, invoking spirits. Speaking a private language they shared with spirits, utilizing momentum.
With the cover of a wood-slat fence, I was able to circle around. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, one facing in my general direction, the other facing the other side of the narrow alley-street, where Green Eyes lurked.
If we pounced, I had little doubt they would catch us in the air. Strike us down.
They’d known I was weak to fire. Or they’d guessed.
I suppose it was a pretty easy conclusion to draw.
Couldn’t close the distance before they could blurt out two syllables or so.
Next best thing…
I stood, appearing on one side of the fence, and I threw the Hyena at the one with his back turned to me. It turned over, pommel over blade, spinning through the air.
The guard hit him, not the blade, but the spin brought the blade into the back of his head. Not hard enough to pierce skull to brain, but enough to stay in place.
“Vbreg, b-”
Seeing his brother with what seemed to be a sword embedded in his head gave him a half-second’s pause.
Evan descended, taking advantage of the delay. A lone sparrow, going for the eyes, giving the man more than a half-second’s pause.
Green Eyes, for her part, came over the fence, taking advantage of the chaos, right for the face of the other brother, biting, her teeth scraping more than they severed. Her tail swung around, bludgeoning the one Evan was attacking.
Almost casually, I hopped the fence.
“Tell me,” I said. “Would an impartial observer call you monsters?”
“Fuck you!” the one said, clawing Evan away from his face. He flung the sparrow to one side.
Not quite a confirmation. Mr. Rogers might have been a little flustered, in such circumstances.
He looked like he was about to do something, until I pressed the blade too his brother’s side, careful to avoid Green Eyes.
“Have you hurt innocents? Have you struck your wife or child? Taken pleasure in the pain of others?”
“Tell her to leave my brother be. You already took his wife from him. She’s taken his face.”
“Tell me, first. Would I see you as monsters, if I got to know the two of you? By standard Canadian values?”
“We follow traditions and practices handed down through our family. Given to us by the ogre shamans of the cold mountains.”
“That’s not a no,” I said. “All you have to do is say no, and I’ll leave you be, with apologies.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he started another short chant, “Vbreg, Jisk, R-“
From the moment he’d opened his mouth, I was already turning. The Hyena pierced his solar plexus, and it was like the air had gone out of his lungs. The ‘r’ sound became a growl, then a moan.
Belatedly, the one Green Eyes was fighting fell clumsily to the ground. She scrunched up her bloody face, then worked to pull her tail out from beneath the man’s mass, before she resumed eating, biting into the softer meat at the front of the neck.
“Let’s not be so hasty next time,” I said. “I wasn’t sure Jan over there deserved that. We need to be careful, moving forward.”
Green Eyes had to gulp three or four times to get the full mouthful down, her gills flaring with each gulp.
“Smelling her brought back memories,” Green Eyes said. “Bad ones.”
I approached Jan’s degloved body. She’d already bled out, and her eyes stared skyward.
Bending down, I sniffed.
I didn’t have superhuman senses, but even beyond the reek of blood and other bodily fluids that came with a grisly end, I could smell the distinct reek of alcohol.
“Being a drinker isn’t grounds for executing someone,” I said.
“No,” Green Eyes agreed. She looked a little sullen. “But she wasn’t a someone anymore.”
“I’m not sure that-”
“She wasn’t,” Green Eyes said. “I promised I’d be good and I was good here. I followed the rules you gave me. I smelled it on her.”
“Okay,” I said.
I looked at Evan, who gave me his best bird shrug.
I dragged the bodies together, and as I reached the Necromancer, he fought me, weak.
He had what appeared to be a doll in one hand, fashioned of some soft material. It wore another man’s face, hyper-realistic, distorted in agony. In moving the necromancer, I’d broken a black ribbon that stretched from his neck to the doll’s.