They wore little or no clothing and ran howling like beasts. He had seen them tear men limb from limb and eat the raw, bloody flesh, watched them throw themselves on spears and pull their dying bodies up the shafts to reach their enemies. They couldn’t be talked to, much less reasoned with.
And they were close already. How could he not have heard them? How had Stephen not, with his saint-sharpened senses? The boy seemed to be losing his knack.
He glanced quickly around. The nearest trees were mostly slender and straight-boled, but some fifty kingsyards away he saw a broad-shouldered ironoak reaching toward the sky.
“To that tree,” he commanded. “Now.”
“But Neil and Cazio—”
“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Aspar snapped. “We can’t reach them in time.”
“We can warn them,” Winna said.
“They’re already over there,” Stephen said. “See?”
He pointed. Across the narrow valley, bodies were pouring over the rim and down the steep slope. It looked as if a flood were carrying an entire village of people down a gorge, except that there was no water.
“Mother of Saint Tarn,” one of the Dunmrogh soldiers gasped. “What—”
“Run!” Aspar barked.
They ran. Aspar’s muscles ached to bolt him ahead, but he had to let Winna and Stephen start climbing first. He heard the forest floor churning behind him and was reminded of a cloud of locusts that once had whirred through the northern uplands for days, chewing away every green thing.
They were halfway to the oak when Aspar caught a motion in the corner of his eye. He shifted his head to look.
At first glance the thing was all limbs, like a huge spider, but familiarity quickly brought it into focus. The monster had only four long limbs, not eight, and they ended in what resembled clawed human hands. The torso was thick, muscular, and short compared to its legs but more or less human in its cut if one ignored the scales and the thick black hairs.
The face had little of humanity about it; its yellow carbuncle eyes were set above two slits where a nose might be, and its cavernous, black-toothed mouth owed more to the frog or snake than to man. It was loping toward them on all fours.
“Utin,” Aspar gasped under his breath. He’d met one before and killed it, but it had taken a miracle.
He had one miracle left, but looking past the shoulder of the thing, he saw that he needed two, for another identical creature was running scarcely thirty kingsyards behind it.
Aspar raised his bow, fired, and made one of the luckiest shots in his life; he hit the foremost monster in its right eye, sending it tumbling to the ground. Even as Aspar continued his flight to the tree, however, the thing rolled back to its feet and came on. The other, almost caught up now, seemed to grin at Aspar.
Then the slinders were there, pouring from between the trees. The utins wailed their peculiar high-pitched screams as wild-eyed men and women leapt upon them, first in twos, then in threes, then by the dozens.
The slinders and utins were not friendly, it seemed. Or perhaps they disagreed on who should eat Aspar White.
They finally reached the oak, and Aspar made a cradle of his hands to vault Winna to the lowest branches.
“Climb,” he shouted. “Keep going until you can’t climb anymore.”
Stephen went up next, but before he had a firm foothold, Aspar was forced to meet the fastest of their attackers.
The slinder was a big man with lean muscles and bristling black hair. His face was so feral, Aspar was reminded of the legends of the wairwulf and wondered if this was where they had come from. Every other silly phay story seemed to be coming true. If ever there was a man who had become a wolf, this was it.
Like all of its kind, the slinder attacked without regard for its own life, snarling and reaching bloody, broken nails toward Aspar. The holter cut with the ax in his left hand as a feint. The slinder ignored the false attack and came on, allowing the ax to slice through its cheek. Aspar rammed his dirk in just below the lowest rib and quickly pumped the blade, shearing into the lung and up toward the heart even as the man-beast rammed into him, smashing him into the tree.
That hurt, but it saved him from being knocked to the ground. He shoved the dying slinder away from him just in time to meet the next two. They hit him together, and as he lifted his ax arm to fend them off, one sank its teeth into his forearm. Bellowing, Aspar stabbed into its groin and felt hot blood spurt on his hand. He cut again, opening the belly. The slinder let go of his arm, and he buried his ax in the throat of the second.
Hundreds more were only steps away.
The ax was stuck, so he left it, leaping for the lowest branch and catching it with blood-slicked fingers. He fought to keep the dirk, but when one of the slinders grasped his ankle, he let it drop to secure his tenuous hold, trying to wrap both arms around the huge bough.
An arrow whirred down from above, and then another, and his antagonist’s grip loosened. Aspar swung his legs up, then levered himself quickly onto the limb.
A quick glance down showed the slinders crashing into the tree trunk like waves breaking against a rock. Their bodies began to form a pile, enabling the newer arrivals to drag themselves up.
“Sceat,” Aspar breathed. He wanted to vomit.
He fought it down and looked above him. Winna was about five kingsyards higher than the rest, with her bow out, shooting into the press. Stephen and the two soldiers were at about the same height.
“Keep climbing!” Aspar shouted. “Up that way. The narrower the branches, the fewer can come after us at a time.”
He kicked at the head of the nearest slinder, a rangy woman with matted red hair. She snarled and slipped from the branch, landing amid her squirming comrades.
The utins, he noticed, were still alive. There were three of them now that he could see, thrashing in the slinder horde. Aspar was reminded of a pack of dogs taking down a lion. Blood sprayed all around the slinders as they fell, dismembered and opened from sternum to crotch by the vicious claws and teeth of the monsters, but they were winning by sheer numbers. Even as he watched, one of the utins went down, hamstrung, and within seconds the slinders were dark crimson with its oily blood.
There would be plenty of slinders left when the utins were dead. Aspar gave up the vague hope that their enemies might cancel one another out.
Winna, Stephen, and the two Hornladhers had done as Aspar directed, and now he followed them until at last they reached a perch above a long, nearly vertical ascent. Aspar took his bow back off his shoulder and waited for the creatures to follow.
“They’re different,” he muttered under his breath, sighting down a shaft and impaling the first one to reach the base of the branch.
“Different how?” Stephen shouted down from above.
Aspar’s neck hairs pricked up—now Stephen’s uncanny senses seemed to be fine.
“They’re leaner, stronger,” he said. “The old ones are gone.”
“I only saw the dead ones at the fane by the naubagm,” Winna said, “but I don’t remember them being tattooed like that, either.”
Aspar nodded. “Yah. That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. That’s new, too.”
“The mountain tribes tattoo,” Ehawk said.
“Yah,” Aspar agreed. “But the slinders we saw before came from a mixture of tribes and villages.” He shot the next climber in the eye. “These all have the same tattoos.”
They did. Each had a ram-headed snake wound around one forearm and a greffyn on the biceps of the same arm.
“Maybe they’re all from the same tribe,” Ehawk offered.
“Do you know any tribe with that tattoo?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
“The ram-headed serpent and the greffyn are both symbols associated with the Briar King,” Stephen said. “We’ve been assuming that the Briar King drove these people mad somehow, took away their human intelligence. But what if…”