He had a torch in one hand and a sword in the other as he sprang up the steps to the empty gateway instants before the nuuwa came lolloping, gape-mouthed, to meet the women. Sheera made the mistake of slashing at the widest target—the breast—and the creature she cut fell on her with a vast, streaming wound yawning in its chest, eyeless face contorted, mouth reaching to bite. The Wolf had decapitated the first creature within range; he spun in the next split second and hacked off both huge hands that gripped Sheera’s arm, allowing her to spring back out of range and slash downward on the thing’s neck. It was all he had time for—nuuwa were pressing up toward them, heedless of the cut of the steel; spouting blood drenched them, hot on the flesh and running down slippery underfoot. Beside him, he was vaguely aware of Denga Rey, fighting with the businesslike brutality of a professional with sword and torch.
He felt something gash and tear at his ankle, then saw that a fallen nuuwa had sunk its teeth into his calf. He slashed downward, severing the head as it tore at his flesh. Clawed hands seized his sword arm, and he cut at the eyeless face with his torch, setting the matted hair and filthy, falling beard aflame. The creature released him and began shrieking in a rattling, hoarse gasp, blundering against its fellows and pawing at the blaze. Denga Rey, freed for an instant, kicked it viciously back, and it went rolling down the steps, face flaming, howling in death agonies as others stumbled over it to close in on the defenders.
Through the confusion of that hideous fight and the searing agony of the head still clinging doggedly to his calf, Sun Wolf could hear the distant chaos of cries, hoarse grunts, and shrill shouts. He heard a scream, keening and horrible, rising to a fever pitch of rending pain and terror, and knew that one of the women had been overcome and was being killed. But like so many things in the heat of battle, he noted it without much interest, detached, grimly fighting to avoid a like fate himself. Another scream sounded closer, together with a slithering crash of bodies falling from the wall. From the comer of .his eye, he saw locked forms writhing on the icy clay of the hall floor, a tangle of threshing limbs and fountaining blood. Eo the blacksmith sprang forward with one of those huge two-handed broadswords upraised as if it were as light as a willow switch.
He saw no more; filthy hands and snapping, slobbering mouths pressed close around him. For a moment, he felt as if he were being engulfed in that horrible mob, driven back into the shadow of the empty gateway and wondering where the drop of the steps was.
Then steel zinged near him; as he decapitated one of the things grabbing and biting at him, Denga Rey’s sword sliced the spine of another, and it fell, rolling and spasming, at his feet. Those were the last of the immediate attackers. He swung around and saw that the steps were piled knee-deep in twitching bodies, from which a thick current of brilliant red ran down to pool among the rocks. Behind him, the tower was silent, save for a single voice raised in a despairing wail of grief.
The nuuwa were all dead.
He looked down to where the severed head still locked on his calf with a death grip. Fighting a surge of nausea, he bent down and beat at the joint of the jawbone with the weighted pommel of his sword until the jaw broke and he was able to pull the thing off by its verminous hair. Hands shaking, he knelt on the slimy steps and held out his hand for Denga Rey’s torch, since his own had been lost in the fight. Reversing it, he drove the flaming end into the wound. Smoke and the stink of burning meat assailed his nostrils; the pain went through his body like a stroke of lightning. Distantly, he was aware of the sound of Sheera’s being sick in a corner of the hall.
He flung the torch away and collapsed on his hands and knees, fighting nausea and darkness. It wasn’t the first time he had had to do this, from nuuwa or from other wounds, but it never got any easier.
Footsteps pattered on the clay floor. He heard the murmur of voices and opened his eyes to see Amber Eyes binding up Denga Rey’s bloody arm with someone’s torn, gold-embroidered scarf.
Both women hastened to his side, and Amber Eyes knelt to bandage his wounds. Her hands were sticky with gore. When he had breath to speak, Sun Wolf asked them, “You bitten anywhere?”
“Few slashes,” the gladiator said shortly.
“Burn ’em.”
“They’re not deep.”
“I said bum ’em. We aren’t talking about sword cuts in the arena; nuuwa are filthier than mad dogs. I’ll do it for you if you’re afraid.”
That got her. She damned his eyes, without malice, knowing he was right. Under her swarthy tan, even she looked pate and sick.
After a quick, brutal cauterization, he helped her to her feet, both of them leaning a little on Amber Eyes for support. They were joined in a moment by a very pallid Sheera, her hair in wet black strings before her eyes. Like theirs, her limbs were plastered in gore. Sun Wolf shook himself clear of Denga Rey and limped to put a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“You all right?”
She was quivering all over, like a bowstring after its arrow was spent. He sensed that it was touch and go whether she would fall on his shoulder in hysterics; but after a moment she drew a deep breath and said huskily. “I’ll be all right.”
“Good girl.” He slapped her comfortingly on the buttock and was rewarded with the kind of glare generally reserved for the humbler sort of insects in their last moments before a servant was called to swat them. He grinned to himself. She’d obviously got over the first shock,
There were no other women in the empty hall. Slowly, limping with the pain of their wounds, the four of them staggered to the narrow postern that let them into the ruined circle of the curtain wall. Like the steps, the ground there was littered with the bodies of dead nuuwa with severed heads and hands and feet. Dark blood dripped down the stones and soaked into the winter-hard ground. At the far end of the court, the women stood in a silent group, staring in nauseated fascination at a tall, rawboned woman named Kraken, who was kneeling, her face buried in her hands, over the dismembered and half-eaten body of sharp, little, red-haired Tamis Weaver. Kraken was rocking back and forth and wailing, a desolate moaning sound, like a hurt animal.
After a moment Gilden and Wilarne moved in, bitten and painted with the blood of their dead enemies, and gently helped Kraken to her feet and led her away. She moved like a blind woman, half doubled over with grief.
Sun Wolf looked around at those who were left. He saw women with scared faces, gray with shock and nausea, the ends of their tangled hair pointy with blood. Some of them had been bitten, clawed, chewed—there’d be more work, burning the wounds, the agonizing aftermath of war. The place stank with that peculiar battleground smell, the vile reek of blood and vomit and excrement, of death and terror. Some of them, like Erntwyff Fish, looked angry still; others, like Sister Quincis and Eo, seemed burned out, as if only cold ash remained of the fire that had carried them alive through battle. Others looked merely puzzled, staring about in confusion, as if they had no idea how they had come to be wounded, exhausted, cold, and sick in this slaughterhouse place. More than one was crying, with shock and grief and relief.
But none of them looked, or would ever again look, quite as they had. .
The Wolf sighed. “Well, ladies,” he said quietly, “now you’ve seen battle.”
8
The rain that slashed against the bolted shutters of the Brazen Monkey made a far-off, roaring sound, like the distant sea. With her boots extended toward the enormous blaze that was the only illumination in the shadowy common room, Starhawk scanned the few travelers still on the roads in this weather and decided that she and Fawn would take turns sleeping tonight.