The Camborr struck the snake again with her whip, and Ashok struck it with his chain, but this time the barbs were slow to come free, and Ashok’s chain didn’t distract the left head. It turned from him and surged at Olra over the top of the right head. Olra didn’t see it coming.
“Watch out!” Ashok screamed. He dropped his chain and dived onto the snake, but its reach was too great. The left head struck before Olra could get her whip up as a screen. It sank its fangs into Olra’s neck and drove the Camborr back against the forge hearth. She dropped the whip and flung her left hand back into the burning coals.
Olra screamed, but the snake choked off the sound, biting and pumping venom into her blood as fast as it could in quivering, jerking motions. At the same time, the reek of burned flesh filled Ashok’s nostrils. Olra’s arm spasmed. She couldn’t pull it out of the fire.
Ashok snarled in fury and wrestled with the snake, dragging it back several feet by sheer desperation. Abruptly he saw the dagger still sticking out of its flesh. He let go with one hand and pulled the weapon out. He stabbed down, repeatedly driving the weapon to the hilt. Finally, he hit something vital. The snake’s heads reared up in unison and fell away from the forge.
Released from the snake’s fangs, Olra pushed off the forge with her back and fell forward onto her stomach. She pulled her burned hand in close to her chest and lay still, panting.
The snake’s heads made one last feeble attempt to strike at Ashok, but he wrenched the knife out and stabbed again to widen the wound. The heads dropped, the left on top of the right, across one of the workbenches.
Ashok rolled away from the corpse. The heat and smoke made him light-headed. He put a hand against the floor to lever himself up and felt his fingers slip in warm wetness-Olra’s blood.
“Ashok, are you in there?” Skagi’s panicked voice called from outside.
“We’re alive,” Ashok called to him. “Olra needs healing!”
He didn’t know if Skagi heard him. He crawled to where Olra lay. She tried to roll over onto her back but was too weak. Ashok took her shoulders and gently turned her.
The snake had savaged her neck. It hadn’t merely poisoned her but had tried to eat her alive in its frenzy.
“Quick strikes, shallow wounds,” Olra said. Her jaw muscles were rigid, making it hard for Ashok to understand her. “Doesn’t fit … their nature. Should have been trying to … hide from us.”
“Don’t try to talk,” Ashok said. “Lie still here while I go to Makthar and get a healer. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
He started to rise, but Olra grabbed his arm. “Poison is the same,” she said.
“I know, that’s why I have to hurry-”
She ignored him. “Shouldn’t have … pumped all of it … into me, but it did. Nothing left to milk … for the merchants.”
Her words penetrated at the same time Ashok saw the milky venom overflowing from her wound. There was almost as much venom as blood.
“No,” he said softly, then louder, “No! Tell me what to do. How do I stop it?”
Glassy-eyed, she pushed his hand away when he touched her wound. “You know enough … to know when there’s no more to be done. When you’re ready, you should lead the Camborrs … You have the skill … My wishes … my orders, tell Uwan. My life for the Watching Blade.”
She relaxed. Contentment spread over her features, and she closed her eyes.
“Ashok!” Skagi burst into the room. Blood and sweat streamed from his upper body, turning his spike tattoos a glistening red. “You’re needed.”
“I told you to get a healer,” Ashok snarled. “Where were you?”
“I’ve been with-” Skagi came around the workbench and saw Olra. “Tempus have mercy-”
“Godsdamned oaths won’t help us!” Ashok cried.
He expected Skagi to be angry at his blasphemy, but then he noticed the warrior’s pallor and the strain in his muscles where he gripped his falchion hilt.
Cree wasn’t with him.
“Skagi,” Ashok said, in a dead monotone, “what happened?”
“Cree. You’d better come,” Skagi said.
Ashok started to get up, but he stopped when he noticed the shallow rise and fall of Olra’s chest. “She’s not dead yet,” he said. “We can’t leave her to die alone.”
“I’ll stay with her,” said a faint voice near the hearth.
The injured blacksmith was trying to stand. She clutched the bite wound in her arm, but the fang marks were not as savage as those inflicted on Olra, and no venom dripped from her wound. Ashok and Skagi went to help her. Together they sat her down next to Olra’s still form. She cradled the Camborr’s head in her lap and nodded to the two men.
“Go,” she said calmly. “We’re fine.”
“The clerics are chanting over him,” was all Skagi said as he led Ashok to the hut at the edge of the training grounds. Inside, two healers, including the one Ashok had seen tending to Tuva, kneeled on either side of Cree, obscuring him from view.
Ashok didn’t speak. As he stood watching the clerics work, he could not hold a thought in his head that didn’t involve killing. A red rage settled over his mind, a haze he did not attempt to quell. The last time he’d felt this way was when he’d confronted and killed Reltnar, a shadar-kai of his own enclave who had tortured Ilvani. Back then the rage had made him cold, methodical, able to deal with each threat as it came. Now he was helpless, as impotent as he had been kneeling at Olra’s side.
Finally, one of the clerics stood up and walked stiffly over to them. “By Tempus’s will, he lives,” the cleric said. He directed the words at Skagi. The big man nodded, betraying no emotion beyond the oath to Tempus he uttered under his breath.
The other cleric left to fetch litters to carry away the dead and wounded, and for the first time Ashok could take in the details of the hut. The room was similar to the other forge, with as much disarray and as many signs of fighting. Ashok looked for the body of the second snake, but it was not in the hut.
Skagi saw him looking and explained. “Cree blocked its escape.” He pointed to a gap between the ceiling and wall stones that admitted patchy light from the torches outside. “This one was smaller than the other, but it still laid into him like a demon. I thought it would take his head off.” He swallowed. “Once he went down, the thing got out, but we’d hurt it enough, it flopped around, didn’t know which way to go. More Guardians came and finished it off.”
Ashok wasn’t really listening. He kneeled in the cleric’s place beside the unconscious Cree. They’d cleaned the blood off his face, and Ashok saw that the fang marks spread diagonally across Cree’s face. One had punctured his cheek, the other his eyebrow. Between them, Cree’s left eye was missing, torn from its socket.
“They couldn’t save it,” Skagi said, and for the first time Ashok heard a catch in his voice. Still Ashok said nothing, and eventually he heard Skagi’s footsteps as the warrior left the hut.
Alone, Ashok continued to stare down at Cree. The hot rage finally passed, and he thought he felt nothing, not relief or sadness. He simply stared at the place where Cree’s left eye had been and tried to conjure an emotion.
This is what you’ve wrought, he told himself. Two battles-you may as well have fought in neither of them. Why had he sent the other blacksmith outside? To protect him? He could have helped them, provided another distraction at least. If Ashok had fought with a sword instead of a chain, he could have lopped the thing’s heads off one by one. There’d been a table full of weapons, and he hadn’t thought to grab anything but a paltry dagger.
Ashok’s thoughts continued to ramble. He searched for a reason, he had to find an explanation for how it all went wrong. Why had he tried to grab the snake with his bare hands? Was there something wrong with his chain that had made him discard it? He reached for the weapon to see, but it wasn’t there. He realized he’d left it in the hut with Olra.