Extraordinary Zoology (19 page)

The next volley of arrows was spread wider. The Tharn had lost Edrea and were now picking different targets. Arrows dropped amid them, and a few struck home, thumping deep into the shoulders of the trollkin, but most bounced off.

With that thought something struck Lynus in the head, so hard he could hear a crack. He put his hand up to his head, expecting to find blood and brain matter, but both seemed safely contained within his skin and skull.
Thank you, Morrow, for Iosan magic
, he thought. It occurred to him that this was probably horrible blasphemy to an Iosan, but there wasn’t time to ask Edrea who he should thank. Besides her, of course.

Looking ahead he could now see figures on the knoll. They wore animal skins, rough leathers, and bones, including animal-skull masks and horned headdresses. Men and women, all filthy, caked with mud and blood, and armed with bows and spears.

None of them looked like Lynus imagined a beast-handling warlock might look. Or maybe all of them did.

“I’ve got the big one!” shouted Horgash. “I’ll break the line; you break necks.” He dug his heels into Greta’s flanks, and the bison sprang forward, surprising Lynus with her speed.

As one, the blue-skinned, grey-quilled phalanx leaned forward and began a sprint, running faster than Lynus thought possible for aged warriors. He leaned into his own run but quickly fell behind. His sword, his armored greatcoat . . . it was all so heavy.

Edrea and Kinik kept up with the group and pulled ahead of him. Lynus sucked air and steadied his pace. He couldn’t run that fast, but he wouldn’t be too far behind.

Greta and Horgash entered the trees with a raspy, gurgled battle cry and a resounding crunch, followed by screams in at least three languages. Through gaps between the trees, Lynus could see that Horgash had charged the largest of the Tharn, an axe-wielding monster of a man Greta gored and flung left like a giant rag doll, knocking down several of his fellows. Horgash, meanwhile, leaned far to the right side and hacked deeply with his off-hand sword, smashing through a Tharn shield and shield arm.

Then the trollkin phalanx arrived, and the wooded knoll erupted in chaos wrought of spears, blood, axes, gore, and the limbs of both trees and men.

Lynus couldn’t make sense of it. There was too much going on. Then motion caught his eye in a still part of the copse, off to the far left, well beyond the fray in the trees. There stood a heavily bearded northerner dressed in dark robes—a Skirov, perhaps. He held aloft a curious bladed staff and was ringed by spinning, glowing runes.

“
There! THE LEFT!
” Lynus screamed, pointing with his sword.

Edrea dropped to one knee, whipped her rifle up to her shoulder, and fired.

The Skirov spun to his right, and a spray of blood erupted from his shoulder. But instead of dropping or clutching the arm, he shrugged, and with no flash of magic, no change to the runes spinning about him, his shoulder was healed.

At that same instant a giant, inhuman scream sounded from the village.

Perhaps, just like the farrow warlock Rorsh, this Skirov could push his own wounds onto the beast via some magical bond, Lynus thought. He shivered to think that this warlock might be impossible to kill. He wouldn’t die until the gorgandur did, and the gorgandur was sixty feet of armored horror.

Unless . . .

He had no time to shout instructions. Kinik had heard Edrea’s shot and turned to charge at the warlock. Edrea, still kneeling, reloaded.

Lynus wouldn’t need to shout instructions. Either this warlock was effectively immortal or the magical ability to push wounds from himself onto the wurm granted Lynus, Edrea, and Kinik a narrow, treacherous path through the monster’s otherwise impenetrable scales.

A gap in the armor.

Kinik lunged, her aim as true as Edrea’s had been. The war cleaver tore deep into the warlock’s belly and out the back and side, tearing flesh, bowel, and cloth in a single stroke that nearly cut the man in half. Then, fast as an eye-blink, his flesh was whole and Kinik’s blade unbloodied. Again, a howl sounded from the village. At least, Lynus hoped it was howling. The wurm might also be reveling in its repast of defenseless trollkin, he reflected.

Kinik stopped, stunned by the magical erasure of her work. The warlock raised a rune-wrapped hand, grinned wickedly, and pointed at her. Lightning sprang into the air between them.

The single flash seared a long path in Lynus’ sight, connecting Kinik’s right arm, her war cleaver, and two of the nearby trollkin. The lightning was so fast Lynus didn’t even see it arc from one victim to the next. There was just a flash and an afterimage spotting Lynus’ vision as three of his allies fell to the ground.

He blinked away the spots and kept running. He passed Edrea as she fired a second time, and the fact that the carbine’s report didn’t startle him at all testified to how bright and loud that bolt of lightning had been.

“Eight paces!” Edrea shouted from behind him.

Lynus slowed. He did not want to face this warlock without her support.

Edrea shouted something in Iosan. A bolt of blue-white fire seared past Lynus and struck the warlock squarely in the chest.

Runes pulsed around the man, and the gaps in his tattered, scorched robe revealed unblemished, unwounded flesh. Again, the great wurm howled from the village.

The warlock turned to face Lynus and Edrea and pointed at them as he’d pointed at Kinik. Another bolt of lightning seared Lynus’ vision. He gasped in surprise when it didn’t strike him.

Edrea gasped in pain.

Lynus’ skin tingled briefly. Edrea’s magic was gone from him.

“The greater threat dispatched, I can now chide you for fleeing a rare honor,” the Skirov said in thickly accented Khadoran. He reached out toward the village with his right hand, his left held before him, comfortably wrapped around the haft of that wickedly bladed staff. Runes swirled around the outstretched hand, and Lynus thought he sensed power accumulating there. He stood, uncertain, and brought his sword in front of him for defense.

The point bobbled and dipped.

The warlock raised an eyebrow and waved his left hand in the direction of the melee to Lynus’ right. There was an explosion, closely followed by the screams of trollkin and men. A scattering of soil rained down upon Lynus.

“The Devourer would embrace you, and yet you come here, to me? Where your death will mean nothing?”

Lynus shivered, and the point of his sword dropped farther.

“I didn’t come up here to die,” he said in passable Khadoran. He tried to mean it, but his voice quavered. He let the point drop even more, exaggerating the weakness he felt.

“Alas, I am afraid you—“ and then the warlock lunged.

Lynus brought the point of his sword up, and the warlock’s left arm glided along the blade. The man hissed in pain and stepped back, barely retaining his grip on his staff. Lynus swept and swung as hard as he could, burying the sword deep in the warlock’s right shoulder and jarring Lynus’ hands as the blade struck bone.

There was no exaggeration this time. His grip failed, and he let go of the sword. It fell free of the naked, unharmed shoulder. A howl of monstrous pain and rage rose from the village.

“Feigning weakness is effective, but only if it is, in fact, feigned, child.” The Skirov adjusted his grip on the wickedly bladed staff. “But that is the last of the lessons you will learn in this life.”

No rifle, no sword . . . Lynus fumbled with the sample kit at his left hip. One of the little bottles had a mild acid in it. His fingers closed on the slim handle of his scalpel, its blade barely the size of his thumb.

The warlock lunged again, and for the tiniest moment Lynus envisioned a series of cuts arranged in sequence before him, an unorthodox dissection plan for a very dangerous, quickly moving cadaver.

He turned to his left, presenting his right shoulder, where the blade of the staff glanced and caught in the heavy leather of his greatcoat. The shock numbed Lynus’ right arm. He spun back to the right, stepping close to the warlock, and with his left hand he traced the short scalpel blade in a long, deep path: up the inside of the staff arm, along the brachial artery, across the pectoral group, and up the jugular, laying arteries wide.

The warlock screamed as blood erupted from the long, smooth cuts in two major arteries. He staggered backward, and Lynus despaired as the wounds closed.

Another roar of bestial anguish burst forth from below, the gorgandur echoing the warlock’s own scream of agony as analogs of opened arteries and severed muscle were instantly, magically inflicted upon it.

The roar ended abruptly, not even a quarter the length of the creature’s previous screams.

The warlock’s eyes went wide, the wound in his neck reappeared, and blood poured out over his scorched and shredded robe. He staggered forward as if to lunge again with the staff, but he dropped it before he could finish the movement.

The runes whipping around him winked out, and he fell forward into a heap.

Lynus stared. That was far worse than a dissection.
Focus on the process. What’s next? Right.
He wiped his scalpel clean and sheathed it. He bent down and retrieved his sword, then picked up the staff. Behind him he heard Horgash roar in triumph, a cry taken up by several other trollkin. The surviving Tharn were fleeing into the woods.

He looked back at Edrea and Kinik. Edrea sat up, leaned to her left, and retched. No blood, so she wasn’t bleeding in at least three of the dozen internal ways that could kill her.

“I think we won,” Lynus said.

Edrea nodded weakly. “I woke up, so that was my conclusion.”

Kinik groaned, and Lynus moved to crouch beside her. Smoke rose from her right arm. Her right hand, still clutching the haft of her polearm, was blackened and ruined. It would have to come off. And that would take more than a scalpel.

“You’re going to be okay, Kinik. Can you walk?”

“Walk, yes.” She looked down at her arm and groaned. “Not carry.”

Horgash hobbled over using a tree branch as a crutch.

“Horgash!” said Edrea. “You’re missing a foot!”

“On my way back through, one of the Tharn got in a good swing and took me off Greta. She stomped him to a pulp for his trouble.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the carnage, where Greta chuffed and paced. Five of the eight trollkin were up, picking through the battle-torn copse for trophies, or perhaps missing digits.

“It was too ragged to try reattaching it,” he said. “I’ll just need to keep well-fed this winter so I can grow a new one.” He stooped a bit, bending down to look Lynus in the eye. “I’m claiming the rest of the expedition’s bacon. With your permission, Chronicler.”

Chronicler, Lynus thought.
Chronicler.
If Pendrake was dead, it might fall to Lynus to write the end of this story.

“We need to get down to the village.”

Jata met Lynus and the others at the gate. They were a ragged, limping band, but Jata . . . patches of her skin were blackened, her quills were broken, and the
quitari
pattern cloth she wore looked as if it had been used to smother a fire.

Yet for all that, she wore a smile that threatened to split her face in two.

“You,” she said, looking at Lynus. “You will never be able to write this tale in a way that others will believe it.” She pointed back into the village, where a man sat on a stone block that had once belonged to a house.