Kagur whirled. His flowing blood vivid in the grass and the dirt, Holg sprawled on his back, beating with his staff at the creature that had plunged down on top of him.
At first glance, his attacker looked gigantic. It took Kagur an instant to see it was mostly huge, flapping leathery wings—the reptilian body at their juncture was no bigger than a child’s.
Yet the creature was still plainly capable of inflicting ghastly wounds. The backswept vane on its head swinging back and forth, it jabbed and bit at Holg with a straight beak as long and pointed as a sword while its talons dug into his flesh.
No birdsong, Kagur remembered. Why would there be, when the beasts that ruled the sky of the Vault weren’t truly birds after all?
Even as she was thinking that thought, she loosed her arrow. It flew straight, and should have taken the flying reptile in the body. But at that same instant, Holg tried to drag himself out from under his attacker, and the creature twisted to hang on to him. As a result, the shaft simply stabbed into its wing and dangled from the membrane. The reptile turned its head to screech at Kagur but didn’t let go of its prey.
She dropped her bow beside her shield, drew out her sword, and rushed the creature. Then she heard a snapping sound at her back.
She wrenched herself around and cut at the beast that was swooping down at her. Her blade hit it somewhere, and then it slammed into her, its momentum nearly knocking her over. Talons gouged and clung.
With the reptile’s body pressed against her face, it was impossible to see and almost as difficult to breathe. Its wing beats sent her stumbling off balance, its claws gripped painfully, and its beak gouged at the reinforced leather armoring her back.
She stabbed at the reptile again and again. Finally, it screeched and fell away from her, and then she saw that while blind, she’d blundered to the very crumbling edge of the cliff. With a snarl, she lunged back to safer ground, cut at her bleeding assailant as it turned to face her anew, and sheared halfway through its neck. The beast collapsed with a final spastic flailing of its wings.
As soon as its death throes subsided, she sprang over the carcass. It was the quickest way to reach Holg and the reptile tearing at him.
Yet it wasn’t quick enough. The creature had time to let go of the old man and wrench itself around to face the danger. Huge wings spread and flapping as though to confuse and contain its foe, long beak alternately stabbing and snapping, it hopped forward.
Kagur met the attack with a cut that sliced the leathery hide on the creature’s beak but glanced off the bone beneath. She shifted in and to the side when the next attack stabbed at her, and the beak clashed shut over her shoulder. Bellowing, she cut into the reptile’s body, and like its fellow it collapsed with a frenzied lashing and rattling of wings.
Kagur rushed to Holg and threw herself down beside him. “How bad is it?” she panted.
He didn’t answer. He was unconscious, and his wounds were plainly quite bad indeed. His attacker had gouged furrows in his mostly hairless head and shredded parts of his torso. His skinny body was bloody from crown to belly.
Kagur held her hand before his nose and mouth. He was still breathing. She told herself that was something.
Rasping cries sounded from the bottom of the cliff. She looked over the edge.
For the first time, she noticed that some distance off to her left, a trail of sorts ran up the cliff face. It was too narrow for the enormous three-horned creature, but Eovath and the reptile-men were running toward it.
Plainly, they’d noticed the commotion on the high ground, as they naturally would if their own winged sentry beasts had caused it. If their arts could tame a four-footed reptile, why not flying ones as well?
It occurred to Kagur that she still might be able to shoot Eovath, but she realized even as the thought enticed her that it was stupid. Hitting him at long range when he was standing still and unaware would have been one thing. Killing him now would be far more difficult.
Besides, though she would gladly have traded her own life to avenge her tribe, it would be despicable to simply let Holg die of the wounds he’d already taken or beneath the spears and claws of the reptile-people. She had to save him if she could, and every moment counted.
So did every bit of weight and bulk. She retrieved her bow but left her shield where it lay, discarded her backpack with the green crystal lantern inside it, yanked Holg’s bundles off his back, and thrust his staff through his belt. Then she heaved him off the ground, draped him around her shoulders, and scurried back into the jungle.
She judged she could manage his weight for a while. At the moment, she was more concerned about the blood still dripping from his wounds. It was spoor for their enemies to follow.
“Wake up, old man,” she said. “Wake and pray to your spirits to heal you.”
He didn’t.
So she sought to carry him as far and fast as she could without leaving an obvious trail of footprints, trampled ferns, and broken low-hanging branches. She only made it a short distance before the jungle grew quiet, the faint background noise of small, unseen animals abating. The change surely meant Eovath and his allies had made it up the cliff and entered the trees.
Sweat stinging her eyes, Kagur desperately scanned for somewhere to hide in the profusion of plant life. Lord in Iron, she even knew how to hide on the tundra, where everything was open. Yet she didn’t see any blind likely to conceal her for long against a score of determined searchers, and if Eovath had observed just who was fighting the winged reptiles on top of the cliff, he was unquestionably determined.
A rasping cry sounded behind her. She looked back. A reptile man had spotted her and was alerting its companions.
In too much of a hurry to be gentle, she dumped Holg on the ground and readied her bow. The reptile man simply kept crying out, without scrambling for cover, and she realized that, like Nesteruk, it had never seen archery. It assumed that if it was out of javelin range, she couldn’t possibly hurt it.
The reptile somehow sensed it was mistaken about that when she pulled the fletchings back to her ear. It lunged for the cover of the nearest tree-fern, but it was too slow. The arrow plunged between its ribs, and it collapsed.
Kagur grinned, but the satisfaction was only momentary. She hadn’t dropped the reptile man in time to keep it from calling to its fellows, and now she only had four arrows left, not nearly enough to kill them all.
She wrapped Holg around her shoulders and strode onward. He felt heavier than he had before.
“Sister!” Eovath’s bellow came from somewhere behind Kagur and off to the left. She looked but couldn’t see him.
“Sister!” the giant repeated. “Give yourself up, and I promise my new allies and I won’t hurt you! You know I never wanted to in the first place!”
She sneered and tried to quicken her stride. Eovath knew her too well to believe she’d ever surrender. He just wanted to provoke her into answering back and giving away her position.
“All right!” Eovath called after a time. “We’ll do it your way! I understand, you have to walk your path to the end! How could I not, when we two are the same?”
The hell we are! she thought, and then, ahead and to the right, she spied a tangle of red flowers on tall stalks.
Or maybe not precisely flowers, for, ranging from hand-sized growths to those larger than her head, each consisted of just two lobe-like petals with yellow, hair-like tendrils protruding from the edges. But whatever they were, the thicket was one more patch of cover to put between her pursuers and herself. She considered swinging around it, but it looked like she should be able to push and squirm her way straight through.
Taking advantage of a narrow gap in the foliage, she started to do so. She caught a whiff of the flowers’ peculiar scent, sickly sweet with a hint of rot, and then a tug brought her up short. She, or more likely Holg, had snagged on something. Scowling, she yanked and twisted to pull loose.
But afterward, she was still caught. She looked back over her shoulder, and her eyes widened. A two-lobed crimson growth had closed around Holg’s dangling arm like a pair of jaws and clung with sufficient strength to keep her from yanking him free.
She reached to snap the vine-like stem to which the flower was attached away from the primary stalk. But as she gripped it, a second scarlet growth looped over and down to close around her hand.
The fleshy insides of the lobes were moist. For a moment, the dampness stung, and then her hand went numb.
With a snarl, she jerked it free. But then, as if the more she thrashed about, the more she excited them, additional scarlet flowers twisted in her direction. One closed on her shoulder, and a second strained at the very limits of its reach in an attempt to wrap around her head. Behind her, others were no doubt taking hold of Holg.
Fast, vigorous motion might have roused them initially, but it was the only recourse now. Kagur fumbled for her sword with numb fingers, yanked Eovath’s dagger from its sheath with her off hand, and slashed and hacked as best she could with Holg’s dead weight riding on her back.
Somehow, it was enough. After a moment, it became clear that once their jaws closed, the plants never willingly let go, but she managed to cut apart enough of them to pull free of the rest. She staggered back out of the thicket.
Voices rasped among the trees and tree-ferns, calling to one another. “Kagur!” Eovath rumbled.
Curse it, the hunters were catching up! And the thicket was no help, just one more obstacle stretched across her path!
Or was it?
The reptiles surely realized the crimson flowers were dangerous, and for that reason, they might assume no one would or could take refuge among them. Yet, maybe because they mainly ate the Vault’s oversized flying insects, most of the double-lobed traps grew high on the stalk. So it was possible someone could hide in the thicket safely if he or she kept low.
Hating the deadness in her fingers that made every frantic action clumsy, Kagur laid Holg on the ground, pulled the amber bead fetish from around his neck, and swiped wet blood from his body. Then she scurried down the front of the thicket, flicked drops of blood on the ground, pressed a clear footprint in soft earth, and dropped the fetish at the end of the false trail.
Then, with the voices of her hunters growing still louder, still closer, she rushed back to Holg. She dropped to the ground, and, crawling, dragged the unconscious old man into the shadows at the bases of the stalks.
Not all the sweet-smelling crimson jaws grew too high to threaten her. Some coiled down to bite. She shifted away when possible, ripped them from the stem when necessary, and kept moving.
She hadn’t penetrated nearly as far as she’d hoped to when something, pure instinct perhaps, told her to freeze. She did, and a moment later, Eovath and three of the reptile-men came into view and peered into the gap.
Despite the cover the plants afforded, Kagur found it all but impossible to believe her foster brother’s yellow eyes didn’t see her when only a few paces separated them and she could see him clearly. Still, lying absolutely still, she told herself he wouldn’t. She and Holg were not going to die like this, with the giant unpunished and the Blacklions unavenged.
Maybe Gorum heard and approved of that silent vow, for Kagur turned out to be correct. From the left, where she’d left the false trail, a sibilant voice jabbered. Eovath and his companions turned and headed in that direction. Other reptile-men followed.
Kagur lay still for a while afterward, to make sure her foes were truly gone and simply to catch her breath. Finally, when the numbness in her hand was giving way to a painful jabbing, she hauled Holg back out into the open. The old man was still breathing, and as best she could judge, the bleeding had finally stopped. But he showed no signs of coming around.
Scowling, she hoisted him back onto her shoulders and marched in the opposite direction from Eovath and the reptile-men. When she thought she might have traveled far enough to avoid them henceforth, she turned her steps toward the section of the crags where Nesteruk had tried to steer her.
Arriving with the same startling swiftness as before, night interrupted her trek, and she realized she had no way of carrying Holg up a tree. She simply had to lay him on the ground and keep watch with her bow and sword ready, while great beasts snarled and roared in the dark. Fortunately, none of them happened her way, or if they did, she never spotted them, and they passed her by in favor of other prey.
In time, Holg started to whimper. She touched his brow and felt the fever burning in his skin. Without truly waking, he fumbled for her hand, called her Ulionestria, and insisted the solution to the riddle was in the items on the tabletop in the portrait.
Kagur resumed her march as soon as day returned. Though mottled pink and itchy, her sword hand was essentially well again, but her back ached from carrying her burden.
She happened on more of the tart yellow fruit and gobbled it as she trudged. Eating made her more alert despite her sleepless night.
Gradually—far too gradually to suit her—the ground rose, the vegetation grew sparser, and glimpses of giant reptiles became less frequent. Crags loomed before and then around her. If she peered, she thought she could even make out the spot where they became the cavern wall.
But she didn’t sight any human beings, or even orcs. Maybe Holg had been wrong. Maybe no one lived up here.
Maybe. But she stumbled onward even after the way became steep and difficult, and pebbles pattered away beneath her feet. It was too late to try anywhere else. For good or ill, the highlands were the old man’s only chance.
And finally, after both the yellow fruit and her water were long gone, when her throat felt full of dust and the ache in her back had spread to torture her hips and knees as well, two figures rose up from behind the rock formation above her. Unfortunately, they were hefting javelins.