It is the nature of magic to exact a heavy fee of the user. For each and every power, there is a proportionate cost, until there is nothing left of the user but grief and insanity. Even the gods lived by that rule, as evidenced by the mad brutes that remain of them. Witness, too, the gibbering god-touched who crowd the gate of every town.
–From "Infection of Magic on Our Shores," religious pamphlet circulated in Kingsport, late reign of Chasia
Chapter Twenty-One
The horses screamed. Holly reared, pulling her lead line free of Willard's saddle, even as Molly snarled and Willard's sword chimed from its scabbard. Caris kept her saddle, but Idgit bit at Harric, and when he dropped her bridle she spun and bolted back the way they'd come, with Holly in pursuit. Brolli toppled from Idgit's saddle like an ill-tied sack of meal.
"Girl! Get those horses!" Willard bellowed. "Don't let them run!"
Caris urged Rag to a gallop past Harric.
The mossy hillock shuddered and rose on stump-like limbs. Twigs and detritus cascaded from its peaked back in miniature avalanches. The yoab's head rose, a mossy boulder, weaving drunkenly, then dropped with a sound like a falling tree. It lifted again. Nostrils the size of badger holes snapped open and closed, gusting and sucking the air.
"Back off, Willard," Brolli said.
"I'm trying." Willard cursed. "Molly won't have it." He jerked the reins to turn her, but she growled in fury at the notion of retreat.
"It's belly is too full to move," Brolli said. "Belly dragging. We turn and leave it if it doesn't — " The monster convulsed, and a wave of blackness surged from its gullet to bury the moss. " — Vomit. Now it moves."
Harric backed to Brolli's side, unable to tear his gaze from the Phyros and her rider, who shrunk in comparison to the walking hillside before them.
Brolli drew a pearly globe the size of an apple from his satchel. "Cover your ears!" he shouted. With a straight-armed overhand motion like a catapult he flung the globe at the yoab's head. The globe arched over Willard and Molly and thumped before the yoab, then vanished in a flash and deafening concussion.
Dirt and rocks rained beneath the canopy. Birds scattered.
The yoab charged. It moved with more speed than Harric would have dreamed possible for anything so huge. Molly surged to meet it, but before the yoab could muster its full momentum she swerved along its left flank and Willard's sword rang musically off its skull. The yoab roared and spun, clawing a wall of debris that hailed upon Harric and Brolli. Its jaws clashed together with the force of logs in a whitewater whorl. Harric saw no teeth, only bony ridges like continuous molars in a ferocious underbite, and heavy folds of skin like the throat of a pelican. Harric could see no eyes on the creature, only nostrils and jaws.
Molly swerved again and again, and Willard aimed jabs at patches of gray skin that appeared beneath the carpet of flora. Willard seemed anything but injured. It seemed as if all the years of Phyros blood in his veins somehow welled up in him in this moment of need.
They were a magnificent team, the knight and the Phyros, moving as one with a sureness and power that Harric had never witnessed in anything. Willard held no reins, but communicated with his knees and whatever unknowable bond he shared with Molly, wielding the Phyros-sword in both hands. Nevertheless, his thigh was already bright with fresh stripes of blood.
The Kwendi scooped globes blindly from the satchel and lobbed them at the yoab. "Throw!" he said, to Harric, spilling some at their feet. Brolli's second globe bounced from the yoab's side and burst in a cloud of yellow sparkles. A third split in half and erupted in music like out-of tune bagpipes. Harric snatched another and hurled. His ribs screamed in pain, truncating the effort, and the globe fell well short, but took a lucky bounce into the yoab's knee, where it stuck like a wart without further effect.
"Will you stop throwing toys and do something?" Willard shouted.
The Kwendi muttered something and sprinted foot and knuckle as if he would run up the yoab's fern-crested back.
Willard's sword rang from some bony structure on one of the monster's forelimbs, then he turned Molly and sped up the mule track away from the others, shouting, "This way, you great worm!"
The yoab ignored the ruse — was possibly unaware of where Willard had gone — and instead charged the opposite direction, straight for Brolli and Harric, who almost ran into its mouth. Brolli dodged aside, lobbing a red globe into the bellowing maw before the monster's passage cast him sidelong into a hump of ferns. Harric plastered himself to a torchwood bole as the beast tore past, flattening smaller trees and shuddering the ground with its passage.
Crimson smoke spouted from its mouth and nostrils and from holes that might have been ears atop its skull. It roared and coughed like a firesaw, redoubling its speed and charging down the sloping forest floor in the direction Caris had gone.
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The Jack of Souls (Multi-award winner!)
Fantasy************************************************************************************** An outcast rogue must break a curse put on his fate, or die on his nineteenth birthday. To survive, he'll need the sword of a maiden, the aid of an immortal, and...
