And it wasn’t alone.
Fifteen, twenty more were diving down after it from the high heavens.
“Damn it!” Scorio flung his Shroud in the first’s path and then changed his wings to their hummingbird form, short and mobile, to fly right up at the diving cloud of toothed tentacles and shrieking mouths.
At the last second he changed into his black fire form, and flew heedlessly through the flock of fiends, incinerating all that he touched. Tentacles contracted and cindered, bodies charred and blistered, screams were cut short. In a flash he punched out the far side, and unable to maintain the form for longer he inhaled the flames deep into his chest, lungs swelling, and turned, to hover at an apogee for one glorious second before diving back down after the flying fiends.
But damn they were fast, and they didn’t so much fly through the air as swim, occasionally bunching their tentacles up to shoot them out and fly forward again, getting a huge boost in speed. They split up, six or seven remaining, and scattered out wide, curving through the air to come back around.
Scorio flew after three, straining for speed, but he couldn’t hold the flames any longer. With a cry of rage he unleashed his plume of fire even as he carved a curve through the air, chasing a pair as the third split off, and his attack rushed forth, six feet of barely visible incandescent blue fury as thick as his wrist which then exploded into a raging ball of black fire and torched the first, swept across the second as it dove and sent it tumbling into the Tokalauths below.
A flying fiend dove down at him from above—he had to start thinking in three dimensions up here—but the Shadow Petal blinked into existence beside it, already spinning, blades slashing out to carve through the fiend’s torso, and then she dropped away, falling back into the melee with the bifurcated fiend corpse which tumbled down with her.
Scorio banked sharply, came around, saw that number “7” was besieged now by the huge centipedes which were seeking to sever its legs. Two had already been cut off. Wesanin was gone from his post, his whirlwind of sand tearing a chaotic path through the fiends and leaving a trail of shattered corpses. Fyrona’s black flame sheeted down, again and again, Penaela raked her sun out over the desert, causing scores of fiends to warp and collapse.
Merideva and Ursan were fighting back to back, but they were surrounded. Dozens of burning staffs already fought around her, clouting Tokalauths and smashing their carapaces, and Scorio dove down to pass right over the fiends assaulting their flank, reaching out with his talons to sheer and slash apart segmented bodies and split heads open like melons as they reared up.
Scorio skimmed up the dune’s flank, slamming his Shroud into a Tokalauth that plunged toward him so that it bounced away, and then again he rose up above the dunes just in time to see the first Okozs come within range and leap.
The huge gorilla fiends had felt like easy prey before. Big, dumb brutes with fists the size of barrels and instincts that made them predictable and simple to cull. But now as hundreds flooded in and surged into the sky, Scorio felt his heart sink.
Their leaps were as prodigious as before, but now nobody was focused on them. They rose high, huge arms raised above their heads, howls splitting the air, some reaching heights of thirty, forty meters as they hurled themselves to come crashing down on the beetles trapped between the huge dunes.
Scorio flung out his Shroud before one, blanketed the air with a universal command that they STOP!, and summoned his flames once more. Bronze mana was already becoming rare, great empty spaces appearing between the gleaming billows, but Scorio drank deep as he flew through the falling Okozs, burning and blackening their beautifully patterned forms, then sucking in the ebon fire to turn, flying backward, and spill forth his fireball to its greatest extent as he tried to fill the air with an inferno.
A handful of Okozs fell through the maelstrom, their howls turning to shrieks, but more and more rained down upon the beetles, the palanquins, hitting like meteors, fists shattered boards, causing barrels to explode, knocking huge holes into the beetles’ shell. Number “7” reeled, half its legs gone, and then keeled over onto its side.
More Okozs fell upon it, slamming and punching, and the beetle went right over. Huge straps snapped, and the palanquin slid away, spilling what Great Souls remained atop it into the air.
“No!” Scorio saw Kelona fling herself free, but Wesyd, crying out his song, went down under the snapping mass of boards and disappeared as number “7” rolled over him. Dozens of Great Souls fought to their feet as more Okozs landed around them, as the Tokalauths reared and struck, as the sand continued to boil as more fiends burrowed up from below, and that’s when the first of the lithe hound fiends came pouring over the dunes to race down into the trough, fleet as shadows, muscular and agile.
There wasn’t time to scream.
Scorio summoned his rage, his absolute refusal to let this massacre take place, and dove into the fray.
Chapter 39
Scorio hit the sand and drew his wings back into his frame. Raised his white-burning talons, hunched his shoulders, and went to work. His Shroud was a weapon; he formed it just in time for a charging fiend to slam into it, and the moment it reeled back he reformed it somewhere else, covering another Great Soul’s rear or blocking a new attack. His will was turgid with fury, and he used his command power like a hammer, bringing it down upon each fiend he faced so that it buckled, faltered, fell.
DIE, he commanded, overwhelming primitive instincts with fear, with despair. Tokalauths drew back as if the sands had turned to flame, Okozs flinched, the hounds—the Angraths—drew away, circling like starving carrion feeders around slowly dying prey.
DIE, Scorio screamed, charging forward, talons lashing back and forth. He didn’t stop to exchange blows. Didn’t stop to calculate the best path. Where he saw fiends he dove in, his talons cutting through insectile legs and huge armored segments, shearing Okoz limbs or opening up their flanks, and more rarely yet catching an Angrath with enough force to fling the fiend away.
The ground suddenly shuddered and turned to water, heaving and rising and falling in ripples that caused dust to fly up and hundreds of fiends to falter and fall. Scorio leaped up just before he lost his balance, extruded his wings, saw Ursan rise from a huge double-fisted blow he’d dealt the ground, Okozs spilled out around him.
But the sky was alive now with the tentacled flying fiends. They dive-bombed him, forcing him to flicker into flame so that their arms charred and snapped. Scorio flew after the fiends, cutting them out of their air, fighting for speed, rose and became corporeal. Instead of torching more of the flying foes, he instead dove back and skimmed just over the melee to unleash his fireball along the flank of a dune and torch a score of Angraths who yipped and howled and leaped while blazing bright to tumble dead amongst their fellows.
Penaela’s sun was holding a portion of their left flank, a bulwark that swayed from side to side and mutated and burst open endless numbers of fiends that pressed into its baleful light. Forty or fifty burning staves spun around Merideva, making the base of the dunes look like a forest fire, bright orange and fast enough to match the Angraths, beating a large clearing open into which the surviving Great Souls had retreated.
And everywhere floated banks of black fog. Huge segmented tails tipped with bone blades rose from these to slash and whip around, dealing immense damage to the fiends that climbed over their own fallen to get at their foes. Never had Scorio seen the Nightmare Lady’s power so perfectly used; each tail operated with a will of its own, and if destroyed, they simply faded away only to reform again from a different bank of fog.