Ibrahim hesitated. Last night’s ritual had reeked of the unholy, but it hadn’t hurt anyone on his side, and if allowing it was a sin, well, it was a sin he’d committed already. Perhaps a victory on behalf of Islam would balance the scales.
“Very well,” he said. “Execute the prisoners.” Execute seemed a more righteous word than murder. Or sacrifice. “Work your magic one more time.”
Adalric roused with a start to find himself beside one of the wagons parked outside the stable. An instant before, or so it seemed to him, he’d been near the doorway into the keep. Evidently he’d crossed the courtyard sleepwalking or in a stupor approximating sleep.
He scowled and knuckled a gritty eye. If he was going to doze off, he might as well seek his bed and sleep properly. God knew he needed it, and surely the trouble with scorpions was done. Both big ones were dead, and dozens of the common sort as well.
Yet he couldn’t rid himself of the suspicion that, just as strange perils had crawled from the darkness last night, they might arise tonight as well. If he didn’t want to alarm the men when they’d just calmed down and his imagination might simply be running wild, he needed to patrol the fortress himself. He gave his head a shake and headed back across the courtyard.
At the periphery of his vision and low to the ground, a shadow shifted. Or perhaps not. When he pivoted in that direction, nothing was moving anymore.
He suspected his eyes were playing tricks, but he needed a closer look to know for certain. He adjusted the strap that ran from his shield to loop around his neck, made sure his sword was loose in the scabbard, and stalked forward.
After two paces, he perceived he has advancing toward the cistern, a rectangular hole in the ground with a low brick ledge around it. A bucket on a rope sat ready to hand to draw the water forth.
Adalric still couldn’t see any further movement. But he squinted because something about the murky shapes before him was off. Was there a spot where the brick barrier humped up higher than it should?
He took another step. The bulge became a scorpion the size of a man’s head. It had been crouching motionless atop the ledge, but now the sting poised above the cistern began to flick. It was flinging venom into the water.
Underneath Adalric’s coif of mail, the hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end. He and his fellow Tafurs had rid the citadel of the enormous scorpions, yet here, inexplicably, was another deliberately poisoning the water supply. Surely no vermin would undertake such a thing unless guided by a man’s intellect… or a demon’s.
Whatever accounted for it, Adalric had to stop the contamination. He drew his sword, shouted for help, and advanced.
The arachnid neither fled nor assumed a defensive posture. It just kept on flicking. Was it so intent on the task that it hadn’t even noticed him? Or was it trying to hold his attention while another scorpion sneaked up on him like the creature last night?
He glanced behind him. Nothing was there but one of the sentries scurrying down from the battlements in answer to his call. Reassured, Adalric turned back toward the scorpion.
The sentry, a Frenchman, shouted something. It took Adalric an instant to translate it to “Watch out!” By then, the ground was grumbling, and dirt was sliding under his boots.
He whirled, and a scorpion the size of a donkey heaved itself from the burrow where it had hitherto lay hidden. One set of pincers hooked around his shield to seize him.
Appalled, he didn’t consciously shift the shield, but a lifetime of training, cutting at the pell and sparring with other men-at-arms with swords of wood or whalebone, did it for him. The action kept the claws from closing on his body.
Unfortunately, it didn’t stop the pincers from grasping the edge of the shield itself. The alder crunched and splintered, and the scorpion jerked on its prize, staggering him. He reeled and fell into a low space like a shallow grave, the burrow from which his foe had just emerged.
Legs splayed to straddle the pit, the scorpion tried to reach him with its unencumbered set of claws. With his shield immobilized and his sword all but useless in such close quarters, he dropped the blade, snatched the dagger from his belt, and met the groping claws with stabs. Each counterattack balked them, but only for a moment. Meanwhile, dirt spilled down the edges of the grave, blinding and choking him.
The scorpion grasped the shield with both pairs of pincers and tried to wrest it away. Adalric clung to the hand strap, switched back to his sword, and stabbed upward, shouting half in fury and half in terror with each thrust. His weapon jolted against the scorpion’s body. With the shield blocking his vision and dust blurring it, he couldn’t tell if any of his strokes penetrated the creature’s shell.
A piece of the shield crumbled in the arachnid’s grip, exposing more of Adalric to its attacks. He struck across his body at the pincers that now sought to close on his shoulder. They jerked back, but then the arachnid’s sting whipped down, pierced the shield, and stopped a finger length above his chest. It yanked free and struck again. The repeated blows clattered like hail on a roof and were steadily smashing the armor to pieces.
Though still fighting as fiercely as before, Adalric braced for the death stroke that was likely imminent. Then pincers and sting lifted away, and, legs skittering around the hole in which he lay, the scorpion changed its facing. Something, probably the sentry rushing to his aid, had distracted it.
Adalric gathered himself to take advantage, and then a smaller but still unnaturally large scorpion, likely the one that had been poisoning the cistern, hopped down by Adalric’s feet and seized one of his ankles in its claws. The pressure hurt. If not for the reinforced leather of his boot, it would surely have cut flesh and broken bone.
Adalric drew up his other foot and stamped. His heel slammed home just above the gnashing mouthparts and in the center of the four sets of black little eyes. Shell crunched, and though even in death, the creature still gripped him, the pressure abated.
He’d have to settle for that. He scrambled to his knees and thrust his sword at the remaining arachnid’s underside. The blade drove into the seam between two pieces of shell. The scorpion froze for an instant, then scuttled backward away from the pit, nearly jerking the hilt from his hand.
He hoped he’d hurt the creature badly. Grinning, he scrambled out of the burrow before the scorpion could straddle it anew, and his momentary elation turned to rage. A decapitated body sprawled on the ground, gore pooled around the stump of the neck, while the scorpion held the severed head in one set of claws. The sentry had indeed succeeded in saving his captain’s life, but at the cost of his own.
Adalric realized the bugle was blaring. The remaining sentry was sounding it. Responding to the call, Tafurs charged out of the keep, then faltered when they beheld the scene before them.
“It’s wounded!” Adalric bellowed. “Flank it and kill it!” He ran at the scorpion, partly to encourage them, partly because he hated it. His strides shook the carcass of the smaller arachnid loose from his ankle.
The scorpion dropped the sentry’s head. Its pincers snatched and, not trusting the scant remains of his shield to block the attack, Adalric dodged. The claws clacked shut on empty air, and he cut at the place where they swelled from the limb behind them. The sword didn’t shear them off entirely, but when he drew it back, they dangled uselessly.
A moment later, Faramund lunged, chopped with his battle-axe, and maimed one of the scorpion’s legs. Another man rammed a spear into its side.