Frost caught scent of its musk.
The whistling noise became louder…moving closer.
“Either it moves,” Cheval said, gliding past him, “or we kill it.”
Li urged his tiger forward, blocking her with its sinewy body. The little man glared at her. “Do you really think it is alone?”
“Ah, bloody Hell!” Grin swore, as if in answer.
As one they all glanced back at him. He ignored them, staring still into the forest they had just traveled through. Two more of the Black Devils were moving out of the trees, hooves noiseless on the wet ground.
The winter man studied the centaur ahead of them, took a step toward it. “We don’t know they’re enemies. Even if they are, they might not be Hunters.”
Blue Jay circled around his head, wings fluttering, and with a blur of color that seemed darker against the rain, transformed once again into the jean-clad trickster. The feathers in his hair lay flat and damp against his head. His eyes were clear and bright with danger.
“Something else is coming.”
The tiger growled. Li shifted anxiously upon its back. The Mazikeen appeared suddenly at the winter man’s side as though he moved between moments.
“They are Minata-Karaia. We must leave the forest.”
Frost heard the whistling. It grew louder still.
The Black Devils moved through the trees in a slowly closing circle, but they were only three. Around the winter man, the rain turned to snow. He was weaker here in the tropical climate, but not entirely without power.
“Get to the pyramid!” he snapped. “Kill anything that gets in your way!”
As one, they turned south. Blue Jay took flight again, diminishing into a bird and darting up through the branches. Li and his tiger bounded into the trees with Grin and Chorti crashing through the forest behind them. Cheval Bayard was all green and silver streaks, shifting in an eyeblink from woman to horse. Frost could have summoned a chill wind to carry him, but he dared not exert himself so much in this weather. Instead he ran, slicing through the forest again.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one of the Black Devils careening through the trees to cut him off. He tensed, dagger fingers hooked, prepared to slaughter the thing if it attacked. But before he could even pause, Cheval was there. The kelpy thundered through the trees, snapping branches before her, and collided with the Black Devil, knocking the centaur off of its feet. Before it could fight back, she began to beat it with the hooves of her forelegs, breaking bones and pulping its skull. The Black Devil screamed, then fell silent.
The winter man kept going, grateful and impressed. He had underestimated Cheval, and vowed not to do it again.
Another bestial cry came, off to his left, and he glanced over to see a Black Devil writhing on the ground, bucking against the earth in obvious agony. Over it stood the Mazikeen, one skeletal hand extended from beneath its robe, the air shimmering between its fingers and the centaur’s flesh.
The last of the Black Devils galloped behind him, its hooves pounding the forest floor, but Frost was not concerned. On its own, a single Black Devil posed no challenge to the Borderkind.
Ahead, in the trees and through the sheen of light rain, he saw Chorti and Grin rumbling through the rain forest like enormous children playing some sort of game. But the whistling sound had grown louder still, and the name the Mazikeen had used, Minata-Karaia, was echoing through the winter man’s head. What were they? The sound was unfamiliar, but if the sorcerer said they had to flee, he knew they must be terrible indeed.
Branches whipped against him, snapping on his frozen form. All around him, snowflakes whipped in a light breeze, the rain no longer reaching him. Frost darted around trees and leaped-flowed-over fallen logs.
Up ahead, he heard Li’s tiger roar.
Something shifted in the forest beside him.
A tree.
But not a tree. He looked up and his eyes widened at the sight of the creature as tall as the tallest tree, fruit hanging from its strange branch-arms, its head a thick wooden knot that jutted up from the trunk of its body. There was a hole in its head, and even as it bent to grab at him, the air rushing through that hole screamed into that terrible whistling noise.
With merely a thought, Frost became the winter storm. There in the rain forest it was little more than a cloud of frigid mist, but as the Minata-Karaia reached its tree-fingers into that cloud, the entire branch froze solid. When the creature moved, that whistle announcing its motion, the branch snapped off.
Frost drifted only a dozen feet before taking form again, a sliver man, narrow ice carved like a stick figure. He could not keep up the storm for long. Now he ran again, but this time his gaze searched the trees above and he saw them moving. The whistling grew louder. The Minata-Karaia came after him through the harmless, unmoving trees.
Li’s tiger roared again, the sound echoing through the rain forest. There came a howl that could only have been Chorti. Then Cheval thundered past, her hooves pounding the ground. Frost would have tried to swing up onto her back, but by then the Mazikeen was beside him as well, not running but rather floating along a few inches above the forest floor.
Together, they burst from the trees out into the vast open plain around the settlement. Small huts and white-washed buildings were clustered on the far side of a narrow river, little more than a stream. On the near side was the pyramid.
The Borderkind charged out across the open ground, leaving the trees behind. Chorti had blood matted on his furry back. The Grindylow rested on his fists like a mountain gorilla and spun to face the others. Li leaped down off of the tiger, spheres of fire bursting from his hands, ready for battle. Blue Jay danced down from the sky, spinning until he was a man again, his boots alighting upon the ground. Cheval reared back, the battle cry erupting from her throat not quite a neigh.
Together, Frost and the Mazikeen turned to look back the way they’d come. The Minata-Karaia shuffled to the edge of the rain forest. Only when they were moving was it obvious they were not trees, but then it was very, very obvious. They were not even tree-men, but giant, narrow creatures with dark, brittle flesh like bark and long, long legs. They were a race of giants perfectly created to camouflage themselves in a jungle or forest, save for that horrid whistling their heads made as they moved.
But they stopped, unwilling to come into the clearing, at least for the moment, and so the whistling stopped as well. They made odd Hunters, these things who would not pursue their prey. Frost saw perhaps fifteen or twenty of them, just standing there watching as though they were the audience at some kind of bizarre Roman forum.
A single Black Devil trotted from the woods, but it was not looking at them. Its gaze was on the sky.
Then Frost knew.
The Minata-Karaia were the audience, but they had also been shepherds, herding them into a real forum, a gladiatorial ring. He turned and looked up at the top of the pyramid where those red-winged birds-blood-winged carrion birds who bathed in the lifeblood of sacrificed prisoners-had begun to land atop the temple roof, also watching, also waiting.
The Borderkind moved nearer together, forming a tight, defensive circle.
“I sense magic,” the Mazikeen said, glancing at Frost with black eyes.
The winter man nodded. “Yes.”
“It seems we did not run fast enough,” Cheval Bayard said, pushing silver hair away from her face.
Blue Jay spread his arms, the blue shimmer of deadly, invisible wings beneath them. “I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, “but I’m tired of running.”