Looking away from the gruesome mess, she hunted until she found its sword. Her fingers closed over a clammy hilt, and she almost flung the weapon aside, her insides revolting at the nasty feel of the weapon. She could not afford to be squeamish, so she lifted the blade and whirled.
As she closed on the battle at a soft-footed trot the shouts and yells, and clangor of steel smashing against steel, grew into a chaotic din. Drawing nearer, she faced the immediate dilemma of choosing a target. In the pervasive darkness, enemy and companion all looked the same. As she searched, she sensed a presence. She twisted, bringing the sword to bear. A few paces off, a pair of silvery eyes regarded her. Not only did those eyes serve as a target, they separated friend from foe. With dagger held low in one hand, and sword held high in the other, she advanced, studying her enemy.
The shadowed figure had no apparent weapon, save its flesh. Ellonlef attacked without warning. With a practiced lunge, her dagger sank into its middle, and an instant later her sword whirled, striking off the demon’s upraised hand. Again, where her steel met flesh, there were brief, almost unseen burst of azure fire.
Where a man would have retreated, this creature laughed in her face. Unlike the other mahk’lar, this one attacked before its shadowed spirit could fully disperse. With unnatural quickness, it caught her sword arm in its remaining hand. As Ellonlef struggled to push it away, the stench of corruption filled her nose. The demon swarmed over her, flesh and spirit intent on subduing her. As she fought, cold thick blood splashed across her face, gagging her. The stump of its wrist battered against the side of her head, making her hair fly. The next blow scattered a cascade of twinkling lights across her vision.
Desperate, Ellonlef lashed out with her dagger, stabbing and stabbing again. The demon broke off with a strangled hiss, backed away, its breathing labored. Seeing her chance, she aimed her sword at the creature’s neck in a brutal attack.
The blow never fell. Something heavy slammed into her, knocking her to the ground. She landed on her belly with a muffled cry, her dagger and sword spinning from her grasp. Deathly fingers curled around her neck and squeezed. Her eyes bulged as the pressure mounted. Ellonlef fought to cry a warning, but only a high, wheezing sound escaped her throat. As she wallowed about in the sand with the demon’s weight pressing her down, the already dark world began to fade before her eyes. She sunk her fingers into the mahk’lar’s arm and tried to heave it off. In response, the demon wrenched her head back until her neck popped, then slammed her face into the sandy ground, once and again. Somewhere Kian bellowed, oblivious to her plight. Her face struck the ground again, and all went utterly black.
Chapter 27
Through a veil of cold fury, Kian saw the silvery eyes and knew them for the same kind that he had seen under the Black Keep, those of the mahk’lar. These eyes, however, were set in the face of a man.
He parried a thrust and lunged, slamming his blade through the demon’s skull, creating a wild flaring of blue radiance where his steel hacked into unholy flesh. Shrieking, the mahk’lar fell away. Puffs of inky vapor far darker than the night’s shadows flooded from its wounds, and the figure slowly collapsed in a shapeless mess. Spinning around in a tight, guarded circle, Kian sought more foes, but there were none to be had. As fast as it had begun, the battle ended. One moment the demons were fighting, the next they had disengaged and vanished.
Kian shouted, “Light anything that will burn!”
Following his own command, he moved to the nearest banked cookfire and tossed a handful of tinder on the ruddy coals. A few puffs of breath set the dry wood and grass alight. From all directions, the Asra a’Shah closed in, the whites of their eyes wide and stark in the dark skin of their faces. Without question, there were fewer now than had rode into the valley.
“We need torches,” Ba’Sel said, his accent thicker than normal for the pain he must be feeling from a deep slash to his cheek.
Azuri strode out of the dark, filthy and spattered with blood, as if he had been dragged across the floor of a butcher’s shop. The blood, black and thick, was not his own. “This will work well enough.” He tossed a shredded white tabard into the dust at Kian’s feet. As Kian spread it out, revealing a silver fist floating on a field of black, Azuri added with disgust, “Men of House Racote attacked us.”
“They were not men,” Hazad said, hollow-eyed.
“Mahk’lar,” Kian hissed as if it were a curse. Then he remembered Ellonlef.
Without a word, he sprinted down the sandy path. Someone shouted after him, but he ignored them. When he got to the place where he had left Ellonlef, he found only an empty hut. He searched, thinking his eyes must have betrayed him, thought that she was probably balled up in a corner somewhere.
But that made no sense, not for a woman like her.
And then he knew what she had done.
He cursed under his breath to hide his growing alarm. Despite having a good idea of her actions after he had left her, he called out her name. Echoes of that cry were his only answer.
Hazad and Azuri trotted to the hut’s ragged doorway, each bearing a hastily made torch. Kian snatched Hazad’s away. “I’ll search to the north. You two head back toward the camp.”
“What are we looking for?” Hazad asked.
“Ellonlef,” Kian answered, even as he rushed away down the trail.
He ran with the torch held high, his heart pounding. He kept telling himself to slow down, get a better look at the disturbed ground, but he could not help but push forward at a near sprint. After a few hundred paces, he concluded that the only tracks in the sand were his own, and those left by creatures of the desert.
More desperate than ever, he turned and forced himself to walk back the way he had come. He halted when he reached the spot where she must have killed the first demon. All that remained was chainmail and a tabard resting amid a jellied pool of some reddish-black substance that roughly defined the shape of a man. One thing he noticed was that there was no sword-the same, presumably, that Ellonlef had spoken of retrieving.
Hazad’s frantic shout from the direction of camp sent Kian into a dead sprint. As he ran, he saw Ellonlef in his mind, saw her smile and her eyes. On my life, I will protect you, he had promised, and he had failed. He ran all the faster.
When he reached camp, he halted beside Azuri and Hazad, who were staring down at two objects on the ground. With torches held aloft, the flickering glow rippled along the edges of a sword and Ellonlef’s dagger. Black, congealing blood covered both. There was another pile of clothing and armor soaking in a grisly stew. The ground was much disturbed, and more splashes of the black blood were sprinkled everywhere. Kian swallowed. In one spot, the blood he saw was red, human, and surely Ellonlef’s.
Feeling trapped by the swift passage of time, Kian began giving orders. “Spread out. Search each side of the canyon. She must be wounded and insensible.”
For an hour or more, each moment of which hammered at Kian’s soul, the company scoured every tumbledown hut, delved into splits and hollows in the canyon walls, and wandered far in each direction. When all had gathered again, each man, bloodied and dusty and despondent, reported that they had found no trace of Sister Ellonlef.