Then he saw the red-faced creatures, swarming out of the fumaroles dead ahead. They squealed piercingly, and the trolls rose in answer, cutting off the party from the trees.
The sfvantskors met them first, slashing at the flaming arms, the spitting heads. The Turachs did their part as well, hacking and stabbing alongside their old enemies. Three or four trolls died before they could escape the tunnels.
But right and left the creatures were gaining their feet and leaping to the attack. Suddenly all was carnage, terrible and blindingly swift. Cayer Vispek jumped over a troll’s groping hand, then killed it-killed it-with a savage kick to the head. A Turach drove his blade straight into flaming jaws. The dogs killed the rodent-beasts with swift efficiency, shaking them, flinging the carcasses away. But their muzzles were burning; Big Skip’s shirt was burning; a dying troll spat flame in Vadu’s face. On Pazel’s right a dlomic soldier beheaded a troll just rising from the earth, and a second troll caught his arm and wrenched him, headfirst, into the fumarole. He never managed a scream.
“On! On! Stop for nothing!” Hercol was bellowing. And somehow they did go on, right through the fire, over the twitching bodies, the arms still reaching from the earth. They ran with the red-faced creatures dragging from their ankles; they ran not knowing which of them, what part of them, was burning.
“Pazel, stay with us! Protect them!” Thasha shouted, waving at the ixchel. He ran with her on one side, Neeps on the other. Together, as though maddened by danger, they charged a huge troll with broken fangs. The beast lunged at Thasha; she parried with her sword and stabbed it through the hand with her knife, and turned her head before its fire-spittle could scald her in the face. Neeps managed only to graze the creature before it raked him with the claws of its free hand, sending him sprawling. The troll snapped at him, tore out a mouthful of hair. Then Pazel and Thasha lunged together. His sword pierced its chest; Thasha’s tore its belly open. It toppled sideways, dying; the three of them were past it-and then Pazel felt it sink those teeth into his calf.
He fell flat atop the ixchel; the troll’s claws were shredding his pack and clothes, seeking his flesh; then from the corner of his eye he saw Neeps make a desperate upward thrust, and blood from the troll’s severed throat washed down his leg.
The corpse fell burning atop him; Thasha and Neeps somehow moved it in a matter of seconds, and to their clear amazement Pazel leaped up and ran at their side. But the burning followed him, enveloped him; and still more trolls slavered at their heels. He felt that his run was an extended fall down a black cliff, faster and faster, his feet somehow staying under him just enough to fend him off the lava, and then suddenly he was on thinner lava, crumbled lava, then earth, then leaves, and the hooting, howling pursuit went on into the forest, and he smashed through vines and palms and thorns and flowers and brush, his arm over the ixchel’s faces, his own flesh torn, and then Praise Rin and His host there was the river, a blessed short muddy bank and then in, down, the fire in his clothes hissing out, the ixchel coughing and choking as he lifted them clear, trod water, kicked out into the water among the other survivors, while on the banks behind them twenty or thirty flame-trolls stood screaming their hate, and fighting over the corpses already roasting in their grasp.
The Ansyndra here was wide and shallow; they bobbed along with it gently, the dlomu helping the humans stay afloat, until they rounded a long bend and left the creatures behind. Then they dragged themselves ashore. Three of the eight Masalym soldiers were gone, and one Turach also. Two dogs limped onto the sand, and a third, nearly hairless, came whimpering from the forest.
“Sit down!” said Thasha to Pazel, catching him by the arm. “We’ve got to take care of that leg. Damn it all, the packs, our medicine kit, our food-”
“How did we do it?” Pazel gasped. “How did we get away?”
“Hercol,” she said, “and Vadu. I know it looked like there were trolls everywhere, but most of them were behind us. They held them all back. Vadu can fight, by Rin.”
“Hush, Thasha,” said Neeps, looking past her shoulder.
The surviving dlomic warriors were laying Vadu in the grass. He was hideously burned, his face unrecognizable, the lids barely moving over the silver eyes. His hands were so blistered and torn it was hard to tell where one finger ended and the next began. “I don’t think he can move,” whispered Neeps. “They floated him downstream like a log.”
But Vadu could move, for he was raising one hand, weakly beckoning. It was Hercol he wanted. The swordsman drew close and knelt at his shoulder.
“Now I pay,” said Vadu, his voice faint and rasping. “For all my folly, and a life of borrowed strength.”
“You have been paying for years, son of Masalym,” said Hercol.
Vadu shook his ruined head. “Not everyone who touched a Blade surrendered to it. I gave myself to the eguar, and lost my sanity, my soul. You alone had no fear to say so, to my face. Human, warrior human. I look at you and see the man I should have been.”
“You are that man,” said Hercol. “You have outlived the curse you carried.”
“I have done that,” said Vadu. “Yes. That is something. Farewell, strange friend-”
Vadu said no more. He lay still, and though Pazel knew he might be imagining it, he thought that peace stole over the counselor’s body; and Bolutu, no longer a monk of the Rinfaith but practiced in such moments nonetheless, gently closed his eyes.
The Infernal Forest
8 Modobrin 941
Thasha’s hair was half the length it had been an hour before; her locks ended in singed, black strands. Kneeling beside Pazel, she cut away the shreds of his trouser leg, and winced at what she saw. But Pazel knew he was lucky. His calf had been pierced in four places, but the broken fangs had not gone deep; the troll had meant to hold him while its claws did the killing. Still, something was wrong. The wound throbbed, and ugly green-purple blotches were rising around the broken skin. Thasha looked around helplessly. “Blary wonderful place to be without a doctor,” she said.
Pazel thought of Neeps, and cringed inside. What doctor could help him, though? In Arqual Chadfallow had cured the talking fever, but that was not a magical plague. And all the doctors of the South had obviously failed. So much horror, he thought, watching a Turach wrap wet bandages about a burned dlomic forehead.
“The trick will be to keep those holes from getting infected,” said Ensyl, studying his leg.
No, he thought, the trick was to keep moving. To keep moving, and not to let his thoughts wander anywhere he couldn’t stand to look. With that goal in mind he glanced up at the trees. There were fifty shades of green straight overhead. Tiny butterflies were descending like a fall of orange snowflakes. “This doesn’t look very infernal to me,” he said.
“No,” said Thasha, “I don’t suppose we’re there yet.”
The survivors dressed their wounds, and those of the three remaining dogs. Then they carried Vadu into the forest, and built a cairn of stones over his body, and held their breath to the count of one hundred for the dead, as their people had done for so many generations that no one could say how the custom began.
As they returned Pazel looked over the remaining soldiers. Two Turachs: an older warrior, with a scar on his forehead like an extra eyebrow; and a younger man with a sullen, boyish face. Five dlomic warriors, including a tall and capable woman who appeared to be taking charge of her comrades.