Douglas Niles - The Heir of Kayolin

The expression on her face told him she had something very important that she wanted to discuss.

The monsters attacked with only minimal warning: the clicking sound indicated their presence for several seconds before the buglike creatures scrambled into the village from two different directions. They spilled out of the cavern from which Gretchan and Brandon had just exited, and they charged from another, smaller tunnel mouth. The two groups blocked the dwarves from reaching the third passage, the only other escape from that miserable hole in the ground where the Aghar had been hiding and, for a time, surviving.

Gretchan screamed and swung her staff, smashing it over the head of one fast-approaching horax. The monster dropped, stunned or killed, but another one scrambled over that one and snapped its mandibles around the priestess’s arm. Crying out in pain, Gretchan clutched her staff tightly before losing her balance and falling. Two more horax pounced, quivering and snapping, trying to pinch her legs in their cruel jaws.

Brandon, meanwhile, met the first two horax with crushing blows of his axe, swinging from left to right and back again, splitting their armored heads, then twisting his grip to pull his weapon free as the creatures fell dead. Two more closed in, and he swung the weapon wildly, forcing them to retreat. It was then he saw the dwarf maid fall onto her back, desperately swinging her staff to hold off the attack of two of the horrid monsters.

She knocked them aside long enough to allow her to climb to her feet and retreat. But Brandon saw another horax, looming behind the segmented bodies of its fellows. Unlike the other grayish bugs, it was a crimson red and was further distinguished by a bulging growth on the underside of its head. The monster reared back, and something shot out from that pulsing lump, like a long stream of rope, and Gretchan screamed again as she was tangled in the strands of a tough, sticky web. She dropped her staff and fought against the tangling lines, but her struggles only seemed to wrap her more tautly in the webbing. The red horax reared up and pulled, and the strands entangling the cleric tightened, pulling her inexorably toward the monster.

“Gretchan!” Brandon cried, lunging after her and chopping right through the body of a horax that blocked his path. By then the monster dragged the still-struggling priestess out of the cavern and back into the tunnel the two dwarves had used. Still more horax were creeping forward from the passageway, adding their numbers to the half dozen already swarming the ruined village. All of them closed in on the axe-wielding dwarf, their eyes glittering, segmented bodies rearing, hook-tipped forelegs waving in the air.

They formed a barrier, a wall of armored, arachnoid bodies lined up before him, but Brandon hurled himself against that barricade like a dwarf possessed by the devil. The Bluestone Axe struck and struck again, seeking out any weaknesses in the horax carapaces, plunging into the soft flesh between the armored joints, lopping off legs, and gouging eyes.

In seconds he had dispatched three of the beasts, but two other horax materialized with snakelike speed to occupy the breach and re-create the wall of armored bodies. Cursing, all but spitting in rage and frustration, Brandon chopped at the two, cutting the heads from both of the hideous creatures. Somehow the wall blocking him formed again.

“Gretchan!” he called again, his voice cracking from the strain.

By then the priestess had vanished, borne into the darkness in the clutches of the grotesque monsters. He strained to hear a scream, some sound of distress, and his heart sank when he could discern nothing beyond the incessant clacking of the horax who seethed and reared, blocking his pursuit as if they were tactical-minded rearguard soldiers.

Outnumbered at least six to one, Brandon didn’t hesitate, didn’t even pause to consider the odds. Raising his axe over his head, the blade still dripping with the guts and ichor of horax innards, he hurled himself at the monsters in a frenzy of battle rage. But instead of plunging into the center of the formation, where he would have been swiftly overcome, he dodged to the side, swinging a roundhouse blow that cut the head and the first two body sections from a rearing horax. As that monster fell, Brandon tried to skip past.

As he did, he swung a sideways blow, his axe again biting deeply into an arachnoid body. The stricken horax fell, hissing and wriggling, but the dwarf already had moved on to his next target, bringing a hard blow down on one of the bug monsters that, unfortunately, only glanced off it hard skull, though it did cut through one of the two jutting mandibles and sent the monster recoiling in something that resembled fear.

Still the bugs rose and snapped and swayed, blocking him from pursuing Gretchan. Brandon, feeling acutely aware of each passing second, ignored the badly injured bug wriggling on the floor and took stock of the three horax that continued to block his path.

The one with the cracked mandible held back from its two fellows, rearing in the center of the tunnel mouth. The others advanced slightly, jerking forward with four legs supporting each of them, while the forward half of their bodies, four legs waving menacingly in the air, reared and bobbed, weaving back and forth like snakes looking for an opponent.

“You want a target?” Brandon growled, addressing the horax to his left. “How about this? ”

He sprang forward, axe held high, and just as quickly bounced back. His apparent target reared farther back, rising so high that two more of its legs came off the floor. All six of the taloned limbs spread wide, ready to grab him in a lethal embrace. The other two horax, reacting in concert with their companion, struck viciously in his direction.

Only he had dodged the other way. He brought the axe down savagely on the back of one horax’s head, lopping it off at the neck. The second horax was still exposed, and the dwarf pulled his weapon around on the backswing, driving the sharp, gore-slicked blade right between the monster’s eyes. Suddenly, the odds had shifted. Only one more horax stood between him and the rescue of his cherished companion.

The remaining horax surprised him, however, by seeming to sense his intent and acting to counter him. The creature scuttled away, backing into the tunnel where Gretchan had disappeared and taking up a position at a bottleneck where the cave was only five or six feet wide. Brandon lunged toward it, swinging wildly, but the monster feinted and bobbed away like a boxer. It spun to the side, leaving the path into the tunnel relatively free, but the dwarf was quickly beginning to understand that the monsters were smarter than he had thought. Far more than instinct drove them, and he knew that he was being dared to try to charge past the remaining horax. Even if he succeeded in a mad dash, he would have left an implacable enemy following him to his rear.

So Brand raised the Bluestone Axe and attacked again, chopping from the left and the right, as if he were chopping away at the trunk of a large tree. He sliced one foreleg from the horax’s left side and two more from the right. The beast’s multifaceted eyes glittered with some angry emotion-whether fear or hatred, the dwarf couldn’t tell-but when he drove in for the last attack, swinging the axe forward and slicing through the chitinous plates of the rearing monster’s belly, the gleam in those eyes swiftly faded to the universal blackness of death.

But Brandon didn’t wait to see the creature die. He was already sprinting down the tunnel, chasing along the path where Gretchan had been taken, hoping desperately that, by some miracle, he could catch up to her while she was still alive.

He had gone a dozen steps when he skidded to a stop, remembering the staff that she had dropped when the red horax had tangled her in its web. Running back into the ruined village, he snatched up the shaft of wood and returned past the bleeding bodies of the slain horax. As he headed deep into the cavern, he noticed that the anvil at the head of the cleric’s shaft was glowing slightly, adding just enough light to allow him to run as fast as he could.