Мэтт Форбек - The Queen of Death

“Where’s the other one?” Esprë yelled. “Where is it?”

Xalt scanned the sky but saw just as little as Esprë. Then he flung his head over the bow. A moment later, he sprang back up. “Down there!” he said. “Down and to port!”

Grateful to have some direction to head in—any direction at all—Esprë pushed the airship in that direction. As she did, Monja let loose of her leather strap and flung herself to the bridge’s rear gunwale.

“He’s going after the wagon,” Monja said, straining to be heard over the roar of the ring of fire. “He looks like he’s going to— Spirits! He killed one of their horses. I think they’re going to crash!”

Esprë’s heart sank, but she pushed out with her mind harder, striving to shove the performance of the airship’s elemental to new heights. Just as the wagon hove into view beneath the twisting and turning Phoenix, something dropped past the airship’s deck at top speed, heading right for the wagon below.

Then Esprë realized that the falling object wasn’t something but someone. “Te’oma!” she shouted, fearful of what the treacherous changeling might do. “Te’oma!”

The horses screamed as their companion lost his footing and sagged in the harness. They fought hard to remain on their hooves, but gravity and momentum worked against them.

Kandler cursed and hauled back on the reins as hard as he could. “Hold on!” he shouted.

The wagon went up on two wheels and threatened to tip right over, but Kandler pulled on the reins and wrestled the surviving horses away from the direction in which their dead fellow had fallen. The beasts bellowed in protest at the way he forced them to twist and turn, but he ignored the noise and forced them to come to a thundering halt and pull the wagon back onto all four wheels.

It was everything Kandler could do to keep his seat. Behind him, he heard Burch growling as the barrels and casks in the back of the wagon threatened to crush him under their rolling bulk. Sallah grunted as she held on to the wagon with her free hand, refusing to drop her sacred blade.

Then the wagon hit a bump, probably just the roots to some long decaying tree, the trunk of which had long rotted away into the swamp. The wheels came to such an abrupt halt that Sallah lost her grip and catapulted forward, past the horses and onto the marshy ground beyond.

“No! ” Kandler shouted. He flung out an arm to grab her as she went by, but his fingers failed to find purchase on her armor. She hit the ground hard and did not get up.

Kandler dropped the reins and leaped from the wagon. As his feet hit the ground, he heard a horrifying screech from above. He flung his head back and saw a soarwing coming straight down at him as he raced for Sallah. The lizardman rider on its back hissed triumphantly and brought back its arm to hurl its last spear through the justicar’s heart.

As Kandler reached Sallah, he saw that she still lived. The fall had knocked the air from her lungs, though, and she had yet to catch her breath. He fell to his knees next to her and drew his sword, unwilling to let the long-beaked soarwing have either of them without a fight.

The justicar glanced at the wagon, but he could not see Burch under the pile of supplies that had crushed forward against the front of the wagon’s bed. The two horses stood there, terrified, and probably would have stampeded off again if they hadn’t had their companion’s corpse weighing down their harnesses.

The soarwing screeched again, closer now, and Kandler’s heart started to pound. Should he cower over Sallah, protecting her with his body, or should he stand and fight?

He leaped to his feet and held his sword over his head, directly between himself and the soarwing. He stood straight over Sallah, ready to hurl himself between her and danger of any sort.

Then he spotted something coming straight at the soarwing, right out of the sky. At first he wondered if it could be the second soarwing, which he’d somehow lost track of. It moved too fast, though, and it was too small.

Perhaps it was the rider from the other soarwing. It could have tumbled from the back of the creature, just like the one Burch had shot before. Had the shifter taken out another rider with a last, desperate shot before he’d disappeared under a pile of supplies? Kandler couldn’t be sure.

Then something struck the ground behind Kandler with a hard, wet sound. He snapped his neck around to see a green-scaled body bounce up from the road beyond him, spraying bits of mud and blood as it arced into the air and came down again.

The soarwing screeched a third time, and when Kandler looked back at it, the creature was reaching for him with its claws. He readied his sword for a desperate swing, hoping to at least be able to take the monstrous lizard with him. If he could manage that, then maybe Sallah and Burch would survive, especially if they could find Esprë, Monja, and Xalt, wherever they were now.

He spotted the telltale ring of fire from the airship just then, but the soarwing’s ivory-colored shape eclipsed it before he could do more than focus on the orange blaze. He grasped the hilt of the fangblade in both hands and prepared to swing at the onrushing talons slicing through the air at him.

Kandler knew that the trick to such a defense was to wait until the last possible instant to strike. Swing the sword too soon and you wasted your chance, leaving yourself even more vulnerable to the raptor. Swing too late, and you might never get your chance at all.

The fact that the soarwing was the largest flying predator Kandler had ever seen—outside of a dragon—meant the beast had eaten a lot of other creatures before this. Many of them had probably been snatched up in an attack just like this. Kandler promised himself not to be taken the same way.

Even if the soarwing grabbed him, Kandler hoped to slash the thing to ribbons. Its long, white neck practically begged for the fangblade’s edge, and he meant to make the two meet, whether he survived the encounter or not.

Then the thing zooming up behind the soarwing slammed into its back. Kandler heard a loud crack, as of bone on bone. The lizardman riding the beast was knocked from his perch on the soarwing’s back, and the creature spun forward, head over tail, stunned.

The ground shook when the soarwing smacked into it, just beyond Sallah. It tumbled along from the point of impact like a monstrous ball of sinew and scales until it crashed to a halt in a boggy patch of ground so wet and treacherous that it seemed to start pulling the beast down as soon as it fell in.

Kandler spun about as he watched the soarwing smash into the earth, watching its demise in stunned silence. The fangblade hung loose in his hands as he gaped at the thing. Its wings had to have been forty feet across. He’d probably have swung too early at it just because his brain wouldn’t have been able to believe it had been that large.

For a moment, Kandler wondered if the soarwing represented some ancient, distant relative of the dragons like Nithkorrh. Although the dragons had far greater smarts on their side, when it came to sheer, brute force in the sky the fruit didn’t seem to have fallen far from that fearsome tree.

Kandler heard a horrible, gurgling noise behind him. He turned to see Te’oma standing over the fallen lizardman, whose legs had been shattered in the fall. Before he could say a word to stop her, she took her obsidian dagger and slit open the cold-blooded creature’s throat. His struggles ceased.

Kandler gave the changeling a grim nod. He never liked to see someone killed like that, but he bore no doubts that the lizardman would have done the same to each and every one of them given half the chance.