Барб Хенди - The Night Voice

The domin was about to step into the lead in gripping the rope, but Leesil waved him farther back, wanting to stay at the lead himself as Brot’an made his leap. At one quick whistle in the dark from the chasm’s far side, Leesil tensed.

“Brace,” he said, tightening his own grip.

The rope went slack, and Leesil’s hands clenched even tighter. He watched as the rope dropped down over the edge and suddenly shifted a bit to one side. It then lurched taut in his hands under a sudden sharp weight.

Brot’an must have run to one side and jumped at a tangent, trying to arc around through the chasm to keep from slamming straight into its nearer side.

“Don’t pull unless I say,” Leesil ordered the others.

If the rope frayed on the ledge, better that it did so in only one spot so that it could be cut and retied. They would need as much of its length as possible—if any of them survived to leave this place.

Weight on the rope increased rapidly in an instant. Likely Brot’an had used his arc to neutralize the collision and was running along the chasm’s wall.

The rope finally centered up over the chasm’s edge.

“Can you hold?” Ghassan asked behind him.

“Yes,” Leesil answered.

The domin hurried around him to the edge and looked down. He quickly straightened and turned around.

“He is on his way up.”

Leesil took a deep breath as he waited and held fast to the rope with the others.

Chap swerved as something gray and shadowy scrambling through the legs of the others tried to grab his foreleg with a bony hand. He barely glimpsed its head when it was suddenly stomped to a pulp under a huge booted foot. There had been no time or chance to see it clearly.

He kept running.

More than once he’d had to ram or brush one of his companions to get the male or female to break off an assault upon an undead. Keeping them with him in all this became harder with each panting breath.

There was only one target they—he—had to find. And his hunger was aroused by all around him, everywhere, with so many undead mixed in the slaughter.

Chap barely hung on to sanity, and that was slipping. His instincts nearly overwhelmed him; time and again he fought against turning on an undead that tried to assault him. Too much hunger and too many screams of fury and terror were coming at him from everywhere. Then he was struck by a hunger greater than the others—a hunger for one target. He fought to keep himself from hunting that one.

Yet when he sensed it, he clung to it and instantly lost himself. He swerved to seek it out as awareness of all else stripped away.

There was now only the hunt, and Chap had only one prey.

Sau’ilahk wove through the battle in a tangent toward where three majay-hì were headed. He had already lost two of his ground-level servitors along the way. Then his watchful one above showed him the large gray dog bolting in a fixed direction. The other two majay-hì fell behind in trying to keep up.

The battleground was thinning as more combatants fell, not all of them dead for a first or second time as they crawled and clawed across the parched ground. In a cluster ahead, one fought amid others all attempting to get at her. When she twisted to strike out at an opponent with hooked fingers, and follow with a wide and long single-edged blade, in the dark he saw her too-pale face curtained in flailing black hair.

Even among the other undead, he felt her most of all.

The urge to go at her with his bare hands was immediate.

Sau’ilahk restrained himself, fighting for self-control. Why did he feel driven with hunger? Something more was wrong about her, and then he sensed her life .

That was impossible for an undead.

Was that why the others went at her with such insane hunger? Her eyes were like nothing living, pure black without pupils, and yet she saw everything.

She had to be the source of whatever had happened to the horde. If so, was this somehow Beloved’s own doing? Who else could have done this, controlled this woman?

She nearly cleaved a ghul in half with her broad blade.

Planned or not, if this was Beloved’s doing, then that was enough for him. Betrayed again and again, if he could not strike down his tormentor of a thousand years, then he would end any of its tools. And by the way he took her life, Beloved would know who had taken her.

The gray majay-hì broke into sight and charged at the woman.

Sau’ilahk stalled again. Was it enough to simply watch Beloved’s tool be destroyed?

No, it was not.

Chap saw only the undead woman; he ignored all others. He broke through a tangle of those killing and those dying and fixed on the one that he hunted.

White face and black eyes were all that he saw. His hackles stiffened upright, his ears flattened, and his jowls pulled back. The need to hunt compelled him. This need fixed upon that one greatest hunger he sensed, even as the tiniest, deepest part within him shriveled in fright of himself.

And still he could not stop.

Some gray thing of slit nostrils and eyes as black as hers split slantwise under the strike of her sword. As its halves fell, he leaped through its spattering fluids and hit her straight on before she recovered from her swing.

In that scant moment, he saw only a tall woman’s pale, feral face, her fangs and distended teeth, and her eyes as fully black as darkness. Everything in the night tumbled as they both slammed down on the parched earth. He righted himself as she came at him on all fours.

Her hand clamped on his throat, choking off his breath.

With a twist of his head, he bit down on her forearm, grinding on flesh.

When that white face came at him with jaws opened wide, he raked it aside with his foreclaws and then tore at her abdomen, trying to rip through studded armor.

Something else slammed into both of them. He heard snarls, snapping teeth, howls, and screeches that were not his own as he tumbled. His head and body pounded on the hard ground again and again under the weight of others.

Chap smelled—tasted—something that cut through the hunger.

Blood?

Sau’ilahk barely evaded one ghul long enough for his servitors to assault it. When he spun around that tangle, he stumbled into a break in the battle to a sight that froze him.

The woman in studded leather armor rolled across the ground under the assault of two majay-hì, while a third such animal shook itself in trying to rise.

He was close enough to see her more clearly now.

She had the face of an undead—a vampire—lost in a bloodlust madness. But that face was also marred with scratches and claw marks that bled ... red, not black.

All around her lay dismembered bodies of ghul, other white-skinned men and women, as well as once-living things and other humans. The ground itself was soaked dark with blood and other fluids that stained her and the majay-hì as they thrashed and tore at each other.

She was a living woman who acted like an undead caught in maddened hunger.

That thing—she—had to be the one he sought. Given that she was unnatural in both life and death, nothing natural could have made her that way by birth, so she could have only one maker.

And that was the one who had made—tricked—him a thousand years ago with a wish for eternal life.

He saw in her some little part of what Beloved should have given him, instead of eternity as a fleshless spirit. This woman was the tool of his tormentor, his betrayer. But there were still those majay-hì in his way. He could not face all those at once and alone.

Anguish, hate, envy, and spite became one.