The alien horrors
danced along the backs of the mastodons, weightless and lithe though their
heads would have come up well on any mastodon’s shoulder. Their long scythe
arms blurred with movement and then disappeared in strikes too fast to see, cutting
riders apart. Then they themselves vanished, and reappeared in another place,
driving blades down into the skulls of beasts or severing their spines at the
neck.
Jerem Cozak
turned to look at me, our beasts still standing side by side on hind legs, his
eyes wide in astonishment.
“They were
already here,” he said. “They lied to me.”
Then a
flaming darkness loomed behind him and my blood chilled and a great scythe
split Jerem Cozak from his shoulder to his waist. Another cut sideways across
his stomach and tore him entirely in two, splitting Profusionist armor utterly
and with ease. I cried out. The pieces that were Jerem Cozak fell away in ruin just
as my mastodon leaned down unto the pike that drove into her brain. It tore on
into my soul. Pain shattered the core of me. My back arched in spasm, my vision
blackened, my hands released their grip. My mind flashed, seared blank, stopped.
As I tumbled
I saw Marcus likewise unmounted, leaping backwards off his mastodon to avoid
the strike of the demon that hounded him. And the creature flinched back, as
from a wound. But when Marcus landed on his feet, the terror was somehow also
there, twisting so that its blow fell vertically and cut down directly through
Marcus’s skull, cleaving it in two. The next stroke came counter, and cut
cleanly through his torso at the chest.
Finally, my
fall completed. My head slammed against the Profusionist metal even before my
back did. It knocked the wind from my lungs. My vision swam and darkened even
more. I could not move and did not want to. Auger pikemen stood all around me.
One put his foot across my chest, and I could feel the motion as he reversed
his weapon. The last blow would fall. The Neverborn wouldn't reach me. I
blinked. In the distance, between the legs of men and the outlines of the
wreckage of the artillery, orange fire bloomed in the streets of Kasora.
The nine khrall
had come.
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