Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [12]
Behind her she heard screams, clangs, and ugly wet crunching sounds. She pressed forward, intending to buy herself some space to summon a minion to give her a little advantage. Instead the viashino let her come, and another one grabbed her leg from the tar. Rakka gritted her teeth as her skin sizzled. “All right then,” she muttered. “No time to do this fancy. Let’s just bring the pain.”
Rakka raised her staff, took a deep breath, and screamed two syllables of power into the air. Her staff broke into shards of obsidian, raining down all around her. The shards writhed where they fell on the volcanic ground or the surface of the tar. Each obsidian shard was expanding, adding new facets and edges to itself.
She turned to the viashino at her leg and unsheathed a scimitar. Before she could swing at the creature’s wrist, though, it yanked hard on her leg, dropping her to within inches of the boiling tar. The viashino yanked again, dragging her across the volcanic pebbles to the other pool of tar.
She kicked hard, catching the viashino full in the face with a satisfying thud, and it let go her ankle. She scrambled to her feet just in time to parry the axe of the first viashino that had attacked her.
The shards of her staff were spiky clods of black crystal. Two of them had grown huge, sprouting limblike projections and were towering over the viashino despite standing in the tar.
“Kill them!” Rakka commanded.
The obsidian elementals had no heads or sensory organs to speak of. As such, they didn’t need turn to face the viashino attackers; instead, spikes of obsidian erupted in the direction of their master’s enemies, and the elementals simply lurched. Two viashino were impaled immediately.
Rakka fell back and let the elementals close between her and the viashino. She hazarded a glance behind her, thinking she’d be in the center of the fray—but instead she saw that she’d been cut off and isolated from her clan, who battled back the viashino several paces off. A viashino leaped at her with an onyx-tipped spear, but she chopped hard, and shattered the spear into pieces. Weaponless, the viashino pounced on her. Its claws came down on her back and shoulders. She yelled out as it dragged open long gashes in her back, and sliced her satchel clean away. She turned quickly, adrenaline augmenting her strength. Her scimitar sliced the creature’s belly clean open, and it slumped into the tar, dragging her satchel with it.
“No!”
Rakka watched in horror as the satchel sank into the bubbling tar. She knew her obsidian elemental minions would puncture the thing if they tried to touch it, and its contents would mix hopelessly with the tar. She tried to steel herself to plunge her arm down to grab the satchel, but she already knew the pain of the boiling tar from her ankle, and she couldn’t make herself do it. Her mission was sinking in a tar pit.
“Get the herbs!” Kresh shouted.
One of Kresh’s warriors screamed crazily and dived into the tar after the satchel. Rakka heard his flesh crackle. Somehow, in a wild, thrashing motion, the man tossed the satchel onto the pebbles at Rakka’s feet. He made no sound as a viashino submerged him.
The satchel was smoking, the leather blackened through, but the contents were only singed. Rakka carefully pulled the herbs out, gathered them into a fresh piece of leather, and bound them up again. She gently tucked them into her shirt.
After the last of the viashino had been finished off by Kresh’s warriors, Rakka’s elementals fell back into the tar and disappeared. She realized the survivors were all watching her. “How many did we lose?” she asked.
“Many,” said Kresh. “Eight of our thirty. We’ll need to go back and get fresh