Lady of Poison_ The Priests - Bruce R. Cordell [64]
As she'd hoped, the larger, smarter creatures began to shuffle back, herding their smaller, more numerous brethren with them. That's when all the creatures went insane.
As if in response to a signal neither she nor Gunggari could see, the enchanted twig constructs went on a rampage en masse. Twigblight turned upon brother twigblight, with the larger ones immediately tossing a few of the smaller creatures headlong through the air, but the smaller monsters swarmed the larger ones like ants on a piece of meat.
For Elowen and Gunggari, that sudden madness included a loss of respect for Dymondheart.
Despite destroying three creatures in as many rapid eye blinks, another was already slashing past her guard, hacking at her face with its sickle-like fingertips. She flinched back, only to trip over a tiny twigblight that had rushed up from the side.
Gunggari steadied her with a lightning-fast hand. He said, "Back to back. These things have lost their fear of death."
A flailing branch scratched Elowen's cheek. Her counterattack exploded that one nicely, but two more encroached from the left. One failed to,penetrate her armor; the other sliced her along the neck. The pressure of Gunggari's back flexed and strained; he was fighting off attacks no less massive than she, though he did not have Dymondheart to even the odds. The sound of his dizheri swishing through the air created a strange melody all its own, almost as if it were being played in truth. She grunted as she deflected a twiggy body hurling through the air-one of the big ones had thrown one its small brothers at her, but apparently by accident. She managed to clip the tumbling creature with her blade; the twigblight came apart before impacting her.
She yelled, "What's happened?"
She could hear Gunggari grunting with exertion as he fought off the unrelenting wave. Finally he said, "Less talk. More sword."
"They've gone mad!"
She realized that if the creatures had earlier decided to rush her and the Oslander without fear of casualties, they'd have been overwhelmed already, but the branch golems were attacking each other as much as the intruders in the lane. Already more than half of the creatures that had surrounded them lay unmoving and dismembered on the ground, choking the lane with so much kindling. A terrible stench also grew. When the monsters perished, they leaked a foul-smelling ooze.
Gunggari cried out behind her. A second later, the pressure of his back against hers was snatched away. Whirling around with her blade extended straight out from her body, she managed to detonate three more creatures as she sought to locate her friend. His feet dangled at eye level. Craning her head, she saw that a large twigblight had caught up the southlander in a punishing grip of tightening wood.
Elowen rushed forward. The creature's hands were busy clutching the struggling Oslander, so the monster couldn't prevent her from running it through with Dymondheart. It fared no better against her blade's touch than the others, and Gunggari awkwardly fell away from the bed of splintered wood that had been his captor. She kept the remaining creatures at bay. The creatures were doing a better job of destroying each other than she could have purposefully managed.
After the tattooed soldier scrambled to his feet, he and Elowen backed up to a nearby arch. They sought to get out of the eye of the madness.
The rampage ended when a swarm of smaller twigblights, having just overcome a larger sibling, turned on each other in an impressive spray of splinters. Finally, only Elowen and Gunggari remained standing in a lane choked with debris reminiscent of the aftermath of a storm. Pregnant silence descended.
Gunggari cocked his head, then said, "Somebody's coming." He turned his gaze back in the direction they had just tried.
Materializing out of the fast-dispersing greenish haze was what at first seemed an oddly shaped silhouette. The strange silhouette quickly resolved into two people, one carried by the other.