Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [78]
The patrol reached the edge of the clearing, bristling with stumps from the trees felled to build the tower—within the last day, Dag guessed from the still-pungent smell of the sap. In the faint moonlight he could make out the hulking shapes of at least four mud-man guards at the tower’s base. Maybe bear-men or even bull-men; big, lithe, stinking. Without need for orders, he could sense his pairs moving to the front. His stomach clenched, and he fought down a wave of nausea. Time to clear the path.
At some faint clink or whisper of a weapon drawn from a sheath, a guardian’s head turned toward them; it lifted its snout, sniffing suspiciously.
Now.
Dag did not cry his command, just yanked out his war knife and plunged forward, weaving around stumps. His thoughts narrowed to his task: slay the mud-men, get his knife-wielders past them and up the tower as fast as death. Faster. Dag took on the nearest mud-man to hand, ducking as it brought up a rusted sword stolen from who-knew-where and swung violently at his head. Dag’s return stroke tore out the creature’s throat, and he didn’t even bother dodging the spray of blood. Arrows from patrol’s archers whispered fiercely past his head to sink into the chest of a mud-man beyond, although the shafts didn’t drop it; the mud-man staggered forward, roaring. Mari, her sharing knife clenched between her teeth, reached the tower and began to climb. Codo darted past her around the tower’s corner and swung himself upward too. Another patroller reached the tower, and another, all in that same intent silence. The rest turned to protect their climbing comrades. Dag could hear them engaging new mud-men reaching the clearing, as yet more came crashing up the hill yowling in alarm.
The dark shape at the top of the tower moved, standing up against a cobalt sky scattered with stars and luminous with moon-washed cloud. The four climbers had almost reached the top. Suddenly the figure crouched, leaped—descended as if floating the full twenty feet to land upon its folding legs and spring again upright. As if it were light as a dancer, and not seven solid feet of corded muscle, sinew, and bone. It wheeled, coming face-to-face with Dag.
This malice was lean, almost graceful, and Dag was shocked by its beauty in the moonlight. Fair skin moved naturally over a face of sculpted bone; hair swept back from its high brow to flow like a river of night down its back. Its androgynous body was clothed in stolen oddments—trousers, a shirt, boots, a Lakewalker leather vest—which it somehow endowed with the air of some ancient high lord’s attire. How many molts must it have gone through, how quickly, to have achieved such a human—no, superhuman—form? Its glamour wrenched Dag’s gaze, and he could feel his ground ripple—he snapped himself closed, tight and hard.
And open again as Utau, sharing knife out, staggered with a sudden cry. Dag could sense the strain in Utau’s ground as the malice turned and gripped it, starting to rip it away. Frantic, Dag extended his left arm and stretched out his ghost hand to snatch at the malice’s ground in turn. Out of the corner of his eye, Dag saw Mari, clinging to the tower side, drop her sharing knife down in a pale spinning arc to Dirla, who had temporarily broken free of mud-men.
As a fragment of its ground came away in Dag’s ghost hand, the malice turned back to him with an astonished scream. Dag recalled that moment in the medicine tent when he’d snatched ground from Hoharie’s apprentice, but this time it felt like clutching a live coal. Pain and terror reverberated up his left arm. He tried to cast the fragment into the earth, but it clung to his ground like burning honey. The malice reached two-handed toward Dag, its dark eyes wide and furious. Dag tried again to close himself against it, and failed. He could feel the malice’s grip upon his ground tighten, and his breath locked at the surge of astounding pain that seemed to start from his marrow