Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [4]
The length of the blade seemed off. He tried to correct, but the creature swatted his sword out of the way. It lurched inside his guard and fastened its wide mouth on his unarmored forearm. He was momentarily distracted by the odd design running the length of his limb, ash gray like tattoos of ghosts—
The thing bit down hard. The pain was spectacular and he screamed.
Something hot ignited behind his eyes, and suddenly glimmers danced across the length of his borrowed sword, one line down each side. On one side they were white like the full moon, and along the other, red like the sun at day’s end. The glows flickered, gone one instant, back the next, suggesting some sort of half-remembered runes or glyphs that should have been clear …
The creature didn’t like the display, and its jaws relaxed. He wrenched his arm free from the thing’s mouth. It mewled when it lost its grip, and blood dribbled from between its teeth. His blood. He was lucky it hadn’t stripped any tendons.
He blinked when the creature shouted, “The Eye is watching! It always watches. It searches!”
“What eye?” he replied with a wit so sparkling he impressed even himself.
The nightmarish thing gazed at him like an avaricious peddler who’d just realized he’d come upon a village of idiots. Then it hurled itself forward again, lashing its clawed arms in mad frenzy. The light show with his sword hadn’t cowed the monster as much as he’d expected—
A claw clipped his temple. A spurt of blood turned everything red.
He slipped and nearly fell, and the beast screamed louder as its claws tore at him in earnest.
He desperately rubbed blood from his eye with his free hand. If I’m not careful, he thought, this minor dretch is going to kill me!
… dretch? He suddenly realized it was a dretch, a demonic pest and among the very least of its kind. Why he hadn’t immediately recognized it, he didn’t know. Probably because of the odd crystalline encrustations across the thing’s upper torso, and a matching red glint in its eyes.
It didn’t matter. His fingers tightened into a surer grip on the sword hilt.
He angled his shoulders with a twitch and sidestepped a fraction out of the creature’s range. Then he feinted high, stomped on the thing’s foot as it tried to dance away from the blade, and struck its head from its shoulders in a spatter of ichor. The runes flashed with the death blow, then flickered out like lanterns in a windstorm.
The body collapsed. The head bounced a few times before lodging between two stones.
Quiet returned to the shrine. He stood for several heartbeats, marveling. It had felt so … good to dispatch the creature. Almost like drinking a draft of some alchemist’s elixir. Joy thrummed through him like lightning through the clouds.
He moved closer to inspect the body. The eyes on the decapitated head blinked at him.
“Dominions!” he cursed.
The head whispered, “The Elder Elemental Eye watches …”
His exultation billowed away like a cut sail.
The lopped-off thing said nothing else.
Get a hold of yourself, he thought, as his heart pounded in his ears. It’s just a dying beast, and you’ve got a sword.
He inched forward again, ready to plunge the blade straight through it at the first sign of anything suspicious.
But it was finally dead. Amazing it had been able to whisper at all, without any air to inflate its vocal cords. Or, maybe not. What did he know about demonic anatomy?
The head twitched. Before he could leap back or hew it, it slumped, as if transformed into running wax. A gelatinous, melting lump that bubbled and evaporated even as it lost all shape. Then nothing remained but a damp spot.
The headless body evaporated too. He was the only moving thing within the ring of stones.
Memory twitched, but maddeningly refused to come clear. That wasn’t how slain demons normally decayed. Right?
Why, he thought, does it seem like I’m trying to think