The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [29]
Like all of its kind, the slinder attacked without regard for its own life, snarling and reaching bloody, broken nails toward Aspar. The holter cut with the ax in his left hand as a feint. The slinder ignored the false attack and came on, allowing the ax to slice through its cheek. Aspar rammed his dirk in just below the lowest rib and quickly pumped the blade, shearing into the lung and up toward the heart even as the man-beast rammed into him, smashing him into the tree.
That hurt, but it saved him from being knocked to the ground. He shoved the dying slinder away from him just in time to meet the next two. They hit him together, and as he lifted his ax arm to fend them off, one sank its teeth into his forearm. Bellowing, Aspar stabbed into its groin and felt hot blood spurt on his hand. He cut again, opening the belly. The slinder let go of his arm, and he buried his ax in the throat of the second.
Hundreds more were only steps away.
The ax was stuck, so he left it, leaping for the lowest branch and catching it with blood-slicked fingers. He fought to keep the dirk, but when one of the slinders grasped his ankle, he let it drop to secure his tenuous hold, trying to wrap both arms around the huge bough.
An arrow whirred down from above, and then another, and his antagonist’s grip loosened. Aspar swung his legs up, then levered himself quickly onto the limb.
A quick glance down showed the slinders crashing into the tree trunk like waves breaking against a rock. Their bodies began to form a pile, enabling the newer arrivals to drag themselves up.
“Sceat,” Aspar breathed. He wanted to vomit.
He fought it down and looked above him. Winna was about five kingsyards higher than the rest, with her bow out, shooting into the press. Stephen and the two soldiers were at about the same height.
“Keep climbing!” Aspar shouted. “Up that way. The narrower the branches, the fewer can come after us at a time.”
He kicked at the head of the nearest slinder, a rangy woman with matted red hair. She snarled and slipped from the branch, landing amid her squirming comrades.
The utins, he noticed, were still alive. There were three of them now that he could see, thrashing in the slinder horde. Aspar was reminded of a pack of dogs taking down a lion. Blood sprayed all around the slinders as they fell, dismembered and opened from sternum to crotch by the vicious claws and teeth of the monsters, but they were winning by sheer numbers. Even as he watched, one of the utins went down, hamstrung, and within seconds the slinders were dark crimson with its oily blood.
There would be plenty of slinders left when the utins were dead. Aspar gave up the vague hope that their enemies might cancel one another out.
Winna, Stephen, and the two Hornladhers had done as Aspar directed, and now he followed them until at last they reached a perch above a long, nearly vertical ascent. Aspar took his bow back off his shoulder and waited for the creatures to follow.
“They’re different,” he muttered under his breath, sighting down a shaft and impaling the first one to reach the base of the branch.
“Different how?” Stephen shouted down from above.
Aspar’s neck hairs pricked up—now Stephen’s uncanny senses seemed to be fine.
“They’re leaner, stronger,” he said. “The old ones are gone.”
“I only saw the dead ones at the fane by the naubagm,” Winna said, “but I don’t remember them being tattooed like that, either.”
Aspar nodded. “Yah. That’s what I couldn’t put my finger on. That’s new, too.”
“The mountain tribes tattoo,” Ehawk said.
“Yah,” Aspar agreed. “But the slinders we saw before came from a mixture of tribes and villages.” He shot the next climber in the eye. “These all have the same tattoos.”
They did. Each had a ram-headed snake wound around one forearm and a greffyn on the biceps of the same arm.
“Maybe they’re all from the same tribe,” Ehawk offered.
“Do you know any tribe with that tattoo?”
“No.”
“Neither