Wings Over Talera - Charles Allen Gramlich [39]
“Kill him,” the demon-thing growled from behind the man. Its voice was like echoes.
The swordsman jerked as if struck, then came for me, drawing a short, sparring dagger into his left hand. His blade lashed back and forth, darted in the next instant toward my face. I tapped his weapon aside with mine, launched a riposte. He met it smoothly. For a moment we fenced wildly, face to face, so close I could smell his sweat. Our steel blurred, clicking and chiming, locking and coming free. He stabbed at me with his dagger and I blocked with my arm, hearing the sound of the rawhide coat tearing as it saved my flesh.
I stepped into the man then, pushing him back. He gave only a few paces of ground before launching a blazing counterattack. This time I matched his speed, and the tip of my yataghan cut a slice through the silk at his shoulder. Human skin peeked through, pale but scrawled with tattooed lines. The swordsman leaped away. Both of us were breathing hard.
I gestured at him with my sword. “Last round,” I said.
Again my voice seemed to abrade him. He paused. His whole body shook, though I did not think it from fear.
Behind him the demon shrieked. “Kill...him!”
The swordsman gave a tortured half moan, the first sound I’d heard him make. Then he came, rapier driving at my chest. I blocked with an upstroke, knocking his sword out of attack line, then spun off my right heel, left foot curving around, snapping straight into his belly. He grunted and folded over. I planted my boot, hammered back with an elbow that exploded in his face.
The man’s whole body went loose, arms flying outward. I twisted into him, dropping the coat from around my left arm as that hand dove down to catch his wrist and my other hand rose over his shoulder, the yataghan spinning up in my fist.
“The tunnel!” I shouted at Valyan, as the masked swordsman faltered into a slow collapse and I took his rapier away with one clean jerk. My right arm straightened and I hurled my own sword in a flashing bolt toward the demon that crouched before the altar.
My move was completely unexpected. The sword flew true. It took the demon right between the ebon glitter of its eyes. And the effect was just as unexpected to me. The skull of the beast split open; the whole body cracked wide. I heard an incandescent scream. Something chatoyant came out of the hollow shell of the demon, something not quite human-sized, but winged and glistening and wet. It hovered above us.
I gaped. My skin crawled with a sudden sick dread of the supernatural. I had not for a moment believed we faced a real demon. I still didn’t. But….
The newborn being found me with a sharp and bitter gaze. Its liquid eyes were black upon black upon black. The head was heart shaped with a woman’s face sculpted upon it, a face that was lovely and evil above a body that seemed a hybrid of human and praying mantis. The four wings were multicolored, fibrous but flexible, and translucent enough to show a webbing of strange textures inside. They didn’t look real. The creature raised a human-type arm, pointed at me with an elongated finger, but its gaze swept over my shoulder now, to the awed and hushed villagers who watched at the torn open wall of the temple.
“The house of Vohanna has been profaned!” it shrieked to the crowd, and the words struck like daggers stabbing ice. “Destroy them! Destroy all who would befoul your goddess!”
The being whirled higher, wings thrumming, and the remaining fiends closed around it defensively, locking tails and bat-like hands. The whole mass of them swept toward the roof, surged through the skylight and away into the darkness. Behind us came the bull roar of the mob.
I turned, looking wildly for Graye and Valyan, found them staggering toward the altar with Kreeg lolling between them. The ex-gladiator’s face was pasty,