“Tell us when they strike the eagle down,” Maddek said.
Because the revenants across the stream would not be held back by her brother then, and would attack their party. That fight could not be avoided, but hopefully the eagle would be struck down before more revenants arrived. They’d passed so many corpses on that race through the linen thief’s territory. A sorcerer could not raise dead humans without a demon’s assistance, but there’d been fallen animals aplenty for her brother to reanimate—and those were only upon the road.
With a sharp whistle and command, Fassad sent the wolves to Yvenne’s side. Not only to guard her, she knew. The wolves and the horses might only be tools, but they were too useful to risk—and putting any of the animals in a battle with revenants guaranteed their death. A bite or scratch from a revenant was poison to a human, but to a living animal, the revenant’s poison would change them into the same.
Palms clammy with cold sweat, her brother’s foul magic breathing down the back of her neck, she looked out over the grasses again. Toric and Danoh seemed almost directly below the eagle. With awe, she saw that they did not even slow from a full gallop as they took aim. It seemed the arrows’ flight was as swift as the pounding of her heart, released at one beat—and on the next beat, Toric’s shaft pierced the eagle’s breast.
“It is killed!” she cried.
Even as the eagle tumbled from the sky, the ravenous growls from the stream burst into terrifying howls.
She didn’t recognize the animal that leapt the stream without slowing. An antelope, perhaps, its hide hanging in sheets from withered bones, head lowered and antlers jutting like spikes. Grunting, Maddek blocked the spikes with his shield and jammed his sword up through the creature’s snapping jaw. With a double-armed swing of his axe, Kelir split the skull of a charging bison. At the edge of the stream, Ardyl spun her glaive in an upward slash that beheaded a cowled lizard, then scrambled back as the big animal fell, viscous black blood spurting from the long, writhing neck.
Banek felled a yellow-horned laybeast, sword impaling its soft underjaw. Yvenne drew in breath to cry warning as another bison charged across the stream at him, but with shield at his chest, Fassad rammed into the beast as it reached the bank, knocking it off-stride. The warrior stabbed through its rolling eye with a short sword while the wolves snarled and whined by the legs of Yvenne’s mount, bodies quivering with the need to rush forward and help.
With the same helpless frustration Yvenne watched the battle, until movement north caught her attention. The nesting crows were winging upward in raucous flight. And the rock they’d settled upon . . . had not been a rock.
This creature she recognized, though she’d only seen one before at a distance. Maddek had said whiptails were as tall as trees. And though this one was still a sprint away, it stood taller than any tree Yvenne had seen. Its legs were like trees, and the neck and tail each longer than the span of its giant humpbacked body.
Terror in her heart, she looked to Maddek. In the moment after he struck down another revenant, when it was not so dangerous to distract him, she shouted, “Maddek! To the north!”
She saw him glance in that direction, his face covered in gore, before he raised his shield against another revenant that crossed the stream. The warriors slowly began falling back toward the horses, the defensive arc they made across the road smaller and tighter. On the other side of the stream, Danoh and Toric galloped toward the whiptail. Their arrows pierced the hide but were only like the stings of bees to the enormous reptile.
And the trails through the grasses were not all converging now. One crept slowly toward the mounted Parsatheans.
“Toric!” Yvenne screamed the warning. “Behind you!”
The young warrior had but a moment to turn, shield in front of his chest, when the creature leapt at him. A long-toothed cat, only recently dead, its yellow fur still spotted instead of rotting away in clumps. The revenant slammed into the shield, knocking Toric from his saddle. Yvenne heard Danoh’s faint cry, and then the warrior surged from her horse with axe in hand. The thrashing of the grasses was all Yvenne could see then.
A deafening roar clutched at her heart. The whiptail. It had not been looking in their direction. But Yvenne’s scream had drawn its attention.
Not even in her nightmares could she have imagined such a creature. Not even the trap jaw had been so big—beside the whiptail, even that great predator would have been as a wolf next to a mammoth.
No fangs or claws the whiptail revenant had, yet the foul magic that reanimated the decaying brain within its small head and moved its mountain of rotting meat cared nothing about the original purpose of its host—and teeth that stripped leaves from giant palms could tear frail human flesh from bones.
The ground itself shook when the whiptail took a step, then another, faster with each earthquaking stride. Its huge belly had split, bloodied entrails spilling out and dragging along the ground. Through torn skin and gaping wounds, the whiptail rained gore as it came.
Other revenants were still coming, too. Not all at once, as the first burst had been, but still so many the warriors could not turn away from the stream for more than a moment. They could not run. Unlike horses, the revenants would not slow or tire.
“Ran Maddek!” Kelir shouted, grunting as he slammed his axe into the skull of a louth. “Take your bride! We will hold them.”
Perhaps the small revenants could be held, but that whiptail could not be. It would be like a mouse trying to hold back a horse. Kelir’s axe might chop through the meat of those treelike legs, but it could not crack the solid bones at their centers. Even a mounted Parsathean with a glaive could not swing the blade high enough to reach that snakelike neck. The warriors would die—and Maddek would never leave them. Only a perfectly placed arrow into the brain might fell that monster, yet both Danoh and Toric were unseated, battling the long-toothed cat, at no angle to strike the whiptail’s small head.
Maddek’s fiery gaze shot to Yvenne. “Ride!”
The rage of helplessness clutched at her chest. She looked to the charging whiptail. Had she only more than a day’s practice, she’d have had the strength to kill it.
But . . . she did have strength. She had chosen him for that reason.
Urgent purpose gripped her heart. Kelir’s bow and quiver was strapped to the cantle of his saddle. Untying the weapon, she slid from the tall horse, careful to land on her right leg. She hobbled as fast as she could toward Maddek, notching the arrow in the string.
Maddek shoved a revenant from the end of his sword and glanced over his shoulder. She knew not what to make of his expression when he saw her coming, carrying Kelir’s bow and the arrow. It seemed molten and icy at once, full of anger and fear.
A hoarse, short laugh broke from him and he turned back toward the stream. “Now is not the time for practice, my warrior-queen. It is time to ride away.”