The Queen of Death

34

The horses screamed as their companion lost his footing and sagged in the harness. They fought hard to remain on their hooves, but gravity and momentum worked against them.

Kandler cursed and hauled back on the reins as hard as he could. “Hold on!” he shouted.

The wagon went up on two wheels and threatened to tip right over, but Kandler pulled on the reins and wrestled the surviving horses away from the direction in which their dead fellow had fallen. The beasts bellowed in protest at the way he forced them to twist and turn, but he ignored the noise and forced them to come to a thundering halt and pull the wagon back onto all four wheels.

It was everything Kandler could do to keep his seat. Behind him, he heard Burch growling as the barrels and casks in the back of the wagon threatened to crush him under their rolling bulk. Sallah grunted as she held on to the wagon with her free hand, refusing to drop her sacred blade.

Then the wagon hit a bump, probably just the roots to some long decaying tree, the trunk of which had long rotted away into the swamp. The wheels came to such an abrupt halt that Sallah lost her grip and catapulted forward, past the horses and onto the marshy ground beyond.

“No! ” Kandler shouted. He flung out an arm to grab her as she went by, but his fingers failed to find purchase on her armor. She hit the ground hard and did not get up.

Kandler dropped the reins and leaped from the wagon. As his feet hit the ground, he heard a horrifying screech from above. He flung his head back and saw a soarwing coming straight down at him as he raced for Sallah. The lizardman rider on its back hissed triumphantly and brought back its arm to hurl its last spear through the justicar’s heart.

As Kandler reached Sallah, he saw that she still lived. The fall had knocked the air from her lungs, though, and she had yet to catch her breath. He fell to his knees next to her and drew his sword, unwilling to let the long-beaked soarwing have either of them without a fight.

The justicar glanced at the wagon, but he could not see Burch under the pile of supplies that had crushed forward against the front of the wagon’s bed. The two horses stood there, terrified, and probably would have stampeded off again if they hadn’t had their companion’s corpse weighing down their harnesses.

The soarwing screeched again, closer now, and Kandler’s heart started to pound. Should he cower over Sallah, protecting her with his body, or should he stand and fight?

He leaped to his feet and held his sword over his head, directly between himself and the soarwing. He stood straight over Sallah, ready to hurl himself between her and danger of any sort.

Then he spotted something coming straight at the soarwing, right out of the sky. At first he wondered if it could be the second soarwing, which he’d somehow lost track of. It moved too fast, though, and it was too small.

Perhaps it was the rider from the other soarwing. It could have tumbled from the back of the creature, just like the one Burch had shot before. Had the shifter taken out another rider with a last, desperate shot before he’d disappeared under a pile of supplies? Kandler couldn’t be sure.

Then something struck the ground behind Kandler with a hard, wet sound. He snapped his neck around to see a green-scaled body bounce up from the road beyond him, spraying bits of mud and blood as it arced into the air and came down again.

The soarwing screeched a third time, and when Kandler looked back at it, the creature was reaching for him with its claws. He readied his sword for a desperate swing, hoping to at least be able to take the monstrous lizard with him. If he could manage that, then maybe Sallah and Burch would survive, especially if they could find Esprë, Monja, and Xalt, wherever they were now.

He spotted the telltale ring of fire from the airship just then, but the soarwing’s ivory-colored shape eclipsed it before he could do more than focus on the orange blaze. He grasped the hilt of the fangblade in both hands and prepared to swing at the onrushing talons slicing through the air at him.

Kandler knew that the trick to such a defense was to wait until the last possible instant to strike. Swing the sword too soon and you wasted your chance, leaving yourself even more vulnerable to the raptor. Swing too late, and you might never get your chance at all.

The fact that the soarwing was the largest flying predator Kandler had ever seen—outside of a dragon—meant the beast had eaten a lot of other creatures before this. Many of them had probably been snatched up in an attack just like this. Kandler promised himself not to be taken the same way.

Even if the soarwing grabbed him, Kandler hoped to slash the thing to ribbons. Its long, white neck practically begged for the fangblade’s edge, and he meant to make the two meet, whether he survived the encounter or not.

Then the thing zooming up behind the soarwing slammed into its back. Kandler heard a loud crack, as of bone on bone. The lizardman riding the beast was knocked from his perch on the soarwing’s back, and the creature spun forward, head over tail, stunned.

The ground shook when the soarwing smacked into it, just beyond Sallah. It tumbled along from the point of impact like a monstrous ball of sinew and scales until it crashed to a halt in a boggy patch of ground so wet and treacherous that it seemed to start pulling the beast down as soon as it fell in.

Kandler spun about as he watched the soarwing smash into the earth, watching its demise in stunned silence. The fangblade hung loose in his hands as he gaped at the thing. Its wings had to have been forty feet across. He’d probably have swung too early at it just because his brain wouldn’t have been able to believe it had been that large.

For a moment, Kandler wondered if the soarwing represented some ancient, distant relative of the dragons like Nithkorrh. Although the dragons had far greater smarts on their side, when it came to sheer, brute force in the sky the fruit didn’t seem to have fallen far from that fearsome tree.

Kandler heard a horrible, gurgling noise behind him. He turned to see Te’oma standing over the fallen lizardman, whose legs had been shattered in the fall. Before he could say a word to stop her, she took her obsidian dagger and slit open the cold-blooded creature’s throat. His struggles ceased.

Kandler gave the changeling a grim nod. He never liked to see someone killed like that, but he bore no doubts that the lizardman would have done the same to each and every one of them given half the chance.

“Thanks,” he said. He surprised himself by how much he meant it.

The changeling shrugged as if she’d done nothing more than slap down a stinging insect. She bent down and wiped her blade on the lizardman’s sash then sheathed it.

Kandler reached down and helped Sallah to her feet. The lady knight flushed with shame at not having been able to defend herself at the end.

“I should have been the one over you,” she said.

“Play your cards right, and maybe you’ll get a chance later,” Kandler said with a grin.

“I’m not hurt,” Burch said as he extricated himself from the mess of supplies strewn about the back of the wagon. “If anyone cares, that is.”

A bit of blood trickled down from the shifter’s scalp, but he didn’t appear to notice it. He grinned at the others as he wiped the red from his face. “Looks like I missed a good scrap. Everyone still breathing?”

As if in answer, the roar of the airship grew louder. Kandler craned back his neck to look up at the Phoenix and had to step back out of the way as a rope ladder fell down where he had been.

Xalt’s head poked out over the gunwale. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” Kandler shouted as he reached for the ladder and started climbing toward the airship’s deck. Sallah followed close behind him. “How about up there? Where’s Esprë?”

“She has the wheel,” the warforged said.

“And Monja?” Burch asked, shading his eyes as he peered up at the Phoenix.

“She’s fine.”

“What happened to the third flyer?”

“The soarwing you forced toward the ring of fire? It’s here on the deck behind me, half-cooked.” The warforged glanced back over his shoulder. “I believe Monja is already cleaning the corpse. She said something about not wanting lo waste a single bit of food before a long ocean voyage.” “Fantastic,” Burch said, flashing a toothy grin. “I hear those things taste like stirges.”