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Fourteen: Dentos Falling

The soldiers were well trained and reacted quickly, but the first of their assailants crashed through one of the tavern's windows well before more than a few swords were drawn from their scabbards. It looked at first like a naked, emaciated child with some sort of disease that had turned its skin a sickly greenish grey. Then it grinned hungrily at the soldier closest to it, and all comparison to a child evaporated when it revealed its rows of triangular, shark-like teeth.

Squinting as though the tavern's dim light hurt its beady eyes, the creature lunged without warning toward the nearest soldier. It had no weapon of its own save its teeth and the jagged claws tipping its fingers, but those looked deadly enough, and it showed no fear of the soldier's sword. The man had just enough time to position his blade between himself and his attacker before the diminutive monster leapt at him, skewering itself on his sword with enough force to knock the man on his back.

Even with the blade sticking through its abdomen and out its back, blackened by its inky blood, the creature thrashed and bit at the soldier beneath it, its claws tearing gouges through the man's tabard and chain tunic in its effort to reach the softer flesh beneath. It didn't stop trying to kill the man until another soldier lopped off its head with a swift downward stroke of his own sword.

By that time, two more of the creatures had leapt through the same window as the first, and another had crashed in through the window nearest the tavern's staircase, showering sharp glass onto the soldier who had let Trent play his lute as it landed on his small table. They didn't seem to know what the door was for.

All this happened in little more time than it took Marc to get to his feet.

"What are they?" someone shouted just as Marc opened his mouth to ask the same question.

He hadn't noticed that the Right had crossed the tavern to stand near Trent, Dola, and him until the man calmly said, "Demons," in a quiet voice not meant to carry. Taurus held an unsheathed long sword in his right hand and looked far more like an army's general at that moment than he did any kind of wizard. The image was amplified when he crisply said, "Shell formation," in a voice just loud enough for all of his men to hear.

While fighting off more of the demons that kept pouring in through the tavern's windows, the soldiers swiftly withdrew to form an arch of resistance between the Right and their attackers, toppling tables as they went to act as makeshift barricades. The wall of men curved protectively around Marc, Trent, and Dola, too, while they all backed up against the tavern's bar. Corgal was no longer anywhere to be seen, the bartender evidently having fled to the shelter of the kitchen.

The demons threw themselves one after another against the wall of soldiers, a mindless tide of bloodshed, but now that they'd recovered from their surprise, if not their confusion, the Right Guard was so disciplined that none of the creatures came close to breaking through. Some of the demons wielded crude weapons, flint knives or rough, granite axes, and one managed to slice an ugly wound in a careless soldier's forearm, but most attacked with nothing more than their own bodies, and that one cut was the worst of the injuries the soldiers received.

Marc felt like a coward, waiting helplessly behind Taurus's defenders. He glanced at his companions while his heart tried to climb up his throat. The Right scanned the one-sided battle with a calculating eye while Trent watched the scene unfold with an openmouthed expression of wonder, as if he were merely watching a scene from a thrilling movie. Between Trent and Marc, Dola stood backed up against the bar. She looked terrified, but she had a long, white-bladed knife held in each hand, ready to fight should the wall of soldiers fail.

That was when Marc remembered the knives sheathed at his own belt. He pulled them out hastily and tried to imitate Dola's stance, holding the dagger in his right hand with its obsidian blade pointing up and away from him, while holding the left dagger's blade down parallel to his forearm. He felt clumsy with the weapons in his hands, like he was a worse threat to himself than the demons could hope to be, and he didn't think he'd last ten seconds against even an unarmed opponent if they fought as tenaciously as the creatures swarming the inn.

Fortunately, the demons weren't making any headway, and the stalwart soldiers looked like they could easily keep fighting through the night and into morning.

At least, that seemed to be the case until black arrows began whistling through the tavern from beyond its shattered windows. They struck demon and man indiscriminately, but where the demons kept surging forward until they were dealt a killing blow, any man so much as grazed by an arrow was soon thrashing helplessly on the floor. The arrows were apparently poisoned.

"Behind the bar!" Dola shouted, following her own advice by vaulting over the bar behind her, kicking a nearly empty mug of ale against the back wall in her haste. She almost wasn't quick enough, a black arrow thudding against the wall where her head had been an instant before she ducked under the bar.

Trent was already dashing around the bar's corner with Marc close on his heels. "We're a shooting gallery in here," Trent yelled. "There's got to be a way out the back of this place."

Taurus nodded and gave his men the order to fall back in the same crisp tone of confident authority as before. The soldiers began backing up slowly, guarding the Right's retreat, their arch of protection shortening each time one of them fell and they closed the resulting gap before one of the berserkers could breach it.

Marc hated fleeing when people were dying just so that he and the others would have a chance to escape, but he could see no alternative. The worst fight he'd ever been in had been a brief scuffle in sixth grade with a bully during recess before a teacher could intervene, and he'd thought at the time that he'd been pretty tough for handling a bloody nose so well. In the battle that had inexplicably consumed the inn, he wouldn't be able to do more than get in the soldiers' way.

Just as Dola reached the door to the kitchen, hurrying ahead of Trent and Marc while keeping her head low to avoid being shot, the door burst open, and the pretty waitress who had served them dinner collided with her.

"They found the back entrance!" the girl screamed while untangling herself from Dola. A rush of hysterical kitchen workers were pushing into the tavern while Marc could hear shrill cries being cut brutally short behind them.

One woman, more concerned with the danger chasing her than the battle she was running into, was too slow in ducking behind the bar's protection. A black arrow nicked her cheek as it flew into the doorframe behind her, and as Marc watched in horror, tendrils of sickly brown and blue began spreading up and down her skin from the scratch, her face swiftly becoming bruised and swollen. The woman sank to her hands and knees and retched, and the serving girl and her young sister, Kicoba, were at her side as soon as they saw her condition.

"Ma?" the older sister cried out in fright, supporting her mother with a hand on the poisoned woman's shoulder. "Ma, what's wrong?"

On the woman's other side, Kicoba pawed at her mother's blouse helplessly and bawled in her terror. The girl was between Marc and her mother, but she didn't block his view of the woman's face. As the battle raged around them, he couldn't pull his gaze away from the horrible blue and brown spikes of discoloration that were reaching down over the woman's neck and throat. Despite her daughter's supporting hand, she collapsed onto her stomach and began convulsing uncontrollably.

Marc was finally able to look away when the poison crept up to the woman's eye and he saw tiny blue veins spread toward her iris. He had to look away, to keep from vomiting as well.

"Brenna?" a burly man backing into the tavern from the kitchen's doorway said, looking back at the fallen woman. "Brenna!" He twirled and fell to his knees behind her, dropping the fire poker that had been in his hand to try to calm the woman's convulsions. Unable to fully enter the tavern due to the press of kitchen workers crowded behind the bar, he could do nothing beyond keeping her legs from kicking. The man wept as openly as either of the woman's daughters.

"Durim, we need you in here!" came a shout from the kitchen. Marc recognized Corgal's voice, though it was now pitched high in alarm. "Kenner and I can't hold them all off by ourselves!"

Durim was beyond hearing the bartender's plea for aid, though, his face burying into the woman's skirts as her convulsions stopped and her body stilled. The man let out a keening wail that made Marc's ears flatten against his skull and brought tears to his own eyes.

With Trent, Kicoba, and the mourning man all between him and the kitchen door, Marc couldn't have come to Corgal's aid even if he'd had the presence of mind to do more than huddle behind the bar with his black daggers held uselessly in his hands, their blades pointing toward the floor so that they wouldn't hurt anyone. Trent was weaponless, and made no move to claim Durim's forgotten fire poker, whose pointed tip already glistened black with demon blood.

It was Dola that leapt fearlessly over the kneeling man into the kitchen, her white daggers held before her. Marc could only hear grunts of effort from the kitchen as Dola fought beside the two humans who had caused her such frustration earlier that evening.

Unable to help her, Marc risked a peek over the edge of the bar. Nearly a third of the Right Guard had fallen to the poisoned arrows, only thirty or forty left standing between the trapped inn staff and the main force of demons. The soldiers would have fared better if they had shields to deflect the arrows, but if any members of the Right Guard used shields, they must have left them in their rooms above the tavern. On Marc's left as he stared out at the carnage, the Royal Right stood at the bar's corner, glaring at the battle as if the fury of his eyes alone would win the day.

Before Marc could duck back to safety, one of the soldiers in front of him fell back against the bar with an arrow embedded in his chest, and a morbidly skinny demon leapt through the gap left in his wake straight at Marc's face. Another soldier's sword caught one of the demon's legs in midair on an upward swing, though, making it tumble in the middle of its leap, and Taurus brought his blade down in an unfaltering arc that decapitated the demon before it landed. The headless body's momentum carried it over Marc and into the wall behind him, where it fell in a crumpled, bleeding heap.

Marc crouched with his back against the bar, panting in terror as his heart raced. He pulled his feet under him as black blood began spreading over the floor around the dead demon's neck and its nearly severed leg. With an effort, he twitched his tail back away from the blood as well, barely noticing the flare of pins and needles that shot down his tail's base. He looked up at the Right, who just kept glaring at the demons while his men died. Surely if the man could use magic, he would have done so by now to save them all.

If someone didn't do something, they were all going to be killed like cattle trapped with wolves in the pen.

Dola, Corgal, and a lanky teenager finally managed to back into the tavern, pushing the kitchen door closed behind them. The other Oncan looked haggard, but Marc was relieved to see her otherwise unharmed as she leaned against the door beside the bartender, bracing it against the pounding and scratching of their attackers on its other side. They'd find no escape through the kitchen, and the flood of demons jumping and clambering in through the tavern's shattered windows seemed endless. That left only one option.

"We have to get upstairs!" he shouted.

The Right just muttered a word Marc couldn't understand, "Varkra," or something, then yelled, "Get down!" loudly and followed his own command, ducking behind the bar's protection.

Marc didn't know what happened in the next instant. A flash of light lit the tavern so brightly that he felt like it had set his eyes on fire, and was accompanied by a clap of forceful sound that hit his chest nearly hard enough to break his ribs as it knocked him back against the bar.

His vision swam red in the flash's aftermath, as if he had stared too long at the summer sun, and he was nearly deafened by the ringing in his ears. The only sounds able to pierce the high pitched drone were the confused and frightened cries of those around him, as thin and distant as if they were coming from a building across the street. He thanked God for those cries, though. In the long seconds of blind stillness after the explosion of light, they were the only way he had of knowing that others were still alive.

Then another sound joined the shrill ringing in his ears, a feminine voice that dripped with so much insincerity, Marc could almost taste it. "Look at all the angels, brother. Did you ever dream there could be so many?" She sounded like a talk show hostess from the seventies, or a terrible television news reporter.

"Truly, sister," a second voice replied, "we chose an excellent entry point for the vanguard." This second speaker had a dry, raspy tone, but it rang every bit as false as the first.

Gathering what little courage was left to him, Marc twisted where he crouched and lifted himself just high enough to peek over the edge of the bar. He smelled burnt ozone and smoke, and realized that several brighter areas of orange and red in his swimming vision were patches of fire devouring tables and climbing the tavern's support columns. The ringing in his ears had veiled the flames' excited crackling.

The tavern had been blasted by lightning. Marc could still feel it in his bones and skin, making his joints ache mercilessly and the fur all over his body stand on end. Of the Right Guard, all but a few had been reduced to smoldering husks, and the reek of burned meat was rising from the carnage to mix nauseatingly with the smoke. Seven or eight soldiers were climbing painfully to their hands and knees, those who had been swiftest in heeding the Right's warning and diving to the floor.

Despite the men's swords and chain mail fatally drawing the lightning to them, the demons seemed to have been decimated by the blast as well. Those few misshapen creatures still alive were waiting along the tavern's front wall, as though being held back by invisible leashes while a new host of enemies filed in through the room's open doorway. Marc could spot the burning splinters of the tavern's front door scattered about the room.

The newcomers were nothing like the swarm of starved monsters that had preceded them. They looked like humans at Marc's first glance, twelve or so men and women striding confidently to form a row along the burning tavern's breadth, blocking every place their victims might try to escape. Then Marc realized that the smoke was still too high against the tavern's ceiling to make their faces appear so ashen. Their skin ranged through every shade of gray from coal black to corpse white, many tinged with traces of iridescent blue, and they all had silver hair pulled back in long braids behind vests and tunics of thick, black leather.

While placing a long bow in a holder behind her shoulders, a gray woman in the middle of the row spotted Marc and gasped in a terrible mimicry of delight. "Oh, look at the furred ones, brother!" Marc glanced to the side and saw that Dola had stood along with several of the Riversider's staff. She had her head down in a daze, rubbing at her eye with the back of a dagger-wielding fist. "They're beautiful," the inhuman woman went on. "Think of how much their pelts would be worth."

"Now, sister," a darker gray man beside the first speaker admonished hollowly, "we have a job to do first. Prizes can wait until we are finished." With a polite and vacant smile, he drew a long, slightly curved sword from a sheath at his hip, the blade so indescribably black that it made Marc's daggers look like pale chalk in comparison. The sword looked like a sliver of emptiness arching away from the gray man's hand, and as soon as it escaped its sheath, Marc was overwhelmed with a sense of sickening dread and despair.

They were all going to die.

Rather than rush forward and slaughter the humans and Oncans while they were all still stunned by the lightning blast, though, the gray man took a single step forward and addressed them, holding his empty sword at his side unthreateningly. "We seek the Wanderer," he said calmly, and Marc's knees almost buckled. "Do any of you angels know where we can find him?"

"I do hope my lightning didn't kill him," the sword bearer's sister commented, though by the way she studied her silver fingernails while the fire in the tavern spread around her, she didn't appear capable of caring about much of anything.

"Oh, come now, sister, the Wanderer wouldn't be much of a savior if he let himself be killed by a little burst of static like that." He seemed to be talking just to fill the silence while his victims tried to decide how best to save themselves.

While Marc still crouched behind the bar in terror, peeking over its edge like a wide eyed toddler, Taurus stood beside him and stepped around it to join the survivors of his Guard, sword in hand. "The Wanderer isn't here, but we are under his protection," he said, his voice as even and confident as ever. Marc's eyes widened further at the back of the Right's head. Did the man know something about the Wanderer that Dola hadn't told Trent and Marc? Maybe Marc's concerns about being some destroyer of worlds was unfounded after all. "The damage you have inflicted is already insult enough to the Wanderer. You will let us go free, or he will bring his wrath down upon you." Then again, he might have just been bluffing.

The gray woman's dark eyes lit with what Marc could almost believe was genuine excitement. "Promise?"

The Right shook his head slowly and went on as though lecturing a particularly dense student. "Kill us, and he will make you suffer beyond your worst imaginings before you die."

The gray man with the sword of emptiness smiled then, showing vampire-like fangs. "Then our mission will be complete. We will have found the Wanderer." He swung his blade forward to point at Taurus, and as its tip swept in Marc's direction, Marc felt a feverish heat weigh down his limbs and a poisonous chill leach into his lungs. "Try not to damage the hides too badly," the gray man told his comrades before dashing forward with the surprising swiftness of a serpent.

Taurus was ready for him, meeting the demon's lunging slash with a parry from his own sword, but his Guard didn't fare as well. In the time it took Marc to get to his feet, two of the surviving soldiers were cut down by the gray men and women, each of whom had drawn a sword as black and dreadful as that wielded by the first. The remnants of the Right Guard fought valiantly, but they would have been outmatched even had their enemies' numbers been the same as their own. The demons seemed able to find every weakness in the soldiers' defenses, and worse still, like the arrows that had rained into the tavern before, the slightest scratch from the empty blades made the men collapse in violent convulsions.

While everyone behind the bar watched the losing battle in horror, Corgal and Kenner the only ones brave or foolhardy enough to vault the bar and join the clash, the door to the kitchen burst open. One of the emaciated demons leapt on Dola from behind, knocking her forward onto the bar and reaching around for her throat. It didn't take her long to recover from her surprise and stab back with one of her white daggers, piercing its side over and over until its grip on her shoulders failed and it fell into a twitching heap. By that time, though, more demons had poured into the tavern from the kitchen, and the inn staff had no choice but to fight.

Marc could only stand numbly, cursing himself for an idiot as well as a coward. He didn't know who he should be helping. Aside from Dola and Kicoba's older sister, who had picked up Durim's abandoned fire poker, the inn staff was weaponless, and wouldn't last long against the assault from the kitchen, but beyond the bar, Taurus, Corgal, Kenner, and the few surviving soldiers were quickly being overwhelmed, and if the gray warriors weren't stopped, everyone was as good as dead. Even without the demons, the spreading fire would consume them all soon.

Before he had a chance to gather what little courage he had and choose a course of action, Trent took his shoulder and steered him toward the tavern's staircase. "We have to get out of here while those nasties are all busy!"

Marc let his friend push him to the base of the stairs before he shook Trent's hand off of his shoulder, staring at the big man in stunned incredulity. "We can't just leave everyone to die." Even while gripped by paralyzing fright, the option of escaping at the cost of everyone else's lives hadn't occurred to him.

"It's not our fight!" Trent insisted urgently, and he began to race up the stairs, leaving Marc behind to follow or stay as he chose.

Before Trent reached the fifth step, though, a gray woman saw him trying to escape up to the inn's second story. With inhuman agility, she ran straight up the wall formed by the side of the stairwell and swung over the railing to intercept Trent, spinning as she hit the stairs and swinging her black sword in an arc that would have decapitated him had he kept running forward. Instead, Trent flinched back away from the blade's swipe and lost his footing, tumbling right back down the stairs.

A hollow chuckle sounded from behind Marc as he knelt to help his friend to his feet, and he spun to meet a second gray woman approaching him slowly from the middle of the tavern, the desperate battle raging beyond her. "A cut to the throat, I think," she said, holding her curved sword in both hands like a samurai's katana as she crept closer. Marc gagged as that sword pointed toward his face, feeling as though the thin void of its blade were exuding a miasma of physical corruption. "That will keep the pelt whole," the gray woman went on, "and the blood should wash out."

Marc knew that his daggers were no match for the reach of that blade, even if he managed to remain conscious and resist throwing up until she came close enough for him to use them. In a desperate last resort that he knew was idiotic even as he was pulling back his arm, he threw one of the daggers at the gray woman as hard as he could, but she batted it out of the air with the merest flick of her sword. How many times had he berated characters in movies for doing something stupid like that?

Then that long blade darted toward his neck, and he was barely able to knock it aside with a desperate parry of his remaining dagger before it could slash under his chin. In the same swift motion, the gray woman slapped the flat of her blade against the back of his hand, and his arm jolted up past his elbow with searing pain, even though she hadn't cut him. His second dagger fell out of numb fingers and clattered to the floor beside his feet.

The gray woman granted him a condescending smirk as she swept her sword back for the killing blow, and Marc staggered backward, tripping over Trent's prone form as the empty blade whistled through the air toward his throat.

The sword's arc faltered, though, as a giant of a man stabbed the murderous gray woman through her side. She screamed and shifted the blade to meet her new threat, but the man, largest of the Right Guard, ripped his sword sideways and out through the demon's stomach, splashing dark blue blood against Marc's shins.

Spinning from where she loomed on the stairs above Trent, the other gray woman leapt at the soldier, their swords clashing before her feet hit the floor. Her momentum carried them back toward the middle of the tavern, where three or four of the Right Guard still struggled to protect Taurus against at least eight of the sword bearing demons that remained.

Marc rolled off of Trent and frantically reached down to the floor at his feet, groping for his dagger without daring to take his eyes away from the battle.

His hand fell on the dead demon woman's forearm.

He recoiled in revulsion, but then looked down at the impossibly black sword still clutched in the corpse's hands. His daggers were useless against the monsters' longer blades, but with a sword of his own, maybe he'd actually be able to defend himself, even if it did make his stomach lurch and fill him with hopelessness by its close proximity.

Hastily, he pried the demon's fingers away from the weapon's long hilt. Relieved to find the pommel wrapped in safe leather, though he tried not to wonder what the leather might have come from, he picked the sword up.

As soon as his fingers grasped the hilt, Marc's vision inexplicably shifted to grayscale, the colors of the tavern, the combatants, even the scattered and escalating flames all fading to pale imitations of their former vibrancy. Everything except the back of the demon woman who was forcing the large soldier toward the rest of the struggling Right Guard with a series of rapid blows that should have been too swift for any man to parry. In the dull hollowness that the tavern had become, her back seemed to glow with stark luminosity, various points on her blackened leather vest shining with a harsh violet light. Her sides, where the backs of her kidneys waited. The back of her neck at the base of her skull.

A small spot just to the right of her left shoulder blade.

Marc stood slowly, staring transfixed at the demon warrior's back as her movements, and the movements of everyone else in the burning tavern, seemed to slow. All he would have to do is strike at that vulnerable spot beside her shoulder blade, and he will have returned the favor the big soldier had given him by saving his life.

He hesitated for but an instant, confused by the uncanny change in his vision. Then, demonic blade in hand--

Strike now!

--he ran forward. The gray woman began to turn toward him in the instant before his sword met her back, as though she could sense him coming, or maybe she simply heard the three steps it took him to reach her. In either case, she was too slow to stop the sword in Marc's hands from piercing her back and erupting out from her chest.

He wasn't even aware at first that he'd struck the demon woman. He just kept running forward with the curved blade held in front of him until its tip disappeared through her vest's hopelessly soft leather. When she twisted her neck to look at him, though, and he saw her fading life leave her surprised eyes with a distant glaze, a feeling of pure exuberance washed over him. The sensation took his breath away, but it left him with something far greater, a terrible energy that frightened him to his core.

He needed more of it.

There! To his left, one of the lesser demons was rushing at him from the tavern's outer wall, hoping to catch him defenseless while his sword was stuck in the gray woman's body. The new attacker's brownish body gleamed a sickly bronze to Marc's eyes, no part brighter than a thin line of reddish gold that traced its neck from one torn and mangled ear to the other. Marc wrenched his sword free as the demon woman sank to her knees, spinning more quickly than he thought should be possible to trace that ethereal collar with an unfaltering, backhanded stroke. The emaciated demon's body fell to the floor. Its head soared in an entirely different direction.

To the right! Two of the leather clad demons broke away from the main fight, marking him as a threat. Vulnerable points glowed and shifted over both of their forms as they swung their swords from side to side, but one demon faded to the rest of the tavern's dull shades when the large soldier who had saved Marc before turned and engaged him with a forceful chop aimed at the demon's shoulder. The demon blocked the man's attack with no apparent effort, but that was the last Marc noticed of him before he focused completely on the gray man that still glowed with threat.

Marc and the demon leapt at each other in the same instant, their swords clashing between them with a noise of metal hitting metal, despite the blades' unearthly material. The demon let his sword bounce away from Marc's when they met, and Marc's momentum carried him forward. He spun when the demon sidestepped to keep his opponent in front of him, barely managing to block the gray man's backhand swing as he twisted, but in the next instant a patch of skin on the demon's neck glowed white above his sword arm's shoulder. Marc could see the path his blade needed to follow to reach the demon's throat, and let his blade slide up the demon's own as he reversed his spin. When his sword was an inch away from the demon's narrow cross guard, Marc flicked his wrist and cut into the side of the demon's throat, piercing his esophagus. Marc kept moving with his momentum, ducking under the demon's last, halfhearted swipe and turning to find another target as the gray man fell with a hand at his throat. For a brief moment, the euphoria brought to him by the demon's death made his vision swim.

The big soldier seemed to be holding his own against the demon whose attention he'd drawn, though he was steadily being driven back toward the bar, behind which Dola and the serving girl were having some success defending the inn staff from the demons swarming through the kitchen door. Taurus was in trouble, though. With only two other men from the Right Guard and young Kenner flanking him, and an oak support column at his back, the Royal Right was surrounded by the six remaining gray men and women.

Three of whom had their backs to Marc. A long line lit the smalls of their backs in Marc's grayscale vision where a single charging swipe could sever all of their spines. This time, as if guided by compulsion, he didn't hesitate.

The first in the line of demons took the blade in her back before she made any move to counter Marc's attack. The second, a male, had heard him coming and turned, but he couldn't move his sword fast enough from where it parried one of the soldiers' feints to keep Marc's blade from laying open his belly.

The third caught Marc's cross guard in his fist while deftly blocking attacks from the Right with his left hand. Heaving Marc back, he stepped lithely away from one of Taurus's attempted stabs and took a swipe at Marc's thighs, trying to cripple him before he had a chance to catch his balance. It almost worked. The gray man's slash rebounded off of Marc's blade an inch before it could cut into his leg.

Marc recognized his foe as one of the demons' two sibling leaders, but he didn't have time to worry that he might be in trouble. His opponent's sword was falling toward his head. Marc let his own sword rise and block the gray leader's chop, almost of its own volition, then brought it down to block_another low swing aimed at his legs. Seeing an opening glowing in the side of the demon's vest, he _cut at it while the gray man's sword was still bouncing back from his last parry. Marc's attack slashed through leather and skin, and while the injury wasn't fatal to the demon, it made his opponent falter just long enough for Marc to bring his sword up and block again the swing aimed at the side of his neck. Marc used his sword to lift the demon's high swipe just enough that he could duck under the attack and lunge inside the demon's guard to stab him through the chest, pushing his curved blade through the gray leader's body until his cross guard pressed against his opponent's vest.

The demon's left hand grasped Marc's wrist in a death grip, but he let it stay, taking his own left hand off of his hilt to catch the demon's sword arm before the dying gray man could twist the weapon around to stab him. It might not have been necessary. As soon as Marc caught the demon's forearm, the sword fell out of the demon's fingers to clatter against the floor beside their feet.

Inches from Marc's face, the dying demon grinned in a morbid parody of relief, and as his legs buckled and his weight threatened to pull Marc down with him, his head sagged close to Marc's ear. "Found you," he whispered, the short sentence ending in a wet gurgle.

Marc wrenched his blade free and stepped away from the gray leader's collapsing body, basking in the victorious joy brought to him by the demon's death. He didn't allow himself the luxury of concern over the gray man's last words. He needed to find another target.

The big soldier who had saved Marc earlier had finally gotten the upper hand on the gray man he fought, cornering the demon against the staircase wall and raining blows down on his smaller enemy until it seemed all the demon could do was keep his sword raised to block the man's onslaught. Taurus, Kenner, and the one other surviving soldier from the Right Guard had managed to defeat two of the three demons Marc had left to them, but the third--

There, by the bar!

--had escaped the center of the fray when the battle turned in her intended victims' favor. She stood now with her back to the wall, but held everyone at bay by clutching a girl to her chest and holding her empty sword near the girl's vulnerable throat. Somehow she had pulled Kicoba from behind the bar to use as a hostage.

Marc leapt over a toppled table and wove around a burning pillar to reach the last of the armed demons. The girl hostage might have been enough to dissuade the others in the tavern from attacking the demon woman, but a child would make a soft and feeble shield against Marc's sword. All he would have to do is run the girl through, and the last of his opponents would fall.

He brought his charge up short with the tip of his blade less than a foot away from Kicoba's chest, a dawning horror making his entire body tremble. Color tried to seep back into his surroundings, but it was washed away again with an unbearable compulsion.

Run her through!

The tavern around him faded and blurred to a single, empty grayness. All Marc could see was the vibrant blue of Kicoba's dress in a tiny sliver directly in front of his sword, the one spot on the girl's body that he would have to pierce in order to skewer the demon's heart beyond it. It would be easy, effortless. The girl's body would offer no resistance.

His fists clenched on the sword's hilt. Its blade trembled in his grasp as every muscle in his body flexed, locking up. What had gotten into him? How could he be so driven to kill the last of the demons that he would be willing to murder a helpless child in order to do so? Yet he couldn't bring himself to lower his sword, to back away.

Why am I hesitating? Victory lies on the other side of this girl's life. So take it!

Marc sank to his knees, but his blade remained poised at Kicoba's chest. He understood, now. Left on his own, he would never have stood a chance against opponents who were obviously born and bred for combat. These demons were all trained warriors, yet he had cut through them as if he was a master swordsman. But he had never actually been wielding the sword.

The sword was wielding him.

With a vicious snarl, the only expression he could remember feeling on his face since picking the sword up, he did the hardest thing he could remember doing in his entire life. One at a time, he forced his fingers to release the sword's hilt, until at last it fell from his thumb and forefinger to clatter against the floor.

All at once, the gray hollow that had corrupted Marc's vision evaporated, sound and sensation returning along with color before he even realized that they'd been muted as well. All at once, he could hear Kicoba sobbing in terror in front of him, as well as the roar of the fire all around him as it climbed the tavern's walls and pillars, quickly growing out of control. All at once, he choked on the smoke that filled the air and his lungs, and felt the soul-lashing heat that emanated from the gray woman's sword and the blade in front of his knees, overpowering the burning tavern's heat even as it chilled his bones near the point of shattering.

Marc turned his head to the side and threw up.

Looming over him with Kicoba squirming and sobbing between them, the gray woman heaved a dramatic sigh of mock delight. "There you are!" she exclaimed, then went on as if quoting a phrase from scripture. "'I have discovered the Wanderer, and he knelt before me.'"

Marc gathered his strength and looked up at the demon's face after wiping his lips weakly with the back of his hand. When his eyes met her emotionless grin, he found he couldn't pull them away, not even to gauge the reactions of the other survivors at hearing the demon name him the Wanderer. Nor could he move any other part of his body from where he knelt prone on the floor, one hand planted beneath him while the other hovered beside his chin. It was a spell, he realized, and he wasn't the only one affected. Kicoba's endangered life wasn't the only thing keeping everyone so still.

The demon's eyes swept over the burning tavern, her grin never faltering, even when they settled on her brother's body. "You killed my brother, Wanderer," she said, but she spoke with a tone of approval rather than one of anger or grief. She might as well have told him that he'd painted a rather beautiful landscape, or that he'd built a suitably sturdy desk. "And you did so wielding torialis," she continued. "Strange that a soul blade should take such a liking to you, and that you could withstand holding torialis for so long. Are you certain you're fully an angel?"

He wouldn't have known how to answer that even if he'd had enough willpower to break the demon's hold over him and speak.

She evidently wasn't expecting a response, in any case. "No matter. You are angel enough to care what happens to this sweet child, aren't you?" The way she called Kicoba "sweet" sounded like she was referring to the girl's literal flavor rather than her disposition. "Of course you care about her. She is close to you, isn't she? All angels love children, don't you? Especially those of the opposite gender, so the unbound one told us." She spoke of love like she had no clear understanding of its meaning, and stared into Marc's eyes as though its definition hid behind them. "What would you give," she asked, "in exchange for this child's life? What would you offer me to see her walk away from here alive and unharmed?"

Marc understood then that the gray woman had no intention of letting Kicoba live. She was going to kill the girl no matter what answer he gave. When he was able to speak again, the invisible bonds loosening around his muzzle if around nothing else, he could think of no offer he could make that the gray woman was likely to accept, aside from possibly one thing. The demons had come there seeking the Wanderer. But despite the pleading look on Kicoba's face, despite her panicking sobs, he couldn't bring himself to offer to take her place. The gray woman had returned his voice to him, but his own fear kept him mute.

He had told himself earlier that evening that he was no villain. Had he been wrong?

"What would it take?" he finally managed to make himself growl unsteadily, trying to buy himself time to think, to save the girl without sacrificing himself.

The gray woman grinned down at him. "You know what I want, Wanderer."

Marc wished he could close his eyes so that he wouldn't have to see the girl's terror. He didn't have the time he needed. A loud crash came from the Riversider's upper floor as part of the roof, or perhaps the second story's ceiling, collapsed. A dark bruise was spreading along Kicoba's throat just by having that poisonous blade held so close to her skin, until it was a wonder she could even breathe.

But he couldn't bring himself to give the demon what she was asking for.

After his silence stretched on while the tavern burned around them, the gray woman's grin faded to a more neutral expression, devoid of emotion, and she tilted her head quizzically. "Perhaps the unbound one was wrong. He will have to explain this." Behind Marc, a loud crack came from one of the support columns as the oak heated near the point of bursting. At the demon's back, the tavern wall shimmered, as if it were the surface of a pool that someone's footsteps had just disturbed. "Very well," she said coldly. "The child will suffer where I take her. Do not doubt that she will wish you had not fought your soul blade's encouragement before her end comes. She may yet survive, though, if you come quickly enough. Follow me, and you may yet save her."

The wall's shimmering became waves of distortion that stirred Marc's already troubled stomach unpleasantly, but his eyes were still locked forward. Kicoba got an arm free of the demon's clutches and reached desperately toward someone behind the bar at Marc's side as the demon woman stepped back into the distortion. The unsettling waves overcame the forms of demon and girl alike, but as much as Marc strained his will against the spell holding him, he was unable to move in order to do as the gray woman suggested and follow her. He was only able to watch as Kicoba screamed, her face and outstretched hand the last of her to enter the distortion.

She had time to cry out, "Da!" before she vanished entirely.

One last ripple spread slowly over the solid wood, and a hollow echo of the demon woman's voice whispered through the tavern before the ripple subsided. "Flee now, if you would live. A watcher comes to purge this place."

A moment later Marc was once again in control of his body, but without the demon's coercion, his limbs lacked the strength to even hold himself on his hands and knees. He wasn't given time to fall on his face, though. As soon as he began to sag forward, strong hands gripped his shoulders and hauled him to his feet. He was spun and shoved roughly against the wall that had an instant before been insubstantial, his back hitting wooden beams with enough force to knock his breath away. Lifted by the front of his tunic until his toes no longer touched the floor, he looked down into the furious, red rimmed eyes of Durim, the man who had earlier dropped his only weapon to weep over Kicoba's dying mother.

"'What would it take?'" the man shouted, repeating the only response Marc had been able to give to the gray woman's implied demands. Durim brought his face inches away from Marc's and his voice broke when he shouted again, "'What would it take?'"

Spittle landed on the side of Marc's muzzle, but before he could flinch, the strong man dragged him across the wall and slammed him down against the bar. "You knew what they were after, didn't you?" Durim dragged him roughly across the bar, knocking mugs and platters to the floor with Marc's body. Marc had the man's thick wrists in his hands, but he didn't have the strength to fight him off. "You could have saved her!" Durim shouted with tears in his eyes. "You could have saved her, but you didn't! You just stared. You watched that monster take her without lifting a finger."

Beyond his body's pain and his mind's confusion, Marc felt numb, his emotions exhausted and banished by shock. The one thing he could think of to say in his defense only condemned him more. "It was all I could do not to kill her myself."

Durim screamed. Lifting Marc off the bar, he swung him over his head and threw him hard onto the tavern floor, Marc's legs landing on the torso of one of the fallen soldiers. Durim's hands moved from Marc's collar to his throat, thumbs crushing his windpipe, and despite his exhaustion, Marc still wanted to live enough to struggle against the larger man, albeit feebly.

"Durim, we're leaving." Was that the Right's boot, planted beside Marc's head? He couldn't see it clearly past the sparks of light beginning to cloud his vision.

"You heard what she called him. We can't let him live. He's the Wanderer."

"We'll discuss it when we're safe. If we don't walk out of here now, we never will."

As if to punctuate Taurus's sentence, one of the tavern's support columns finally exploded, the oak's sap expanding as it heated until the internal pressure became too great for the wood to contain. Burning splinters rained down around them, starting new conflagrations where there had been none before. Marc's vision swam red from lack of oxygen, but then, maybe that was just the fire's red glow, lighting the tavern.

His grip was beginning to falter around Durim's wrists, but someone pulled the man off of him before he could pass out. Marc gasped, and where he lay against the floor there was little enough smoke that he only broke into a small coughing fit.

Trent was beside him, slinging Marc's arm around his broad shoulders and hefting him up to his feet. "Come on, Marc, we have to get out of here," he said, an echo of his earlier insistence that they needed to escape. Surprisingly, he held the lute that he'd played before the attack in his free hand. Maybe he intended to use it as a club if more of the demons appeared.

Marc could only nod his agreement as the ceiling sagged where it was now missing a support column and another pillar began to creak threateningly.

Trent guided him around the bar and through the inn's kitchen, falling into step with the rest of the battle's survivors as they hurried out through the kitchen's back door and into the still raging storm beyond.

Marc breathed a sigh of relief when Dola met them outside. He hadn't been sure she was still alive. She was staring at him with a haggard frown, her black fur already soaked through again by the downpour, while she held out the two obsidian daggers he had thrown and dropped before he'd gotten ahold of that cursed sword.

"Never, ever, lose your irsekt again," she said as he took the small weapons from her hands and clumsily sheathed them at his belt with a weary nod of gratitude. "What were you thinking, trading irsekt for a sword? And where did you learn to use a sword like that?"

"I was wondering the same thing," Trent said as their band of refugees staggered from the burning inn to the river's edge. "I've never seen a real sword fight outside of the movies. Marc, it was incredible!"

"It was disgraceful," Dola told them with a curt shake of her head. "Oncans never wield swords. If your father ever finds out..." She trailed off, catching herself before she could keep speaking as if to the old friend whose body Marc was borrowing.

Marc just laughed wearily, though, and fought back a sudden wave of dizziness. "You're beginning to sound like Herschal," he said.

It took him a short while to figure out why his comment made Dola take a step away from him and stare at him with her muzzle agape and her eyes wide with shock. When he understood what had stunned the other Oncan, he shook his head in confusion, that dizziness sweeping over him again and making him sway on his feet.

Marc had no idea who Herschal was. Dola had never mentioned the name before, but she clearly recognized it.

In the relative silence surrounding the survivors as they gathered at the river's edge and waited for Taurus to tell them what to do, Marc could hear screams and the sounds of fighting over the constant patter of rain and the hissing, crackling roar of the fire they'd left behind. More immediate concerns banished the mystery of Herschal to the back of his mind. The screams were coming from every direction. Marc couldn't see any buildings burning except the inn, but the demons had clearly invaded the rest of Dentos Crossing as well.

They weren't safe yet.

The Royal Right had been peering out over the river since they'd reached its bank, for all the world like his sight could pierce the midnight storm's gloom and see the far bank. "They're in the other side of town, too," he said. "We go south." He began following his own order without waiting to see if the others would go with him, his two last soldiers flanking him and scanning the river and back alleys at their sides for threats.

Of course, everyone else followed Taurus's lead. They had only been waiting for him to point them in the right direction. "What's to the south?" one survivor asked with a tremor in her voice. She had been among the kitchen workers who had gotten themselves trapped behind the Riversider's bar.

"The forest," was Taurus's curt response, but after a few more strides he decided to elaborate. "We'll wait out the storm once we're a safe distance from Dentos Crossing, then skirt the town in the morning and take the road east to Joharla."

A lanky youth pushed his way past the adults to walk close behind the Right's shoulder. Marc recognized Kenner. "We can't just leave all the townsfolk to fend for themselves," he argued, his voice raw with emotion. "There has to be something we can do to help."

Taurus replied without looking back or slowing his pace. "There are too few of us left to be of any help. Those in the town with the strength to fight or the wits to flee may survive to see the sunrise."

Kenner looked ready to protest further, but Durim took hold of the teenager's wrist and pulled him back with the rest of the inn staff.

Walking behind the others, Marc didn't see Corgal among them, and realized the bartender must not have made it out of the inn. A knot clenched in his stomach. He suspected Corgal had been Kenner's father. All of the inn staff were probably related in one manner or another. They had lost a large part of their family that night.

Before he could brood further, a loud rush of wind hit their faces, and for a brief instant the rain above them was interrupted, but as soon as Marc looked up to see what had swept over them, the curtains of water were falling in his eyes again. The pretty serving girl screamed and pointed back toward the burning inn, and all of the survivors' faces turned to follow her wide eyed gaze.

It was a dragon. Marc couldn't make himself pull his eyes from the enormous creature's green scales, lit and gleaming in beautiful contrast by the inn's harsh orange light below as it flapped its huge wings and settled elegantly on a corner of the inn's roof that wasn't yet on fire. A curtain of flame mostly hid the dragon from view, only its wings and sinuous tail visible after it landed, and the burning building lent it a sinister, malevolent aura.

"Is that the one that fought the wizard on Falcon Wing?" Marc asked Dola, amazed that he could force any words out past his awe.

He sensed more than saw her shake her head beside him. "That one was black, and not as big as this." The dragon's green head lifted above the crest of the flames and glared straight at their huddled group. "Not nearly this big," Dola whispered.

"I think it's the one we saw over the reefs earlier--" Trent began, but Marc didn't hear the end of his sentence before he suddenly, without warning, found himself in a cage.

Three men were in the cage with him, each holding a deadly sharp spear pointed at his chest as they drew closer. As he backed away from them, his shoulder hit iron bars behind him, which were spaced just far enough apart that he could squeeze through them if he hurried.

He almost fell to his knees when the vision left him and he found himself back in the storm between the back of a shop and the flowing river. "Get out now, or you will die." The vision's summary came to him in its familiar way, but even though he didn't actually hear the words as much as he felt or tasted them, there was an inexplicable difference in them from what he remembered of the invisible presence back on Earth. They almost felt more feminine, though Marc had no way to tell why he thought that.

Had the warning vision come from the dragon? Or had it come from a different source entirely, warning him about the dragon?

In the end, it didn't really matter. "We have to get out of Dentos Crossing," he said, but he heard another voice say the same words along with him, he and the Right speaking in unison. When he looked back over the dazed faces of the other survivors, he met Taurus's piercing, searching gaze.

"Now," Taurus finished for both of them, turning abruptly away from the perching dragon and running southward along the river.

Marc began to follow him, but held back when the others sluggishly staggered around to face the direction the Right was running, looking disoriented and confused. The vision had swept over them all that time, he realized, instead of only him. "Now!" he echoed the Right's command more urgently, snapping them out of their collective, bewildered stupor. "We have to run!"

Behind them, a bestial roar rose above the sounds of fire and rain, loud enough to shake the ground beneath their feet.

They ran.

Twice as he glanced into alleys and narrow streets that passed on his left, he saw lesser demons beyond the front walls of the riverside shops and homes, but by a small miracle, none of the scrawny monsters noticed the small party rushing alongside the river's bank. The demons were all standing motionless, staring openmouthed at the dragon with expressions that could as likely have been rapture as terror. Marc couldn't tell from his brief glimpses, nor did he spare any concern for them once it was clear they were too distracted to attack Marc's group.

Instead of becoming dimmer as they distanced themselves from the inn, the fire's orange glow grew brighter, illuminating their path with stark red and golden hues and casting long, sharp shadows that danced in front of them. Even with the storm raging around them, the fire's light was almost as strong as the sun, and felt far, far hotter. The rain was beginning to evaporate before it fell on their shoulders, and a thick, sauna-like mist was rising from the ground in front of them, as well as from their wet clothes, hair, and fur.

Marc didn't dare look back. He didn't need to. He already knew that the fire eating the inn couldn't have spread quickly enough to singe the fur on his tail, especially not in such a downpour. Something else was causing the intense heat behind him, and he had little trouble imagining what that source could be.

The dragon was finishing what the demons had started.

After the battle in the tavern, Marc was quickly growing winded, and some of the older inn staff members were beginning to lag behind, but Taurus, despite his age, kept running as determinedly as ever once the buildings on their left became trees. His two guards matched his pace with little apparent effort, but it didn't take long for everyone else to lose sight of him as the forest's deepening gloom overcame the burning town's brilliance. Marc, Trent, Dola, and the Riversider's workers all slowed to an out of breath walk, roots and slippery stones making their footing much less certain than when they'd been running through Dentos Crossing.

"Where's the Right?" Kenner asked. Aside from Dola, perhaps, he appeared the least winded of them, and seemed to be having trouble deciding if he should hurry after Taurus or stay back with his family. "He can't have just left us."

A few shaking heads were his only answer.

Marc took a moment to turn back toward the town, but they were already deep enough into the forest that the only sign of Dentos Crossing was the orange light shining on a few of the most distant trees behind them. He welcomed the rain that was once again falling on him through the leaves overhead. It meant they'd escaped the dragon's fire.

"Marc, come on, they're leaving us behind," Trent called to him, and Marc began following his friend wearily farther along the river's bank. Had it only been an hour or two since Trent, Dola, and he had traveled the other way along that path? It seemed like a different life entirely.

He had listened to Dola's story about the conflict at sea between wizard and dragon as though it was a fairy tale. He hadn't disbelieved her--the impossible had come to life around him too often recently for him to disbelieve much of anything anymore--but somehow the possibility that he might face such danger himself had never occurred to him. The world he'd been thrown into hadn't seemed all that different from Earth until this night, cat people aside.

Now, after seeing the slaughter of so many people at the hands of creatures from nightmare, all he could think about was finding a way home.

Marc had his eyes lowered to the ground in front of him, carefully matching Trent's steps so that he wouldn't stumble over anything in the gloom, so he didn't realize they'd caught up to the Right until he almost walked into his friend's back when Trent stopped in front of him.

They were in a small clearing of rocky ground jutting into the river where the trees retreated slightly from the unyielding stone. Taurus stood on a boulder that reached out into the flowing water, staring intently back upriver at a distant red glow, barely visible through the persistent storm's curtain of rain.

"We'll wait for dawn here," Taurus told the gathered refugees without looking away from Dentos Crossing's faint luminescence. "If the fire spreads into the forest, we'll swim across the river to the other side, provided it's not burning there, too."

"We're too close to Dentos Falls," Durim argued. He stood bent over with his hands braced on his knees at the front of the small crowd, looking nauseated by the exertion of their escape. "We might not be able to reach the other side without the current carrying us over the cliffs."

"Then pray the forests don't burn," was the Right's grimly practical response.

"And if the demons come after us?" Kicoba's sister asked, her voice wavering.

Taurus nodded toward the trees both up and downriver, where his two soldiers waited with their backs to the other survivors. "Caerts and Dossek will stand sentry through the night. If we need to fight or flee, they will let us know." He stepped off his perch and regarded them all sternly, with little regard evident for the trial they had all been through. "I suggest that if any of you are able to get some sleep, you do so. We don't know what tomorrow will bring."

Marc was already sitting with his back slumped against a stone raised above the smaller rocks around it. For the life of him, he couldn't remember at what point he'd sunk to the ground. He struggled to summon the energy to get back to his feet, but now that they'd escaped, now that they were safe, if only for the time being, such an effort was beyond him. He fought to stay awake while the inn staff settled in a group away from Trent, Dola, and him, some darting furious glares his way. The last thing Marc wanted was to be unconscious if more of the demons appeared out of the night to kill them all, but he had been exhausted by the day's events even before arriving at the Riversider earlier that evening.

His head sank back against the stone behind him. He was terribly uncomfortable, with pointy rocks digging into his legs and back and his tail twisted awkwardly to one side, but he couldn't even bring himself to shift into a better position.

By the time Trent sat beside him, Marc's eyes had closed. His first full day awake in a new world had ended.

He could only pray that when he woke up, he'd be back home.