Eril met him on the stairs. The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer came flying up the steps, face contorted with panic in a way Ringil would not have believed possible a few minutes ago. He saw Ringil and brandished his knife like a madman.
“It’s got him,” he shouted. “It took Girsh.”
Chilly tingle along Ringil’s spine.
“What did?” he asked.
“It’s a fucking—a wraith, a marsh demon, a—” Eril’s eyes were staring with what he’d seen. He tried to push past. “It came right out of the fucking wall, man! Girsh shot it with the crossbow, the bolt went through, fucking let me
Ringil put a hand on Eril’s chest and slammed him hard against the wall. His gaze cut sideways and nailed the enforcer where he was.
“You stand!” he hissed. “Running isn’t going to help now. You stand there, you get a fucking grip, and tell me what happened.”
But he already knew what had happened. Knew what it had to be.
He thought he heard laughter ghost upward from the chamber below. Eril swallowed hard, trembling, mastered himself.
“Listen, we’ve got to get out of here,” he said shakily. “You can’t fight this, it’s fucking sorcery, man. The bolt went right through, didn’t stop it, didn’t even
“What makes you think this thing is going to let us run?”
The laughter again, unmistakable this time, echoing from the bottom of the stairs. Eril shuddered.
“That’s it,” he hissed. “That’s the noise it made.”
Ringil eyed the confines of the stairwell. It was knife-fighting ground at best, no space to wield the Ravensfriend. He nodded over his shoulder.
“Back outside. If it can come through a wall, we need some open ground.”
“Open ground?” Eril managed a choked laugh. “I told you, the bolt went
Ringil ignored him, backed up the four or five steps he’d come down, through the door and out once more into the courtyard. Eril came with him, but he could see at a glance the enforcer was too close to breaking to be much help. It was a look he knew well enough, had seen on countless faces, League and imperial alike, at Rajal Beach and Demlarashan when the dragons came. It was in the eyes. Men were like blades, they would all break sooner or later, you included. But you looked around at the men you led, and in their eyes you saw what kind of steel you had to hand, how it had been forged and tempered, what blows, if any, it would take.
He sighed.
“Go on, get out of here.”
“What?” Eril’s grip on his knife shifted. He wet his lips. “Look—”
“I said go. You’re right. You can’t fight this.” Ringil suffered a sudden, overpowering urge to put a hand on Eril’s shoulder, on the point where it met the soft rise of his neck. He settled for a tight-lipped smile. “But I think I can.”
Faint bluish glow now, spilling up what he could see of the stairwell and staining the interior wall with its radiance. Ringil settled into a two-handed guard with the Ravensfriend. Eril was still hovering at his side, wavering on the edge of his own barely controlled terror.
“All right, I’ll stand wi—”
“No.” Sharper now; the time for gestures was past, and Ringil’s own fear was starting to eat into his resolve. “You get the fuck out of here while you still can. Get back to Milacar alive, tell him what happened here. Make sure the Brotherhood pay Girsh’s family their blood dues.”
“You—”
“Just fucking
The thing that had killed Girsh spilled out into the courtyard.
There was a kind of relief in the moment, a letting go of other options that he knew well enough from the half a hundred battlefields in his past. But beside that old familiar slide, Ringil felt an icy blast of terror spike up his spine and into his head. The dwenda was nothing like he’d imagined it would be.
