Chapter 23

  Something was happening beneath the cliff’s edge, something Hitasa’s subconscious reasoning told her was cataclysmic. Through her good ear, she heard booms echo from below, accompanied by the occasional flash of light and the distant howl of mutts. But Hitasa still had three living mutts to contend with. The first was recovering from its wounds near the cavern wall. The second was trapped in the vines and branches of Hitasa’s Rangatura, and the third traded blows with the hunters.

  Hitasa couldn’t worry about whatever disaster was unfolding at the bottom of the cave.

  What mattered was this: Dalex lived. When he came back, he would give Hitasa paper.

  She watched the hunters work, Metsa, Staja, and Oyuun keeping the one healthy and mobile mutt at bay.

  Staja was young and quick. The blows he dealt were weaker than his comrades, but, even with a gash in his leg, he was faster than any of them, and faster even than the mutt. Sword or spear in hand, he would dart in, wound the mutt, and retreat before the beast could swipe him off the side of the cliff. But the injuries Staja dealt healed quickly.

  His mother was wise with good eyes and even better judgement. Metsa delivered arrows exactly where she wanted them, carrying exactly the right publication to do maximum damage to the mutt. She kept it blind, deaf, and anosmic so that it couldn’t smell its attackers. But her arrows did not fully impair the mutt. To some extent, it could still see, hear, and smell, but it was slower and indecisive.

  Oyuun struck her foe with unbelievable explosive force. She put every pound of her strength into her cut, and then the nature of her sword potentially allowed her to triple her output of damage. An untrained observer might say she attacked recklessly, throwing herself into danger to reach the mutt with her blade, but Hitasa saw the calculation. Oyuun knew when and where to strike to avoid her own annihilation. But all of her strikes fell short. The mutt accurately feared her. It knew to avoid her blade more than Staja’s.

  And the mutt was too tall for the shorter humanoids to reach anything but its legs and belly.

  And the team lacked the sheer power that came from Dava, their leader. Without the blows from his hammer and the iron bars he left behind to keep wounds from mending, they could not bring the mutt to its knees and finish it off. The plant matter in and around Dava’s wounded worked quickly to heal him, but not quickly enough.

  The mutt trapped in Hitasa’s Ragnatura would be free soon. The spell only lasted a few minutes. As for the first mutt, it was healing quickly. It would be up before Ragnatura wore off. Hitasa could cast the constricting spell one last time.

  She put a hand to Dava’s cheek. He reacted slowly to her touch, not fully alert through the pain and blood loss.

  “Can you speak?” Hitasa asked. “Can you call for the voice of the dragon again?”

  He mumbled something unintelligible, and it wasn’t just Hitasa’s impaired hearing that made it so. She let go of his cheek and tried to heft his hammer. Ancestors, but it was heavy. How did a canid beastkin without the strength of a bear carry this around all day? He was strong, but he didn’t look that strong. Perhaps he was publicized as mightier than he looked, but Hitasa hadn’t heard him speak any words of power to that effect.

  She dragged the hammer toward the first mutt, recovering its strength with every second. Even with its dimmed vision, it saw her coming and writhed in anger and pain. The iron bar in its stomach from Dava’s earlier blow slowed its healing, and its severed leg had not fully reformed, but it retained some range of movement.

  Before she got too close, Hitasa stopped, gripped the hammer low on its handle with both hands, and then heaved as hard as she could. She swung the weapon over her head in an arc and slammed the face of it down on the mutt’s skull. With Hitasa’s own meager force, the face of the hammer gave the beast a light smack. The mutt’s flesh and bones were strong, but the latent power within the hammer’s publication still ejected an iron rod through the skin and hardened skull and into the beast’s brain.

  The mutt jolted and then was still. Hitasa did not know if it was dead, but at least she had bought everyone time. She took the shaft of the hammer and dragged it toward the mutt trapped in her spell’s roots and branches. Her muscles were tired. Even with elven strength superior to the average beastkin, the hammer was too much of a burden.

  Beyond the trapped mutt, the other hunters still fought to keep the third beast at bay. It bristled with arrow shafts and bled from half a dozen slashes and puncture wounds, but it remained on all four paws, fully able to pounce and retreat before Oyuun could land a decisive blow. The longer the fight went on, the more the mutt regenerated, its wounds closing as fast as Staja and Oyuun could open them.

  “Staja!” Hitasa called, almost out of breath. She wasn’t sure she could lift the hammer again. “Staja, you have to get Seventh!”

  She had said she could do everything Dalex could do.

  Staja morphed his sword into a spear and danced forward to plunge it into the mutt’s side. He ripped it out before the beast could cut him to ribbons with its claw. After retreating several feet to a somewhat safe distance, he shouted back at Hitasa, “Who?”

  “Seventh! Dalex’s companion. You have to go get her.”

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  “You go get her!”

  Hitasa growled at his obstinance. She understood it, but it was still inconvenient. “It needs to be you. I’m not a warrior. If there are more mutts in the tunnels, I won’t reach her.”

  “That human runt won’t be any help,” Oyuun said, voice strained with exertion. “You saw how much use her friend was.”

  “Dalex is not dead,” Hitasa pleaded. The two of them probably hadn’t noticed the quiet cacophony going on below. “There’s a reason he’s still down the cliff and not back yet.”

  “Staja!” Metsa shouted at her son. “Listen to her. Go!”

  Staja instantly reacted to his mother’s voice. Despite his injured leg, he broke contact with the mutt and sprinted up the tunnel, away from the fight. The mutt lunged after him, but Oyuun jumped in and cut a nasty gash across its foreleg. When the beast retreated from her, putting weight on the wounded leg, it almost collapsed.

  Metsa drew another arrow and loosed it with the spell, “My arrows bring great burdens.”

  It struck the mutt’s good foreleg. The beast fell back another few steps, moving slower than before, as if under a great weight.

  In the meantime, Hitasa reached the mutt trapped in the branches of Ragnatura. She gripped Dava’s hammer for another swing but could not lift it. The thing had to weigh a thousand pounds. Oyuun could probably execute the beast, but the moment she turned her attention away from the third mutt, it would probably kill them all.

  It would not be long before Staja reached Seventh. It had taken the group around twenty minutes at a walk to reach the cavern. As long he didn’t encounter any mutts, Staja could sprint that distance in a fraction of the time.

  “Oyuun, can you make another wall?” Hitasa shouted.

  The damekin ignored her, focusing on the mutt.

  Metsa answered for her, “She can speak Fortesse one more time, but the mutt is too aggressive. It will cross before the barrier is complete.”

  That left only one option. Hitasa needed to speak her own Ragnatura and trap the final mutt while they finished off its packmates for good. She looked at her foe and opened her mouth to speak, but another dragon’s roar tore through the cavern like a solid wave of sound. Hitasa’s second eardrum burst, plunging her into near deafness.

  She looked back at Dava. He leaned forward, a painful smile on his lips. Their eyes met and then he fell back, unconscious.

  On the other side of the cavern, the mutt cowered in fear. Both Oyuun and Metsa screamed unintelligibly, their voices mere murmurs of pressure against Hitasa’s ears. Suddenly, a new stone wall erupted from the ground between the hunters and the mutt. Oyuun reacted quickly, taking advantage of Dava’s spell to erect the barrier.

  “Oyuun!” Hitasa shouted, her deafness making the name feel strange on her lips. She pointed at the constricted mutt. “Oyuun, over here!”

  Suddenly, the damekin was sprinting in her direction. Oyuun slid to a stop next to the mutt’s neck and raised her sword, silently—to Hitasa’s ears—publicizing its power. When she struck, she severed the beast’s head from its body. If Hitasa knew one thing about mutts, it was that they couldn’t heal a severed head.

  She shifted her attention to the wounded mutt against the cavern wall. Even with an iron bar in its stomach and head, it still moved, the flesh around both wounds writhing in an attempt to heal.

  “Now that one!” Hitasa screamed, trying to hear her own voice in the hope it would mean others could hear her too.

  Oyuun ran past her toward the mutt with the iron bars embedded in its body and chopped of its head as well. Neither beast moved again.

  Metsa laid a hand on Hitasa’s shoulder. She mouthed, “Are you injured?”

  Hitasa pointed to her ears and said, “I can’t hear.”

  Metsa said something else, and suddenly Hitasa’s ears popped. Sound rushed in. She heard the roaring of the beast trapped on the other side of Oyuun’s stone wall as it scraped against the barrier to reach its prey. She heard Oyuun herself gasping for breath behind her, exhausted from the fight. She heard a grinding sound from the rock ceiling above their heads.

  “How about now?” Metsa asked. “Are you well?”

  The older elf must have used her publicized healing spell to fix Hitasa’s ears. Hitasa nodded and swallowed. This wasn’t over. The final mutt would break through the wall any second now. It had taken less than a minute for two mutts to do it together.

  But victory was in sight. All it would take was one more Ragnatura. Either that or for Staja to return with Seventh. Hitasa readied herself, her final word of power on her lips. None of her other spells would help here.

  “Your third ancient word of power,” Metsa said. “You called Ragnatura and Cardiameetsa. What’s the last one?”

  “Aquarigare,” Hitasa said, “the funeral rite.”

  Metsa laughed. “Girl, I can’t decide whether to slap you or hug you.”

  “Enough!” Oyuun shouted, stopping next to them, her sword raised and her breathing barely under control. “It’s coming.”

  The scraping and grinding from the other side of the barrier continued, and the center of the wall bowed out towards them.

  It was then that Hitasa realized the mutt scraping against the wall and the grinding in the cavern ceiling were two separate noises. She looked up just in time to see a small black rod break through the ceiling and fall into the deeper cavern far below. At the same time, the mutt burst through Oyuun’s wall. It charged, mouth agape with a furious roar.

  Hitasa thrust out a hand, “Ragnat–”

  The ground beneath her bucked. The mutt stumbled, eyes widening in fear and animal confusion. The earth shook and both Hitasa and the hunters lost their footing. A fiery light emanated from far beneath the cliff’s edge. A boom lower and more violent than the dragon’s roar erupted below, vibrating Hitasa’s entire body. Rocks fell all around her. Parts of the cliff collapsed, bringing its edge dangerously close to where she and the others huddled, covering their heads.

  They scrambled away from the cliff toward Dava and the cavern wall. The ground under the mutt fell away and it dropped over the cliff with a yelping scream.

  It felt like Gaia Eta was exploding from its core, and that the old human prophecies of Gaia’s apocalyptic end were coming true. Or perhaps the Winged Inferno himself would come clawing up the cave shaft after bathing in the molten fires of hell, breaking the world in half with his ascent.

  Something did zoom up from the bottom of the cave, but rather than a dragon the size of the greatest mountain in all of Gaia, it was a dopey looking man covered in mutt blood. He arrived at the same time as a battered silver sphere about ten feet in diameter. The sphere stopped just over the top of the cliff. Dalex overshot it and slammed into the ceiling with a puff of pulverized rock dust.

  The light from below subsided. The rumbling of the earth died down. It took Dalex a few seconds to extricate himself from the ceiling. He popped out of a man-sized hole and fell like a boulder, smacking into the ground next to the cliff’s edge with a satisfying whack. The cliff next to him crumbled, but he scrambled away just in time to avoid falling again. He got to his feet and trotted toward the wall for safety. Only then did he notice Hitasa and the hunters staring at him from several feet away.

  “Oh hey, you guys are safe,” he said, adopting his dumb smile. “You wouldn’t believe what I just went through.”

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