Chương 81: Chapter 80 — Twin Lightning

The yard stank of everything at once — smoke, hot iron, split wood, and under all of it the copper reek of blood cooling in the dirt. Ant crossed it at a run with Mahkir matching his stride, and the closer he got to his people the more of the damage he could count. Ray's coat was scorched black down one arm. Maren had a cut above her eyebrow that had dried and cracked and started bleeding again.

Hazel stood with most of Vulcan behind her, and Vulcan was favouring a front leg he hadn't been favouring the last time Ant saw him. They'd been fighting for a long time before he ever got out of that cell. It showed.

"Ant." Kalsar didn't take his eyes off the far end of the yard to say it. One hand stayed pressed to his side, and the bandaging under his shirt had gone dark where the spear wound had opened up again.

"Good of you to join us."

"I'd have come sooner. The door was locked."

"So I heard." Across the open ground, the three men hadn't moved. The one in front watched the yard burn around him the way a farmer watches weather — as a thing that would pass, and change nothing that mattered. Ant ran his eyes over the two flanking him. Neither of them was the one who had stood in his cell tonight, promising to take his family apart one at a time for Calvin's sake. That one was nowhere in this yard, and Ant filed the absence away in the part of his mind that was learning to keep lists.

Then the man in front raised one hand, and let it fall. The two flanking him stepped apart, and what Ant had taken for coils of rope stacked at their heels began to move. Two serpents unwound themselves upward, thick as ale barrels, scaled in grey-green plate that caught the firelight and threw it back dull. They kept rising.

By the time their heads stopped climbing they stood taller than Duncan, and behind each of them a tail lifted clear of the ground, ringed at the tip with segments of dry bone that began, softly, to buzz. The sound crawled straight down Ant's spine and kept going. And behind all three men, the dark bulk Ant had taken for part of the central building took a step, and the building it wasn't shed dust from its actual walls with the impact.

It came forward into the firelight a piece at a time — a leg like a support column, a flank of matted brown fur running with old scars, tusks that swept down from its skull and ploughed twin furrows in the dirt as it walked. Its head alone was longer than Mahkir's whole body. It stopped beside its handler and stood there breathing, slow and unbothered, each breath moving air Ant could feel from forty feet away.

"Andy." Kalsar said it quietly.

"Tell me what I'm looking at." Andy had gone very still. His eyes were lit from within, the glow bleeding faint at the edges of the lenses, and whatever he was seeing through them had wiped every trace of the showman off his face.

"The snakes read close to what Hexa's would have, four or five years back. Both of them. Dense, banked deep, nothing common about it." He swallowed.

"The big one — I've felt an aura like that exactly once before, and she's standing behind me. Whatever that thing is, it's her class. It might be past her class. On dry land, tonight, with no water within a mile of us —" He stopped himself finishing it.

"Say it anyway," Kalsar said.

"On dry land I don't know if she beats it." Mahkir's voice arrived low, meant for Ant alone. Then she doesn't need to beat it. She needs to keep it busy while the rest of us kill the snakes. Kill enough of a clan and the head stops mattering. Ant checked the maths on it and found nothing better.

"Andy. The big one's yours. Just hold it. Everyone else —" His voice came out steadier than he had any right to, given his legs.

"The snakes. All of us, both of them, nobody fights alone." Nobody argued. That was new, and there was no time to feel any way about it. The rattling doubled. Then it stopped being a sound and became a pressure, a thin whine of charge building in the air, and the hair on Ant's arms stood up half a second before the first snake struck — not with fangs, with light. Lightning left its open mouth in a fork that split three ways midair, and the yard turned white.

Ant was already moving when it landed, dragged sideways by Mahkir's shoulder before the decision reached his own legs. Where he'd been standing, the dirt had fused into a plate of black glass. Mahkir didn't stop to check on him. He was gone before the glass finished cooling, low and flat across the yard, and the first fork that chased him hit nothing but the memory of where he'd been.

Flame Breath raked the nearer snake from throat to mid-body, and the plating held, blackened but whole — the fire finding the gaps between scales and boiling out again without getting under them. The snake's answering strike missed him by the width of his tail. He was faster than anything else in the yard. He was also one creature, and the yard was wide. Xylock reached the same snake from the other side and did the thing nobody sane would do — put himself directly in front of its open mouth.

The strike hit him square in the chest, and the runes on both forearms flared ember-orange, and Xylock walked forward through the lightning like a man wading upstream. The snake's eyes tracked him for one long second. Then both serpents adjusted at once, the same thought moving through two skulls, and every strike after that bent wide of the four-armed Kithren entirely — forks splitting and curving to pour down on everyone who couldn't drink them. They'd met his kind before.

Or their handlers had, and trained it into them. Either way, they starved him. The second fork found Ray's tiger mid-leap. The big cat took it full along the flank and came down wrong, legs folding under it, hitting the ground in a smoking heap that rolled twice and stopped moving. Ray screamed its name and got there before anyone could stop him, and the third fork earned him a burn across both forearms for standing too close to a body still carrying charge.

He went down beside his Kithren and stayed there, teeth bared, hands too ruined to hold his knives. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"It's still breathing!" Rowan wasn't there to hear it, and Ray shouted it anyway, to the yard, to anyone.

"The scales are insinuated — arrows just skip off them, don't waste the —"" Insulated," Maren shouted back, loosing Axel toward the nearer snake, "and they're not, they're conducting, get BACK —" Axel reached the snake and got two of his four hands on it, and for one second it looked like enough — six hundred pounds of gorilla-muscle hauling the thing sideways off its line. Then the rattle blurred, and the charge went through Axel at skin contact with nowhere to split off to.

He dropped straight down like his strings had been cut. Maren's shout cracked in half somewhere in the middle of his name. She got under one of his arms, all her strength against a tenth of him, and dragged anyway, and Hazel sent Vulcan to cover the retreat because there was no version of Maren that would have left him. Vulcan bought the retreat. It cost him.

The snake's tail took him across the ribs — not lightning, just mass, a blow like a falling tree — and threw him the width of the yard into the wall of the burning storehouse. He did not get up. Hazel made a sound Ant had never heard from her in all the months he'd known her, and kept her feet, and kept her hammer up, because she was Hazel. They were losing.

Ant could see the arithmetic of it even from inside it — he and Mahkir had fallen into a rhythm of pulling people out rather than putting snakes down, Mahkir drawing strikes with his speed and paying them back in fire that scorched and never wounded, Ant dragging Ray clear of his tiger's still-sparking body with his sword in one hand and a fistful of scorched coat in the other. Every time Mahkir baited a fork away from someone, it bought seconds. It never bought ground.

Rebekah's arrows crossed the yard flat and silent — no arc to them, no whistle, flying straighter and farther than any bow Ant had ever seen should allow — and every one of them found an eye or a mouth or the soft join under a jaw-plate, and every one of them skipped or stuck a half-inch deep in hide that was built to shrug off worse.

The spirit fox pressed against her calf, ears flat, doing nothing Ant could name, and he watched her nock, loose, nock, loose, faster than thought, achieving exactly enough to be ignored. Xylock chased the lightning and the lightning refused him. He threw himself into the path of every strike he could reach and the forks bent around him mid-air, split, curved, found the targets beyond him — and Ant watched a creature built to be a wall discover that a wall means nothing to an attack that turns corners.

Sam and Duncan hit the second snake together, and for a moment the old rhythm held — the shield drawing the strike, the lance punching in behind it, the turtle planted like a boulder for the Glacier Panther to break from, ice spikes shattering against scale and cracking it in places where arrows hadn't. Bramble came in beside them, low and fast, all teeth, fighting the way Thomas had never wanted to see.

The three Kithren pressed the snake back a full body-length, and Ant let himself believe, for the length of one breath, that the line would hold. Both rattles went off at once. The snakes had stopped striking separately. The forks left both mouths in the same instant and met in the middle, and what came down on Sam and Duncan's position wasn't lightning anymore, it was a ceiling of it.

Mahkir was mid-stride toward them when it fell and threw himself flat into a trench the mammoth's tusks had ploughed, close enough that the smell of his own singed fur reached Ant through the bond as much as through the air. The turtle's shell took the worst and the worst went through it. The Glacier Panther leapt to clear the strike and the strike followed it into the air. Bramble had thrown himself in front of Thomas before it landed, and Ant lost all three of them in the flash.

When his eyes worked again, three Kithren lay in the churned dirt without moving, smoke rising off shell and fur alike. Duncan was on his knees with his shield arm hanging, the shield itself split down the middle and still crawling with small blue threads of charge. Sam lay flat, chest rising, eyes open and fixed on his panther, saying its name over and over in a voice with nothing left in it.

Thomas crawled to Bramble on his elbows, one leg dragging, and put both hands into his scorched fur, and Ant heard him from thirty feet away through all of it — you stupid boy, you stupid, brave boy, I never asked you to do that, I never once asked — The yard had gone quiet except for the fires and the rattles, winding up again, patient. Six of theirs were down.

Hexa's roar rolled in from the far side of the yard where the mammoth had her giving ground one shoved step at a time, all six heads striking and none of them landing anything that mass didn't simply absorb. Ant stood with a sword in his hand and his own people falling by degrees around him and understood, in a cold and complete way, exactly what Kalsar had tried to tell him at a midnight table after the first attack, about the difference between wanting a fight and being ready for one. Ant.

Mahkir hauled himself out of the trench and came back to his shoulder, flame banked low in his throat, sides heaving. Look at Xylock. He looked. Kalsar's Kithren had stopped chasing the lightning. All fight the snakes had bent their strikes around him, starved him, spent him on running — and now he'd quit running and planted himself directly over the fallen, all four arms spread above the turtle and the panther and Bramble where they lay, and made himself into the one thing the snakes could no longer strike around.

There was no angle left. Any fork meant for the wounded had to go through him first, and the snakes, winding up again, patient, seemed to conclude that through him was acceptable. The first strike hit him square, and he caught it. The runes along his limbs — the ones Ant had only ever seen glow ember-orange, that guttered out and left him swaying after one good fight — burned white. Both forearms. Both shoulders.

Lines Ant had never seen lit before, climbing his neck, wrapping his chest, waking one after another like windows in a house at dusk.

"Xylock!" Kalsar's voice tore raw across the yard.

"That's enough — disperse it, throw it back, you can't hold that much, DISPERSE IT —" Xylock looked back at his partner of forty-three years, and did not. Another fork. He stepped into it. Another. The white of the runes climbed past white into something Ant's eyes refused to stay on, and the snakes, sensing a problem their handlers hadn't named yet, both turned on him at once and gave him everything, twin rivers of charge pouring into a creature that should have burst and instead stood there, arms wide, drinking.

Appraisal. Ant threw it at Xylock without deciding to, the old habit firing on its own, and the screen that came back stuttered — actually stuttered, text flickering, rewriting itself as he watched. Xylock. Grade: Common. Level — The line broke apart. Grade: Common. Grade: —. Grade: — Evolution detected. Recalculating.

The light coming off Xylock stopped being light with a colour and became light with a sound, a note held low in the ground under everyone's feet, and through it Ant saw the outline of Kalsar's Kithren begin to grow. His back split its own silhouette.

Beneath his four spread arms, two new joints pushed outward against skin gone translucent with the glare, and Kalsar — sixty years old, forty-three of them spent certain he knew every last thing his partner would ever be — stood ten feet away with his sword forgotten in his hand, watching, saying nothing at all, because there was nothing in four decades of knowing that had given him a single word for this. The snakes poured on. Xylock kept drinking.