room for the orc riding it, let alone her. Tusks plated with beaten gold jabbed at her face and she grabbed one, yanking it out of the orc’s mouth. The orc squealed like a pig and grabbed her throat. The serrated edge of its blade eased towards her face. It was stronger than she had expected.
The orc shoved Neferata back against the rough scales, the edge of its blade brushing against her throat. With a convulsive swipe, she pushed up and beat the blade aside. The orc reared back, arms wide, mouth open. Neferata drove her blade through its chest and twisted her wrist, cutting its heart in two. It fell from its saddle, plummeting into the streets of Mourkain.
Neferata had no time to celebrate her triumph. The wyvern shrieked again and spun in the air, trying to dislodge her from its back. Without its master, it had gone wild. Neferata jammed her blade between two of its scales and hung on as the creature jerked and looped through the air. Flattened against its back by its speed, Neferata began to wriggle forwards. She needed to dispose of the beast, and quickly.
Inch by torturous inch, she climbed towards the beast’s head. Jerking her sword free and stabbing it in, she anchored herself against the creature’s increasingly violent efforts to throw her off. Its wings brushed one of the higher buildings, sending a stream of shattered stone and dust cascading into the streets. She reached the base of its skull, grabbed its horn and gave a jerk, yanking its head around through sheer brute strength. The wyvern banked, if unwillingly, and squalled in fury. Gritting her teeth, Neferata gave the horn another yank. The beast was stronger than her, but it hadn’t quite realised it yet.
It was also very, very angry. And she was going to make it even angrier. Neferata spun her sword and jabbed the point against the edge of the wyvern’s eye-socket. It snarled in agony as she shoved the blade between its eye and the socket wall. Spasms of pain rippled through its body, nearly flinging her from her perch. But she had accomplished her goal – the beast twisted through the air and raced blindly back towards the palisade and its fellows. Neferata hunched up on its head, gathering her legs beneath her. She jerked her sword free of its eye as it smashed into the second of the wyverns.
In the chaotic moments before the two beasts collided, Neferata saw Rasha leap away, followed by a crackling column of emerald fire. The orc shaman turned and gaped comically as Neferata’s wyvern barrelled into its own and both beasts toppled backwards from the palisade in a thrashing, crashing heap of scale and muscle.
The water of the river reached up for them greedily and Neferata leapt from the wyvern even as the water closed around them. She lunged for the orc shaman, attempting to disembowel it as they hit the water. Abhorash had insisted on digging a moat between the palisades and the rest of the mountain slope. It had taken a hundred men more than a hundred days of backbreaking labour to carve the winding scar and another month to properly divert water from the wild, dark river that surrounded and irrigated Mourkain into it. The moat was only as deep as three men standing one atop the other, but it had served its purpose, blunting the idiot ferocity of the first few orc assaults.
A thrashing wing crashed against her, sending her shooting through the water. She barely held on to her sword. The two wyverns were tangled together, snapping and writhing. Bloody clouds floated through the water as Neferata arrowed towards the floating shape of the shaman. The orc was desperately clawing for the surface.
She grabbed its thick ankle and yanked it down. Sorcerers were dangerous, even to her kind. Even if the sorcerer in question were a green-fleshed savage, the magic they wielded was one of the few things she knew of that could kill one of her kind.
Thus, caution was called for. She sank down to the river bottom and crouched, hauling the struggling orc after her. Its piggy eyes bulged as the shadows of the struggling wyverns fell over them, and it clawed for the distant grey light of the surface. A slew of bubbles burst from its bulbous jaw. Neferata grinned as the shaman slowly drowned. When she was certain it was dead, she let the body float to the surface and