certain – he was causing his victim a great deal of pain, judging by the way it screeched. Its tail curled around, threatening to hit him with the force of a bludgeon. He leapt over the blow, even as two of the lizardman’s companions closed in from either side.
Tyrion caught one in the throat with his sword, where the windpipe ought to be. Something crunched under the blow and the lizardman fell backwards, mouth open in a silent scream, no sound being emitted from its broken voice box, then the pommel of his blade connected with the snout of the other lizardman with sickening force. It too halted momentarily, stunned.
Tyrion split its skull with his sword and then wheeled to stab the other as it clutched at its slashed throat.
With the force of a striking thunderbolt he smashed into the melee, dancing through the swirl of combat with impossible grace. Every time he struck a lizardman fell. Within heartbeats he had turned the course of the battle and slaughtered half a dozen more of the cold-blooded ones. The rest of them fled off into the undergrowth, shrieking and bellowing like beasts.
Something flickered in the corner of his vision. A dart erupted from the bushes heading straight at him with eye-blurring velocity. He plucked it from the air, careful to avoid its sharpened obsidian point. He had no doubt that the black goo smeared on the blade was a deadly poison. He hurled the thing point first into the bushes from which it had come, but whatever had fired it was gone. The dart stuck quivering in the bole of a great tree.
Around him, the humans went around finishing off the wounded lizardmen, smashing their skulls or stabbing them through the eye or heart. They were brutal, driven by fear.
A lot of their cruelty came from that fear. Tyrion disliked this. He enjoyed violence but he had never understood this need to abuse defeated foes that many people had. He supposed one thing bred the other. Fear was parent to cruelty.
He looked over to make sure that Teclis was unharmed. The wizard stood there, glaring around him, looking for a target for his spells. The battle had been fought so quickly that he had had no chance to unleash his power.
Tyrion could tell that he was frustrated by that and he could understand why. His brother did not like to feel powerless in any situation – he had experienced too much of that in their youths.
‘They are gone,’ Tyrion said. ‘For the moment.’
‘How can you be certain of that?’ Teclis asked.
‘I can’t,’ said Tyrion. ‘But normally when you kill things to the point where they run away, they don’t come back quickly. Of course, with these slann creatures you can never be sure. They are too alien.’
‘Those were skinks,’ said Teclis. ‘That’s what they were called. According to the Chronicles of Beltharius, they are servants of the slann, not the slann themselves.’
‘I’ll take your word for that,’ said Tyrion.
‘You would do well to do so,’ said Teclis. His brother sounded keen to assert himself, even if only by displaying superior knowledge. ‘Beltharius is the only elf to have left any records of visiting an actual lizardman city, and he barely survived that.’
Beltharius was the captain of the explorers who had visited the Golden Pyramid of Pahuax back in the reign of Bel Shanaar. He had been one of the few to fight his way out of the city when the great toad-god that ruled it had turned nasty.
The tale was well known, but his brother had spent a great deal of time in the library at Hoeth, studying the actual journals Beltharius had kept. Before they had made this trip he had studied every scrap of information the elves had ever compiled about the jungles of Lustria and its inhabitants. With his usual thoroughness he had turned himself into an expert on the matter.
Tyrion glanced around to see how the humans were doing. One of them was on the ground, dead, his skull crushed by one of those stone axes. It had been left buried in his forehead.
Tyrion shook his head. This was not the sort of thing that Teclis ought to be saying to the humans right now. They were upset by the loss of their comrade and they were on edge, ready for violence. It would not take much to turn them