Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,13
stuff, maybe even desperate.
She knew she had a few and maybe more coming up behind her. Whoever she helped out might curse Huggs if she led them down after her—trapping Huggs and whomever else between two slavering mobs.
Oh well. She hefted her crossbow and darted down the side passage.
She heard a solid thunk—like the world’s biggest crossbow—and that worried her, until she heard demonic shrieks of agony and rage.
Someone’s found a new toy?
Clattering claws behind her, closing fast, and that wasn’t good.
Huggs halted, crouched, raised her weapon, and waited until she saw the gleam of the first demon’s eyes. Took that one down easy. Dropping the crossbow, she drew her sword into her right hand, her crack-finder into her left.
Four more sets of blazing eyes rushed upon her.
“Drop flat!”
Huggs did.
A thunderous whoosh raced over her. Sudden mayhem up the corridor, as a huge pig of a barbed quarrel ripped through three of the damned things, gouging a shoulder of the fourth one. Laughing, Huggs leapt to her feet and charged it.
With a squeal, the demon fled as fast as three working limbs could take it.
“Shit.” Huggs halted, jogged back, peered in the darkness. “Who?”
“Wither—listen, found a whole storeroom of these fuckers. Siege arbalests.”
“Lead the way, darling.”
“Watch your step up here. Lots of bodies.”
“Right.”
Captain Skint shoved the faceless mess aside and pushed through the doorway, stepping clear and then turning to meet the first of the demons that lunged into view at the threshold. Her sword tip opened a wide grin in its throat. The next one, clambering over its fallen kin, lost the top of its head, bisecting its relatively small brain, which stopped working in any case.
Three more squeezed through and Skint took a step back to clear some room and let them in.
Talons slashed with murderous intent, but caught empty air. Jaws snapped on nothing. Surges to close and grapple missed again and again. The woman was a blur of motion to their eyes. A demon’s head jumped free of the rest of it, and the stumpy neck poured blood everywhere. Another shrieked as something kissed its belly and it looked down to see its intestines tumbling out—withered, empty things, like starving worms. Collecting them up, it waddled to the doorway—but that was blocked as dozens of demons struggled to press through the doorway. The disemboweled demon snarled and took two fatal talons to its eyes for its ill manners.
Skint helped a demon leap into a wall, and when it fell to the floor, she stamped her heel into its throat, then jumped away to avoid its thrashing.
She cast a gauging regard upon the swarm of gleaming eyes jammed in the doorway, and then stepped forward and began hacking with her sword. Sometimes, finesse was just stupid.
Flapp balanced on the crossbeam and watched as the third and last demon passed underneath. His quarrel buried itself in the back of the thing’s head, and as it fell, the sergeant flung the crossbow at the nearest beast—which had twisted around, eye flaring like coals—and saw it bounce from the demon’s flat fore-head even as Flapp plunged off the edge to land on the floor, two short swords snapping out but held points-down.
He rushed the demons. Blades slashed, intersecting wrists and forearms, slashed some more, cutting through hamstrings and other assorted, necessary tendons. He drove his head forward. Helmed bridge guard slammed with a happy crunch into a forehead, and then Flapp was past them both—they flopped and writhed behind him all messy with blood. He spun around and made quick work of them, and then retrieved his crossbow, only to snarl when discovering its bent arm. Flinging it away, he trundled down the corridor.
He could hear fighting.
He went to find it.
They could make out a mob of the bastards swarming a doorway, which meant someone was cornered, or, rather, had let themselves get cornered, which meant it was the captain. Grunting beneath the weight of the arbalests both women held, they sent two bolts tearing into the crowd. Torn bodies and pieces of meat flew.
And then, with a scream, Huggs charged the rest. Cursing, Wither dropped her arbalest and unsheathed her swords, setting off after her. By the time she reached the writhing mound, Huggs was buried somewhere beneath the heaving press of snarling demons.
Wither started chopping off limbs, heads.
She saw the captain’s sword tip lunge from the doorway, driving deep between two widening eyes, and a moment later Skint kicked her way into view.