No, that wasn’t quite true. It was more accurate to say that the Nar’ath were each voids in his perception, rather than felt directly. They were roving holes in what should have been.
A distant part of him was bewildered at the clarity with which he knew all this. The positions of the Nar’ath were all so obvious to him suddenly that he could throw a rock and strike any one of them. Another part of him insisted that there could be nothing more natural, that this and more was at his fingertips, and he had only to embrace it…
A burning sensation fought its way up through his chest and all of a sudden his head felt like it would split asunder. He gasped, staggering to the side before he caught himself. The strange clarity faded along with the pain, but not before he sensed the sinuous form of the queen hesitate at the sound and spin in his direction.
Perfect, he thought. Let us give her another whiff of the bait she has been anticipating.
Amric coughed.
He pitched it low, made it muffled as if he meant to conceal it. At the same time, he lightly dragged the tip of one sword along the coarse stone of the floor at his feet to make a gentle rasping sound. With luck, it would sound to her as if he had stumbled for the briefest of moments, grown careless or distracted.
She came at him like a lightning bolt, hurtling across the intervening ground with a speed that was stunning. Amric had a few seconds to crouch and brace himself, and then the Nar’ath queen burst through the churning wall of sand and was upon him.
He waited until the last moment, holding his ground with his blades crossed before him, and then he threw himself to the side. He had been hoping that she, in her eagerness to reach him, would be unable to slow her great bulk before colliding with the sheer wall of the chamber a pace and a half behind him. In this he was disappointed, however, as she evidently knew the bounds of the chamber she had created too well to fall for the simple trick. The countless small, clawed appendages that fringed her serpentine body dug into the ground, slowing her with a high-pitched grinding noise. She slid to a stop, almost brushing the wall.
Quick on the heels of that disappointment came another: he had waited an instant too long to evade her charge.
Her black talons lashed out at him. One set scored the sandstone, leaving angry furrows behind him as he rolled away, while the other raked across his mail shirt and caught. The force of the blow lifted him from the ground and slung him against the wall, wringing all the air from his lungs in one explosive grunt. Amric slid to the ground and struggled to draw a breath. Huge hands seized him immediately, wrapping around his torso and constricting until he thought his ribs would surely crack. Darkness washed over him and was peeled back just as quickly, and he knew that he had lost consciousness for a fleeting instant. His hands closed on empty air, and his stomach plummeted as he realized that his swords had fallen away from nerveless fingers. He began prying at the claws that held him tight, even as he felt himself being lifted through the air.
Amric gasped, trying desperately to fill his burning lungs. His entire body felt as if it was on fire, and the world spun around him in a dizzying cyclone. He craned his neck to see the triumphant visage of the Nar’ath queen drawing closer and closer. As he watched, the huge outer jaws began to flare open and separate.
In unison, Innikar and Sariel attacked from either side of the queen. Appearing out of the swirling sand, they each lunged forward to ram a single blade into her body, all the way to the hilt. The queen’s expression twisted from gloating to furious in a single spasm. With a shriek to freeze the blood, she swept her lower set of forelimbs at them without relinquishing her grasp on Amric with the upper arms. The warriors darted back from her attacks, withdrawing their swords from the bloodless wounds. Such minor injuries could not have greatly troubled a creature of her size, and yet she issued a roar of raw hatred as she whirled first one way and then the other, indecisive as to which of the troublesome