edges sharp around the hole in its crown.
More sharp blows followed and the rest of the dome fell in, raising a huge cloud of black dust like a stain of night across the morning. Something huge moved inside it.
“What is that?” the young man guarding the bridge asked.
Kylar was already running.
Most of the fighting men had noticed nothing. The grim business of war took all their attention. The allies’ armies were doing extremely well if what Kylar had seen of their relative numbers was accurate. He saw one of Agon’s archers fit an odd arrow to his Ymmuri bow and shoot. Two hundred paces away, one of the Khalidoran signal flags went up in flames. It was obviously on purpose, because only one or two Khalidoran signal flags remained on the entire plain. Kylar wondered briefly whose good idea that had been.
Curoch was still strapped to his back and the black ka’kari concealed it. Kylar drew neither as he closed with the rear of the Cenarian line. His battle senses seemed to explode, obliterating conscious thought, blotting out everything but the sharp outlines of the figures in his path. This group was spearmen, packed tightly and surging forward. There would be no slipping through these men. They pushed against the backs of the men in front of them with oblong shields, holding their elbows up so their spears wouldn’t become entangled in the press.
Kylar leapt lightly and pushed off one man’s shoulder, twisted, pushed off another’s spear hand, then planted both feet on the shoulders of a man in the second row and jumped as hard as he could. He was over the Cenarians so fast he didn’t even hear their cries of surprise.
His leap took him over the first six lines of krul. Kylar read the bodies of those among which he would land. Five black creatures and one a diseased flaky white that seemed their leader. Two saw him. Kylar tucked his knees to his chest, flipped, then threw his feet forward at the last second. His feet connected with a big black krul over its eyes. Its head snapped back and its neck cracked. Kylar rolled to his feet.
He’d never seen krul before. They were shaped like men with grotesquely bulging muscles, their eyes small and piggish, brows prominent, shoulders heavy, necks almost nonexistent, but beyond that, each was different, as if they were the products of many different hands. The one closest to Kylar’s left was covered with fur, two others were hairless. The one directly in front of him had a nose smashed upward into a snout. It also had thin curling horns. Three had an extra knuckle’s worth of finger on their hands, sharpened into claws. Their skin or fur was the black of a bloated corpse, and they smelled of rot. None wore armor or clothes except the white one, and few had weapons other than their claws or horns. The white was taller than the others, more than six feet, and recovered first, swinging a huge dull blade at Kylar.
Kylar dodged it and crushed the white’s throat with a kick. Kylar darted behind another, grabbed its horns, and broke its neck before he realized that perhaps a dozen black krul weren’t moving at all; they simply stared at their dying white leader. It was hissing, trying to breathe. Unnerved by their sudden listlessness, Kylar paused for a moment—a pause that in a normal battle could have been lethal. He pulled a tanto from his belt and jammed it into the white krul’s heart. Krul apparently kept their hearts where men did, because it died as he withdrew the blade.
What little light had been in the piggish eyes around him guttered out. The ten krul looked lost. For three impossible seconds, they didn’t move. Kylar could sense them searching for something. Then, as if each had been yanked on a leash toward a new master, the krul bolted in ten different directions.
A jolt of fear more intense than any he’d ever felt lashed through Kylar’s bond with Vi. She was two hundred paces to his left.
Kylar ran through the Dead Demesne, over corpses that looked oddly fresh but didn’t stink. He was behind the main line of krul, but there were still hundreds that saw him. His Talent filled him like a fire. He was a blur.
As always, he could feel Vi more intensely the closer he got. She was in the middle of a thick knot of fighting. The sheer volume of