The Ippos King (Wraith Kings #3) - Grace Draven Page 0,103
dispatched all of them, but she wasn't taking any chances by leaving retrievable, repairable weaponry.
Chamtivos's headless body lay crumpled in the dirt. Anhuset poked his body with her toe. “Scum with visions of greatness but no character to achieve it. Consider yourself privileged to have died by the hand of one whose boots you weren't fit to lick.” She gave the corpse a hard shove, sending it tumbling down the slope in a flail of arms and legs before it came to a thumping stop against a big conifer. “May the scavengers eat well,” she said and turned away to head back to Serovek.
By the time Cuama returned with three more monks, Anhuset had amassed a small arsenal of looted weapons and laid Serovek on his back in a cushion of leaf fall. The monks wasted no time constructing a sledge with fallen tree limbs and a pair of cloaks to carry Serovek down to the shore. She helped them lift, then lower him into one of the boats and climbed in with him.
Dark water lapped against the boat's sides, and the vessel yawed right, then left as Cuama and two of his brothers climbed in as well to take up oars. One more monk shoved the boat away from the shore, wading deep into the lake before hoisting himself into the vessel as well. Anhuset gave the island a brief glimpse before setting her sights on the opposite shore. “Goodbye and good riddance,” she muttered.
Those same arrowing wakes that had followed Chamtivos's boats to the island now moved parallel to the monks' boats for the return trip. She now knew what created the big wake, had caught a clear glimpse of a giant sinuous body with the head and skin of an eel, a great milky eye and a double set of jaws filled with curving fangs that had clamped down on one of Chamtivos's men and dragged him beneath the water.
Anhuset didn't count that hunter as one of her kills. She'd merely dodged her attacker's charge and given him a shove that propelled him off the cliff on the island's windward side. She'd assumed he'd drown, weighted down by armor and weaponry or simply because he didn't know how to swim. The lake monster though had other ideas.
Unfortunately, it looked as though this one did as well. The wake's arrow point increased in speed and decreased in distance as it turned perpendicular and shot straight toward the boat's side. “Brace!” she called to the others, gripping Serovek with one arm while she reached for one of the looted swords with her free hand. The thing was either going to ram the boat so that it capsized and spilled its occupants into the water or breach, hurling itself down on top of them. She and Serovek had survived the predation of more than a dozen hunters. She refused to be devoured by a snake in the water when they'd just defeated one in men's clothing.
One of the monks leaned over the boat's side and plunged his hand into the water. He bellowed two words in a language Anhuset didn't understand, and two bolts of lightning forked across the water's surface to light the ripples of waves just below the surface. They illuminated a colossal shape whose length stretched far and away from the wake point. The fine hairs on Anhuset's arms rose, and her scalp tingled.
A lake monster, much like the one she'd seen earlier, only bigger, broke the surface in a towering flume of water. The creature writhed and convulsed, trapped in a net of lightning that turned its milky eyes blue, red, even lavender in its reflective arcs. The muscular body, its girth greater than a draft horse's, shivered as muscle contracted under sleek gray skin. The vicious jaws snapped together once, twice, like steel traps.
Another monk joined the first, adding his invocation, and more lightning scorched fern-like roads into the creatures hide before it plunged back into the water with a splash whose deluge threatened to swamp the boat and gave them all a thorough dousing.
Anhuset wiped her eyes and immediately checked the unconscious margrave in her arms. He sputtered once, mumbled something unintelligible, but didn't wake. She gently brushed water droplets from his cheeks and turned her attention to her companions.
Awe and admiration battled with bitterness for supremacy inside her. Warrior monks with formidable sorcerous powers. What the Kai had once possessed generations ago, what they possessed to a much lesser degree only a year