Meek

Eli drew his falcona and crossed to stand at the edge of the pillar.

Behind him, Riadn re-strung her strange curved bow with a few quick motions and Lara stood over a semi-conscious Payde with Eli's old sword.

The monkeys leaped closer across the rooftops in eerie silence, save for the patter of paws against stone--then an arrow flew, and another and another.

Each of them struck a monkey in a rear paw, making the creatures stumble from the impact. Riadn wasn't trying to kill them, just to slow them down so they didn't arrive at once and overwhelm Eli. It worked, too. The ones she hit tumbled against the rock walls and rolled deeper into the troughs.

When they reappeared, they were moving more slowly, tripping and dragging, not bothering to remove the arrows.

But the first three leaped the gap from the rooftop to the pillar with ease. They flung their small bodies through the air like they'd been launched from that catapult at the village.

Eli slammed a spark into the leading one, but that didn't even slow it down. It sailed toward his head and he sidestepped and slashed, chopping it cleanly in half. He didn't hit the blood blister so both halves writhed and grasped as the second monkey fell short, vanishing in the gap between the wall and the pillar.

Riadn put arrows into two more and Eli's second spark caught the third monkey mid-leap. Instead of trying to block that one, he lifted it even higher. The stench of decay almost made him gag but the monkey twisted violently in the air and lofted past the pillar.

When it hit the ground behind and below Eli, it burst into a smear of organs and fluids. So that worked.

Lana stabbed the bisected monkey over and over until bright red smeared her blade and Eli decapitated another monkey a moment before it landed--then the one that had fallen short sprung upward from the side of the pillar.

It landed on his sword arm and tore away a chunk of flesh with its teeth.

He grabbed it with his free hand and lofted another one past the pillar with a spark, then a cluster of them leaped into the air at once, with dull white eyes and shiny bared teeth. Most of them landed on him, five or six dead monkeys clinging, chewing, tearing, and ripping.

He slashed with his blade and punched with his pommel. He grabbed handfulls of rotting fur, he spun and hurled. Teeth tore into his stomach and legs, his side and neck and back and arms. His sparks buzzed around him like angry hornets around a nest, smacking the monkeys, but there were too many of them, and they felt no pain.

Unlike him. His world dissolved into a whirl of blood and stench and fur.

He killed one--he killed another--then the ones Riadn had injured leaped onto the pillar. Ignoring everyone else, just swarming him. Ten moneys clinging to him like ticks on a dog, trying to overwhelm him, trying to bring him to the ground.

He roared in pain and got a mouthful of putrified monkey knee in his mouth. He flailed and struck but for every one of them he knocked away another climbed him and then--

Then a sword sliced him.

A blade drew across his ribs.

With his sparks buried in a pile of monkeyflesh, he couldn't see who was stabbing him. He stumbled away, dragging the monkeys precariously close to the edge. One clawed his face, one took a bite from his thigh.

The sword slashed at him again and again. When a spark finally rose overhead, he caught sight of Lara swinging wildly at the monkeys, chopping them to the ground. And chopping him, too.

"Get them off him!" she screamed at Riadn.

Riadn danced toward him, and he drew the sparks into the monkeys again, using them to protect his throat from rending fangs. He lost sight of Riadn but felt the point of her sword bite into his chest and his elbow and the back of his head.

When Lara smacked one away from his face with a swing that cut through Eli's nose, he saw that every one of Riadn's blows had beheaded another monkey. Except 'beheaded' sounded too muscular and explosive. She'd simply severed heads with the quick efficiently of a kitchen servant plucking a chicken.

At least she had after Lara showed her that she didn't have to worry about hurting Eli. And by the time she killed the last monkey, he was bleeding from dozens of bites and scratches, and half as many stab wounds.

He said, "Ouch."

Then he fell to his knees, unable to stay standing.

He bowed his head and gritted his teeth, waiting for the numbness to spread. Took longer than he would've liked. Well, even a single heartbeat was longer than he would've liked, but it took longer than he expected.

Still, after a time the pain ebbed to an unpleasant tingle. His wounds closed. The puckered divots of missing flesh started filling in as his trollblood replaced what the monkeys had torn away. The tingling combined with the sensation emanating from the Reach, the almost-hypnotic thrum of power.

Eli lost himself in the twin discomforts while Riadn and Lara kicked monkey corpses from the pillar. Payde pushed himself into a sitting position, and soon Eli felt strong enough to raise his head. Then he felt strong enough to stand, though he still didn't move.

Next he'd feel strong enough walk, like an absolute hero.

Then his spark caught motion among the undulating stone rooftops of the inner city.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said.

"What?" Lara asked.

"Another bear."

A smaller one was padding toward them. Not in any rush. Only visible in brief flashes; vanishing into the shadows of the waves then reappearing. Not rushing but there was no reason to rush when your prey was caught in a trap.

"Bury my bones!" Lara spat. "We can't beat that. Not with you and Payde injured. Not stuck here with no room to move."

"We don't have a choice," he said, taking her outstretched hand and rising unsteadily to his feet.

"You're going to need to find that blood blister fast," Riadn told him.

"I got lucky last time. You're going to need to buy me time."

"How many shields, Payde?" she asked.

"Zero," Payde said, leaning on his axe to stay upright. "None."

"Unfortunate," she said.

"Yes, it is slightly less than ideal," Payde agreed. "Also, I need to sit down again before I faint."

"Stay back," she told him. "Until you see the beheading blow, then put it down."

"Yesmir," he said, and collapsed.

"Uh," Eli said. "I'm not sure he's up to that."

"You're going to have to keep it occupied," Riadn told Eli. "Until I behead it."

"You aren't strong enough," Payde mumbled to her.

"And you are?" she said.

"What about me?" Lara asked.

"Stay out of the way," Riadn told her. "You're useless."

"She right," Eli told Lara in dryn, limping forward to meet the bear.

"You're both binhudu," she muttered in the same language

He didn't know what 'binhudu' meant, but he could imagine. He rolled his shoulders. Going through the motions of preparing to fight the bear, while his mind desperately searched for a way out of this. He could barely walk, and Payde was in worse shape. Plus, how the halo was he supposed to locate another blood-blister inside the bear's slurry of guts within the few seconds before it batted him off the pillar?

No.

No, it was better to run. Drop from the pillar into the mob of risen and break for the Eld shrine. Except the risen were still wandering the square and there was no way into the shrine. And getting cornered between a wall and a mob and a blood-bear sounded slightly ... unfortunate.

The bear started lumbering faster toward the edge of the rooftop, preparing to leap onto the pillar--and a fat man stepped nimbly from behind a stone wave.

He braced the butt of his spear in a crack in the stone floor. A boar-hunting spear, with a crossguard that would prevent a pain-crazed boar from riding up the shaft and attacking the wielder. The man lowered the point in a smooth fast motion, just in the knick of time. The bear hit the spear hard with the center of its chest. It didn't even slow at first, ignoring the wound completely as the shaft drove through putrefying flesh.

Then it hit the crossguard.

Instead of snagging on it, and slamming to a halt, the bear's rotting chest burst around the metal bar. Flesh splattered and the bear kept driving forward.

The man swore and dove sideways with surprising speed for his size, and the bear swerved to follow. The impaling spear snagged in the juts and furrows of stone, making it stumble. And Eli saw why it was so small: it was a cub.

A bear cub that had warped into a jagged, angular murderous beast ... but still just a cub.

He couldn't help it: he snorted a laugh.

The man scrambled toward the next crest of stone and the bear awkwardly pursed him, the spear sticking and catching on every knob and outcropping.

It took two uncertain steps past the stone barrier, and a blade flashed.

A nice clean blow.

The cub's head dropped with a splat.

The body stopped heaving a few heartbeats later, and another man stepped into view. A lanky man who Eli couldn't see clearly. The first man, the fat man, said something and pulled his spear from the sludge of the bear's corpse.

"Fishhook!" Riadn called, across the gap to the lanky man. "What the vale is going on?"

The lanky one stepped forward. A middle-aged man with thinning hair and a curved scar on his face. "Can't stay long. How close is Payde to bridging the gap?"

"An hour."

"You should've climbed the wall instead of stranding yourselves on a guardhouse."

"You think?" Payde muttered.

"If only you'd told us that," Riadn said, "instead of running away."

"We're holding the line."

"What line?"

"Watching her back," the fat man answered, as he started trotting away. "And we've been gone too long."

"I couldn't let you face that bear alone," Fishhook called. "But you should've been the big ones. You would've wet yourselves."

"Yeah, I'm glad we missed that," Payde said.

"Follow the marks," Fishhook said, turning away. "You'll find us."

"Wait!" Riadn called. "Where do you need us?"

"Are the children alive?" Lara called.

Fishhook's voice floated above the sea of stone. "For now. Until the mage breaks. Follow the marks."