Chapter 209: Falling Talon and Winter Fang

The first thing that reached him was a Loper.

It had come around the frozen Reevers on the left, running low along the edge of the Span, and it leaped from fifteen paces away. Its long hind legs uncoiled like a spring. It sailed toward him through the red evening air, jaws wide, its narrow head reaching for his throat.

Behind it, a dozen more were already in the air.

Lopers. Reevers. A Talljack, leaping from the back of the crowd with its long arms spread. They came at him from the front and both sides at once, a wall of bodies arching over the frozen first wave, all of them falling toward the same small figure at the end of the bridge.

Encrid looked up at them.

And his body moved.

He did not decide to move. That was the strangest part. He had practiced this form twenty thousand times in the dark behind a granary, and every single time, he had had to think about it. Feet. Hips. Shoulders. Hands. The rise. The fall.

He did not think about it now.

The sword came up.

It rose over his head in a single smooth motion, and his whole body rose with it. His heels lifted. His spine stretched. The weight of the Absolute Star gathered at the top of the swing like water gathering at the lip of a falls.

For one heartbeat, he held it there.

And somewhere in the borrowed memories, an old man’s voice said, Now. Let it fall.

"First Form, Falling Talon."

The sword came down.

It did not touch anything. Encrid swung it at empty air, at the stone of the Span a pace in front of his feet. But the air did not stay empty.

The weight came down with it.

He felt it leave the blade. A shape of pressure, enormous and invisible, like the talon of a bird so large that its shadow could cover the whole gorge. It dropped out of the sky above the northern end of the Span and closed on everything beneath it.

Every Roamer in the air stopped rising.

Then they fell.

Not the way things fall when they lose their footing. The way things fall when something presses them down. The Loper that had leaped first struck the stone of the Span so hard that its legs folded under it like dry reeds. The Reevers behind it hit the ground in a long row, one after another, and Encrid heard their bones break against the rock. The Talljack came down last, all its great length at once, and its long arms snapped in three places each.

The stone did not crack.

The deep-folk’s bindings held.

But everything that had been in the air above it was now lying on it, broken, in a wide half-circle twenty paces across.

The Roamers behind them stopped.

For a single breath, the front of the horde simply stood there, staring at the space in front of the small figure at the end of the bridge. At the dead.

Then the thin cold thread that ran through all of them pulled.

Compelled.

They came on again.

Forty-one seconds left.

They came on the ground this time. A packed mass of bodies pushing forward over the broken ones. And at the front of them, shouldering the smaller Roamers aside, came the heavy ones.

Gorehorns.

Three old bulls, side by side, their yellowed skull-plates lowered like rams. Behind them, two Rackhorns with their rake of horns. They were the horde’s vanguard. The armored ones. The ones that broke lines.

Encrid knew exactly what the first one’s skull-plate felt like from the inside. He had stood in a tunnel and watched Rael put a Master’s whole Star into a sword to pierce one.

He drew the sword back.

His left foot slid forward. His weight dropped low. The blade came level with his eye, point forward, and his whole body coiled behind it like a drawn bowstring.

Second Form.

Winter Fang.

If Falling Talon was weight, Winter Fang was speed. It was the opposite of the First Form in every way. The First Form fell. The Second Form struck. It was a single thrust, straight ahead, so fast that the old Gannons in the borrowed memories had said the blade arrived before the sound of the step.

Encrid did not see himself move.

He was standing at the end of the Span.

Then he was standing twenty paces in front of it, with his sword extended, and the first Gorehorn was behind him.

There was a hole through its skull-plate.

It was a perfectly round hole, no wider than two fingers, punched clean through bone as thick as a man’s hand. And around the hole, spreading out across the yellowed plate in a slow, pale web, was frost.

The Gorehorn took one more step.

Then the frost reached its blood.

Encrid felt it happen through the Star. The cold went into the beast through the wound and ran along its veins, faster than any poison. Its heart slowed. Stopped. Its great body stiffened in mid-stride, every muscle locked.

And its hide, the thick, layered hide that ballista bolts glanced off, turned brittle as ice.

The Gorehorn fell onto its side and shattered.

It did not break. It shattered. The way a frozen pond shatters when a stone is dropped through it. Its hide split into pieces along every seam, and the pieces scattered across the stone of the Span with a sound like breaking pottery.

Encrid was already turning.

Winter Fang again. The second Gorehorn. A hole between its eyes. Frost. Stillness. Shards.

Winter Fang. The third.

Winter Fang. A Rackhorn, the thrust passing between two of its rake-horns and through the base of its skull. Winter Fang. The second Rackhorn.

Five thrusts.

Five heartbeats.

Five of the horde’s heaviest beasts lying in frozen pieces across the northern end of the Darwen Span.

Encrid stepped back to the edge of the bridge, to the exact place where he had started.

He had not breathed once.

He breathed now, and the breath went out of him white, and the frost on the stone around his feet spread a little farther.

The Roamers in front of him hesitated.

It was the first time Encrid had ever seen them do that. Not stop. Hesitate. A ripple of uncertainty went through the front of the horde, like wind through tall grass.

Then the thread pulled again.

And they came.

Thirty-six seconds.

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