Comillas’s pulse did not quite return to normal. He was sure he had seen the girl slip into the crack, away from the creature. But that thing was out here with him. Could he outrun it, mounted?
This is part four of an ongoing series. The other parts can be found here: part one, part two, part three.
Comillas and Lofric rode beneath the full moon. The only sounds were the steady thud of their horses’ hooves and the whistling of the wind as it brushed the tall grass into a sea of rippling silver.
As they approached the final rise before the lone mesa, Lofric pulled his mount up short. Comillas reined in beside him. The bigger man rooted through a saddle bag and came out with a small bottle. He popped the cork, sniffed at the contents, and winced. Bad smell or no, he took a swig and handed the bottle to Comillas.
“What is it?” the mage asked.
“Night eye.”
“The moon’s bright. Do we need it?”
“There’s a dozen goblins down there that will drop us the first chance they get. You tell me.”
Comillas raised the bottle to his lips, not daring to sniff, and took a large swallow. It was watery, sour, and rotten. He gagged, but got it down. A moment later the silver and blue of the moonlit night blossomed with all the color of a bright summer’s day. He handed the bottle back to Lofric, who stowed it away again.
They dismounted, crept carefully up the last few yards of the rise, and lay on their bellies, surveying the scene. The mesa was huge. Blocks of stone as big as houses had fallen from its craggy heights. They looked like discarded dolls lying at a child’s feet. The goblins were there, beetles milling about one of those great boulders, mixed in with grayer specks that must be their mounts. Comillas thought he saw the halfling girl sitting near one of them.
“Wait until they settle down?” Lofric asked in a low voice. “We’ll have to circle wide and come at them through the talus.”
“I can mask our presence if we need to. It would be a lot faster if we could go straight towards them over the open ground.”
“Will the spell cover her when we get down there?”
“It’ll cover her, our horses, and a bull elephant if we need it to. The only problem is it stops as soon as I break concentration. You’d pretty much have to guide me in, and deal with any surprises yourself.”
Lofric grunted and returned to studying the ground at the mesa’s foot. Then he hissed and pointed at a line of scree to the left of the goblins. At first, Comillas saw nothing, even with the night eye. Then the patch of ground came alive.
The thing was vaguely feline in shape, but easily larger than a horse. It sprang out of what must seem complete darkness to the goblins, crushing one beneath its massive forepaws and ripping at it with its teeth. The moment the first was dead, the thing leapt at the next, but the goblins were already moving. As if they had trained for this very moment, as if they had but one mind, they mounted in an instant, the bulk of them flying to a crack in the mesa’s stony face while three at the back peppered the beast with arrows. It leapt behind a boulder to avoid the missiles, then reemerged to pounce from another angle. It was too late. The last goblin vanished into the fissure. The thing went after them, but the gap was too narrow for its monstrous bulk. The goblins had escaped.
Comillas’s pulse did not quite return to normal. He was sure he had seen the girl slip into the crack, away from the creature. But that thing was out here with him. Could he outrun it, mounted? He didn’t know. But at length he pushed panic from his mind, ignoring all the signs it left in his body–heart rate, sweat, tension in his limbs. He needed to think. The situation had changed.
“They’re trapped,” he said.
“We kill it?”
“Can we?”
Lofric said nothing. Comillas didn’t know either. He suspected, though, that they could not take both the monster and the goblins. The situation had changed, and he had to find some way to make it change again.
The story continues in part five.
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