Engines & Demons - The Undestined

Chapter 15iii

"Run!" Grifford growled at his sister, and he heard her scamper away, twigs snapping in her wake.

The madriel swung its old head in her direction, his one good horn gouging up a trail in the rotting leaf mulch.

"No!" Grifford shouted. "Here!"

He had spent so many hours in the training-arena, shouting at his own witless steed, and was so used to being ignored, that it was something of a surprise when the beast brought its head round to face him. A beam of harsh sunlight fell across its eyes, and its pupils contracted into two vicious slits, the mottled grey surrounding them suddenly seeming huge.

"Oh, cock!"

The beast broke into a lumbering run, its motion unsteady, like a boulder starting to roll, but the movement was something inexorable.

Grifford turned and ran after his sister.

He saw her ahead of him, climbing a grass choked rise of gnarled roots. When she reached their height, she leapt and scrambled up the trunk of one of the great cherossa's offspring, clambering swiftly into its lower branches. Instead of climbing the slope, Grifford veered away, hearing the graceless crashing of the beast that pursued him, its laboured breath close at his heel.

"Climb, you idiot boy!" his sister shouted down as he passed beneath her perch.

He began to look for a handy trunk to shin up, but then an echoing crack resounded behind him, and his sister screamed. He skidded to a halt in a scatter of leaf rot and turned to see the old male at the base of his sister's hideaway, swinging its head about to give the narrow trunk a second resonating crack with its broken horn. Tahlia was already hanging by hands and calves from the branch that the beast's first blow had dislodged her from, and as the tree shook, the branch bowed up and down, as though the tree was trying to shake her loose.

Grifford looked around for a weapon. Rooting around in the tangled undergrowth, he came up with a half rotten lump of something. As the old madriel roared another challenge and prepared to strike the tree for a third time, he lifted the thing over his head with both hands and hefted it as hard as he could. It struck the beast on its shoulder and its head jerked in his direction, the diverted growl of challenge rising again in its throat.

Then it fell towards him in an ungainly fashion, its hind quarters moving stiffly. The beast was slowed by age and did not have the advantage of the open plain beneath its paws. Maybe he could keep ahead of it; lead it away from his sister at least.

He turned to run again, but his feet became entangled in something that lay invisible beneath the undergrowth, and with the sounds of brittle snapping, he stumbled to his knees. He tried to kick his legs free of whatever had tripped him, but one of them was held firm. He rolled over, dragged himself backwards and pulled his leg up, to see his ankle ensnared in a cage of bone. He realised he was lying in the half hidden ruins of a karabok carcass, picked clean so that only its gnawed bones were left. His foot was caught in a section of its broken ribcage. The thing was, unbelievably, still held together by bands of black cartilage so he kicked at it with his other foot, trying to break it loose, but the beast was drawing close. It was lumbering up the slope towards him, its stinking breath labouring with exertion, strands of saliva catching in the fur at its chest.

He could not run, so he would have to fight.

He cast around him for another weapon and came up with a haft of bone, scored by old teeth, and with strands of brown dried flesh still clinging to it. One end of it was heavy and lumpen, part of the karabok's powerful hip bone, and if he swung it hard enough, maybe he could do some damage.

He did not have time to stand, so he hefted the bone over his shoulder. He would only have one chance, and if he missed...

The madriel was a scant two metres away when it crouched back on its haunches. Its lips pulled back to reveal the remains of its yellow teeth, its growl of attack rumbled it its throat, and its eyes fixed on him with the light of his doom.