Extinction

?and was slammed to the ground by an attack he should have anticipated. Rolling quickly away, he saw that the troll was back. The creature stumbled toward him, one hand holding its head on the stump of its severed neck, the other attempting to rake Ryld with its claws. Even as Ryld flipped himself up off the ground and back onto his feet, dancing out of the reach of those claws, he saw flaps of sinew burst out of the ropy muscles of the troll's neck and quest up like sentient worms to hook themselves into the head. Swifter almost than the eye could follow, they stitched the head back onto the body, while the entrails that had spilled from the troll's slashed belly sucked back into the stomach wound. Already the fingers that Halisstra's blow had sliced off earlier were starting to grow back. Knobs of pinkish-gray flesh pulsed outward from the severed digits.

Leaping forward, Ryld slashed at the troll's neck a second time, but the monster, unlike him, anticipated the attack. It ducked?startlingly fast?then lunged forward and wrapped a rubbery hand around Ryld's own. Ryld heard a bone in his hand crack and gasped at the incredible strength of the troll. Even with a hand that was missing two fingers, its fist was crushing his. The troll jerked Splitter out of Ryld's hand and cast it away.

Halisstra had struggled to her feet and was slashing at the troll's broad back, her sword making strange, flutelike noises as she swung it. The monster grunted with each stroke like a slave under the lash but otherwise ignored the deep cuts in its back. Whirling, it backhanded her away with a blow that sent her staggering. Ryld drew his short sword and thrust at the spot where the troll's heart should have been, but even though the blade buried itself to the hilt in the thing's rubbery chest the monster was not slowed.

A hand whipped out with the speed of one of Quenthel's whip vipers and wrapped itself around Ryld's neck. Powerful fingers tightened against flesh, choking off his breathing. Ryld felt a rush of magical energy flowing into his body from the dragon-shaped ring on his finger, as the ring hardened his flesh against the troll's claws?but too late. His windpipe had already squeezed shut. Abandoning his sword, still hilt-deep in the monster's chest, he drove stiffened fingers into what would have, on a drow, been a crippling pressure point?then he winced. He might as well have driven his fingers into solid stone.

Halisstra charged back into the fray and managed to slice one of the troll's feet from its ankle. It stumbled but quickly found its footing, balancing on the stump. Halisstra was rewarded with a rake of claws that snagged her chain mail, tearing a link from it.

Ryld, unable to breathe, shouted at her the only way he could.

Flee! I am finished!

"No!" she gasped. "I won't leave you."

She lunged forward, attacking the troll with a furious barrage of blows. Ryld, observing with the eye of a master, saw that Halisstra had opened her stance, inadvertently exposing herself to what would be a fatal rake of the monster's claws.

Though Ryld should have been watching with the detachment of someone who knows he is about to die and can do nothing about it, he felt a strange emotion fill him in that impossibly long moment that stretched between two fading heartbeats, a deep sadness and a sense of infinite loss. Not only because Halisstra was about to die, but because her death would mean the end of something Ryld had only just discovered: true friendship?perhaps even love. The kind that would cause a person to willingly sacrifice herself in a hopeless attempt to save another. As their eyes met, Ryld realized that he would have done the same for Halisstra?and he saw that she knew it. He also saw something he'd never seen in the eyes of a drow: trust.

At that moment a drow female burst out of the forest, her silver-white hair plastered against her face by the rain. She was naked, save for a heavy silver chain around her waist that was hung with a large silver disk and a curved hunter's horn. She moved at a full-out sprint, holding above her head a sword whose blade glowed with leaping silver flames. With a piercing, high-pitched shout that sounded like a single note in a song, strong and true, she slashed down with her sword.

The blade bit deep into the troll's shoulder, then flared. Silver fire spread instantly across the troll's body, blinding Ryld. He winced, expecting to be burned himself, but the wave of heat he'd been anticipating never came. The flames seemed to emit song rather than heat, dancing to their own rhythm as they licked over the troll's rubbery skin.