Murtagh

The fingerrats screeched and spun in circles as if a bee had stung them on their sunken flanks.

“Begone!” Murtagh cried again. It was a mistake. The sound of his voice focused the attention of the creatures; they turned toward him, tongues extending like so many feelers, bleached whiskers twitching, knobbed hands reaching.

“Kv—”

The horde rushed him, their hands and paws scrabbling against the dirt and stones of the cave floor.

Murtagh struck down the lead rat, but then the rest of the creatures swarmed him, snapping and clawing and lashing him with their heavy tongues. His wards flared, and his strength ebbed with alarming speed as the spells struggled to protect him.

He tried to speak, but the warm hide of a fingerrat pressed against his face, preventing him from uttering a sound. Nor could he draw in a breath.

The animals smelled of must and musk and warm dung.

Enough! He focused his will and, with his thoughts, said, Kverst!

The bodies of the fingerrats dropped from him like so many sacks of flour.

Murtagh shuddered. It would not have taken much more to deplete his immediate reserves of stamina, and then his wards would have failed in order to keep him from losing consciousness. If the fingerrats had pressed but a little harder, or if he had hesitated a few seconds longer, they would have overcome him.

A sense of satisfaction filled him as he stared at the mound of bodies. He had no love for such slaughter, but had he the time, he would have hunted down the rest of the carrion eaters and seen to it that their like never bothered another person.

More chitters sounded in the distant shadows.

But not now. He reduced the brightness of the werelight to its previous level and hurried away. Maybe the corpses of their kin would distract his inhuman pursuers, give them enough food that they would not bother following him. It was a hope.

As he trotted along, Murtagh reviewed all the animals he knew of in Alagaësia. He had never heard of such grotesque beasts. Had they a name in the ancient language, he was ignorant of it, and none of the old stories spoke of creatures of that kind.

Do they only live here, or in all the places where the Draumar worship? Was there a chance he might have encountered fingerrats somewhere beneath Gil’ead? The possibility disturbed him.

Still, he ran. And though the chitters faded, they never entirely vanished. Twice more, a fingerrat darted out of the darkness and attempted to bite him. Both times he slew the creature with a single blow from Zar’roc.

Murtagh couldn’t shake the feeling that he was trapped in a waking nightmare. The constant sounds echoing around him—and now he began to question whether some came from other creatures stalking through the underground warren—the seemingly endless tunnels, the shimmering distortions floating before his eyes, and the heat and sweat and crushing sense of presence…all of it combined to give him a pounding pressure at the back of his skull and a conviction that he couldn’t trust anything around him.

—a body of a dragon draped across the land, spikes as tall as mountains, teeth as long as towers, blood flowing like rivers across the withered plains—

He shook his head and pressed on.

Amid the chitters and moans, a new set of sounds became noticeable: a scissorlike slicing and a tiny tapping as of iron nails dancing across stone.

He froze when something large and angled ran out of a side passage and darted halfway up the curved wall of a tunnel. The thing stopped and clung there, unnaturally still.

“Naina,” Murtagh whispered, though he almost didn’t want to see whatever the creature was.

The werelight brightened to reveal…what, Murtagh didn’t know. The creature was the size of a large wolf. A very large wolf. But it more resembled an insect than any furred or feathered animal. It had four double-jointed legs with spikes at the joints, and then another set of legs—or rather, arms—held close against its narrow chest, just beneath its mouth, which was a butcher’s collection of cutting blades. Similarly, the arms ended in razor-sharp pincers, and the creature opened and closed them with the same slicing sound Murtagh had heard moments before. Flat, tick-like head, segmented body, jagged limbs: all of them were clad in black plates of naturally grown armor, no different from a beetle’s shell. The creature had no eyes to speak of: only a double row of pits—no bigger than seeds—along both sides of its head.

The monstrosity looked as if it were made out of sawtoothed lengths of shadow welded into an unlovely whole that reminded Murtagh entirely too much of a spider.