The Proving of Champions, Chapter 20

The Thorgarick champion’s ears rang with unexpected silence. She felt night blind and deaf. Scrubbing out an ear with her little finger, she still heard only silence. The jungle was holding its breath.

"What?" Fleta stumbled towards Peace with Others. The colony arms were outstretched, writhing, tasting the air with its tendrils. "What is it?" When Peace did not respond, she tapped the side of his stalk where he usually formed an ear. After the ear grew, Fleta repeated her questions.

Peace’s ear became a mouth, one of his disturbing shortcuts when alternating between human senses and communication. "The beasts!" Peace with Others shouted.

"What kind?" Fleta asked.

"All kinds," Peace with Others shouted. "And the big one!"

The watchmen and women began to cry out in warning. Fleta swore, and soldiers in hammocks around her groaned and stirred.

"Take my speed,” Fleta told Peace. “Help Terrell evacuate the camp."

“Evacuate?” Peace asked. He had picked up their language quickly with the help of mind speech, but the less common words eluded the fungus.

“Get people ready to leave!” Fleta shouted as she turned, fear and anxiousness coursing through her. Stilling herself long enough for Peace with Others’ ear to vanish and his tendrils to do whatever they did when he mimicked a gift, Fleta felt blind, almost like she was falling and didn’t know it. The odor of rotten meat and mold that grows on old food surged through the air in a putrid updraft.

Peace disappeared into Terrel’s tent, and Fleta pulled Alexei from his sheath. The roar of the tarasque smashed the silence. Fleta stumbled. Leaves and twigs pelted the camp. The trees groaned. Then, an unearthly riot of noise exploded in the darkness off the eastern side of the camp, a berzerk unison of roaring, hissing, and hooting. Whatever the colonies had done the night they attacked the Thorgaricks, this tarasque, the sum of all sins, was done on a colossal scale.

The watchers lit the campfires, shedding a feeble orange light on a maw more giant than the camp, only 50 feet below. Some fired bootless bolts that bounced off colossal teeth and lips or got lost in the darkness between them. The howling of creatures rang ever closer; they would tear through the camp as they had to the Thorgaricks… or the Undoras.

“Hold!” zipped to Esmond. “You can’t hurt it. Save your bolts for the creatures coming from the east.” She watched Peace with others zipped through the tents and hammocks, rousing soldiers, pushing them out of the hammock if necessary, not stopping for an explanation. “Hereward, your soldiers need you!” She shouted.

Fleta wanted to run to the edge of the net, to dash down a branch to ward off the attack and save the camp, but she would only block one line of attack. She walked across the net. She swung Alexei to loosen her shoulders, and his lullaby tiptoed interhead unbidden. What did the camp need? Time. She had to give them time by covering multiple angles of attack. She could do that; she was fast. She had to slay dozens of beasts. Alexei knew how to do that. All she had was to deliver him to the right places.

The crunch of bark under claw and hoof and stranger limbs grew into a rumble, shaking the enormous branches that held the camp netting. The howls deepened and echoed. The darkness writhed, and then the hooded spotlight lanterns of the watchers flashed with the crawling of giant furry bugs, scaled wolves, and winged serpents. A horned owl dived at the camp while the watchmen reloaded. Alexei shot upwards, the grip extending until he was a glaive that skewered the owl, intestines spilling on Fleta as she sputtered in surprise.

The watchmen fired again. Fleta recognized the panicked figure of Leana.

"There's no way we can hold them!" shouted Leanna.

"Find—” Fleta cleared her throat and spit out some gore. “Find Hereward and fall back,” Fleta said. Leanna stood aghast at the champion's bloody face. “I’ll stop the creatures climbing towards the net from the east. Ask Hereward how to cover the rest.”

Did she, even for a moment, believe that she could stop that darkness writhing with rabid chimera? Was this the right call? Her stomach was in her throat, and she couldn’t tell the cold sweat from the warm blood dripping down her face. Yet Alexei buzzed with excitement in her hands. She didn’t need to know if she could. She just had to get Alexei to where he needed to be.

A chest-sized ape fist almost closed around Fleta when Alexei sailed through its arm and dove into its stomach. She felt her steps slide, and then they began to glide, and Alexei beheaded a winged serpent, then perforated a giant armored bug repeatedly—and once more—until it curled up and rolled off the edge of the net.

The gore-covered glaive clave into cat and wolf, bear and bat, steer and lizard and slavering rat, driving them both onto the anchoring branch and into the mass of stampeding chimera, slicing the beasts and felling them into the void below. Fleta began to excise the writhing monsters from the shadows of the branches, zipping to where the camp’s netting anchored another branch, disemboweling and dismembering and beheading raging chimera, when she saw a raging elephant with claws charge onto the netting from a third branch. The netting bowed like a trampoline under a monstrous beast.

Fleta struggled with Alexei, who dove again and again into the flesh of the swarming, howling predators.

“Alexei, the other eastern branch!" Fleta shouted, and they flew back over netting. The elephant was almost upon a half-dressed Valcot when its right paw sliced through the netting, causing the creatures to stumble and roll over the Valcott. Alexei buried his blade in its heart. 

Fleta was already pulling the bone falchion-glaive, running up the depression caused by the carcasses of the elephant beast, running towards the teeming masses of shadow monsters spilling onto the netting from the first branch. Fleta danced with Alexei between the three branches, sending claw and tooth, beak, fur and scale into the wash of blackness below, with barely any resistance. The chimera ceased to be flesh and blood but became figments and phantoms, and the flow between charge and stance, strike and guard was a whirling dance of shadow puppets. Fleta heard the firing of ballistae behind her, the shouts of soldiers, but could not afford to stop or stumble. Terrell could think for the camp, Alexei could fight for Fleta, and Fleta would be on his legs.

The darkness below her snapped shut with a bone-shaking collision. Fleta crashed out of her battle reverie as teeth larger than her, barely lit by the dim lantern light above, opened into the enormous pit of a mouth. The tarasque stood below, devouring all the beasts that Fleta killed before they could reach the net; a feast for a creature so large it could barely sustain itself hunting creature by creature. A feast that might maintain it for longer than the half-hour battle they had prepared for earlier that day. Her mind spun momentarily before Alexei cut a striking serpent out of the air, inches from her face.

Right, her job. Deliver Alexei to where he was needed so he could give the camp time. Simple. The tarasque was not yet eating them; it would have to wait for later.