“Fought cockatrices, yes, and other poison beasts. I wouldn’t call this”—he waved a hand at the ruin, and her—“a familiar experience.”
“Variety broadens the mind. Ready?”
Yes, said Gerant.
Amris saluted with the hand not holding the cloth, then drew his sword and sank behind the dome.
The cockatrice bent its head, plucking a final shred or two from the remains of its prey. The curve of the thick neck was like a column of dirty smoke on a windy day: burning far less cleanly than a wood fire and less honorably than a cremation ground. Darya drew back the arrow and then loosed.
Join hands.
As the string snapped against her glove, she was grabbing another arrow, not bothering to look where the first had gone. She knew it would hit. She also knew it wouldn’t kill the thing. The scales on a cockatrice were as good as armor or better, and she was no longbowman of Myrias, whose arrows could punch through shields. Her bow was small and portable, made for hunting of all sorts.
Her arrows would hurt, and they would annoy, and cockatrices, like everything the Traitor God had made, gave in easily to their anger. That was what Darya counted on.
Corners cross.
Another arrow, and the monster rose shrieking into the air, spotted the source of its pain, and dove at the speck that stood by the dome, clear and dark against the pale stone. Its wings beat the air, shedding gray-black feathers onto the rock below, and its leprous beak opened wide, showing yellowing teeth that no real bird had ever grown.
Lead down.
The cloud that poured out was a sickly pink with green undertones, like rotting flesh. It flowed over Darya, and while it didn’t hurt her to breathe, still the burning-hair scent of it turned her stomach. She swallowed and tensed, ready, and the cockatrice dove closer, thinking to finish off its prey. More feathers fell around her. She saw the edges of the monster’s scales and the malice in its tiny pink eyes.
Balance and swing, circle and close.
Darya leapt, up and forward in a neat arc. With one gloved hand, she grabbed the cockatrice by its comb. That gave her a grip and something to push against. She pulled her sword back, twisted her hips for more power behind the blow, and then thrust straight for the thing’s chief artery.
Her sword went an inch into the cockatrice’s neck, then met solid steel.
The impact screamed all the way up Darya’s arm, rattling her bones and numbing her hand. She clutched her sword harder, compensating for her body’s wish to do the opposite, but that was all she could make the arm do, and the cockatrice whipped its head sideways, trying to throw her off into the abyss of ruined buildings below.
“No,” she snarled, and sunk her fingers harder into its flesh. Up close now, she could see patches of scales and skin peeling away from its neck, revealing metal beneath, and she would have asked several questions had she not been preoccupied with survival.
The cockatrice was hard to grip, though. The comb slid between her fingers, half-rotten. It was not what Gerant would have called a tenable situation. Darya could feel his magic working desperately, increasing her shields as much as he could—which might still not be nearly enough to let her survive the kind of fall that waited to her left.
When the neck whipped to the right, Darya held her breath and jumped again.
She landed hard against one of the broken walls and managed to jerk her sword up in front of her. It seemed to weigh twice as much as normal, but she slashed out as the cockatrice tried to grab her with one of its foul yellow claws, and the steel bit deep. Yellow blood came oozing out. The cockatrice shrieked again and retracted the claw—then grabbed Darya from behind with its tail, pinning her arms to her sides.
It started to lift her into the air, and squeezed her in the process. Darya’s ribs creaked under the pressure, but that was far from her main concern. She could just swing herself far enough forward to kick its body, and did so desperately, putting all her weight behind the blow and aiming at the place where its wings joined to its back.
The hit was a solid one, but the cockatrice’s reaction seemed all out of proportion. It reared its head back and howled, releasing its hold on Darya. She fell to the stone, able to control her impact more this time, and puzzled until she saw Amris, raising his sword for another blow at the monster’s wing.
As he made contact, Darya darted around him, moving as fast as the cockatrice could swivel its neck. Face-to-face, she snarled an oath as she stabbed again, aiming for a spot under which she was pretty sure there was no metal.
Her blade thrust smoothly, almost neatly, into the cockatrice’s right eye. Darya stepped forward, driving the sword in and easily dodging the snapping beak now that the creature was half-blind. Another cloud of poison, that one a last desperate measure, surrounded her; she ignored it, hoped Amris had gotten his cloth up in time, and kept going, breaking through eye and brain until the tip of her sword lodged against the cockatrice’s skull and yellow ichor was oozing out onto her shoes.
Then, with a quick backward roll, she withdrew her blade. The cockatrice pulled back as well, but feebly: the last twitching responses it could muster before death. The wings beat a few times, and then it fell with a thump that rattled the whole building.
* * *
After the shaking had passed, when Amris was certain the dome was in no danger of collapsing on his head or Darya’s, he rose from his crouch and cleaned cockatrice blood from his sword. He had missed no part of that; the stuff was glutinous and as putrid as the creature from which it had flowed.
“Have they grown thicker scales, all of a sudden?” he asked.
Walking toward the fallen cockatrice, Darya shook her head. “No. It was metal. Watch.”
There were few things Amris would have liked less, but for the sake of information, he paid attention as Darya slit open the flesh of the cockatrice’s throat, then, with puckered lips and held breath, peeled back the meat and the skin to show iron. It hadn’t even rusted.
“By the gods,” he breathed.
After the moment of faraway-looking silence, which he’d learned meant she was listening to Gerant, Darya said, “Growing flesh around metal is beyond anything the wizards have ever heard of.”
“See how far it goes. If you wouldn’t mind,” he added, pulling himself back before he could slip into old habits. The woman wasn’t one of his soldiers. “I would, but the blood is poisonous as well, or was in my day.”
“Oh, good things never change.”
She began to strip meat from the monster’s neck with the swift, economical movements of a skilled butcher. Halfway through, she added, “Thank you for stepping in back there.”
“It was the least I could do.” He watched her work. “Have you been all your life with the Order?”