Free Seven Into the Bleak by Matthew Iden Page A

I felt a talon hook into the girdle of my armor. I had seen what it could do to a man and a strength born of fear filled me.
    Holding the jaws back with just one bracer and a knife, I drew the other back and plunged it into the fiend's mouth. Karn dropped his axe a fourth time, across the neck of the thing, and I tensed as it kicked and hissed in its death throes. In its spasms, the mandibles closed around my knife arm, raking bloody trails from elbow to wrist. I gasped with the pain and snatched my hand back, leaving the knife buried in the thing's mouth. Inches from the fiend's head, I watched as its eyes--filled with a savage, rudimentary intelligence--faded from red to black.
    Karn kicked the thing off me, then hauled me to my feet. Normally a jest would be in order, but he had seen Meki. Instead he took a look at the blood threading down my arm and turned.
    "Lilath," he called. "Tamik's got the damned thing's spittle all over him."
    I ignored the priestess and ran to Meki's side. With one arm hanging useless, I tried to arrange her properly, to erase the obscene posture the fiend had put her in. I was worse than useless, though, and Harlan and Galdur gently pushed me aside so they could see to it. Lilath whispered the Devotion and I felt the hot rush of new blood thrill through my arm as the healing god's power went to work on me.
    But I felt no joy. Filki, tears streaming down his face, watched helplessly as the others laid Meki's corpse--because that's what it was, a husk--aright. I glared at him throughout the healing. His eyes caught mine and he stammered an apology.
    "Gods damn you, Filki," I said, my voice thick. "It heard the songs. It heard the thrice-damned songs through the rock and just waited."
    "I'm so sorry, Tamik," he said. He was a gentle soul, a lover of life that had no business seeking his fortune a mile underneath the grass.
    "If you sing again," I said, pointing at him. "I'll cut your throat."
    Had this been any other day, any other night, any other place, any other time, one of the others--Harlan, probably, with his misplaced sense of duty and honor--would have said something to me. But none of them uttered a word. They knew I was right.
    Lilath finished her prayer and my arm was whole again. But I felt empty inside as I strode over to the fiend's carcass and, putting one boot on its mouth, reached in and tugged my knife free. I returned to my bedding and began quickly rolling it up and packing my backpack. The others watched for a moment, then turned to their own things. Harlan, looking out of place in mail and white-turned-gray surcoat meant more for a fairground tourney than a bloody cavern, gestured at Meki's body. She lay peacefully now with hands folded and eyes shut. "What of...what shall we do with Meki?"
    "Leave it," I grunted as I tightened the straps on my pack. The gold inside weighed the thing down and loosened the leather over time. "Meki's gone. That thing is bait."
    No one protested. We decamped and moved on, deeper into the Bleak, away from the blood and the bodies that would draw yet more fiends, more killers, more death. Certainly more than we could handle. In minutes, we were gone, six companions fleeing where once we had been seven.
     
    . . .
     
    We had our reasons for being there. Karn and Meki and I had the simplest of motives: treasure and adventure. It had been all we'd ever needed and served us well until we entered the Bleak. Harlan had dreams of vanquishing evil, Lilath of spreading the word of her god. Filki never had a reason for anything. Galdur was not one of us originally, but had heard tell of our exploits and came to us with a proposal. The old man lusted after the knowledge of civilizations buried by time and dirt, but needed strong arms and swords to find them.
    "There is gold to be won," he whispered to us in taverns and on market corners, in temples and in brothels. "There is evil to be stopped, there are souls to save."
    One by one, we fell to the promises he