There was nothing quite so terrifying, Balletaria realized, as seeing the fear of someone else. Shy was frozen in a feral crouch, her eyes wide, her teeth bared in the rictus snarl of a trapped animal. If there was ever an expression of fear in that savage woman, this was it, and Balletaria found it to be infectious.

  She followed Shy's gaze to the trees creaking and groaning, even in this soft wind. It was only after she saw the eyes that she realized the creaking wasn't the trees at all, but them. The noises they made were terrible. A high-pitched chittering, like a thousand dry leaves skittering across stone. The way they moved was even worse, their bodies contorted and twisted, limbs long and spindly. Their eyes, large and black, glittered in the fading light, reflecting the dying ember of the setting sun. They were not flesh and blood, or at least not the same sort of flesh she was, Balletaria realized with a surge of nausea. Their skin, a sickly green, seemed to shimmer and shift, like wet clay drying in the sun. They moved with an unsettling fluidity, their limbs contorting in unnatural ways, their bodies a grotesque parody of human form.

  "Oh, PRICK!" Balletaria cried, whipping her sword and taking a step away from the writhing, skulking tide.

  The sight of her sword only seemed to anger the horde. There was a clattering, thumping din as the creatures beat the ground and the trees around them with weapons of their own. They were crude, fashioned from bone and wood and stone. Animal skulls, tusks, and sweeping antlers shook on their twisting heads and twitching shoulders. Was it armor they wore, or was it simply part of their bodies?

  "Ladies, the best of luck to ya," said Vorga. She'd grabbed the wooden holy symbol at the top of her staff and pulled it away, revealing a keen, glittering spearhead.

  What kind of holy woman is she?

  But that hardly seemed to matter now. Just then, and maybe always in Balletaria's opinion, a woman with a spear was hells more useful than a woman with prayers.

  Not far away, Amani fumbled the bow from her shoulder, struggled to draw an arrow from her quiver, nearly dropping the thing in the dirt.

  When is she going to drop the act? When she finally fires the first arrow? When enough of us have died?

  A sickening feeling was starting to form in Balletaria's stomach, or more sickening than what she already felt. What if it wasn't an act? What if she'd had this elf-maiden pegged all wrong? Balletaria had never been so hopeful to be in the presence of a vicious assassin in all her life.

  Not much more useful was Flora, whose lips once again fluttered noiselessly, still seeming like a mad woman. Her hands were empty, clutching at her robe as though it could shield her against the clubs and spears and arrows of the creatures spitting at them from the trees. She would need more than soot spirits and a pointy hat if she wanted to live out the day. But even as she watched, she thought for a moment she saw the slightest glow about Flora's skin. There was a pressure in the air, like lightning about to strike, and the slightest shimmer to the air above her head and shoulders.

  The scrape of steel drew her eyes to Egret, who'd unshouldered her shield and gripped her mace in her fist. Balletaria would have been overjoyed to see someone who seemed to be taking the problem seriously, or who seemed appropriately prepared for it, but for the fact she blamed Egret for being in this situation in the first place. Why not tell them about the fates of her former companions? Was she that desperate for help that she would trick them into walking through a death trap?

  Balletaria's last diappointment stood baring her teeth at the creatures, for some reason refusing to draw the massive weapon wrapped in rags and strapped to her back. Is this just how the savage warriors of the jungle empires fought?

  "Shy!" she hissed through her own clinched teeth. "Do you need a written invitation? Draw your prickin' weapon!"

  Shy's head snapped towards her, a growl at her throat. For a moment, Ballitaria was sure Shy was about to draw the thing and use it on her, but she only bent to grab a thick branch the length of her arm from the ground at her feet.

  Balletaria's exasperated inquiry of what the prick Shy thought she was doing never made it past her lips. That was when they came.

  They spilled from beneath the trees towards them, an avalanche of green flesh and sharpened stones.

  Balletaria heard Flora shout something that sounded like "Caduceus!" A beam of light, quite as if the sun had decided to shine a single ray of brilliance, descended seemingly from nowhere and planted itself in the earth directly in front of the woman. With a satisfied grin on her face, Flora reached forward her hand as though to grab a hold of the light, but instead plucked from it something that gleamed and sparked with tongues of rainbow fire. It was a staff, a rod as long as Balletaria's rapier, with some kind of bauble on the end that spun with interconnected orbs and rings. No sooner had she appeared to withdraw the staff from the beam that the light extinguished, plunging the writhing forest into the weak light of dusk.

  The creatures were nearly on them now. Balletaria ducked as she heard a snap as something whipped past her head at murderous speed, and then another, cracking against the stones behind her in little shattered shards. They were bones, she realized. The little monsters were using crude leather slings to launch knuckle bones at a deadly velocity.

  Flora was laughing now. She waved the staff above her head and cried out, "lux letalis!" The staff left trails of colored fire as it passed through the air above her head, fire that turned to brilliant white barbs, javelins of the rays of dawn. With a grunt, Flora swung the staff before her, like a child swinging a stick at a ball. The staff made an almighty crack as it smashed into the barbs, sending them scattering in shards into the oncoming army.

  Many of the creatures shrieked, suddenly punched through with smoking holes that sizzled and popped.

  Balletaria did not have time to gawk at the strangeness of it. One of the creatures was on her, it's fists raising a wooden club edged with animal claws. The tip of her sword darted out, her feet carrying her back away from the reach of that awful piece of wood. The creature smashed the ground where she'd just stood sending clumps of mud and pine needles flying. Then it wavered, gurgled, and dropped its club to clutch its throat with both hands. Balletaria's deft strike had opened its windpipe to the evening air. Dark fluid seeped between its misshapen fingers, and when it opened it's mouth, all it could say was dark blood.

  But there was no time to celebrate her victory over the creature, for another had taken its place before the other could sink to its knees. This one's face was hidden beneath a bleached human skull stitched together with thongs of rawhide. It bashed her with a shield woven from willow branches, and it was her turn to taste blood on her teeth. She crumpled to the ground, nearly cut herself on her own sword as she sprang back up to her feet, and slashed under the rim of the creature's shield.

  There was no delay before the pain for this one. It howled in agony, forgetting its shield and clutching at its spilling innards with quivering hands. Balletaria watched spellbound. The stuff coming out of it wasn't guts as she knew them at all. It was mud and sopping moss and frog spawn and slick river stones. The creature squealed much like a bleeding pig, thrashing about on its knees as the detritus of the forest leaked from its insides.

  She realized the same was happening with the one whose throat she'd cut. The dark fluid leaking from between its clutching fingers and flowing over its crooked teeth had the grainy clumpiness of black river silt.

  The disquiet spirits of the earth, Amani had called them. She was wrong, Balletaria realized. They weren't of the earth. They were the earth. They were brutal, savage nature personified. They were the harshness of the wilderness, the biting cold of the wastes, the merciless fangs of the predators and the scavengers on the scent of the weak.

  In short, they were everything Balletaria hated about being in the gods-damned woods.

  She closed her fist around the grip of her sword, hissed a breath of steeled resolve past her teeth, and darted back into the melee, her blade flashing fire in the setting sun.

  **********

  The battle was a chaotic blur. Balletaria danced through the horde, her rapier a silver blur, parrying blows and repaying in kind with a practiced killer's grace. Flora, the joy on her face lit by the fire and lightning she unleashed, stood resolute amongst the goblins, giving little ground as she turned their mud-like bodies to smoking soil. Vorga was scarcely to be seen, but Shaitaan had caught glimpses of her scurrying like a rodent between friends and enemies, the tip of her spear darting out with a surgeon's precision, often turning away disaster by keeping the things from completely surrounding her allies. Egret was an instrument of precise, swift destruction. The reach of her mace described masterful arcs of death that denied any goblin passage with their bodies intact.

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  They were killers, all. That is, all except one.

  Shaitaan watched Amani tremble as she steadied the bow trembled in her hands, her arrows slipping sideways of its rest, more a danger to the archer now than to any target.

  Shaitaan wrestled a goblin whose limbs were tangled with hers in a mad grapple. The thing scrambled to find a purchase on her face with it's stone claws and teeth, but she headbutted it and wrenched it's arm from the shoulder joint with a wet pop. It thrashed and squealed on the ground, its useless arm a flopping fish tangled in a net. Shaitaan's boot stomped on its jaw, silencing it for good.

  "What are you doing?" she shouted at Amani, the pale, wide-eyed, passive witness to Shaitaan's struggle. "Why didn't you stick that thing before it grabbed me? Rekt!"

  If Amani did answer her, Shaitaan did not have a chance to hear it. Another of the monsters leaped at her, bone dagger raised. The weapon seemed fashioned from a deer's jawbone, teeth still rattling in their sockets. Shaitaan caught it by the wrist, the edge tearing a bloody notch out of the flesh of her hand. Her short kick shattered the goblin's knee, and her forearm broke its arm at the elbow, wrenching the limb around the wrong way so the dagger tumbled away. The thing had bleached antlers stitched to its head, so Shaitaan grabbed them and twisted hard. Wet pops and the snapping of branches were the sound of its neck giving way, and the thing crumpled into a tangled mess.

  Shaitaan's arms were slick to the elbows now with the black muck the things seemed to made of. They smelled of fetid swamp mud and rotting hides.

  When she looked up to yell at Amani some more, the girl had gone. A moment later, Shaitaan saw her. She was huddled at the base of a tangle of trees that had grown together, their crooked trunks making a bowl where she curled and whimpered, her bow forgotten at her feet.

  Deadly assassin? Horse piss, you are!

  There was a hollow rattle and a thumping, like the sound of the goblins, but as though coming from a long hallway. Shaitaan turned, an icy feeling forming in her guts, and she remembered the cave.

  The CAVE! We forgot about the rekt cave!

  It smoked and hissed, like a sickly dragon's mouth open and crusted with yellow stone. From deep inside, the sounds of clicking, grunting, squealing voices was becoming louder and louder, as though rising slowly from a great depth.

  She looked again at the elf, knowing she would be worse than useless here. She searched for the closest ally on which she could possibly rely. The mad woman Flora was closest, giggling as she sent her spears of deadly light burning through the woods.

  "Flora!" Shaitaan shouted, pointing her finger at the opening. "More are coming!"

  Flora nodded, her pointed had bobbing excitedly. She ran to the entrance, and this time Shaitaan could hear the words she muttered, spells of power that made the air grow dense and tremble. Flora pointed her staff at the tunnel opening, the glittering orbs and rings on its end turning and twisting with increased speed.

  "Magnus ignis!" she cried as the first glowing eyes of the goblins began to appear in the depths.

  Shaitaan saw a ball of seething light form at the tip of the staff, one that erupted into a roaring, rushing stream of fire as wide around as an old tree. The air shook with it, and Shaitaan had to hold up a hand and stumble away to keep herself from being singed. The goblin's screamed, but not for long. Flora's laugh of pure joy rose above them and the roaring flame, her face lit orange and white to nearly blinding.

  For a moment, Shaitaan began to wonder if her companions might be more of a danger to her than the creatures in this wasteland. Wild animals and bandits were threats she understood, but magic? Shaitaan had killed sorcerers before, but she didn't relish the memories. If Flora decided to incinerate her where she stood, could she stop her?

  When the flames finally died, Shaitaan suddenly became aware of another sound, a thump of heavy footsteps and a bellow like an angry ox.

  It was bigger than the other ones. Its short, stubby legs somehow supported a heaving bulk that stood a full two heads taller than Shaitaan. Tusks fashioned from the horns of some great grazing animal jutted out from a helm of shaggy rawhide. A knotted, fire-hardened club hung from its meaty fist.

  She tried to cry out, to warn Flora, but perhaps she'd been temporarily blinded by the flames she'd cast into the tunnel. Or perhaps the magic had weakened her. Or maybe she was just crap when it came to fighting. Either way, the big one was on her when she'd scarcely stopped casting the fire.

  "Fuuu—mph!" Flora called out as the tusked goblin swung a meaty fist and knocked her aside. The magus struck the rocky slope by the cave opening and crumpled to the ground, senseless.

  It was nothing more than luck the thing had not struck her with the club. Still, that luck would mean little if she'd been brained against the rocks. But Shaitaan had no time to wonder about the state of the magus. Big Tusk had just hefted his club, and the char-black end was soon swinging towards her, a blow that could crack her open like pottery.

  Shaitaan feet coiled beneath her and launched her forward. She ducked before meeting the tip of the club and slid on her side under the swing. Her hand snatched a stone from the ground as big as a fist, and she turned and hurled it just as she was coming up again to her feet.

  The blow struck Big Tusk just as it was turning to find her again, cracking against the hide-covered bridge between its barely visible eyes. The creature gave a grunt, but the blow achieved little else.

  Shaitaan snatched a branch from the ground to parry the incoming swing of the club, but she timed it badly. The tip of the club snatched the wood from her hand and spun her sideways. She barely had time to regain her balance when the thing backhanded her hard enough to send her tumbling across the forest floor.

  The forest was spinning. She raised her face from the carpet of pine needles to see Big Tusk tapping the edge of his club against its massive palm. It would reach her before she could stand, she knew. It would stand over her and bring that heavy charred wood down on top of her spine and break her like a child's toy, that is if one of the smaller, skittering, hissing goblins didn't stick her in the back first. This was the end of her, the end to Shaitaan the murderess, Shaitaan the hunter of men, Shaitaan the hated. She couldn't say it wasn't deserved. Bleeding steps, it was probably deserved ten times over.

  Her only regret was that she hadn't the courage to do it to herself sooner.

  She was suddenly aware that her hand had something in it, something she'd grabbed as she was still rolling from that last blow. It was the hilt of a sword.

  No.

  She leaped to her feet, quick as a monkey, and tried to throw the thing away, tried to hurl it to the side where it could do no harm, only her fingers would no longer obey her. They wouldn't let go.

  No, please!

  The rags that had covered it had come loose. They were uncoiling themselves, falling away like the petals of a flower, revealing the gleam of Xoactali hardened copper beneath, a blade as curved and crooked as an acrobat's spine. It was a hook of beaten metal as long as a canoe paddle, as wide as her hand, as light as moonlight. If that sword could speak it would laugh and boast and sing songs about the many lives it had already taken, and it would whisper sincere promises of what it had yet to do. It was the chosen weapon of the Empress's deadliest warrior, her champion, The Black Maw.

  "Please don't kill them!" she pleaded, "Not my friends!"

  But she could not say the words, for her mouth, her tongue, her throat were no longer her own. Icy cold spread through her limbs, which had begun to move on their own.

  "I will kill them all!" her voice answered her, and Shaitaan despaired because she knew it was true.

  **********

  The world was filled with enemies, and that was good. If there was anything she hated, it was waiting. Waiting for a battle to begin, waiting for the enemy to come, waiting to waken and begin her work, it vexed her, infuriated her, filled her with hunger and rage. And yet, as she awoke, here it was, the enemy, strolling towards her with the burned club in its hands, walking as though it was not afraid of her.

  Well, she would cure it of that notion. She would gladly instruct this big bastard in the ways of fear and pain, and finally death. It would be a superb lesson, a master's class, the only one this big bastard would ever need.

  The club swung sideways, a blow fit to shatter the bones and rupture the guts. An admirable swing, if it could land, but it hit nothing but the wind. That didn't stop it, she was glad to see. It was persistent. It would try and try again until it or she was dead, and she already knew very well which one of them it would be.

  Come on, you bloodless sack of guts! Give me everything! Give me everything and I will take everything and leave you with nothing but briefest sorrow!

  The thing swung again, but she danced through it and around it, her deft ankles and flowing warbraids flowing like the mighty rivers, swift and strong as typhoon winds, and just as impossible to catch. A big overhand blow this time, and she twirled and laughed as it threw up clods of earth with its impact into the ground.

  Another enemy appeared, a spear in its hand. She flashed it her most dazzling grin, golden fangs framed by white teeth.

  "Dance with me!" she laughed, brimming with the battlejoy now.

  She flicked out her wrist, the curved sword whipping out like liquid fire and slicing her dancing partner from hip to shoulder. Dark ooze sprayed out, flicked from the tip of the blade so it spattered across the eyes of the big tusked one. He bellowed in surprise, clutched at the gore that blinded him, and she laughed to see him thrash about in dismay.

  You cannot see. You wander, lost in the dark. But worry not, child of the earth. I am here. I will set you on the righteous path!

  The sword danced again, with a turn severing the wrist that held the burned club. With another, it opened the big bastard across his heaving stomach and spilled its own insides across its stumbling feet. It's thrashing arms could not find her, the stump of it's wrist spraying black muck across her face, her neck, her shoulders, and she delighted in the gift of its life.

  As the tusked one fell, she touched the palm of her hand to the gore that dripped from her cheek. The palm of her hand came back black. It wasn't blood, not really. She loved blood, the color of it, the coppery taste of it, but this was beautiful too. She opened her mouth, golden fangs parting like the open arms of divine grace. The flat of her tongue pressed against that black, grainy muck, and she licked it completely from the palm of her hand, relishing the earthy flavor.

  There were more of them now. They were angry. That was good. They rattled weapons, screeched threats and oaths of violence. That was good too, very good! That would make them bold, and boldness would bring them to her. For if the Black Maw hated anything, and the Black Maw hated all things, especially all things living, she hated waiting for the good work to begin.

  She turned to face them, a score or more new dance partners, and she gave them her best smile. Behind her golden grin, her tongue and the depths of her mouth were black as pitch, the very jaws of midnight.