The Voice said, “Bring her here.”

The words were more clearly spoken than the mud-men’s mumblings, but the undertones made her bones feel as though they were melting. She suddenly could not force her trembling face to turn toward the source of that appalling sound.

It seemed to flay the wits right out of her mind. Please let me go please let me go let me go letmego…

The bear-man clutched her shoulders and half dragged, half lifted her to the back of the cave, a long shallow gouge in the hillside. And turned her face-to-face with the source of the Voice.

It might have been a mud-man, if bigger, taller, broader. Its shape was human enough, a head with two eyes, nose, mouth, ears—broad torso, two arms, two legs.

But its skin was not even like an animal’s, let alone a human’s. It made her think of lizards and insects and rock dust plastered together with bird lime.

It was hairless. The naked skull was faintly crested. It was quite unclothed, and seemingly unconscious of the fact; the strange lumps at its crotch didn’t look like a man’s genitals, or a woman’s either. It didn’t move right, as though it were a child’s bad clay sculpture given motion and not a breathing creature of bone and sinew and muscle.

The mud-men had animal eyes in human faces, and seemed unspeakably dangerous.

This… had human eyes in the face of a nightmare. No, no nightmare she had ever dreamed or imagined—one of Dag’s, maybe. Trapped. Tormented. And yet, for all its pain, as devoid of mercy as a stone. Or a rockslide.

It clutched her shirt, lifted her up to its face, and stared at her for a long, long moment. She was crying now, in fear beyond shame. She would deal with Dag’s rescue, yes, or anybody’s at all. She would trade back for her bandit-ravisher.

She would deal with any god listening, make any promise… letmegoletmego...

With a slow, deliberate motion, the malice lifted her skirt with its other hand, twitched her drawers down to her hips, and drew its claws up her belly.

The pain was so intense, Fawn thought for a moment that she had been gutted.

Her knees came up in an involuntary spasm, and she screamed. The sound came so tightly out of her raw throat that it turned into near silence, a rasping hiss.

She lowered her face, expecting to see blood spewing, her insides coming out.

Only four faint red lines marked the pale unbroken skin of her belly.

“Drop her!” a hoarse voice roared from her right.

The malice’s face turned, its eyes blinking slowly; Fawn turned too. The sudden release of pressure from her shirt took her utterly by surprise, and she fell to the cave floor, dirt and stones scraping her palms, then scrambled up.

Dag was in the shadows, struggling with three, no, all five of the mud-men.

One reeled backward with a slashed throat, and another closed in. Dag nearly disappeared under the grunting pile of creatures. A shuffle, a rip, Dag’s yell, and a mess of straps and wood and a flash of metal thudded violently against the cave wall. A mud-man had just torn off his arm contraption. The mud-man twisted the arm around behind Dag’s back as though trying to rip it off too.

He met her eyes. Shoved his big steel knife into the nearest mud-man as though wedging it into a tree for safekeeping, and ripped a leather pouch from around his neck, its strap snapping. “Spark! Watch this!”

She kept her eyes on it as it sailed toward her and, to her own immense surprise, caught it out of the air. She had never in her life caught—.

Another mud-man jumped on Dag.

“Stick it in!” he bellowed, going down again. “Stick it in the malice!”

Knives. The pouch had two knives. She pulled one out. It was made of bone.

Magic knives? “Which?” she cried frantically.

“Sharp end first! Anywhere!”

The malice was starting to move toward Dag. Feeling as though her head was floating three feet above her body, Fawn thrust the bone knife deeply into the thing’s thigh.

The malice turned back toward her, howling in surprise. The sound split her skull. The malice caught her by the neck, this time, and lifted her up, its hideous face contorting.

“No! No!” screamed Dag. “The other one!”

Her one hand still clutched the pouch; the other was free. She had maybe one second before the malice shook her till her neck snapped, like a kitchen boy killing a chicken. She yanked the spare bone blade out of its sheath and jammed it forward. It skittered over something, maybe a rib, then caught and went in, but only a couple of inches. The blade shattered. Oh no—!

She was falling, falling as if from a great height. The ground struck her a stunning blow. She shoved herself up once more, everything spinning around her.

Before her eyes, the malice was slumping. Bits and pieces sloughed off it like ice blowing from a roof. Its awful, keening voice went up and up and higher still, fading out yet leaving shooting pains in her ears.

And gone. In front of her feet was a pile of sour-smelling yellow dirt. The first knife, the one with the blue haft that hadn’t worked, lay before it. In her ears was silence, unless she’d just gone deaf.

No, for a scuffle began again to her right. She whirled, thinking to snatch up the knife and try to help. Its magic might have failed, but it still had an edge and a point. But the three mud-men still on their feet had stopped trying to tear the patroller apart, and instead were scrambling away, yowling. One bowled her over in its frantic flight, apparently without any destructive intent.

This time, she stayed on her hands and knees. Gasping. She had thought her body must run out of shakes in sheer exhaustion, but the supply seemed endless. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering, like someone freezing to death.

Her belly cramped.

Dag was sitting on the ground ten feet away with a staggered look on his face, legs every which way, mouth open, gasping for air just as hard as she was.

His left sleeve was ripped off, and his handless arm was bleeding from long scratches. He must have taken a blow to his face, for one eye was already tearing and swelling.

Fawn scrabbled around till her hand encountered the other knife hilt, the green one that had splintered in the malice. Where was the malice? “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I broke it.” She was sniveling now, tears and snot running down her lip from her nose. “I’m sorry…”

“What?” Dag looked up dazedly, and began to crawl toward her one-handed in strange slow hops, his left arm curled up protectively to his chest.

Fawn pointed a trembling finger. “I broke your magic knife.”

Dag stared down at the green-wrapped hilt with a disoriented look on his face, as if he was seeing it for the first time. “No… it’s all right… they’re supposed to do that. They break like that when they work. When they teach the malice how to die.”

“What?”

“Malices are immortal. They cannot die. If you tore that body into a hundred bits, the malice’s… self, would just flee away to another hole and reassemble itself. Still knowing everything it had learned in this incarnation, and so twice as dangerous. They cannot die on their own, so you have to share a death with them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll explain more,” he wheezed, “later…” He rolled over on his back, hair sweaty and wild; dilated eyes, the color of sassafras tea in the shadows, looking blankly upwards. “Absent gods. We did it. It’s done. You did it! What a mess. Mari will kill me. Kiss me first, though, I bet. Kiss us both.”

Fawn sat on her knees, bent over her cramps. “Why didn’t the first knife work?

What was wrong with it?”

“It wasn’t primed. I’m sorry, I didn’t think. In a hurry. A patroller would have known which was which by touch. Of course you couldn’t tell.” He rolled over on his left side and reached for the blue-hiked knife. “That one’s mine, for me someday.”