2
Fletcher scrambled back, dragging his mother with him. They pressed against Lysander’s side with the others, but they were still no more than a few feet from the water – and the humped shapes lurking beneath the surface.
‘Where did they come from?’ Cress gasped, drawing her seax from its scabbard.
‘They must have sensed the Zaratan,’ Sylva said. ‘Sobeks prey on smaller ones like ours.’
The shell shook beneath them, and Fletcher saw that they had stopped their slow passage down the waterway. There was a splash as the nearest Sobek thrashed its tail with excitement. They had their prey cornered.
‘Our ride’s going to dive,’ Othello warned, struggling on to his knees. ‘Has Lysander recovered? He’ll drown!’
Another tremor rocked them, but they didn’t sink. Instead the Zaratan held its ground, even as the Sobeks began to circle, their ridged, leathery backs barely breaking the surface.
‘Why isn’t it diving?’ Fletcher murmured. He peered into the water and the golden eyes of the Zaratan stared back at him.
‘It’s … protecting us,’ he whispered. ‘It knows we’d die in the water.’
‘Well, it’ll just die with us if we don’t do something,’ Sylva snarled, tugging her bow from her shoulders. She reached for an arrow, but her quiver was empty, its contents lost to the swamp.
A Sobek lunged at the Zaratan. The turtle demon jerked, dipping his shell to one side, and Lysander slid down the surface. He struggled weakly to climb back up, but as he clawed at the gentle incline, the nearest Sobeks saw their chance. The water foamed white as two separated from the pack, their thick tails lashing back and forth as they homed in on the powerless Griffin. The others hung back: they were more patient than their siblings.
‘No!’ Fletcher yelled, drawing his khopesh and leaping over Lysander’s inert body. Sylva followed, her curved falx held high as the two monsters sped towards them. Yellow-green eyes flashed, then the first leaped from the water. It crouched low on its two legs and scraped its claws along the shell, leaving furrows in the algae coating. The long snout opened, revealing a cavernous yellow mouth filled with jagged teeth.
It lashed out, so fast that Fletcher barely had time to parry it, meeting the five sickle-shaped claws in the curve of his khopesh. The power in the Sobek’s arms was immense and Fletcher could barely keep the needlepoints from hooking into his face. He heaved his sword with both hands, in desperation.
The demon’s second arm swung up, and only a frantic swipe from Sylva’s falx deflected the blow. Even as she did so, the other Sobek sprang from the water and she had to turn and meet it.
Teeth snapped over Fletcher’s blade, forcing him to lean back, teetering on the slippery coating of the shell. Then the Sobek broke away and spun low. Its heavy tail whipped around, knocking Fletcher’s feet from under him. His head cracked against the shell beneath, and his vision bruised. The khopesh fell from his nerveless fingers.
The yellow jaws of the Sobek flashed down, but even as its hot breath wafted over him, a ball of flame blasted the demon into the water, leaving the scent of scorched flesh in Fletcher’s nostrils.
Ignatius had come to the rescue.
In his concussed haze, Fletcher scrambled to his knees and saw Othello, Cress and Sylva advance together, hacking and parrying the remaining Sobek. Seeing its partner defeated, it dived back in with an angry bellow, leaving the trio panting by the water’s edge.
‘We can’t fight them all,’ Fletcher gasped, snatching back his khopesh as Ignatius scampered on to his shoulder. Athena remained with his mother, keeping the confused woman from leaving the relative safety of the centre of the shell.
The burned Sobek seemed none the worse for Ignatius’s attack, but it slipped away into the network of trees opposite them. Its retreat did not deter the others – already they were circling closer, perhaps encouraged by the pitiful resistance from the stranded team. It would not be long now.
‘Fire won’t work, not in the water, anyway,’ Othello wheezed. ‘Kinetic blasts won’t do it either.’
‘Lightning,’ Cress said, and suddenly Tosk was on her shoulder, his furry tail crackling with electric sparks.
‘No,’ Fletcher shouted, holding up his hand. ‘The spell would fan out in the water and hit the Zaratan too. We’ll sink.’
‘We can cross that bridge when we come to it,’ Cress replied. ‘It’s the only spell that’ll work.’
‘Don’t waste your mana,’ Sylva said, gesturing at the circling Sobeks. ‘It won’t be powerful enough to kill them all.’
Lysander groaned behind them, fighting the vestiges of the paralytic poison. A level-ten Griffin battling beside them might help even the odds, but Lysander was barely able to crawl up the gentle incline of the shell.
Another Sobek broke from the pack, gliding closer to test their defences. There was a spray of water as a webbed foot erupted from the river, sending the reptile tumbling in the air. It splashed back down in a deluge, floundering, half-stunned among its brethren. The Zaratan was fighting back.
‘Think,’ Fletcher muttered to himself. He ran through the spells he knew. Shield spells were useless against demons; the demonic energy tore through them like rice paper. There were spells to numb pain, open and close locks, pull moisture from the air. Spells that amplified and deadened sound, spells that allowed the caster to detect nearby movement. All useless.
But then, as he stared out at the marshes around him, he remembered another swamp, back in the orc jungles. And Malik, testing Jeffrey’s ice spell on its inky pools, turning the black water into solid ice. Sobeks would freeze in just the same way.
He etched in the air, trying to remember the pattern that Jeffrey had shown them. It was a complex glyph, in the shape of a snowflake.
‘Wait …’ Othello said, his eyes widening. ‘That might just work.’
The pattern sizzled, but Fletcher’s year of training in Pelt’s dungeons came to the fore, his mind easily maintaining the pulses of mana both to and through his finger. As if galvanised by the symbol’s blue light, a pack broke off from the circling Sobeks. Three of them, powering through the water in a V-shaped formation.
A bead of sweat trickled down Fletcher’s brow. His finger darted back and forth, its pad burning and freezing as the last line was formed in the air. The Sobeks were so close he could see their slitted pupils focused on him, with malevolent intent. A bolt from Cress’s crossbow whipped past his shoulder, but it missed, disappearing into the dark water with barely a ripple.
‘Fletcher, hurry!’ Sylva cried, and he felt the Zaratan shudder beneath them.
Then, as the first Sobek hurled itself out of the river, a long streak of white gusted from Fletcher’s fingers, blasting ice crystals into the water. He could feel the mana draining from him, but he redoubled his efforts, sending pulse after pulse at the approaching demons until the air was filled with a blizzard of snowflakes. It was only when half of his mana had been expended that he stopped, collapsing to his knees and panting with exertion.
Slowly, the flakes settled on the water, revealing the full extent of Fletcher’s efforts.
The Sobek hung motionless in a jagged lump of crystal, its jaws half open, claws outstretched for Fletcher’s throat. Only its tail and back legs remained uncovered, hanging limply from the back of the floating iceberg. The other two demons could be seen half submerged in the water, their bodies frozen solid, while a sheet of ice crackled and snapped around them on the swamp’s surface.
‘Bloody hell,’ Cress murmured. ‘That worked like a charm.’
‘Is the Zaratan OK?’ Fletcher asked, worried at how close he had blasted the ice spell.
As if in answer, the shell beneath them shuddered as the Zaratan began to swim. Fletcher kept the ice symbol fixed in the air, but already the remaining Sobeks were breaking away at the sight of their stricken companions, one by one at first, but soon in twos and threes as the Zaratan neared the edge of the circling pack.
Soon they were alone once again in the swamps, the silence disturbed only by the gentle rattle of tree branches, as a chill wind wafted over them. They had survived.
For now.