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Wary, Anhuset remained where she was. He knew her name. Had Erostis or Klanek made it to the monastery to get help? She didn't have time to question him or exchange introductions and idle conversation.
“Yes,” she said. “And if you're through having a convocation on the beach, the margrave needs our help, and Chamtivos needs to die.”
Her remarks galvanized them all into a rush toward her and the forest. Three monks remained behind while the rest raced with her through the forest toward the protected ledge where Serovek sheltered.
The found him sprawled against a tree, long legs splayed, head drooping so that his chin rested on his chest. One hand lay limply in his lap, the other by his side. Were it not for the bruises mottling his face, he'd be as pale as the moon. Even his lips had lost their color. He looked to Anhuset like a broken doll tossed aside by a bored child.
She hurried to him, skirting Chamtivos's head where it had rolled between her and the Nazim monk who accompanied her. The warlord's death mask was one of bafflement, as if wondering why his gaze looked upon such a skewed perspective. Anhuset crouched beside Serovek and pressed her fingertips against the side of his throat, trying to ignore the panicked thud of her own heart. She scowled, torn between relief and worry. His pulse thumped faintly under her touch but was unsteady. She searched his body, looking for new wounds, for blood. Her relieved sigh must have been loud because he twitched the tiniest bit.
“Anhuset,” he said on a ghost of a breath before falling silent again. His eyelids fluttered but remained closed.
“Were Chamtivos and the margrave enemies before this?” The monk had joined her, his expression puzzled and sympathetic. “We've rescued others from the warlord's clutches. Those taken hostage were never brutalized this way.”
“I don't think the two even met before the attack,” she said, gently tucking a lock of Serovek's hair behind his ear. With Chamtivos dead, they'd never know why he'd visited his malice on Serovek's body, but she could guess. Jealousy and envy made even good people ugly at times. For those like Chamtivos, murderous and petty, with a streak of madness and a thirst for power a league wide, it made them monstrous.
“I'll return with two of my brothers to help carry him to the boats. Or I can stay with him if you wish to go.” The monk gestured to the slope below them. “We could try to carry him ourselves, but it would be a slower trip, and we might injure him even more if we jostle him too much.”
Anhuset held back a wry smile, recalling the grueling climb up the same slope with an unconscious Serovek draped across her shoulders and back. “You go; I'll stay.” The monk, unburdened by fatigue and the exertions of a battle, would be much faster than she any way in rounding up his fellow monks for help. And truth be told, she needed to be here, beside this resilient warrior who'd managed to kill six men, including their leader, by himself while injured and barely able to stand. He defied every assumption she'd ever made about humans, and Anhuset was heartily glad he'd proven her wrong.
She watched the monk, who'd introduced himself as Cuama, sprint back the way they'd come. He paused long enough to snatch Chamtivos's head from the leaf pile where it landed and soon disappeared into the trees. No doubt he'd present the head to the others as proof the warlord was indeed quite dead and no longer a thorn in their side.
She didn't try to wake Serovek. As long as he still breathed and showed no outward signs of distress, she'd let him be while they waited for Cuama to return with help. She used the time to strip the dead of all their weaponry, including the knife she pulled from the archer's body. The only things she left were the pair of arrows still lodged in the back of the man Serovek had obviously used as a shield in a charge toward his enemies. She braced her foot on the corpse, using the leverage to break the arrow shafts in half. By her initial count of the hunters who'd landed on the island, she, Serovek, and the monks had dispatched all of them, but she wasn't taking any chances by leaving retrievable, repairable weaponry.
Chamtivos's headless body lay crumpled in the dirt. Anhuset poked his body with her toe. “Scum with visions of greatness but no character to achieve it. Consider yourself privileged to have died by the hand of one whose boots you weren't fit to lick.” She gave the corpse a hard shove, sending it tumbling down the slope in a flail of arms and legs before it came to a thumping stop against a big conifer. “May the scavengers eat well,” she said and turned away to head back to Serovek.
By the time Cuama returned with three more monks, Anhuset had amassed a small arsenal of looted weapons and laid Serovek on his back in a cushion of leaf fall. The monks wasted no time constructing a sledge with fallen tree limbs and a pair of cloaks to carry Serovek down to the shore. She helped them lift, then lower him into one of the boats and climbed in with him.
Dark water lapped against the boat's sides, and the vessel yawed right, then left as Cuama and two of his brothers climbed in as well to take up oars. One more monk shoved the boat away from the shore, wading deep into the lake before hoisting himself into the vessel as well. Anhuset gave the island a brief glimpse before setting her sights on the opposite shore. “Goodbye and good riddance,” she muttered.
Those same arrowing wakes that had followed Chamtivos's boats to the island now moved parallel to the monks' boats for the return trip. She now knew what created the big wake, had caught a clear glimpse of a giant sinuous body with the head and skin of an eel, a great milky eye and a double set of jaws filled with curving fangs that had clamped down on one of Chamtivos's men and dragged him beneath the water.
Anhuset didn't count that hunter as one of her kills. She'd merely dodged her attacker's charge and given him a shove that propelled him off the cliff on the island's windward side. She'd assumed he'd drown, weighted down by armor and weaponry or simply because he didn't know how to swim. The lake monster though had other ideas.
Unfortunately, it looked as though this one did as well. The wake's arrow point increased in speed and decreased in distance as it turned perpendicular and shot straight toward the boat's side. “Brace!” she called to the others, gripping Serovek with one arm while she reached for one of the looted swords with her free hand. The thing was either going to ram the boat so that it capsized and spilled its occupants into the water or breach, hurling itself down on top of them. She and Serovek had survived the predation of more than a dozen hunters. She refused to be devoured by a snake in the water when they'd just defeated one in men's clothing.
One of the monks leaned over the boat's side and plunged his hand into the water. He bellowed two words in a language Anhuset didn't understand, and two bolts of lightning forked across the water's surface to light the ripples of waves just below the surface. They illuminated a colossal shape whose length stretched far and away from the wake point. The fine hairs on Anhuset's arms rose, and her scalp tingled.
A lake monster, much like the one she'd seen earlier, only bigger, broke the surface in a towering flume of water. The creature writhed and convulsed, trapped in a net of lightning that turned its milky eyes blue, red, even lavender in its reflective arcs. The muscular body, its girth greater than a draft horse's, shivered as muscle contracted under sleek gray skin. The vicious jaws snapped together once, twice, like steel traps.
Another monk joined the first, adding his invocation, and more lightning scorched fern-like roads into the creatures hide before it plunged back into the water with a splash whose deluge threatened to swamp the boat and gave them all a thorough dousing.
Anhuset wiped her eyes and immediately checked the unconscious margrave in her arms. He sputtered once, mumbled something unintelligible, but didn't wake. She gently brushed water droplets from his cheeks and turned her attention to her companions.
Awe and admiration battled with bitterness for supremacy inside her. Warrior monks with formidable sorcerous powers. What the Kai had once possessed generations ago, what they possessed to a much lesser degree only a year earlier before the Shadow Queen of Haradis had tossed her people to ancient, voracious wolves in her bid to seize a power she could neither control nor understand.
A growl settled low in her throat. “Secmis, you vicious bitch,” she muttered in bast-Kai. “If there's any shred of you left, I hope it suffers for all of time and existence.”
The fading of the Kai and the ascendancy of humans—an inevitable future. Anhuset grieved inside even as she held a human male protectively in her arms and thanked every god whose name she knew for each breath he took.
The monks in her boat and the ones occupying the other three vessels ignored her, intent either on rowing as hard as they could for the safety of land or watching the water for any signs of more of the great eel monsters. In Anhuset's opinion, the boats couldn't reach the shore fast enough, especially after one priest pointed out the breach and plunge of serpentine humps and the wave crests and troughs not far from them.
Were she not acting as Serovek's pillow and support, she'd have been in the water with those monks pulling and pushing the boat on land. As it was, she blew out a grateful breath at the sound of the keel scraping along rock as they beached the boats and left the lake and its hungry denizens behind them.
A young acolyte remained to guard a small herd of saddled horses, bowed to their group, his gaze darting repeatedly to her as the monks eased Serovek from her embrace and out of the boat. She followed, once more taking his heavy weight into her arms so that he lay across her lap instead of the unforgiving rocks covering the beach.
She almost laughed aloud at the acolyte's wide-eyed shock when Cuama retrieved Chamtivos's head from one of the boats and shoved it into an empty satchel tied to one of the saddles. The monk tugged on the bag, testing the knot's hold. Satisfied, he patted horse's neck and approached Anhuset.
“The two of you riding pillion won't work. Hard on the horse and far too slow. And I don't think you want to risk draping him over a saddle and tying him down,” he said. Anhuset shook her head. Whatever internal injuries Serovek might have would be exacerbated by such a transport. Cuama continued. “We can construct another sled. All of our horses are trained to pull one if necessary. We'd only have to get as far as Chamtivos's camp before we can put him in the wagon with our brother Megiddo and take him to the monastery that way.” At her scowl he held up his hands in a reassuring gesture. “Those who remained at the camp have been subdued and taken prisoner. They're no longer a threat.”
