Between Two Fires (9781101611616) by Christopher Buehlman Page B

water, but, when his slapping the water with the flat of his blade and his shouts of “Ho! Ho, there! Bring your black ass out of the water and fight me!” failed to rouse it, he ventured first one leg and then the other into the softly flowing murk. The big farmer stood near him, wide-eyed, shocked sober, his arms so tense the end of the billhook quivered.
    “Hand me that boar spear,” Thomas said. The farmer did as he was told, fetching and handing over the wickedly pointed spear. Thomas put his sword in his left hand and began to use the spear to probe the water in front of him. He jabbed at it viciously, hoping to goad the thing into surfacing. It didn’t.
    Thomas went a little farther in.
    He looked at the burned pilings, wondering if it nested down there, curling itself around them. Perhaps he should wade over there—he could use them to help him keep his head above water.
    The wind blew harder, and the rain came now, threatening to snuffthe girl’s censer, which she still swung dutifully. The priest’s Latin prayers were harder to hear.
    Thomas alternated between stabbing the water with the spear and slapping it with the sword’s flat, until it seemed to him that he was wasting his time.
    “What, you only kill mules and fishermen? You only take the legs off fishwives? Come and get me! Me!” he said, his voice cracking a little. Rain poured into his armor and down his face, making him blink. Relief that the thing didn’t want to fight him blended with shame at that relief, but then relief won out. Perhaps a few more stabs at the base of the pilings and then he could say he’d done his best. He slapped the surface of the river halfheartedly again, then began backing out of the mucky water.
    And tripped.
    He put his booted heel down on a submerged log in the mud behind him; the log slithered out from under his foot at great speed, causing him to fall into the river and hurl the sword behind him. He thrashed in the water and sputtered, getting to one knee with difficulty, cocking his spear arm.
    Part of the thing coiled through the water in front of him.
    He lunged at it with the spear, twisting his body into it with the brutality that hours in the tiltyard had made as natural for him as walking. The spear stuck deep; that lunge would have impaled one man and killed the man behind him, but this was no man. The thing coiled rapidly away from him, wrenching the spear from his grip. He stood up with great effort, the sodden chain mail trying to drag him under, and launched himself toward where the sword had fallen.
    He saw that the girl was looking for it, too, up to her thighs in dirty water, her little limbs white against the river and darker sky. She bent down fully into the water now, her face submerged as though she were hunting turtles. He tried to yell
Get back!
at her but could only cough, so he reached into the water, grabbed a fistful of her blond hair, and jerked her up and toward the bank. She had the sword by the blade, getting cut again as she fell and dropped it. He sawwhere it fell, though, and saw her clambering through the mud and up to the bank. The priest was running to fetch her. Thomas grabbed the sword and wheeled around to the river, sensing he had had his back to it for far too long a fall of seconds.
    “Watch! Watch!” the priest was yelling over the rain.
    He turned to see the thing slithering toward him just under the water, its flat, froggy head as big as two tournament shields, its obscene whiskers trailing behind it, the spear making an S pattern in the water where it was still stuck in the thick of it. It was easily twenty paces long, the water rolling over it hypnotic, almost beautiful.
    Its head broke the surface now and its whiskers flicked forward and whipped him. Thomas heard splashing to his right but ignored that, keeping his eye on the monster and bringing his sword up. It opened its mouth wider than it should have been able to, showing its sickly white inside and rows of