The Carnelian Throne by Janet Morris Page A

skin. The wave surged close behind. A shuddering racked him. When it was gone, he pushed the youngling away, and uncurled himself to stand straight before the glowering Chayin, in whose unwavering extended grasp was a white-bladed knife.
    A ptaiss roared, a cough answered, and a high-pitched cry silenced both.
    “I cannot lift weapons against the ptaiss,” Deilcrit got out. “It is not ... not possible. Please ...” His arms, of their own accord, stretched out to encompass the fire, the clearing, the denser shadows of forest cushioning the moonless night. “I cannot.”
    Chayin, with a shrug, flipped the knife and cast it between Deilcrit’s feet. Then he turned his back and joined his companions.
    Silently the three walked to a stretch of level ground, and there, halfway between fire and slope, formed a triangle, back to back. Their alien weapons gleamed. Sereth spoke tersely, very low, and Chayin grunted an assent. And then they stood like statues, unmoving, for an instant.
    Even as Deilcrit bent to still the ptaissling’s sudden bleat, even as the knife jumped of its own accord into his fist and every vestige of his composure fled, the black forest exploded. Into the light leaped and bounded and flapped the wehrs. Ptaiss predominated, and their roars, deafening, were only a background for more terrible cries. A wall of diverse creatures erupted out of the dark.
    Deilcrit had no time to survey them, only a moment for the incredulity of their numbers to sink in, and then a spirit-white ptaiss was upon him. Blindly, his face contorted so that his teeth lay bare, screaming without knowing that he did, Deilcrit stabbed about him. No law, no question of submission stayed his furious thrusts, though he had knelt a hundred times while the wehrs passed ravening among the folk of Benegua, striking dead whom they chose. This time his palms lay not on the ground with his forehead upon them. In one fist he grasped a ptaiss’ ear, in the other the blade that tore again and again into the beast’s belly. The claws of one forepaw raked the ground by his head as the awful weight bore him down; its mates sank deep into his right shoulder and scraped bone. Up into its vitals, again and again, did Deilcrit plunge his weapon. His grip on the beast’s ear slipped, and the slavering jaws thrust toward him, drenching his face in drool and spittle.
    With all his strength, he thrust his free arm down the ptaiss’ throat, gouging the soft palate with his nails. Halting momentarily in surprise, the suddenly choking creature arched its back, threw its head up, and Deilcrit’s knife hand was no longer skewered to the ground by the claws in his shoulder. He thrust the knife upward, deep into the ptaiss’ jugular, even as those hideous jaws closed upon his elbow, and the ptaiss’ frenzied convulsions snapped him up into the air. He had only enough time to drop the blade and hug the beast’s neck as it reared up, shaking its head. Gorge rose in its throat, spilled from its mouth, but the ptaiss would not release Deilcrit’s arm, now torn half from its socket. For a moment, swinging free of the ground, the whole clearing was revealed to him.
    Sereth, Chayin, and Estri, still back to back, stood amid a growing circle of corpses, over which new assailants vaulted. He saw the wing-flutter of an ossasim, its manlike body strewn uppermost on the pile. Then, as a screaming ptaiss launched itself over the barrier, Estri uttered a hoarse cry, she and Sereth both threw their weapons—he at the ptaiss and she at a tusked, long-bodied campt, and the three joined hands. Then they were gone. The campt, with a roar of pain, fell aspraddle where they had just stood; and Deilcrit’s vision went red with pain as the ptaiss jerked him to the ground. His lungs emptied, his head struck a stone. And while he hung limply, gasping, the ptaiss, fangs locked around the limb choking it, blood spurting from the gaping slash in its neck, snapped Deilcrit first to the