Page 38 of Sightwitch
I shoved off once more, picking up speed with each step, even as the wyrms’ shrieks pierced louder.
If the Rook could just keep that wyrm from crossing the ceiling for a few more moments, then we could reach the doorway.
So long as the ones behind us didn’t catch up.
As if on cue, the wyrms’ screams broke off and the man called, “Weren’t there two wyrms behind us?”
Oh, blighter.
“There was definitely a wyrm behind us,” he went on, but I didn’t make the mistake of looking back this time. If one wyrm was gone, then maybe that was a good thing.
Besides, the doorway was closing in. I could make out individual planks in the wood, and there at eye level was a slot for my knife.
Fifty paces and we would reach it.
Of course, the ledge on which we raced was also narrowing with each pounding step. Worse, the wyrm on the ceiling now scuttled toward us.
It was right as I groped the knife from its sheath—forty paces, only forty paces—that the earlier shadow wyrm catapulted from the ravine beside me.
All light winked out. In the space between one moment and the next, the world shrank down to me, the wyrm, and the sense of endless free fall.
This close, I could see what the creature truly was: a skeleton of black speckled with embers, as if bones had been dropped into a fire and left to burn. Smoke coiled off it in vast, eternal plumes of frozen darkness.
Then the sense of free fall hitched higher because I actuallywasfalling.
Found in only the deepest, darkest places of the Witchlands, shadow wyrms are creatures of the Void. Few have entered their lairs and lived to tell the tale.
Something clamped—hard—onto my shoulders, and my fall ended as suddenly as it began. At first I thought the wyrm had reached me, had bitten.
Then I realized I was dangling, the ice wall at my back and a long,longdrop before me. At my side, the wyrm still clambered upward.
Cold scored off it in vicious, mind-numbing waves.
I had no time to find out where it aimed before a strained voice called down, “I’m sorry! I know you told me not to touch you, but it was life or death—”
“HAUL ME UP,” I screeched. The shadow wyrm had not yet changed its course, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t.
“About … that,” the man panted, blocked from view by my pack, “with your bag and my angle … I’m not sure I can.” As if to prove the point, he jolted forward.
And I jerked down.
“Sorry,” the man called, his voice muffled by a steady boom that now drummed through the ice and stone. “The wyrms are … fighting each other … and … they’re tumbling this way.”
I had no choice—though fool that I am, I tried to think of some other way. This pack was all I had to sustain me. It was all I had left of the surface. Without it, I was truly on my own.
Another drop downward, and the man’s face appeared above the pack. Which meant he was about to fall.
That was it, then. This was my path and I had to stay firmly gripped upon it.
I wriggled free from the pack. One strap, two, and it was off. I had just enough time to watch the bag plummet downward—so,sofar—before my vision wrenched upward and ice scraped across my back.
Something cracked against my belt before I reached the ledge, where the Nubrevnan helped me to my feet. He was panting, I was panting, but as one, we launched into a sprint—and just in time, for one of the wyrms was angling back toward us, emitting a scream that sent my vision whirling.
I had to keep one hand flat against the ice as I ran, not caring that the cold sliced.
Those screams that were not screams were getting closer, and the stone beneath me trembled.
Twenty paces shrank to ten shrank to five.
