He was on his back. The creature was twenty feet away, patting at the gash in its belly and roaring like the fall of a giant tree. There was blood on its fangs, speckling the froth bubbling across the broad lips.
Old Nathan couldn’t see out of one eye and his hands were empty. He sat up and only then realized how much his shoulders hurt. The ape’s claws had raked furrows across him before the creature flung the cunning man away.
He wiped his left eye with the back of his hand, then blinked. That cleared enough blood from the eyesocket that his vision, though dim, was binocular again. He needed the depth perception of two eyes. . . .
The jackknife, slimed with a greenish fluid that was not blood, lay beside his right hand. The ichor crusted and turned black where it touched the silver set into one bone scale.
Old Nathan picked up the knife. The tacky ichor would give him a better grip. Despite dazzling flashes of pain, he got to his feet before the monster started toward him again.
The ape bellowed and spread both arms. There was blood on the creature’s foreclaws also. Old Nathan stumbled when he tried to leap forward. That worked to his advantage, because his opponent’s great hands clapped together above the cunning man so that he was free to stab home again within an inch of the first wound.
This time the sound the ape made was more a scream than a bellow. It drove its clawed fingers into Old Nathan’s sides like the tines of a flesh fork lifting meat to the fire. The cunning man shouted hoarsely, but he used the twisting power of the ape’s own arms to tear the blade through rib cartilage that would have daunted mere human strength.
The creature flung Old Nathan over its head. For a moment the cunning man twisted in a kaleidoscope of yellow sky and gray stone, picked out occasionally by the sight of one of his own flailing limbs.
He hit the lava on his left side. His hip and hand took the initial impact, but his head struck also.
Old Nathan lay on the rock. He saw two apes turn toward him, but one image was only a faint ghost. The flap of skin torn from his forehead had almost bled his right eye closed again.
The creature’s mouth was open. The cunning man could not hear the sounds directly, but he felt the lava tremble beneath him.
He sat up. The tear in the ape’s belly was the size of a man’s head. Coils of intestine dangled from the opening, and the fur of the creature’s groin and upper thighs was matted by sour green ichor.
The ape lowered its forelimbs and knuckled toward its opponent.
Old Nathan found the knife beside him. The main blade had broken off at the bolsters when it struck the lava. He tried to open the smaller blade and found that his left hand had no feeling or movement.
The cunning man’s vision cleared, though it remained two dimensional. He could hear the monster roar.
He gripped the jigged bone scales of the knife in his teeth and snicked out the smaller blade with his right thumb. When Old Nathan took the knife from his mouth, the taste of the monster’s body fluids remained on his lips, but that could not be allowed to matter any more than the pain did.
The tiny blade winked in the jaundiced light. Old Nathan had honed its edge too fine to make a weapon, but it would serve until it broke.
“C’mon, thin,” he whispered as he tried to lurch to his feet. His left leg would not support him. He fell back.
C’mon, ye ole fool. . . .
Old Nathan began to crawl forward on his hands and knees. The crystalline surface of the lava was bright with blood that leaked through his abraded skin.
The ape rose onto its hind legs again. It was trying to stuff loops of gut back into its belly, but each handful squeezed additional coils out of the knife-cut opening.
“. . . whar ye b’long,” Old Nathan whispered through the slime coating his lips. He had no peripheral vision. He could see nothing but the figure of the ape standing gray against the lighter gray background of a fumarole, and the edges of even that image were blurred and drawing inward.