“You have come to Malduanan, fool!” it croaked through its cruel beak. “Malduanan will drink your blood!”
Dennis ran the index finger of his left hand across the flat of his blade as he advanced, reminding himself of the sword’s hard reality and the battle it had fought for him.
“Your brother’s a stinking corpse!” he shouted. “I’ll kill you too!”
His body fluttered with anticipation and fear of failure, but all the aches and reminders of his previous fight were gone.
This was what he needed. This was what would make him forget his anger at the folk of Rakastava who had sent him to die.
This is what would make him forget the touch of Aria on his body and the way he felt as he watched her take off her clothing in the mirror.
“I’ll kill you!” Dennis shouted as he lunged.
Then he nearly died.
Malduanan was bigger than Malbawn. Standing on its hind legs, it was easily twice as tall as the youth. As Dennis thrust, the creature toppled forward, letting gravity move its mass faster than Dennis expected muscle power to do.
Dennis shifted back expertly, a swordsman again and not a boy randy with the thought of a naked woman more lovely than he had ever dreamed flesh could look. He blocked Malduanan’s right foreleg with his sword near the guard where the metal was thickest—and still the blade notched like a furrow before the plowshare.
Malduanan’s left foreleg struck from the other side. Its pincers closed over the youth’s ribs hard enough to slice flesh to the bone as they gripped.
Dennis screamed and cut over his own back. Luck aided skill. The sword cracked the horny integument at the joint which permitted the pincers to move in their plates of armor.
Malduanan wheezed foul air over Dennis and jerked away, lifting the injured limb high. The single blade of the pincers sagged at an angle.
The youth staggered several paces backward. He was breathing in quick, shallow puffs because it hurt to expand his chest fully. He thought a rib must be cracked. He was bleeding all over that side of his tunic, though the tough fabric itself hadn’t been cut.
Malduanan balanced his weight on the middle pair of legs, a maneuver that Malbawn had never attempted. Dennis panted, wondering whether or not he dared dart in again. He wouldn’t know how much the pain handicapped him until a sudden stitch cost him his balance and he fell—
Malduanan’s hind pair of legs flung a loop of silk at Dennis.
The youth started to parry it the way he would a swordstroke—but he saw the sun gleaming on beads of adhesive just in time and slashed his sword away.
The creature moved toward him on its four forward legs. Their jointed scissoring seemed leisurely, but the legs were so long that they covered the ground as fast as Dennis could back-pedal.
His heel turned. Another loop arched toward him on a glistening trailer from Malduanan’s spinnerets.
“Help me, Chester!” Dennis shouted as he hunched, turning his misstep into a diving thrust. His whole body was in line with the three-foot blade of the Founder’s Sword when its point sliced into the knee joint of Malduanan’s right middle leg. One of Chester’s curving tentacles caught the forelimb whose slashing blow would have gutted Dennis like a trout had it landed as the creature intended.
Malduanan tried to flatten itself, but the joint with the sword sticking into it was jammed partway open. The creature’s body stuck at an angle to the ground, wedged by a limb that could neither fold nor help support the creature.
Dennis rolled sideways and jerked his point free. Malduanan’s damaged leg flopped loose below the wound, but the upper limb pivoted in its ball-and-socket joint with the body, as though it still carried weight. The youth curled against a pincered kick or a stab from Malduanan’s beak.
Nothing hit him. As he spun to his feet he heard the clang of the creature’s forelimb batting Chester through the air like a shuttlecock, swaddled in ribbons of silk.
There was a gouge thumb-knuckle deep in the metal where Dennis had parried the creature’s blow with his sword. The same limb had just struck Chester squarely.