Flour streamed onto the earth. Hugh was speaking words she did not recognize or understand, and as night and monsters crashed over them, the thread of flour met itself and between one heartbeat and the next the men and horses huddled inside vanished.
She screamed, choked, wept. Moaned.
A breath of stinking cold horrible air rushed past her, soaking her in a chill that stabbed all the way to the bone. Death! Death! She wet herself, but the hot urine soaking her leg jarred her wits into life. Darkness swept down as on a gale, and she fled, running as the horse had, but tripped over her own feet and hit herself hard. Elbows bled. She scrambled forward as a dark shape skimmed over her.
The horse had run itself into a corner. Kicking, it lashed out at the creature. Her vision hazed. The horse screamed as a black pillar engulfed it.
Sparks spit golden above her. An arrow fletched with a shimmering tail pierced the creature, and it vanished with a loud snap. Bones rattled to earth where the horse had been. Its flesh had been flensed and consumed. She scrabbled forward as another thing swirled into view above her. Its cold presence burned her. She sobbed. A second arrow bloomed as a splash of brilliance in the heart of shadow. With a hiss, it snapped out of existence.
The hardest thing she had ever done was in that moment to look back over her shoulder. Better not to see what would devour her, but she had to know. A haze of mist marked the spell in which Hugh had contained his retinue. Most of the galla swarmed about it, as if confused. Bells tolled in her ears. She choked on bile. She got to her knees and crawled, thinking she might not draw their attention if she remained low to the ground.
A third hiss, followed in a steady measure by two more; nothing careless, not in Theodore’s aim. She reached the scattering of steaming bones and fell among them. The clatter resounded into the heavens. A sixth bright arrow burned, and a seventh.
“Eight. Nine,” she whispered, pressed among the bones, hoping death would shield her.
Hugh of Austra. So it murmured as it circled the sealed earth, seeking its prey but confused by the mist that concealed him. An arrow blossomed in darkness off to her right. With a snap and a roar of brilliance the tenth flicked out. A line like silver wire spun in an eddy of air before drifting to the ground.
If the galla had intelligence beyond that of hunting hounds, she could not see it in them.