Head thrust forward on a sinuous neck, broad jaw open to reveal dagger fangs. Massive shoulders behind the neck, long heavily muscled arms with huge curved blades of iron strapped where hands should have been. Leaning far forward as it ran towards them on enormous hind legs, the huge tail thrust straight back for balance, the beast was suddenly in their midst.
Horses screamed. Brohl found himself to the demon’s right, almost within reach of those scything sword blades, and he stared in horror as that viper’s head snapped forward, jaws closing on the neck of a horse, closing, crunching, then tearing loose, blood spraying, its mouth still filled with meat and bone, the horse’s spine half ripping loose from the horrid gap left in the wake of those savage jaws. A blade cut in half the warlock astride that mount. The other sword slashed down, chopping through another warlock’s thigh, the saddle, then deep into the horse’s shoulder, smashing scapula, then ribs. The beast collapsed beneath the blow, as the rider-the severed stump of his leg gushing blood-pitched over, balanced for a moment on the one stirrup, then sprawled to land on the ground, even as another horse’s stamping hoof descended onto his upturned face.
The Overseer’s horse seemed to collide with something, snapping both front legs. The animal’s plunging fall threw Brohl over its head. He struck, rolled, the scimitar’s blade biting into his left leg, and came to a stop facing his thrashing mount. The demon’s tail had swept into and through their path.
He saw it wheel for a return attack.
A foaming wave of sorcery rose into its path, lifting, climbing with power.
The demon vanished from Brohl’s view behind that churning wave.
Sun’s light suddenly blotted-
– the demon in the air, arcing over the crest of the K’risnan’s magic, then down, the talons of its hind feet outstretched. One closing on another warlock, pushing the head down at an impossible angle into the cup between the man’s shoulders as the demon’s weight descended-the horse crumpling beneath that overwhelming force, legs snapping like twigs. The other raking towards the K’risnan, a glancing blow that flung him from the back of his bolting horse, the claws catching the horse’s rump before it could lunge out of reach, the talons sinking deep, then tearing free a mass of meat to reveal-in a gory flash-the bones of its hips and upper legs.
The horse crashed down in a twisting fall that cracked ribs, less than three strides away from where Brohl was lying. He saw the whites of the beast’s eyes-shock and terror, death’s own spectre-