a clump of corrosive excrement that landed twenty yards from the scrambling Gonji, the monster undulated its leathery wings, twisted into a tight arc for a return engagement with its new tormentor.
Gonji reached the trees, panting, on his knees, rubbing his aching abdomen. He drew breath in hungry gulps, grimacing at the reeking stench of the beast’s waste that burned the grasses in a spreading circle nearby. He saw Simon race toward the center of the glade after his fallen sword.
The wyvern bore down on him.
“Iye,” he whispered helplessly. “Run, you fool! Run like the wind!”
Feeling desperate and helpless, he watched Simon slide on the ground, retrieve the useless steel, then launch into a mad zigzag sprint toward the nearer, eastern side of the glade, as the wyvern arched its long neck and began to spit rapid darts of lethal yellow fluid.
The samurai’s heart froze when it seemed the man had been struck. But the jet had passed him by, and with that amazing sprinting speed Gonji had seen from him once before, Simon gained the trees.
But the forest was sparse to the east. And the wyvern’s night vision was keen.
Gonji remembered the bow and quiver, ran after them, his breath regulating now. Grabbing up the weapons, he lashed the quiver to his back and ran toward the sound of the monster’s flight. In the trees: the chilling hiss of its fulsome armament.
Gonji paused to listen an instant, staring overhead, cautious both for the beast itself and the crackle of its foul excreta. With startling suddenness the wyvern barrel-rolled over his concealed position. Gooseflesh flared over his body as he broke from the trees and into a smaller clearing; anything to avoid its direct flight path.
He nocked one of the shafts impregnated with worm’s venom. “Simon,” he called. “Are you hurt?”
No response.
The wyvern cried out keeningly and in a flash was nearly over him again, blotting out the gibbous moon with its tenebrous bulk.
It spotted him. Too late. It was already past when its bowels erupted in an errant dropping that melted the upper branches of a shielding pine, running down its trunk in unnatural putrefaction.
Gonji scowled. Sighting and pulling with desperate speed, he launched the poison-tipped shaft. He missed, the creature’s ponderous bulk already covered by the eastern pine-peaks.
“Cholera,” he swore, slapping his thigh in frustration. He rubbed his sore abdomen, fought back a mild nausea. Drew another arrow and began to run deeper into the intermittent bower, his sashed swords scraping through the brush.
“Simon,” he spat in a growling whisper. Still no answer. He could hear the wyvern’s wind-rush low over the treetops, but its position was lost to him.
A brook trickled through a delve on his left, the trees thinning more now. Thoughts whirling, heart racing, Gonji sprinted along the bank where a stand of oaks lent partial cover, though the farther bank lay bare to the raining death from the skies. At the eastern end of the brook the enormous trunk of a fallen oak, split by lightning, bridged the delve at head height.
“Skreeee!”
Gonji leapt about, saw Mord’s shining black eyes in the antlered head that careened down with a vengeance. The jaws gaped as it sailed in, slowing to aim, neck poised. It hawked a hissing stream of saliva. Gonji was on the move, cutting, jigging, gurgling with the frantic effort, a clothyard shaft nocked on the run.
The wyvern slowed to a flapping hover, short yapping barks aimed at the samurai as it poised its bowels to blat their filth.
Gonji pulled hard and fired as he ran—
The beast cried out in shock, the war arrow needling a wing. The same wing Gonji had penetrated once before. It flapped hard, gaining altitude, the shaft ripping free. But now...a new sensation to the sorcerer’s familiar: the worm-thing’s potent venom. Spreading, irritating, even with the arrow loosed.
The wyvern began to shriek and flap at an ungainly stroke, battling the numbness in the wing. It circled erratically, squawking its fear and wrath.
It turned, favoring the injured wing, to reengage the hated samurai, who reloaded and awaited it in the delve.
“You,” came the shout from the forest.
Gonji half-turned. “Simon?”
“Hit it again. Challenge it. Bring that bastard lower.”
Gonji could ponder his meaning but briefly as the flying demon roared down on the delve, a hundred yards off, already spewing rapid-fire jets of burning saliva. The distance closed, the scorching saliva darts blazing nearer with a tracer-effect in the bubbling stream.
Breath held in check, Gonji pulled, arced the bow downward in the time-tested Zen manner, becoming one with his bow, one with his purpose. He gritted his teeth—
A seething splash of feces between his feet in the brook—Gonji’s face a mask of open terror and revulsion—
He fired.
The creature’s shriek exploded in his ears as he flung away the bow and dove like a gymnast to roll under the oaks. Arrows spilled about him from the quiver. He looked up quickly as the cold rush of reeking wind pelted at him.
The beast had dropped down, hit the water with its raking hind claws, slogging through the stream, now, at an awkward run. Wings flapping madly, its beaked jaw twisted downward toward its underbelly, where Gonji’s thirteen-fist armor-piercer arrow had sunk to half the length of its stole. Splashing through the moon-glinted water like a downed seagull, the wyvern cried to the skies in panic to feel the swift spread of the earth elemental’s deadly venom.
Approaching the blockading tree bridge, the stamping horror increased the length of its stride, unfurling its rodent-furred wings for the great push it would need to again become airborne. It launched upward, hind-claws still gouging mud and water, lofting over the fallen oak.
As it passed the massive trunk, Simon Sardonis broke from concealment in the forest and bounded up the oaken bridge and onto its back with an eye-popping leap.
Gonji shouted in wild glee to see the bold maneuver. Laughing with battle frenzy, the samurai scooped up his arrows and dashed down to the brook. He grabbed up the bow again to sprint after the nightmare struggle. For an instant he lost sight of the fray, cursing in frustration. Then he passed under the oak and picked up speed along the bank, the forest again yielding up snatches of the battle to his fevered vision.
Simon straddled the wyvern’s serpentine neck as it labored to gain height. He struck repeatedly with his blade, slashing it open so that inky fluid sprayed in the wind. It shrilled in pain. When it coiled about to spit or snap at him with its razor-sharp, chitinous beak, he would cling close and stab at an eye or at its soft throat glands, which bulged behind its lower jaw.
They floated ponderously through the groping branches, only the creature’s frenzied wing-lashes keeping them aloft. It craned its head sharply and hissed at Simon. Its barbed tail whipped forward wickedly but could not reach him.
There came a fierce snap as the man’s steel struck full force against the familiar’s beak, splintering it. Squalling in pain, it lost its concentration, and its left wing tore through an ensnaring pine, skewing the beast and its unwanted rider groundward.
Tearing over the rugged terrain fifty yards behind, Gonji howled in bloodlust to see the object of his hatred and shame brought to earth. Sweat poured into his burning eyes as he pounded to catch up.
The beast ripped out of a pine thicket and into another small clearing beyond. Still Simon clung fast, climbing to its antlers now, slashing with the aroused fury of a starved mountain cat.
The wyvern leapt and bounded about the glade, the trees imprisoning it with its turnabout prey. Blatted clumps of searing excrement splattered the ground.
The monster shrieked its terror into the wind.
Gonji nocked