Frell looked at Jace with sharper eyes, plainly seeing her friend in a new light. Nyx remembered her conversation with Jace, back when she had tried on her Ascension robe, which seemed like a lifetime ago. She had told Jace that his education in the scriptorium was unique and important in its own right.
“How does that knowledge help us?” Kanthe asked, staring all around.
Jace knelt and dragged his cloak through the pool of blood and bile. “Daubing such signaling scent on our bodies could further discourage their attention, make them think we’re already afflicted.”
Kanthe nodded at this suggestion. “Why not? I’ve certainly smelled worse in the past.”
They all quickly soaked and coated the gore on cloaks, robes, breeches, and smeared the same on their cheeks. Nyx fought to hold her stomach down at the stench. Kanthe reached toward her with a befouled hand. She flinched away, but he plucked a fat worm from her shoulder, near to crawling into her hair. She frantically searched the rest of her body for any others but found none.
Once they were all finished, Frell glanced around at the horde buzzing throughout the forest. “I think the only reason we’ve not already been assaulted is the reek of this corpse. We’ll have to pray that sickly miasma carries with us long enough to cross out of their territory. Let’s go.”
They set off again through the forest as the mists thickened. The canopy of the trees vanished above them. The drone of the skriitch haunted their path. Leaves stirred with their winged passage. The mists shivered. They crept upward, step by hard-earned step.
The skriitch continued to ignore them. After a time, with her arm over her mouth and nose, Nyx spotted several of the creatures roosting in shrubs, their weight bobbing the tiny branches. More clung to gnarled trunks, nearly blending into the bark. It seemed the horde was growing exhausted.
Then something struck her upper arm.
She winced and twisted her shoulder to look. A skriitch had landed there. She froze and stared. Eight pairs of jointed legs clasped to her sleeve. Its body was broken into the same number of armored segments, while the two centermost were hinged open, bursting forth with two wings on each side, an upper and lower wing, threaded through by tiny veins. Its foremost sections reared up on her sleeve, waving fringed antennae, testing the air. It also exposed a gnashing of four mandibles. As it perched there, it breathed heavily, the segments expanding and contracting. Each breath also lifted and lowered a ridge of black spines.
She pictured those same spikes impaled in the throat of the dwarf deer.
The skriitch lowered back down and crawled up her arm. It traipsed through the bloody gore on her shoulder. It dabbled there as she held her breath—then finally leaped away and flew off.
She shivered, both in terror and relief. She found the others staring back at her, but she waved them on. Sweat soon coated all their faces, threatening to wash the smears off their cheeks. They continued in silence, doing their best to avoid the buzzing horde that continued to settle all about the forest. Still more droned and hunted the mists and foliage.
With his gaze above, Jace’s boot snapped a dry branch underfoot. He ducked as a pair of skriitch immediately sped at him from the canopy. They passed over the crown of his head, then circled blindly back, clearly searching for the source of the noise. He clamped his cloak harder over his mouth. The pair circled twice more, then finally whizzed away.
Frell lifted his brows at Jace, silently warning him to be wary.
On they went.
No one knew how far the skriitch’s territory extended, but Nyx imagined there had to be a limit. The horde had not spread and infested the lower chasm over the centuries. It was as if something was bottling them up here. Maybe it was the thicker mists; maybe it was some scent in the air, like what wafted from their fouled clothes.
Frell stopped ahead, his shoulders slumping.
They gathered to him and saw the reason for his halt. The river cut across their path. The steps upward continued on the far side.
“We’ll have to swim,” Frell whispered dourly.
They all knew the danger was not the river’s current. This stretch of the chasm was relatively flat, so the stream looked sluggish and manageable. But the forest on the other side buzzed with more of the skriitch. The cliffs ahead were pocked with hundreds of their warrens, along with larger caves. If they swam across, the gore would be washed from their clothes and bodies, leaving them exposed and defenseless.
“We have to risk it,” Frell said.
No one argued.
One after the other, they slipped into the cold stream. They tried not to splash and draw attention. Nyx stayed alongside Jace. Kanthe trailed, clutching his bow in one hand and kicking low with his legs. Their eyes remained on the sky, on the air above them. Skriitch buzzed past their heads. A few even crashed atop the water, roiling and fluttering, only to be swept past them.
Finally, they reached the far bank. Frell discovered steps under the water that led out of the river. He crouched there. “We must move quickly. Pray we’re close to the end of their domain. If stung, keep running for as long as you can. Be ready to help each other if someone falters.”
Nyx swallowed and nodded.
Frell turned back to the steps—but Kanthe grabbed his arm.
“Stay,” the prince warned.
Frell frowned. “I know it’s danger—”
“No.” Kanthe turned to the other side of the river. “Listen.”
With her heart pounding and the terror in the air, she had gone deaf to the echoing howl of the hunting thylassaurs. The pack wailed and screamed, likely scenting how close their prey was.
Kanthe faced them, his eyes huge. “Wait,” was all he said.
The triumphant cries of the hunters grew louder, more excited, echoing everywhere. But Nyx and the others weren’t the only ones listening. Skriitch streaked past overhead, all racing toward the howling pack, ready to paralyze the trespassers, each vying to be the first to lay its clutch of eggs into these new warm nests. The skies above the river briefly thickened with their forms as the horde swept down the chasm.
Nyx lowered warily in the water as she watched them pass. Finally, the river cleared of their buzzing wings, until only a few leaden skriitch traced the mists. These last wobbled, a few falling into the current, clearly too old or enfeebled to offer much threat.
“Now,” Kanthe said.
They climbed out of the stream, their clothes heavy and shedding water with each step.
Kanthe glanced across the river. “I’ve never been happier to be hunted.”
“We still must hurry,” Frell warned. “And heed what I said before.”
They took off, not bothering to remain silent any longer. The baying cries of the thylassaurs covered the occasional snapped branch or tumble of loose rock. As they fled upward, those victorious howls transformed into pained, terrified wails and yelps. Nyx pictured the slinky beasts coated in clinging skriitch, being stung and bit, impaled and seeded. Pity for them flickered through her, especially remembering the tortured state of the tiny deer.
No creature deserved such a cruel end.
Half focused behind her, she ran square into Frell, who had skidded to a stop ahead. She bounced off of him, only to be pushed even farther back.
She spotted the reason for his sudden retreat.
Ahead, the woods broke open to expose a section of chasm wall and the mouth of a large cave. The forest looked as if it had been tunneled through to that spot, the branches coated in mats of silvery webbing.