The portal flared. In a blur Pearl slid forward and vanished. Lostara jabbed her heels into her mount’s flanks. The horse bolted through the portal—

—her hooves thumping hard soil. Fog twisted wildly around her, through a darkness that was alive with screams and detonations. She’d already lost Pearl, but that concern was quickly flung aside as four Tithansi warriors on foot stumbled into view.

A sharper had chewed them up, and none was prepared as Lostara charged them, her tulwar flashing. They scattered, but their wounds made them fatally slow. Two fell to her blade with the first pass. She spun her horse to ready a return charge.

The other two warriors were nowhere to be seen, the mists closing in like slowly tumbling blankets. A flurry of sound to her left brought her wheeling her horse around, in time to see Pearl sprint into view. He spun in midstride and sent a star flashing behind him.

The huge, bestial man that lumbered into sight had his head rocked back as the iron star embedded itself in his forehead. It barely slowed him.

Lostara snarled, quickly dropping the tulwar to swing wildly from the loop around her wrist as she brought her crossbow around.

Her shot went low, the quarrel sinking in just below the Semk’s sternum and above the odd thick leather belts protecting his midriff. It proved far more efficacious than Pearl’s star. As the man grunted and buckled, she saw with shock that his mouth and nostrils had been sewn shut. He draws no breath! Here’s our demon!

The Semk straightened, flinging his arms forward. The power that erupted from them was unseen, but both Pearl and Lostara were thrown, tumbling through the air. The horse screamed in mortal agony amidst a rapid crunching and cracking of bones.

The Red Blade landed on her right hip, feeling the bone resound within her like a fractured bell. Then waves of pain closed taloned hands around her leg. Her bladder went, flooding her underclothes in a hot bloom.

Moccasined feet landed beside her. A knife grip was thrust into her hand. ‘Take yourself once I’m done! Here it comes!’

Teeth clenched, Lostara Yil twisted around.

The Semk demon was ten paces away, huge and unstoppable. Pearl crouched between them, holding knives that dripped red fire. Lostara knew he considered himself already dead.

The thing that suddenly closed from the demon’s left was a nightmare. Black, three-limbed, a jutting shoulder blade like a cowl behind a long-necked head, a grinning jaw crowded with fangs, and a single, flat black eye that glistened wetly.

Even more terrifying was the humanoid figure that sat behind that shoulder blade, its face a mocking mimicry of the beast it rode, the lips peeled back to reveal daggerlike fangs as long as a toddler’s fingers, its lone eye flashing.