The Monk roared again, and Kosar and Trey raised their weapons in readiness. The rejuvenated metal arm of the dead machine might intimidate the Monk, but it would not hold it off forever. Their fight was still to come.

The arm lashed out. It seemed slow and ponderous, too old to move swiftly, too heavy to shift with any speed. Yet still the machine snatched out at lightning speed. Its metal end—a club more than a hand, a fat knot of rusted metal as big as a man’s head—struck the Monk in the chest. An explosion of blood and spittle spattered the metal, and the impact threw the Monk back the way it had come. Its arms waved, its cloak billowing, and when it struck the ground the arm fell across its chest. Kosar felt the vibration through his feet as the heavy metal dented the ground. The Monk gurgled and reached for the sword where it had fallen into the bushes. But it could not shift the weight.

Behind Kosar, Rafe mumbled something, then shouted, and then screamed, a cry filled with fury. His fists delved deeper into the ground and his arms shook, lifting his back and shoulders so that he was supported only on his fists and the balls of his feet. His shoulders vibrated with the effort of holding himself up. His eyes had rolled back to show their whites, lips were drawn away from his teeth, muscles standing out in stark relief on his thin neck and forearms. And his fists kept working, opening and closing, fingering downward into the ground to improve that contact.

Something happened to his wrists. Sparks, Kosar thought, yet a cool, pale blue, powerful and full of energy but cold as the nothing beyond death and before life; cold as the Black.

Rafe screamed again. The metal arm crushing the Monk sparkled and shimmered with cool light and then lifted up, curling in the air and fixing around the Monk as it tried to rise. The arm was not as solid as it had seemed before, its edges less defined. And as it tightened around the figure, its length rippled.

The Monk struggled, thrashed and battered the thing that was holding it up. It was a demon flailing against the good, an horrendous vision of things unnatural and unwanted. But Rafe’s ongoing scream of rage piled more violence onto it, and the flexing metal arm smashed hard into the ground. There was a sound like a fistful of twigs being crushed, amplified a hundred times. This time the Monk did not even scream. The arm lifted it again—the Monk’s own arms still waving, but weakly now; legs dangling uselessly—wavered for a few seconds, flipped it over and crashed down again. The Monk’s head hit something solid beneath the pretty purple heathers. When the arm lifted once more, its skull was ruptured and leaking.