‘Now you speak plain, Draconus. No highborn poetry to ride your last breaths.’

The Azathanai shrugged. ‘I can’t be bothered.’

The twelve panthers now surrounded Draconus, giving Caplo a view of the huge man from every angle. Somehow, this did not confuse him, and the flood of senses was a delicious roar in his mind, rising like flames.

The Old Blood was not interested in subtlety. Caplo attacked at once, from all sides. Twelve panthers, converging upon a single enemy.

The chain lashed out, wrapping tight upon a leaping form, and Draconus yanked it close even as the remaining beasts slammed into him. Caplo felt his many fangs sink deep into the man’s flesh. He felt his claws score deep furrows upon the muscles of the Azathanai’s broad back – down to scrape along ribs and shoulder blades. More talons plunged into the man’s stomach. The muscles there clenched suddenly to trap those claws, defying every effort at evisceration, but Caplo held on. Jaws from another beast ground tight around the back of Draconus’s thick neck, seeking the windpipe.

Through all of this, somehow the Azathanai remained standing. The panther he had snared with the chain came within reach of his hands, and, releasing the chain, Draconus drove thumbs deep into the beast’s throat. Blood sprayed and the cat screamed.

Caplo felt its sudden death in a wave of agony.

Flinging the carcass away, Draconus reached round to tear loose the animal clinging to his back and neck, and the Azathanai’s strength was appalling. Unmindful of his own torn flesh, he pulled the writhing breast around, and then broke its spine with a savage twist of his wrists.

Caplo howled.

Fangs and claws tore flesh to shreds, ripped through muscles, yet still Draconus remained upright, his wide-legged stance unyielding.

A third panther – the one with its foreclaws sunk deep into the Azathanai’s gut – died beneath the skull-shattering blow of a single fist.

Caplo released his sense of all but one cat – leaving them to fight on by instinct – and flung his strength into that single creature, which had locked its jaws about the man’s left thigh, and now, writhing and spinning round with a surge of unnatural strength, he toppled Draconus. The remaining panthers closed in to finish him.

Another died, neck broken, its head suddenly loose in the grip of the man’s hands.

But the panthers savaged the writhing, kicking, blood-soaked figure.

Caplo shrieked when a lone hand stabbed into the gut of the beast he rode, and in a welter of blood and fluids his guts were pulled out from their cavity. The assassin fled the dying cat, found another.

But Draconus found that one immediately, rolling to pin it beneath him, even as he began punching, each blow of his fist shattering ribs, flensing the lungs beneath them.

The death of so many beasts broke something in Caplo. Howling, he tore himself free of the Azathanai. The six surviving panthers reeled in retreat, flanks heaving, ears flat, fangs bared. They halted a half-dozen paces from the prone man.