Bloody crows. The thing was alive.

Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.

Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn’t be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade’s thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely—poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.

Tavi grimaced. The chitin blade didn’t have a guard or a tang. It simply... segued, from a long, lightly curved blade to an oblong, rounded handle. He couldn’t walk forward and off the impaling blade. The handle would never fit through the relatively small hole the blade had made, and widening the wound himself seemed... counterproductive.

Stars thickened in his vision. His body was running out of air.

Tavi debated simply striking the sword, snapping it with his own burning blade, but there were excellent reasons not to. The blow might not break the vordblade, in which case it would just cut through him with all the power of his own strike. If he tried to burn through, it would heat the blade and cauterize the wound, rendering it all but untreatable by watercraft. Simply seizing it and breaking it with earthcrafted strength was a fool’s game as well—the blade would nip off his fingers all the more neatly because of the supernatural power backing the attempt.

More screams, human and vord, came from above. Incoming windstreams howled, and a Cane let out a furious roar. He began to feel dizzy.

The soil around him, all over his clothes, his boots, his armor, was loose, fairly sandy.

That would do.

Moving carefully, he gestured with one hand, and a long pseudopod of sandy earth rose up from beneath him. He scooped up a handful, and mused that his own blood had made it sticky and clumpy. He caked it around the vordblade. He did that twice more, until a thick clump of bloody, sandy mud clung to it.

Then he ground his teeth, held out his sword, and poured fire from the glowing blade down onto the mud, shaping it with his thoughts and will. It enveloped the mud in a swift, sudden, short-lived flash of fire that brought up blisters on his hands and face—and when the light had faded, the sand glowed dull red with heat, clinging gelatinously.

A second pass of the sword allowed him to draw the heat back out of the sand again, before it could spread up the blade and into his vitals, and the vordblade was suddenly encased in an irregular lump of glass.