A pit opened between Aneas and the monster; a curious pit, as it was perfectly made, as if a geometric cube of earth had been removed . . .

Aneas understood. He threw a lash of white fire, a rope of thought. It caught on the thing’s shields, but Aneas cared nothing for the shields. He pulled even as the thing tried to rise, force exerted in the real, even as the black thing flung out one arm and threw a gout of its purple-black fire. The glob struck Looks-at-Clouds and knocked hir down so hard that hir body bounced.

But Aneas had it. He pulled. The thing’s arms rotated, and it fell backward, into the pit.

Looks-at-Clouds cast from the ground, rose to a knee as Aneas hurled simple gouts of ops at the thing. S/he stepped to the edge of the pit and unleashed a crescendo of workings straight down. The earth boiled. Aneas’s face was burned as he scrambled away, and then he ran for the opening in the earth, where two great stones rested against each other like a tent of rock. The sense of urgency had not left him, and he was sure that this could only be done in one rush or not at all. Either they seized the well of power . . . or . . .

Farther along the shore were some squalid huts. There were bogglins—dozens of them—boiling out of the huts, one in the lead, two strides from Aneas, and something emerged like a shadow from the tent of stones—another wight.

Krek shot the lead bogglin. It was a long shot; the old bogglin was back by the edge of the causeway. But his arrow was true, and Aneas had another three heartbeats to ready himself.

Nita Qwan, thirty feet away, loosed the arrow on his bow and downed the next bogglin. Then he reached into his belt and drew his short sword and threw it in one motion, hilt first. It rotated in the air like a tomahawk, and Aneas reached and plucked it from the air by the hilt, using the momentum to cut left to right, high to low, through the third bogglin’s attempt at a parry and then through all four hinges of its jaw. Tessen came up, her long Irkish sword plucking one off the edge of the pack; then she swept low, even as Lewen loosed and loosed again, a steady ripple of shafts rolling off his fingers, the range too short for the veteran irk to miss. Irene’s crossbow coughed just behind the irk’s shoulder and Aneas heard the ratchet clack as she cocked again; then he kicked one of the smaller creatures; it tried to seize his leg and he cut into it with his skinning knife and thrust with his sword.

Nita Qwan was coming closer; a step, an arrow, then another step.