Street-fighter instinct had screwed his eyes shut as I grabbed him, but it did no good. The grip on my fingers ripped the eyelid from the brow downward, scraped the eyeball and tugged it out on the optic nerve. He screamed, gut deep. A sudden spray of blood squirted red against the grey of the rain, splattered warm on my face. He lost his hold on me and reeled backward, features maimed, eye hanging out and still pumping tiny spurts of blood. I yelled and came after him, hooked a punch into the undamaged side of his face that threw him staggering sideways against the walkway rail.

He sprawled there for a second, left hand raised dizzily to block me, right fist curled tight despite the damage the arm had taken.

And the swamp panther took him down.

There and gone. It was a blur of mane and mantle, forelimb slash and beakgape. Its claws hooked into him at shoulder height and hauled him down off the walkway like a rag doll. He screamed once, and then I heard a single, savage crunch as the beak snapped closed. I didn’t see, but it probably bit him in half there and then.

For what must have been a full minute I stood swaying on the canted walkway, listening to the sound of flesh being torn apart and swallowed, bones being snapped. Finally, I staggered to the rail and made myself look.

I was too late. Nothing in the carnage around the feeding panther looked like it had ever been remotely associated with a human body.

Rain was already sluicing the worst of the blood away.

Swamp panthers aren’t very bright. Fed, this one showed little or no interest in my continuing existence over its head. I spent a couple of minutes looking for the Rapsodia, couldn’t see it and so set about getting out of the pen. With the multiple fractures Impaler’s arrival had put in the evercrete wall, it wasn’t too difficult. I used the widest crack for leverage, jammed in my feet and hauled myself up hand over hand. With the exception of a bad scare when a chunk of evercrete came away in my hand at the top, it was a swift and uneventful climb. On the way up, something in the Eishundo system gradually stopped my nose bleeding.

I stood at the top and listened for the sounds of battle. Heard nothing above the storm, and even that seemed quieter. The fighting was either done, or down to skulk-and-stalk. Apparently I’d underestimated Vlad and his crew.

Yeah, or the haiduci.

Time to find out which.