“Back—into the drain behind the root!” Ysabet shouted, hooking her left arm under Edris’s right armpit as Osha grabbed the other side of his soaked coat.
Together the two women hoisted the priest off the mud bank, keeping his splinted left hip clear of the boulders while he hopped and shoved with his good right boot. Ahead of them, Pip limped out from under the slashed copper net. The creature listed slightly toward its cracked left shell plate, and the new half-crown of black blades above its right eye scraped sparks off the low petrified overhang as it squeezed into a narrow drainage tunnel behind the main root buttress.
Siv, Tern, and Moth backed into the tunnel behind Edris, their metal-plated rumps bumping the wet rock walls.
Ashaun retreated last, parrying a sergeant’s pike thrust with her stone left forearm and kicking a fallen lantern into the knees of the second soldier. She had one boot inside the dark mouth of the drainage tunnel when she reached to her hip for the narrow bell dagger—and felt only the frayed leather of a cut sheath strap where the copper net had snagged her pack on the gravel.
Ten feet out on the shore, half buried in black mud beside the raft’s mooring stone, the dull-grey bell dagger lay glinting in the match-light.
