Gabriel, finally, climbed wearily to his feet. “Listen, we don’t have to—”
“Yes,” said Shadow, “we do.” He bolted upright, staff in hand, and Clay watched as a swirl of inky blue smoke revealed the wicked white blade at its head, concealed until now by what he could only assume was subtle druin sorcery.
It wasn’t a staff, after all. It was a scythe.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The Spirit Beneath the Skin
So the scythe was worrying. It appeared to be made of bone, possibly the wing of something the size of a horse. But more troublesome still was Shadow’s other, more unconventional weapon.
He loosed a breath that tore like a gale through the smoke above the fire. It blew past Gabriel and took on a form of its own, the same shape and size as Gabe himself, also bearing a massive sword that looked solid enough as it arced toward Gabriel’s head.
Vellichor came free of its sheath in a blur of starlit night, dispelling the shade-figure the moment the two blades met, but already the druin was gesturing toward one of the smoking wards he’d set up around the perimeter of the camp. It raked through Ganelon and coalesced into a murky double of the deadly southerner.
Clay heard Matrick groan, “Oh hell no.”
“He’s mine,” growled Ganelon, springing toward the shade of himself. It flew to meet him, and when their axes met the phantom not only remained intact, it chopped a grey hand into Ganelon’s throat and sent him staggering.
Sabbatha dared a leap toward Shadow, ducking the scythe’s first swing and dancing wide of the second. Matrick lunged from the opposite side, but the druin turned and lobbed a plume of smoke straight into his face. Momentarily blinded, Matrick sketched a defensive skein between him and Shadow, which did nothing to protect him from the apparition behind him. One dark knife opened a gash in his shoulder, while the other barely missed his ribs as he twisted in pain.
Clay saw the druin glance in his direction. Too late, he turned to see the smoke from another ward sweep toward him. Like an idiot, he braced behind his shield, and so managed to avoid being rendered blind by the gust. When he turned it was slowly, with a kind of shame, to face off against the spectre of himself.
“Hi,” he said lamely. His shade said nothing as it unslung the hammer at its hip. Clay sighed. “It’s gonna be like that, is it?”
Gabe, meanwhile, was fighting off phantoms as fast as Shadow could make them. Vellichor alone seemed able to dispel them with a single stroke. Ganelon was locked in a fierce melee with his own, while Moog, yelping and springing this way and that, had managed to elude the druin’s attempts to double him.
But really, Clay had time to wonder as his spectre sized him up, what harm could a phantom-Moog do?
Matrick was scrambling from his own doppelganger, entirely on the defensive, which left Sabbatha alone to deal with the druin.
Or not entirely alone.
Kit staggered toward Shadow, wielding the only weapon he had to hand: his precious batingting, the scourge of phoenixkind. The druin, whose innate ability to glimpse the immediate future would be infallible against something so slow as a lurching ghoul, dodged fluidly and lashed out with the scythe, severing all one hundred and four strings of the world’s only batingting at once with a sound like glass chimes shattering.
“This is exactly why I don’t get involved in this sort of thing,” Kit grumbled before a kick from Shadow sent him sprawling.
“Umbra,” said Shadow, tipping the scythe’s blade so it gleamed like pearl in the moonlight. “A less elegant weapon than Vellichor, perhaps.” He kicked one half of the destroyed batingting toward Sabbatha’s feet. “But it gets the job done.”
Clay’s shadow-self finally summoned its courage and charged, leading with its shield. Clay met it with his own, swinging his hammer at the phantom’s left side. The phantom, unsurprisingly, did exactly the same thing, and Clay winced as he felt the blow land. The chain links of his armour soaked up most of the damage, but his ribs warned him not to let it happen again. He and his double each launched another strike—hammers bounced from the faces of black shields—and then stepped back to assess one another.
“This might take all day,” Clay muttered.
He saw Moog leap on the back of Matrick’s shade, buying time for Matrick to swipe the dust from his eyes. By the time he did the wizard had suffered an elbow to the face and a nasty cut on his forearm, which spurred Matrick into a rage. He attacked in a frenzy, and as Moog stumbled away Matrick and his phantom exchanged a flurry of swipes and stabs so fast Clay could see nothing but a blur of steel and shade between them.
Ganelon grunted in pain as his shade opened a gash on his cheek. Sharp as Syrinx was, he was lucky to have kept his jaw at all. Beyond belief, however, he was grinning, and his expression only brightened as he and the illusory Ganelon hurled themselves at each other.
Shade-Clay came on again, this time leading with the hammer. Clay’s first instinct was to offer up his shield, weather the blow, then try to counter with one of his own. It was what his double—being the pragmatic sort of doppelganger—would no doubt expect.
So instead Clay swung his own hammer, striking the phantom’s weapon with a shrill ring that pierced his ears and sent a tremor up his arm. It was an awkward move, leaving them both unbalanced, but Clay, at least, had been expecting it. He recovered first, ramming Blackheart’s rim up beneath the phantom’s chin. Its head snapped backward, and Clay murmured an apology as he brought Wraith arcing down into the thing’s face.
It broke like a log turned to char, and was gone.
A yelp drew him round in time to see Moog trip over the ettin’s out-flung arm. Dane came awake with a snort, and Gregor mumbled groggily as they sat up. “Is it morning already?”
Clay looked from the ettin to Shadow, who was already in motion. The druin tore open one of the sacks at his waist and lobbed a handful of grainy dust into the air. Thankfully, Moog had gained his feet and was standing between Shadow and the ettin, but when he saw Shadow take a breath he sprang out of the way.
“Moog, wait!” Clay called, too late.
Shadow exhaled. The dust-cloud enveloped the bewildered ettin, and Clay’s heart sank. It took an effort to keep his knees from buckling, to not simply close his eyes and wait for the world to bash his brain open—because it was oh-so-obvious that it wanted to, or else why in the Frost Mother’s unspeakable name did this sort of shit keep happening to him?
The phantom that took shape behind Gregor and Dane was monstrous. The first thing it did was reach down and knock the two heads of the ettin together, rendering them unconscious.
Of course that happened, thought Clay sourly. He shook his head, trying to comprehend how a single druin had got the better of five men, one woman, a ghoul, and half a giant.
“Clay.” Gabriel’s hand was on his shoulder. “I’ve got this.”
Clay scoffed. “You’ve got that?”
“Go help Lark—” Gabe stopped himself. “Go stop Shadow. Knock him out, pin him down—but try not to kill him.”
“Why not?”
“Because once we kill Lastleaf he might be the only druin left alive,” said Gabriel. He took off running, leapt over what remained of the fire, and rolled beneath the massive phantom’s swiping hand. Vellichor hewed into the creature’s leg. It stumbled, but even the fabled blade couldn’t hope to dispel a shade so huge with a single slash.