A thick yellow liquid coated the slive’s front fangs. Tavi had seen slive venom at work before. If the slive struck him, he would grow warm and sluggish, until he sank slowly down to the ground. And then the slives would drag him still alive into their lair. And eat him.
Tavi’s first reaction was a terrified desire to spring away—but fast motion could trigger the surprised slive. Even if the slive missed, the filthy little scavengers would regard his flight as a sign that he was prey to be pursued and eaten. He could outrun them on open ground, but slives had a nasty tendency to remain on the trail of their prey, sometimes following for days, waiting for their target to sleep before moving in for the kill.
Fear and excitement made Tavi tremble, but he forced himself to remain calm. He withdrew as slowly and smoothly as he could. He had just gotten out of the slive’s striking range when the beast hissed again and bolted out of its shelter and toward the boy.
Tavi let out a panicked scream, his light baritone cracking into a child’s higher pitch as he did. He threw himself back from the slive’s deadly bite, got his feet underneath him and started to run.
Then, to his complete surprise, he heard someone call out in an answering shout, one nearly drowned out by the rising winds.
Tavi snarled in frustration. The memory of the Marat warrior and his terrible partner came back to him in a flood of terror. Had they caught up to him?
The wind brought him another shout, the pitch too high to be the Marat. There was no mistaking the panic and fear in it. “Please! Someone help!”
Tavi bit his lip, looking down the causeway toward his home and safety—then facing the opposite way, toward the cry for help. He took a shaking breath and turned west, away from his home, and forced his tired legs into motion again, running along the pale stone of the causeway.
The lightning flashed again, a shuddering flame that swept from cloud to cloud, overhead, first green, then blue, then red, as though the furies of the skies had gone to battle against one another. Light bathed the rain-swept valley for nearly half a minute, while thunder shook the stones of the causeway and half-deafened him.
Shapes began to whirl down toward the ground through the tumult and rain, and raced and danced across the valley floor. The windmanes had followed the storm. Their luminous forms swirled and gusted effortlessly among the winds, pale green clouds, nebulous and vaguely human in shape, with long, reaching arms and skeletal faces. The windmanes screamed their hatred and hunger, their cries rising even above the bellowing thunder.
Tavi felt terror slow his legs, but he gritted his teeth and pressed on, until he could see that most of the windmanes in sight swirled around and around a central point, their pale, sharp-nailed hands reaching.
In the center of the ghostly cyclone, there stood a young woman Tavi had never seen before. She was tall and slender, not unlike his own Aunt Isana, but there the resemblance to his aunt ended. The woman had skin of dark, golden brown, like the traders from the southernmost cities of Alera. Her hair was straight and fine, whipped wildly about her by the wind, and was almost the same color as her skin, giving her something of the appearance of a golden statue. Her features were stark, striking, if not precisely lovely, with high cheekbones and a long, slender nose softened by a generous mouth.
Her face was set in a grimace of desperation and defiance. She wore a bloodstained cloth around her arm, and it looked as though she had torn her ragged, coarse skirts to make it. Her blouse was stained with grime and pressed against her by the rain, and a woven leather slave’s collar circled her slender throat. As Tavi watched, one of the windmanes curled toward her in a graceful swoop.
The girl cried out, throwing one hand toward the windmane, and Tavi saw a pale blue stirring in the air — not as sharp or as well defined as the windmanes themselves, but flashing there momentarily nonetheless, the spectral outline of a long-legged horse, lashing out with its forelegs at the woman’s attacker. The windmane screamed and fell back, and the woman’s fury drove forward, though it moved more sluggishly than the manes, more slowly. Three more manes rushed the air fury’s flanks, and the woman lifted her weight from a branch she had leaned upon, hobbling forward to swipe at the windmanes with desperate futility.
Tavi reacted without thinking. He lurched into a tottering run, clawing at his pouch as he did. His balance wavered in the darkness between thunderbolts, but only a breath later the clouds lit up again. Blue, red, and green lightning warred for domination of the skies.
One of the windmanes abruptly whipped around toward him and then surged at him through the frigid rain. Tavi clawed a smaller package from his pouch and tore it open. The windmane howled in a spine-tingling scream, spreading its claws wide.
Tavi grabbed at the crystals of salt within the packet and hurled a portion of them at the windmane as it charged him.
Half a dozen crystals tore through the fury like lead weights through cheesecloth. The windmane let out an agonized scream, a note that sent terrified chills racing down Tavi’s spine and into his belly. It curled in upon itself, green fire flaming up and over it as it began to tear, wherever the crystals had hit. In seconds, the mane tore apart into smaller fragments that dispersed and vanished into the gale — gone.
The others of its kind scattered out into a wide circle, letting out screeches of rage. The slave looked back at Tavi, her eyes wide with desperate hope. She clutched at her stick and hobbled toward him, the ragged shape of her fury once more becoming unseen, when the windmanes drew away.
“Salt?” she shouted, through the storm. “You have salt?”
Tavi managed to draw a ragged breath and to shout back, “Not much!” His heart thudded and lurched in his chest, and he hurried to the slave’s side, casting a look out and around him at the pale phosphorescence of the windmanes, circling the pair at a wary distance. “Bloody crows!” he swore. “We can’t stay out here. I’ve never seen so many in one storm.”
The slave squinted out at the darkness, shivering, but her voice came to him clearly. “Can your furies shelter us at all?”
Tavi felt a sickly little rush in his belly. Of course they couldn’t, as he didn’t have any. “No.”
“Then we’ve got to get to shelter. That mountain. There could be a cave —”
“No!” Tavi blurted. “Not that mountain. It doesn’t like trespassers.”
The girl pressed her hand against her head, panting. She looked exhausted. “Is there a choice?”
Tavi cudgeled his wits to work, to remember, but fear and exhaustion and cold made them as sluggish as a snow-covered slive. There was something he should remember, something that might help, if he could just think of what it was. “Yes!” he shouted, finally. “There’s a place. It isn’t far from here, if I can find it.”
“How far?” asked the slave, eyeing the circling windmanes, her words trembling as her body shook with cold.
“A mile. Maybe more.”