Roadside Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

unreeled inside his head, present and immediate future interlocking. Fairly straightforward, a tangle of action and reaction flexing and splitting as he took a single step to the side, the weapon lifted slightly, playing through the first move in the sequence that would end with the first barrow-wight sheared in half, greenish ichor splatting dully—but they spread out, evidently cautious, so he halted, the tangles taking on a cast he didn’t quite like.
    Then attack.
    Faraway thunder rumbled; Gallow
moved
. The cursed sidhe speed was still with him, the mortal rooftop a drum his soles whisked over light as a kitten’s tail brushing against a wall. The lance’s blade made a low, sweet sound as it clove chill night air, the drawn-out note dropping at the end as sharp iron tore sidhe flesh. An arc of green ichor, droplets hanging in the air as the lancehaft socked itself against the fulcrum of his hip, the remaining wights scattering and two of the drow leaping, an HVAC unit’s casing creak-buckling as their glove-shod feet
pushed
against it. Angles shifted, the tangle becoming a braided snarl, and he had enough time if he could just gain enough height. Muscles screaming as he leapt as well, mortal world rippling as the Veil snapped like pennons in a high breeze above Summer’s castle upon the green hills.
    The haft scraped his palms; he’d largely lost the protective calluses. Construction wasn’t the same as combat; a cramp seized his left side with clawed fingers.
    Just where Unwinter’s poisoned blade had struck him.
    Gallow ignored it, the lance spinning as it shortened, the blade flushing red as he stabbed with a
crunch
through drow skull. The lance keened, a jolt of warmth up his arms as itsucked a death into its hungry core, and the splatter of sponge-rotted bone and blood and brain was still hanging in the air when he landed, spinning on the ball of his right foot.
    The lance flicked once, twice, lizard-tongue darts. Four drow left, three wights, the terrain was open enough that he could dance. They sought to ring him, the wights hissing and the drow thrumming in their peculiar subvocal almost-language. Their caverns, under forest or mountain, were always full of that grumble, as well as the soft, slippery phosphorescence of their excrescences, clinging in barb-arrowed trails very much like the markings on his own body.
    Every sidhe art had its pattern.
    A short rush forward, the lance singing to itself, warmed and loosened. A drow folding down as the blade punched through its middle, twisting with a savage jerk and bursting free with hungry serrated teeth. To rip and gouge, to whistle and slice, a sleepy warmth replacing its hunger as it gulped another death into its core. He was no more than a bow upon an instrument’s strings, drawing back and forth to sing a cacophony of shattered bone and split flesh, sidhe blood and ichor spattering in unholy flowers. One of the wights had the presence of mind to spit a blackwing curse or two, but Jeremiah skipped aside, past caring about cramps or muscle-tearing, adrenaline-sparks tearing through his bloodstream. Turning, the lance bending impossibly as he leaned back, avoiding the solid silver arc of a bone-hilted blade, too close
too goddamn close
, his knee flashing up to sink into the juncture of the wight’s legs.
    They didn’t breed like mortals, or even like other sidhe, but there was still a nerve-bundle there that could hurt them plenty, if you hit hard enough.
    A long, ear-tearing howl threatened to deafen him, but he was already past the wight as the lanceblade sank in and cutdeep, Gallow’s body airborne and spinning, his axis almost parallel to the rooftop as the Veil bunched and shivered. Landing, still spinning, the lance a propeller now, the last wight baring its yellowed fangs and hissing. Another curse, this one hurried and malformed, hurtled flapping for Gallow’s eyes, but his own spat phrase of the Old Language batted it aside, a dart of