There are many noises you don’t want to hear while deep in a disused mine. Sudden thudding and creaking is, more or less, at the top of that list—that’s the sound support beams make when they’re on the verge of failure, on the verge of dumping a mass of stone as heavy as God’s bollocks on top of you.

  But that day, I discovered a new one just barely below it. The high, shrill shriek of something not remotely human and terribly, impossibly fast. I whirled around as a dark shape came for me, screamed and slashed my sword out. Got lucky, as usual.

  Something terribly solid met the steel and I felt its impact run up through my arm. Like hitting a statue, I thought, but one that toppled back as I did, sort of. The thing’s momentum carried it forwards too fast to clearly see in the gloom, twisting past me and clipping me with one big bodypart that I also didn’t get a good look at. I went down, dropped my lantern, cried out. Sounds rang out behind me, swearing and grunting, heavy impacts, metal on stone. I scrambled up just in time to see Gruin snarling as he stumbled away with bloody gashes down one arm.

  He still hadn’t finished healing from our fight with the bear. Nor had I, to be frank. Not that and not my ruining flight across the countryside. All the aches and twinges were coming back, where they hadn’t already been kept inflamed by hard labour in the mines.

  Still, there was no use whinging now was there? I’d die if I just sat here with both thumbs up my arse, and dying was no thought at all. I came to my feet and lunged for the creature.

  Now, I could see it a bit more clearly, despite the unevenly dancing lamplight. It was not much bigger than a man, not its body at least, but a great pair of wings were half-unfurled at either side that seemed to triple its size. I saw thrashing talons moving and frothing fangs.

  A bat. It was some giant bat-thing, eyeless and fork-tongued, limbs moving like vipers as it savaged Gruin. The Grynkori was focusing on defence, guarding as best he could but still losing ground until I came in and swung.

  With the space limited as it was, I had to limit my chop to a shorter, duller motion without the great distance needed for truly great speeds. Thick hide resisted my blows, breaking open and oozing blood but failing to yield much. I stepped back, gripped my sword, glared as the creature spun to face me now.

  That glare lasted right up until I saw its face aimed at mine. Terror gripped me, squeezed the strength out of every limb like water wrung from a cloth, dried my mouth, weakened my heart. The only reason I didn’t run then and there was I already knew how fast my new enemy was.

  So I waited for it to lunge, then whipped the sword up and braced it against my own body to meet flesh with steel.

  Space proved unnecessary when I had speed and momentum. I felt the pommel of my own weapon driven so hard into my side that it felt as if I were being punched, blown back off my feet and landing hard with the monster atop me. I abandoned the sword instantly, reached out with both hands and grabbed flesh. Neck and head, I think, right under the jaw to force that mouth shut.

  Claws came for me in clumsy, terrified and aimless ways—clearly the monster was no more sure where I was than I was it. Something wet hit me, running down onto my chest from atop. Blood, pouring out the monster where metal had bitten in deep. Was the monster weakening?

  My muscles half-surrendered as everything from the wrists to deep in my chest screamed, shuddered, strained. Barbed teeth came another foot closer to closing on me. Maybe this monster was weakening, but it certainly wasn’t weakening by much. And any second now that mouth, able to slice the head clean from a man, would find its mark in my body. That would be it, the end of the road. I would—

  —Gruin’s hammer smashed down so hard into the back of the bat-thing’s skull that it actually headbutted me in the face with the impact, jaws fortunately closed in shock as it did.

  Fortunately, the creature was shocked as well. It shrieked more, suddenly changing how it moved in what I took long moments to realise was a desperate attempt at disentangling its limbs from mine. Gruin had other ideas, swinging again, again. Four times he hit it, each one with a fully-extended swing that took advantage of his short limbs to operate as if the tight tunnel around us were as wide and tall as a castle gate.

  For my part, I remained under the creature and panicked like fuck. I knew Gruin was far from the most balanced man, and did not have nearly the faith in his discretion or precision to be confident I’d escape this without getting my skull flattened. I ended up clinging onto the monster and using it as a sort of shield.

  It probably looked bizarre, from the outside. As if Gruin were attacking me, and only coincidentally killing our enemy while I screamed and hid behind its still-thrashing body. However weird it was, though, it did end up getting the job done eventually. Another half-dozen blows from that bloody hammer would probably have killed a boulder, and they definitely slowed the monster down by the time it finally disengaged from me and started scrambling off.

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  Gruin tried to give chase at that, swinging again after it, but the creature was too fast by far. Good as his limbs were for delivering full-strength swings in tight conditions, those same optimizations left him unable to match a man’s stride and saw it peeling off far ahead of him.

  It took long seconds for me to get over my shock and scramble back up to stand, by which time the creature was gone and the Grynkori glaring at me.

  “What the fuck was that!?” he snapped, “was I fighting that alone or what?”

  “I got it off you and then you smashed me in the face with its head!” I shot back, temper fraying madly.

  He did seem more receptive to that, looking away and grunting a swift, reluctant apology as he started back down the tunnel.

  “Hopefully it’s hurt,” Gruin noted.

  “I know it’s hurt, we both saw how you hit it and the way it was stumbling as it got off.

  “Aye, but hopefully it’s hurt. We won’t catch that thing at anything close to full speed, wounded enough though and we just might.”

  For some reason, and I really can’t tell you why, the thought of chasing this thing down didn’t strike me as anything near so mad as looking for it in the first place had. Maybe that first encounter, and surviving it, had diminished the threat. No creature in all the world is half so deadly as a man’s fearful imagination.

  If Grynkori shared that imagination, Gruin was doing a good job of keeping it to himself. He barrelled off ahead of me, taking the lead and hissing to himself as he moved the weapon around in his hands. I found myself doing just the same thing with my sword, albeit one-handed while my other arm suspended the thankfully unbroken lantern.

  Days of heavy pickaxe usage had gotten us both accustomed to the balance of mining gear, it seemed. Better to hurry and re-adjust. Any fractional disadvantage I could rid myself of before taking on that monster again would be much needed.

  Mostly it just gave me something to focus on that wasn’t an impending sense of doom of course, but that was no small thing and I clung to it while we further navigated the gloomy tunnels ahead.

  As always, Gruin proved almost supernaturally adept at finding his way across them. I would ask him about this later, over our acquaintanceship, and can tell you now that the way a Grynkori navigates underground is not at all the way we do. Sight and memory are part of it, yes, but so is hearing and some other sense, a kind of rebounding sound they use to mentally map out the area around them.

  “Hm, that creature is a thing of deep caves.” I didn’t ask how he was so certain, though in retrospect, seeing him say it with his ear cocked up, I suspect it was using the very same navigational method as him. That they could hear each other, sharing sight of a world I could only blindly stumble across.

  “It looked like a giant bat,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, it did.” Gruin said no more about it than that, and we continued our search. It did not take us much longer to conclude. We came to a wider cave, one opening out in all directions.

  This was, come to think of it, the first cave I’d ever been in. Funny thing to realise, but true. There weren’t many of the natural rocky formations that are required for caves to form around Sheppleberry, not unless you count the Dungeon—which I don’t. I’d been in holes and ditches, even a trench, but not caves. Seeing one for the first time was striking enough that I almost feel robbed to have done so under such circumstances. Fear has a tendency to obliterate wonder.

  Above me, the ceiling must have extended over ten paces high. That was as far as I could see at least. The walls were farther away still, and the back of the cave farthest of all.

  Every noise we made ran ahead of us and danced along the walls, thrown back in a distorted echo by hard stone littered and jagged with stalactites. I stared at it, felt suddenly overwhelmed. This wasn’t what I’d banked on. I hadn’t even noticed when we started following a natural cave shaft rather than a mining tunnel, and here we now were stood in some looming abscess beneath the earth. We needed to pause, to prepare. We needed—

  “ALRIGHT YE BASTARDS, I’M HERE! COME AN’ HAVE A GO IF YEZ THINK YE CAN MANAGE IT!” Gruin’s voice, already powered by lungs developed to extract oxygen in suffocating deprivation, was further enhanced by the conditions around us.

  I was just frozen, staring at the lunatic while he did his best to pick a fight with the monster that had almost killed us in conditions he greatly benefitted from, and had now lured us into far worse ones.

  But I wasn’t left waiting for long. The bat-thing dropped down like a shadow detaching from its wall, swooping on wide wings and throwing forth a row of talons like lances from a cavalry charge. The Grynkori planted his feet, drew his hammer back and waited for impact.

  That impact did not come as either of them would have expected, because I threw a rock the size of my fist and left it thudding neatly into the bat monster’s head.

  Gruin didn’t flinch as the bat did, obviously, and waited a single second more before swinging his hammer with all the force of a stone dropped off a parapet. I saw the iron head crunch into our enemy with all of its speed adding onto the swing of the wielder, actually wincing myself as bones visibly snapped and rearranged under the force.

  It flew off to one side, hit the ground, slid, rolled, came to a stop right under my feet. Before it could rise, or I could panic, my limbs were moving almost on their own and my sword came down right on its neck.

  Tough bloody skin and tough muscle, hard bone, everything wiry and unnatural, more durable than it ought to have been. Like trying to hack through a statue made of solid wood.

  Wood, though. Not stone or iron, still yielding against edged metal and a strong man’s arm. Before the creature had righted itself I’d slashed down several more times, seeing just how excellent a blade Morlo had gifted me by how deeply each new gash upon the monster’s flesh ran. Blood bubbled up near instantly, pooling under us.

  Magical creatures are not bears or men, though, and this one took a great deal more killing than that.

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