I leap to my feet. I can neither see nor hear the slinker, but I fancy that I can feel its presence. There is the sense of something slimy here, something primal, ancient, only vaguely alive. The vines are rocking just a touch.

“All of you but Halax and I, back,” Vanerak orders. “Huddle together, prisoners against the wall.”

I press up against the vine-covered stone. Nazak pulls me away from it. “Not right up against it!” he snarls. “Don't you know what a slinker is?”

“I know,” I say.

“Not well enough!”

He holds his lantern high and peers at the ceiling, then the floor, the walls, all around. I see no hint of black. It must still be ahead of us, poking around to find a weak-point in our defenses. Or maybe it's already underfoot.

“There!” cries Halax. He points with his sword. “That blackness!”

I see it—and it's as horrid as anything I saw in the caverns above the fort: a black mass of slime and long conical teeth five feet in diameter. Lengthy arms wriggle around it, tipped with claws that do not look too different from its teeth. Many eyes, white circles with small dots of black, like frogspawn, stare at us.

One of the arms lashes up at Halax. His sword flashes through the moist air, but I can't tell if it cuts or not. Another arm grabs at his foot and he leaps back. Yet another arm bursts up from a coil of vines below him. He slashes and this time his sword goes through, but slinkers feel even less pain than trolls do. Both halves of its cloven arm continue at him. They latch on.

Vanerak slashes. Runic force slams into Halax's legs. Sparks illuminate the glistening blackness and Halax is sent rolling back, shouting in shock.

Now the slinker darts at Vanerak, squeezing its body forward incredibly fast. There's a wet slicking sound Three arms strike simultaneously. Vanerak jabs the point of his weapon into the ground between his feet and vaults backward.

He knows that the touch of a slinker means death. No matter how well-forged your plate, it will find a gap to squeeze its black flesh into, and then it will tear you apart with those white claws and teeth from the inside out. A full chainmail body-hauberk might offer some protection, but it would have to be of very fine links indeed, and strongly enruned too. A slinker can crush as well as tear.

One of the runeknights steps out the semi-circle and strikes with his long axe. He buries the head right in its center. A tremor shivers through the monster for an instant, before an unseen arm springs up and wraps around the axe's haft. The slinker pulls, and the runeknight makes the mistake of not letting go. He tries to wrest his weapon back and slips on the slimy ground.

Another arm wraps around his leg. I watch in horror as it vanishes into the knee joint. An instant later he begins screaming.

Vanerak raises his pollaxe. For a moment I think he's going to strike the runeknight, put an end to his pain, yet he has no such mercy. He takes advantage of the slinker's distraction and plants a hammer-blow onto its main body. Its arms convulse, but again, only for a moment. It strikes back almost immediately and this time latches onto him—Nazak jumps forward and severs the arm before it can find a crevice.

The runeknight with the axe stops screaming. Blood is running out his visor and every gap in his armor, coating the vines beneath him. What he looks like under the tungsten I don't dare to imagine.

Vanerak sinks a stab into the nearest arm. It looks to me like it does nothing, but then the slinker abruptly pulls away and vanishes into coil of vines. I catch a glimpse of blackness as it darts past Halax, who's hurrying back toward us. He turns as if to give chase.

“Stop,” Vanerak orders. “Come back, Halax. It would like to lure us.”

He bows when he gets to us. “I apologize for my recklessness.”

“Accepted. And thank you, Nazak. It was about to do me a nasty injury.”

“You are most welcome.” For once he sounds solemn. Then he turns angry: “Cowardly beast! Killing then fleeing. I'll have its hide.”

“It is not cowardly. It is a beast—it does what is in its nature.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“Of course, my Runethane.”

“Do not lose your temper at it. It preys on the reckless. Murak should have known better.”

“Very true, my Runethane.”

“We will rest for one short-hour here. Half will sleep and half watch. I think we hurt it slightly, but in return it got its fill. It may judge us worth attacking again. I will devise a plan to slay it.”

"And how should we bury Murak?" asks Halax.

"He was a strong runeknight, even if he did prove a fool in his final moment. We will throw him into the river later. May the waters carry his remains far below."

"And may his armor protect them from the carrion-beasts."

"Let his death be a reminder to you all: just one moment's lapse can result in an eternity of pain."

"Yes, my Runethane," chorus the seven runeknights.

I sink down to my haunches, very tense. Rest? How can I rest with a slinker about? I turn to face the wall. I can barely see the stone for the vines hanging down it—from behind them the beast could emerge at any moment. I would have no time to react. Black slime inside my armor, terrible pain, then death. It would take only a few instants, yet that would still be too long a time to experience such horror.

“What in hell?” Pellas whispers. “Oh, what in hell?”

“Worse than the fucking dragon,” whispers one of the two dragonslayers.

“Silence!” Helzar rasps. “Do you want to attract it to you?”

They shut up. I stare at the vines for as long as I can until my eyelids begin to grow heavy. Before I know it, Helzar is jabbing me with her boot once more.

“Up!”

We eat quickly then continue downriver. The humid heat intensifies until I no longer feel like I'm breathing air, but hot fog. The vines like this atmosphere—they get thicker and tangle around us more often. Everything's slippery too.

Our pace slows to a crawl. Vanerak raises his pollaxe and slices horizontally. Runic force cleaves through the vines, severing them. I hear a faint screaming. He swings two more times, turning the wormish lengths into chunks for us to wade through. My dull titanium becomes smeared with orange sap-blood. Its stink is strong.

“Hurry the pace,” says Vanerak. “We have drawn attention to ourselves, out of necessity.”

The severed vines make sloppy sounds as we wade through them. More seem to descend from the ceiling to stay our progress. Vanerak slashes them asunder as well. The ground becomes flooded with their sap-blood. The icy power may be gone from my boots, but I'm sliding all the same.

Where the hell is this crossing point he mentioned? We can only see glimpses of the river we walk alongside, and it is in a deep crevasse. There is no place to ford, and no convenient bridges of stone that lead across it either, and it is far too wide to consider jumping. And certainly I would not trust these vines enough to make a rope-bridge from them.

Maybe this isn't the river he thought it was, and there is no crossing point. We will wander until we reach some kind of dead-end, then we will have to make our way all the way back.

When he calls our next halt, my legs are shaking with fatigue. I sink down to the ground, desperate for some kind of rest. Rune-dead armor is heavy. The other prisoners, though their wounds are mostly healed by now, sound even closer to collapse.

“My Runethane!” says Nazak. He sounds very nervous. “I do not wish to question your judgement, but I don't think this is a good spot to camp. Nor time. I think the slinker is still on us.”

“Our guests are tired,” Vanerak says.

“Then maybe we should carry them. We need to get out of here.”

“We shall get out of here eventually.”

“When?”

“Have patience, and don't try mine.”

“I apologize, my Runethane.”

“We stop here precisely because this is such a poor spot. It is here that the slinker is most likely to attack us.”

“I see,” rasps Helzar. “The prisoners are to be bait.”

“The slinker makes no distinction between us and them. To it, flesh is flesh, whether that flesh be behind first degree armor or tenth. We are all bait.”

“Poisoned bait.”

“Yes. When it comes we will abandon all pretense to defense and attack it, from all angles. Let it latch onto your armor. We will kill it before it can find a hold. This is my gamble. Form up around the prisoners.”

They surround us facing outward. I struggle to hold up Gutspiercer. The slinker's body is soft, so if it gets through, even my damaged weapon might be able to do some kind of damage.

My ruby heats up for the first time in more than a month.

“There!” says Halax. “To the river-side. It's coming around us. Thinks we can't see it.”

I can't see it. No one but Halax can, I think. At the edges of his helm, just beside the corners of his eyes, are two gems, heavily enruned. I think they enhance his vision to an extreme degree.

He turns his head left, then right, then left again. He spins around to follow.

“Now!” he says. “Coming in! From behind!”

“Wait,” orders Vanerak. “Let it come in for the kill, Nazak.”

Nazak readies his axe and buckler.

“Now!” says Halax, at the same moment two white-tipped arms stretch out of the blackness to wrap around Nazak's shield hand.

He yells out and strikes fast, severing one. The other wraps around the back of his shield and clutches to his gauntlet. The two runeknights flanking him leap and strike at its main body. The rest rush around. Nazak screams, but does not pull back. He strides forward, kneels and chops heavily into the slinker's main body.

Vanerak and Halax rush past me and stab with their own weapons. The air shivers with runic force. The black mass of the slinker trembles. Its primitive eyes blink open and shut. Sharp metal impales them, cleaves them, crushes them. Its wriggling limbs fall still. The one around Nazak's gauntlet falls away. Blood pours out.

“Fuck!” Nazak screams, scrabbling at the clasps on his armor. “Healing chains, hurry!”

One of the others helps him pull the gauntlet off. Beneath, the skin is torn to shreds. Halax appears with some thin lengths of silver chain and wraps them tightly and expertly around the wound. The blood congeals on them like jelly.

“My thanks,” Nazak says through gritted teeth. “Though you were a little late with your warning, don't you think?”

“Not at all,” says Halax.