Sacrifice (Book 4) by Brian Fuller Page B

the flames some trickery of the Uyumaak or their Chukkas, but Maewen arrived seconds later to correct her assumption.
    “Ethris buys us time,” she said, frantically. “Keep the sun to your left in the morning!” she yelled to everyone. “We meet at the ridge.”
    They pushed southward toward the unknown chambers of the forest, Dason gripping her arm painfully as he vainly tried to guide her around obstacles he himself couldn’t see well enough to avoid. Once the boles had swallowed the light of Ethris’s fire, going forward became a matter of blind feeling about in the darkness. All around, the voices and footfalls of panicked men created the strange sensation of everyone being together in a dark room where the only comfort was knowing someone else shared the same affliction of blindness. Branches and undergrowth continually clawed at their feet and clothing like restless corpses trying to pull them down into an inky grave.
    They had hardly gone two hundred feet into the sylvan abyss when a new sound creeping up from behind them stopped every foot and turned every head. Something moved along the forest floor, scrabbling and scraping among the dried needles and branches, coming for them like a wave in a steady, crescendoing roar.
    “Lanterns!” someone yelled, the cry echoing through the forest.
    None of her Protectors possessed one, but after a few moments, several pockets of light bloomed around them in the gloom. The uneven retreat had scattered the soldiers haphazardly around them, and the Chalaine shuddered to think of what had already become of those too wounded to flee.
    Relentlessly, the sound grew, men drawing their weapons to face the unknown threat. This was no Uyumaak horde, the persistent thumping of their language unheard among the approaching cacophony, but when their enemy did arrive among the forward ranks, oaths and screams punctuated the night. The Chalaine, despite her weariness of soul and body could not stifle the scream ripped from her by the revelation of the horror that came for them.
    Along the forest floor, a horde of black, lustrous beetles the size of a man’s fist scrambled in an anxious advance toward them, the lamplight casting a fiery reflection along their obsidian backs, giving them the appearance of a flowing river of fire. A single snaking tubule hung between wicked pincers, adding to the uncomfortable appearance of their pointy, jointed legs and ridged backs.
    Such was the speed of the insect host that none thought to flee. Swords, boots, hammers, and shields all pounded down with fury on the mass of carapaces, the crunch of popping insects and the explosion of pus and slime bursting all around them. To the Chalaine’s amazement, the creatures avoided her, circling around her instinctively as if she were a warding pillar they could not abide. But her Protectors and every other soldier caught in the unyielding wave eventually succumbed to the beetles, the creatures’ pincers lancing through boot leather, puncturing legs. The insects’ tubules wiggled into the pincer cuts, sucking blood.
    The Chalaine huddled against a tree trunk, powerless as the beetles took their fill of the soldiers’ blood, and then just as quickly as they had come, turned and scrabbled away back to the north. Blood dribbled from the beetle wounds, the wounded staunching the blood with their hands.
    The pale soldiers around her slowly recovered enough to stand, and as tough and indomitable as the Dark Guard was trained to be, the Chalaine could see in Gerand’s and Volney’s eyes the flicker of fear that would plague lesser men in less dangerous circumstances. No more did screams and yells punctuate the forest, only the pitiful sounds of whimpering and crying from an army of men pushed beyond the reach of hope.
    “We’ve got to move,” Gerand said, the first to rise, looking sickly and wan. “Let’s keep the lanterns lit until the Uyumaak give us a reason not to.”
    Maewen found them moments later,