The storm swept over the surrounding hills. The winds arrived first, dropping the temperature by at least ten degrees. The lightning was close behind. The rains seemed to teleport in, so that we were dry one moment and then drenched the next. The raindrops were hard and pelting. It was darker than it had been at night. The lightning dropped to the soil like guillotines. Several of the sturdy horses, only just then freed from where they’d been tethered for the night, bolted. The rains were so fierce we could barely see each other. The horses disappeared into the storm before they’d gone fifty feet. The rains were bitterly cold, one step short of hailstones.

  Fridu linked our minds so that we could hear each other during the thunderstorm. It was unsettling to have such a calm and clear connection in the midst of the chaos.

  “Molly,” I heard Fridu’s voice in my mind. “See if you can find those dumbass horses. The rest of you, don’t get involved with the caravan. They’ve seen storms before. They know what they need to do. Our job is to watch out for anything or anyone who uses the cover of the storm to—”

  “Gilliands.” It was Gerik’s voice.

  “Yes,” Molly said. “Of course we watch for gilliands. But stay alert to—”

  “I meant I see some of the little fuckers. Maybe a hundred. Almost here. Coming from the east. About two hundred feet away now.”

  “Shit,” Fridu said. “Molly, get back here! Now!”

  “I’m on my… FUCK!”

  “What just happened?” Fridu asked.

  “One of the little bastards stabbed my leg. Not bad. And now I’ve just kicked his ass. At least these rains will wash him off my boot. I’m on my way back.”

  “Everyone, report,” Fridu said.

  I said, “I’m near the wagons. I’ll let everyone know the gilliands are attacking.”

  Gerik said, “I’m one hill over. The little army is between us. Might take me some time getting back.” Because we were in his thoughts, we could feel extra meaning in his words. He might never make it back. Alone, the gilliands weren’t terribly dangerous. But as an army? A different story.

  I struggled my way to the caravan master, bulling my way through the winds, trying to find him in the terrible storm. It was odd having two groups of voices in my hearing, the pure communication of Fridu’s magic and the frantic shouts of those in the caravan, muffled by the storm, coming from unseen places, because in the brutal winds and the fierce rain nearly everything was unseen.

  Then someone grabbed my hand. I gasped and pivoted and almost stabbed Starks, the man we’d been talking with the night before. I don’t think he noticed.

  “Josh!” he said. “Can you help me with some tarps? We need to—”

  “Gilliand attack!” I blurted. “Maybe a hundred of them. Coming from the east!”

  “Ah hell,” he hissed. There were more words, lost to a crack of lightning and a rumble of thunder so strong I thought it was going to knock me over. I heard Starks say something about letting the rest of the caravan know. His wife appeared, and he and Lyssa began the process of alerting the others. By then Fridu had reached me.

  “No time to explain,” she said, and then punched my forehead.

  “The fuck?” I said, and then my vision went woozy. It was already difficult to see, what with the rain and the wind, but now I lost all color. Everything went black and white. The world was flattened, and then abruptly it was as if I was being swept up into the air. There was a good reason for this. I was being swept up into the air. The witch was still with me.

  Fridu’s voice, in my mind, said, “Gerik. Molly. Stay back from the gilliands. Josh is going to fry some tiny assholes.”

  “Get a lightning bolt ready,” she told me, aloud, shouting to me over the storm, which we’d suddenly joined. Together, we were easily two hundred feet above the ground, tossed about by the winds, like being on a rollercoaster in the middle of a raging surf.

  “Fuck!” I shouted in panic. It probably sounded like thunder to anyone below.

  “Calm down,” Fridu said in my mind. “You need to cast Lightning Bolt on the gilliands. Best to be up in the air for that, to get a better angle. In a moment I’m going to change your vision, okay? You’ll see the gilliands glow. But quit moving around so much. I can only change your vision if I’m in contact with you. Plus, if I’m not in contact with you, you’ll fall.”

  “Fuck,” I said, as an all-inclusive statement. The winds were battering us. I was fucking freezing, my balls having shrunk so tight that they hurt. And I couldn’t help but think of all those public service announcements about staying well clear of high places whenever there’s lightning around, and right now there was lightning All The Fuck Around, because Fridu had soared us both up into the air.

  I felt a twinge of hot warmth in my eyes, and then suddenly I could see the gilliands moving around on the ground so far below us. They were pink hazes, ghostly figures with glowing presence, but indistinct.

  “There!” Fridu said. “Can you see them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then fry them up!”

  I’d like to say that I acted instantly out of some sense of heroism, or doing the right thing, especially considering that I could see the mass of gilliands moving toward the glowing figures of the caravan, but mostly I acted quickly because I felt like the sooner I got it all done with, the sooner I could get back on the ground.

  So I cast Lightning Bolt at the gilliands. It ripped a huge section of them to shreds. I could see the hazily glowing figures tossed into the air like a bomb had gone off. I could see several figures, the glowing pink ghosts, go suddenly black and then disappear. I could hear Fridu in my mind telling me that the sight she’d lent me could detect living objects, and that’s why so many of the gilliands had disappeared.

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  But these various realizations lasted for only moments, because there was an interruption. There was something about my lightning bolt that all of the other lightning bolts—the real ones slicing through the sky—found appealing. Seductive, even. It was as if all the other lightning bolts collectively decided to play Follow the Leader. The sky lit up. Everything turned fierce yellow and blinding white, tinged with specks of red and blue. Fridu screamed in my head and I could feel her focusing her powers into a protective bubble that encased us. Her other magics faded. I could no longer see the gilliands. And we could no longer fly.

  Together, we fell, even as what seemed like an army of lightning bolts charged past us, racing us to the ground. Soil erupted. Fires found footholds even in the rain. I could hear the terrified cries of the gilliands. A horse was flung past us, blown into the air, a terrified whinny and a look of utter incomprehension in its dying eyes. The bubble shield encasing Fridu and I was being battered by the winds, by the rain, the lightning, and we were splattered with charred soil and flaming body parts as the remains from several gilliands struck us like bugs on a windshield.

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” I screamed, barely aware of all that was happening, and then we struck the ground. At the last moment Fridu caused one of her instantly sprouting trees to slow our descent, grabbing us like a hand with thousands of wooden fingers, but before we could settle—before our descent was truly over—the tree was struck by a stray strand of lightning that not only obliterated the wood but bounced Fridu and I away like a rubber ball. We slammed into the ground maybe twenty feet away, bouncing once and twice and then a third time. Our protective bubble disintegrated on the first bounce. Everything hurt after that. Well, everything had hurt before that, but it hurt worse after.

  “Fuck,” I managed to blurt out, sprawled on the ground. I felt like a bowl of spaghetti. My eyes were full of white spots, dancing about. The rain was insistent, wanting me to be colder, wetter, more miserable.

  “Fridu?” I asked. “You okay?” I couldn’t see her. My eyes weren’t working very well. The wind and the rain and the darkness were too absolute, and each time my eyes adjusted to the darkness there was always another dagger of lightning to banish my sight. I thought I heard groaning to my left and was just turning in that direction when I caught a wave of a stench like deep-fried turds and then a gilliand stabbed me in my back, driving his spear deep.

  I screamed.

  Molly’s voice erupted in my mind, asking if I was okay, where I was, what was happening. The gilliand smelled so vile that it hurt as bad as the spear he’d driven into me. When I turned, my movements swept the spear out of his hands, sending him tumbling. He was a terrible looking caricature of a man. Three feet tall. Hairless. Puckered. Gangly legs with a tiny dick swinging free. Up top he was broader, with a thicker chest perched atop his spindly legs.

  I yanked the spear from my back and knocked him upside the head with it, screaming, “How can you stink so bad when it’s raining this hard?” His scent was making me gag. I wondered if it was one way that gilliands attacked, smelling so ghastly that they stunned their opponents.

  I was gushing blood. The spear had entered through my back and burst out from my side. The shaft of the spear was maybe a half inch in diameter. The point was simply sharpened wood. The rain kept washing my blood away, but the wound was bad enough that there was always more blood.

  “Josh!” Molly shouted in my mind. “What’s happening?”

  “I got fucking stabbed!” I yelled back, both through my mind and also screaming into the rain.

  “Heal yourself!” Molly said, from somewhere.

  “Oh! Yeah!” In the daze of the storm and the battle I’d forgotten I had healing magic. I moved a hand over my side and concentrated on thoughts of my wound knitting together, almost praying to myself for salvation, and meanwhile terrified that I would accidentally let loose with another lightning bolt and inadvertently cut myself in half. But everything went well. My hand felt warm, even in the rain. My wounds closed. I felt a release of the pain that my adrenalin had been struggling to suppress.

  “It worked,” I said out loud and also in my mind, hoping to let the others know. My mind cleared as the healing took place. I realized I was still holding the spear in one hand. The dazed gilliand was struggling to his feet, and he lunged for me, trying to sink his teeth into my upper leg or maybe my balls. I drove the spear down through his back. He bounced off my legs, squealing with the pain of his injury. I grabbed the back of his head, which felt like the inside of a melon. As hard as I could, I rammed my knee up at his face, but he slid from my grasp at the last instant and my knee took him in the neck, snapping it in half with a sound that was equally terrible and satisfying.

  “That worked, too,” I said, dropping the corpse. After that, events became a haze. The rains were blurring the world and the battle was blurring my mind. I remember straggling around, darting here and there, calling out for Fridu with both mind and mouth. I found her slumped against an old tree stump, with blood pumping from a gash on her forehead. She couldn’t speak. The witch’s thoughts, whirling in my own mind thanks to our magical connection, were nothing but chaos. I used another healing spell on her, and it roused her enough that she could further the process by healing herself.

  Together, we stumbled through the storm and wobbled closer to the caravan, where we found Molly standing atop the hill and a mountain of dead gilliands. The gilliands—the ones who’d survived the lightning strikes—had swarmed her. It was like watching an army of rats try to take down a bull. Molly was wounded in a hundred places, with several spears sticking out of her, most of them with broken shafts. She was covered in bite marks, claw marks, and blood. Her legs were marked with cuts from primitive daggers clutched in misshapen hands. But she was standing tall, her double-bladed axe swinging in arcs through the swarming ranks of the gilliands, loping off arms and legs and heads with body parts trailing after the axe like a comet’s tail of debris.

  Down near the base of the hill, a shadow was moving. Arrows kept bursting forth from the shadow, finding their targets in the backs of the gilliands clawing their way toward Molly. Fridu gestured and the hill erupted with grass growing thick as tentacles, grabbing and twisting and snapping the little gilliand bodies. I leapt into battle with my brand-new Blameless Dagger, but I didn’t use any of its tricks. There was no time for tricks. There was nothing but stabbing and being stabbed. Blood everywhere. So many screams. Grunts. Howls. And the fucking stench of those creatures. I think I would’ve lost my mind, but Molly kept laughing into the darkness and the storm, roaring out with laughter that became an insane type of anchor in my mind. It gave me a harbor of sanity. It kept my feet planted. I kept being stabbed. I kept stabbing.

  In time, it was over.

  The aftermath was that three of the horses were dead, and one wagon had been tipped and much of the spices spilled onto the ground. Lyssa, the woman we’d spoken with the night before, had been speared through her stomach and was dying amidst the spilled spices, trying to speak but only coughing blood, her life quickly fading.

  I used a healing spell on her, and Fridu added a potion, and soon Lyssa was as healthy as before the storm and the battle had begun. Starks hugged me, thanking me for his wife’s life, his callused hands holding me tight while he cried into my shoulder, the warmth of his tears noticeable even in the cold of the rain. All around, people were congratulating each other on surviving the fight. The stink of the gilliands was still in the wind. Holy shit it was so terrible. But we’d survived.

  I didn’t tell anybody about how, when hugging Starks, I was looking over his shoulder at the top of a nearby hill, where three foxes had gathered, watching me.

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