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again, shattering the thick wooden pillar and sending splinters flying every which way. One thick sliver embedded itself painfully in the back of my hand, and I snarled an angry curse. When I yanked it out with my teeth, the taste of tarred oak gave me the first ghost of an idea, but I needed a bit more time to let it grow into something solid.
    I slipped sideways, keeping one sword between me and it to fend off any more sudden attacks. When I got to the next pillar, I used a long vertical cut to shear off a corner, effectively making myself a short wooden spear.
    I quickly returned my left sword to the sheath on my back and slid a foot under the jagged piece of wood, flipping it up into my hand. I was only just in time, as the beast charged me then and I had to cartwheel out of its way to avoid a vicious swipe from freshly regrown tusks. Moving in behind the whatsis, I jabbed the rough spear through one of its hind feet and down into a crack between two flagstones. It wouldn’t stop it for long, but it ought to—
    “Oh, fuck.” I swore aloud as the damned thing kept moving forward without slowing. Sure, its hind leg stretched out briefly like some boneless bit of tentacle, but then the flesh simply parted around the wooden spike and grew back together afterward, like water cut by a knife.
    That’s not good,
sent Triss.
    No. I think we’re going to have to do something pretty drastic.
    Any idea what?
    Maybe, yeah, but it’s ugly dangerous. I need you to go to sleep for a bit while I see about making a fire.
I hate using fire as a weapon, but I didn’t see a lot of choice given the thing’s regeneration.
    A low growl from behind warned me that the original head would soon be providing me with a second whatsis to deal with. I needed to end this fast, and I could only see one way to do that. I silently kissed off the supplies that I’d not yet had the time to retrieve and set about implementing my plan.
    For starters, I took over from Triss, who had slipped into the dream state that allowed me to use his powers and senses as my own. The whatsis seemed to favor scent over sight, which meant there was little point in shrouding myself, but any sort of complex magic required that there be only one of us pulling on the reins. Honestly, I suspect he would be better at the spellwork than I was if we could arrange things that way. But, with the notably bizarre exception of the Dyads, that’s simply not how the mage-familiar relationship goes.
    Magic works much like swordplay, with the mage in the role of the hand on the hilt and the familiar playing the part of the blade. I drew my shadow up from the floor and across my skin, forming it into a coating thinner than the finest hair as I bent Triss’s substance to my will.
    When it covered my face and head, my senses expanded into the realm of shadow in ways that are hard to describe in any human language. Darkness took on tastes and textures that no mortal tongue or eyes ever experienced—light howled, color vanished, and textures whispered. The first time I’d clothed myself in Triss’s substance, the utterly disorienting mishmash of sensation had driven me to my knees. It had taken years of training to allow me to interpret the flood of new information in any useful way.
    I got out ahead of the whatsis again now. Easy enough, since it didn’t seem to be in all that big a hurry to kill me. That was convenient, but also worrying. When someone is trying to murder you in a leisurely sort of way, it’s usually because they’re not at all concerned that you’re going to get away. Hopefully, that was out of ignorance of who I was and what I could accomplish, but somehow, I doubted it.
    I took down the pillars holding up the part of the balcony overhanging the secret door—shutting it forever. That narrowed my exit options considerably, since the main entrance had been bricked over years before. It was one of the things that had attracted me to the potential fallback in the