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think about anything else but death. She had barely started to duck before a flurry of arrow shafts peppered the room, hissing out of the darkness. She heard screams as some of the men were hit even as they were diving for cover. The volley of arrows still seemed to be in the air when dark shapes began to swarm into the chamber, bristling with horns and barbed points, rushing amongst the now scattered men. For a split second she was afraid they were being attacked by a horde of demons up from the bowels of one of the Six Hells, but then it registered that they were men, men wearing masks made to resemble horned demons, men wearing black feathered hides and a hodge-podge of armor pieces about their bodies (when they were clothed at all), men wielding spiked clubs, archaic curved swords, and barbed spears.
    She practically breathed a sigh of relief. Devil-worshippers. Nameless Cultists. Followers of the Forbidden Gods . Joy coursed through her. I know what to do , she thought as she plunged the tip of her rapier into the throat of a horn-masked man running straight at her. She felt his spiked club whistle past her head as she ducked under it and the cultist’s momentum took him past her and she almost lost her rapier, but she managed to wrench it out of him, sending him spinning and blood arcing even as she sidestepped another horn-masked berserker and punched her dagger into his gut. I know what to do. Thank you, gods , she thought.
    Atop the idol, Stjepan snarled a curse. At the first volley of arrows that had scattered Guilford’s men, he immediately started to roll the map back up. Harvald crouched next to him, putting the heatless torch down onto a seam in the great idol’s head and holding the waiting scroll tube for him, and together they carefully slipped the map into the tube.
    The moment they were finished Stjepan turned and glanced over the chamber below them as Harvald dropped the scroll tube into one of his satchels. Black shapes swarmed throughout the room. Too many of them , he thought sadly. It looked like Llew and Porter were down already, and as he watched a gaunt, naked horn-masked man covered in blue-ink tattoos ran a barbed spear through old Jon Pastle. He could see Guilford laying about him with heavy blows of his broadsword, while Erim moved smoothly, surely, even gracefully through the battle. But we might still have a chance , he thought, and he crouched, preparing to start clambering back down the idol.
    He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked behind him. Harvald shook his head and nodded up at the ceiling.
    â€œThere’s always another way out,” Harvald said quietly. Stjepan looked past him, and was surprised to see the outline of a trapdoor in the ceiling, now illuminated by the heatless torchlight. He didn’t remember that on the maps.
    Erim was almost in a trance. The fighting on the temple floor was chaotic, brutal, a real every-man-(and-woman)-for-himself melee. Which suited her just fine. She figured she was better at fighting this way anyway, where she didn’t have to worry about anyone else, about keeping the line, about the shield wall or the pike hedgehog or the other things that soldiers trained to formations had to think about. She could just flow . So she did. She practically danced, and everywhere she danced a man with a horn-mask died. Somewhere she could hear a woman’s voice chanting, singing, and she wondered if she was imagining it, or if some dark fae spirit was playing an accompaniment as she worked. She danced over the body of Colin of Loria, his ugly blond-haired head split open by a sharp blow, his brains leaking out under her boots, and the horn-masked swordsman who had killed him gurgled a scream and dropped to the ground, blood spurting from his missing sword hand and a perforated lung. She danced in next to the Stick, beset by two horn-masked warriors, and stabbed one horn-mask up through the throat into his brainpan, and then with the