Page 111 of Silk & Sand
Raider flung off his kaftan and climbed to the crenelated lip of the wall. Last time, he hadn’t been ready for the fight. Last time, he’d lost his grip on the horns behind the sand serpent’s head.
This time, he would do better. He had to.
“Raider—no!”
Raider’s heart leaped at Seth’s shout. He looked back to see Seth racing along the empty street, sword in hand, chakram at his side. Damn it! Seth was a lot faster than he looked.
Raider faced the sand serpent again, readying himself as the huge head snaked toward the broken gate. With so much potential prey, it didn’t respond to Raider’s insignificant presence on the city wall.
When the head came within range, Raider leaped down. He landed at his mark, just behind the sand serpent’s head, narrowly missing the venomous spines running along the creature’s back.
The impact would have been little more than a nuisance to the massive creature, but it still jerked in response. This time, however, Raider was ready. He managed to get a firm grip on the horns with his bare right hand. Drawing back his left, he punched down as hard as he could at the base of the sand serpent’s skull. His brutally studded quicksilver fist cracked the scale—and the sand serpent shrieked.
The creature lashed, writhing back from the broken gate, tossing its head with titanic force. For a moment, the world went crazy and Raider could do nothing but hang on.
When the sand serpent suddenly stopped thrashing but instead coiled its body, drawing back to hiss at something, it took Raider a second to get his bearings. Then he heard the high whistle of the chakram. He saw it flash in the sun as it arced back to Seth’s arcane glove, clearly having struck the sand serpent.
Seth caught the chakram and hooked it onto his belt. Sword in one hand, Seth reached for something else on his belt. Raider had no time to see any more. He didn’t even have time to be furious with Seth for drawing the sand serpent’s deadly attention.
Hauling back his quicksilver arm, Raider punched again at the cracked scale. This time, as the massive head whipped in response to the blow, Raider nearly lost his grip—but it wasn’t because of the momentum. It was because movement caught his eye. Impossible movement.
For a split second, Raider thought that Seth was actually flying. He soared through the air in a sweeping arc and came zooming toward the sand serpent’s head. He had his sword high and ready. His other arm was outstretched … grasping his multi tool. The wire, its harpoon-like barb lodged somewhere in the sand serpent face, was retracting, drawing Seth straight to the creature’s head.
Raider could only watch, dumbfounded, as Seth came flying in to land on the bony ridge of the sand serpent’s snout. The instant Seth’s feet touched down, he struck down with his heavy sword—straight into the creature’s eye.
When the sand serpent screamed and thrashed, dislodging the sword, Seth had no hope of keeping his feet. Raider shouted in horror as Seth was flung off. They were so high, Seth would never survive the fall.
But Seth had managed to keep hold of his multi tool. For a moment anyway. Long enough to delay his fall. But, inevitably, he lost his grip.
When he lost sight of Seth, Raider punched frantically at the weakened scale. The sand serpent’s head shook then whipped high. Raider hung on desperately, hitting as hard as he could. The scale shattered.
Raider punched into the raw, exposed flesh, but he could tell even with the first blow that the legends were wrong. The flesh was too dense. There was no vulnerability in this thing, no weak point that a man could possibly break through. Raider would never be able to hammer bluntly through that flesh before the creature’s violent lashing managed to unseat him.
But he had a more immediate problem.
As the sand serpent arched high, fangs bared, Raider spotted Seth far below on the ground. He was on his feet, sword in hand—and he had all of the sand serpent’s deadly attention.
It didn’t matter how fast Seth was, how strong, how precise. The sand serpent’s strike would kill him.
The world receded.
Raider ceased to think. He only felt, and what he felt was terror and rage and absolute, desperate need.
And the quicksilver answered.
As it had on that day when Asha had been in danger, the quicksilver roared through Raider’s body. It shot through his right shoulder, cascading down that arm. It spiked viciously through his legs and along his spine.
As the sand serpent struck down toward Seth, Raider did not consciously command the quicksilver. It responded as intuitively as his own hands—but with so much more power.
The quicksilver punched, spear-like, through the sand serpent’s scaled body to burst through its throat. The liquid metal lengthened and thinned and hooked back to spear through the creature again. Then the strands of quicksilver wrapped around and around its neck.
The sand serpent’s broken shriek cut off entirely as the quicksilver bound its punctured throat, tightening and tightening. The creature thrashed in desperation and agony as the quicksilver cut deep into its flesh like razor-sharp wire, slicing muscle, severing nerves and blood vessels until it wrapped around the creature’s spine.
Raider didn’t hear his own shout of fury. He barely registered the way the sand serpent plummeted—and him with it. But he did hear the sickening crack of bone as the spine broke. And he felt the booming impact with the ground as its body collapsed—and the massive head tumbled free.
The severing dislodged Raider and sent him thudding across the hard pack. The quicksilver whipped brightly through the air as it retracted into the armor.
Raider rolled to a stop and lay on his back, stunned by the impact and the sudden silence and the terrifying foreignness of his own body. Quicksilver still encased his limbs and jutted from his spine. It extended up his neck and across part of his face.