Caewen went at him with her sword, but though she landed two good swipes, the armour the creature wore was too thick or too spellwoven. The blade glanced off and the Boggart batted Caewen aside with one hand. She tripped and fell. The creature would have put a foot of iron-like claws through her throat except that Dapplegrim jumped between them, screaming his own demoniac shrieks and kicking his hooves. He caught the boggart with a kick, but the blow didn’t even knock the creature over. Any man or woman would have been killed outright by that hoof. Instead, the boggart just took a couple steps backwards to regain his stance. He snarled and started approached again, perhaps more wary than before but only a little. They circled each other, Dapplegrim snapping and snarling with his sharp carnivore teeth and the boggart swinging that mattock around and around. Several of the mattock-blows landed. Big streaks of blood were torn from Dapplegrim’s hide each time he was caught by the blade-tip though it was never a square enough strike to go right in and kill.
All through this, Caewen was scrambling to her feet. She backed away, recovering her wits and her dropped sword. She was breathing hard, mouth open, eyes glistening as if fevered. Rather than charge at the fight, she raised her left hand and performed a strange gesture with it. The boy had never seen anything like it, but just watching her fingers twist gave him a chill and awful shiver down his spine. His stomach squirmed. As Caewen completed the profane looking gesture, the boggart made a gasping noise, then it choked and stumbled. It dropped its weapon. It clawed at its own throat and its eyes bulged. First a trickle of blood spilled over its lips, then blood came out of the nostrils, eyes and ears. As it fell to its knees torrential bleeding started. Even Dapplegrim looked surprised as he danced back. The other boggarts–smaller creatures all of them–drew farther back now, growling worriedly, edging away.
The scarle-lord fell forward into a muddy puddle of its own blood. Some twitching was the only sign of life.
Dapplegrim gave Caewen the strangest look, as if he were suddenly a bit afraid of her too.
But she was stoney eyed and hard-voiced. “Come. This way! Now!” And she took off at a run down an ivy-tunnel that led off at an angle to the one they were on.
Everyone else followed her, though if the mob of boggarts did too, they didn’t do so at once. A fear had been put into them, and no wonder thought the boy. Watching the boggart chieftain die had sickened and terrified him. And Caewen was his friend.
He tripped and stumbled along after her as she ran. Fleat was running beside him, though he wasn’t foundering nearly as much. They came to a place where the ivy formed a beard hanging off a great stone arch. There were stairs running up and they took them. There was nowhere else to go and the noise of pursuit was now arousing behind them again. Boggarty voices and boggarty howls rang and reverberated. The path curved up and around, growing narrower and steeper with every passing moment.
Without warning they crashed through a curtain of ivy and into a declivity in the stone. It seemed they had climbed high enough that they had entered a shallow cave in the cliffside. Light penetrated only dimly and green-stained because of the hangings of foliage, but there was enough to see by. The boy could see shapes moving about in the shadows near the stone of the cliff-face. It stank. It was the same old wet dog smell, but worse. The air smelled as if someone had been storing piles of old rotten skins or half-cooked, half-fermented meat.
At first he thought the shadowy lumps were creatures belonging to the boggarts, perhaps some breed of hound, as they were making plaintive noises, mewings and cawings, and not the angry, ravenous shrieks of even the smallest bogey-beast. But when his eyes adjusted he saw that was not so. He was taken aback and caught speechless.
It was Dapplegrim who said it, “Wee boggarts?”
The shadow-thing that rode with Caewen in her bag hissed and snickered. “Tsh, Tasch, tssssch. Kill them. Break their brains open, cretinous little things.”
But Caewen said, “I’m not killing children,” and after a pause, “not even boggart children.”
“Someone, somewhere will regret you not killing children,” spat the shadow-thing in the bag. “Small fleas grow up to be big lice. It’s not easy, true. It’s a sad thing, true. Tssssch. But it needs to be done and quick. Their daddies are rushing up the stairs.”
Dapplegrim snorted. “That’s literally not true. Fleas and lice are quite different things.”
“Tssch. Oh, you’d know I guess.”
“Hey! Hurm. Look here you–“
“Wait a moment,” said the boy. He’d spoken without really thinking it through, but now that everyone was looking at him, he finished. “The fetch is right, these creature’s dadas are chasing up behind us… but where are the mamas?”
Caewen hissed a hard word under her breath and drew her sword. “If there’s young about there’ll be at least one she-boggart. And if you think a jack-boggart can be a nightmare, just try imagining what a she-boggart will do if she thinks… you’re… threatening… her… young.” Her sentence had ended with a series of half-murmured words because as she spoke, a rolling, wailing noise arose out of the darkness at the far end of the cave. There must have been a crevice in the shadows somewhere after all, and something very large was moving swiftly through that space in the rock, coming closer with every screech.
The boy had already run a few paces farther than the others. He was looking for another way out of the cave-shelter. He spotted a shadowed trail, cutting through stone and running upward and northward. “Hurry. This way.” He pointed and waved. As soon as he did, he saw all the little hairy shapes twist their misshapen heads towards him and their eyes all opened and lit with a white-crimson fire. “Hurry,” he managed to say again. “There’s a way out here.” He ran and the others followed.
Now he was leading the way, and terrified. He was at the head of the group, fumbling along, brushing aside stands of ivy with his hands, groping his way around shattered pillars in the dark. Once, he put his hand onto something that was unmistakably a face, and he felt his heart nearly stop before he realised that it was a statue of some long-forgotten lord of this place, half-tumbled and leaning weirdly in upon the path.
He ran on.