The Fifth Dawn Read Free

rat, which swatted at the mammoth insect with its cable-tail. The hulking rodent couldn’t seem to score a hit, but kept the insect at bay without slowing its own charge into the brush. The other wasps were heading straight for Glissa, but the thick undergrowth was slowing them down. Their thin wings, already straining to keep their heavy bodies in the air, were too wide to slip easily through the thick undergrowth.
    Glissa couldn’t risk her own growth spell in the middle of the thicket; she could end up impaled on a tree. But she didn’t needmagic. She knew this forest better than anyone. She could make it through. But where would they end up?
    When she turned back, Slobad was gone.
    “Slobad?” the elf girl hissed into the darkened woods. “Slobad, this isn’t fu—hey, back off!” One wasp had gotten close enough that Glissa had to swat at it with her sword, but the creature sluggishly avoided the blade. “Slobad, where
are you?”
    Another wasp moved in too close and Glissa whirled, slashing backward furiously and feeling the sword tip connect with a thin metal exoskeleton. The wasp shrieked—Glissa was surprised to hear the voice of an insect, she hadn’t realized they had them—and turned in mid-air, crashing back the way it had come like a drunken goblin. Half of a translucent silver wing fluttered to the forest floor. There, it joined a severed stinger six inches long that twitched as it pumped wasp venom into the ground.
    The other wasps swarmed on their fleeing cousin, stinging the defenseless insect repeatedly. The savaged creature dropped onto its back, kicking spasmodically as its kin tore it to pieces with powerful mandibles. One of the wasps, the smallest, couldn’t get to the cannibal feast—twice, the other wasps batted the runt away with legs and wings—so it turned and continued to chase Glissa, followed closely by the rat, which gave the insect feeding frenzy a wide berth.
    “Up here!” came Slobad’s voice up ahead, about twenty feet in the air if her ears weren’t lying. Glissa kept running and craned her neck to see where Slobad had found refuge.
    He stood upside down on the bottom of a tree branch, his arms crossed and the worn satchel hanging awkwardly from his armpit.
    “How—?”
    “Just run up that tree! Trust me! Straight up! Meet you there, huh?” And with that, Slobad turned—still upside down—and rantoward a wide Tangle tree trunk directly in Glissa’s path. The tree was ancient, and had no low-hanging spikes for leverage. Her claws would be useless in the bark of a tree that age, hardened and weathered by centuries of moonlight.
    But she trusted Slobad and her eyes. Claws would not be needed.
    Glissa reached the tree in seconds, swatting blindly with her sword but never feeling contact with the giant beasts she knew were right on her tail. She kicked out with a flying leap, extended one foot parallel to the tree trunk, and hoped she hadn’t been hallucinating.
    Her foot found solid purchase and gave no resistance as she pulled it loose, brought up her other foot, made firm contact with the tree trunk, lifted that foot …
    If she hadn’t been running for her life, Glissa would have slapped her own forehead. She was using a climbing spell. Or rather, one was affecting both of them. Glissa looked over her shoulder and saw the ground like a wall receding in the distance. Her horizontal had gone vertical.
    The wasps finished off their cousin’s corpse, and now four of them buzzed lazily around the base of the tree, but their wings couldn’t lift them clear of the ground. One still dive-bombed the rat, which had been forced to slow its pace and fight back.
    All giant creatures. All obviously subjected to growth magic. Glissa had seen no mage, and the creatures had materialized seemingly out of nowhere. And now she was running easily along narrow, spiky limbs and boughs that should never have supported her weight. Stranger still, so was Slobad. Suddenly, it all