"They're called garim," Gaius supplied quietly. "They make marvelous cloaks when-"

The underbrush ten feet to the First Lord's left erupted in sudden motion, and something massive and leathery and low shot across the forest floor, its head turning sideways, its jaws gaping to snap at Gaius's legs.

It was an enormous lizard-a garim.

The First Lord saw it coming, and he reacted with admirable speed. He managed to turn and thrust his heavy walking staff into the beast's jaws. The garim snapped them shut, neatly clipping off the end of the staff. Then it spat the wood aside and pressed in on Gaius.

Gaius's maneuver, though, had given Amara precious seconds to act. The Cursor called upon Cirrus, borrowing of the wind fury's swiftness, and the world slowed down to a lazy, syrup-thick dance.

Amara's hand dipped to her belt, and her fingers found the hilt of the knife there. She drew, even as she turned toward the menacing garim, shifting her weight with maddening slowness, and flung the knife at what, to her own perceptions, was almost normal speed.

The knife tumbled precisely one and a half times, struck the creature's scaled hide, and sank several inches into the garim's flank, just behind its forward leg.

The garim reacted more slowly than any animal she had ever seen would have, and Amara had taken most of a step before it suddenly wrenched itself to one side, falling into a slow tumble as it snapped its jaws at the knife, tearing it free.

Amara drew her sword and flung herself at the beast, gripping the short weapon in both hands. The extra speed lent her by her fury would allow her to deal out a powerful blow-and she would need it to cut through its hide if the lack of penetration from her knife throw was any indication.

The steps between her and the garim drifted by slowly, and she had time to appreciate another mixed blessing: Though the gift of speed granted by her fury made her swift enough to intervene on the First Lord's behalf, it also left her with entirely too much time to realize the danger in her course of action.

The beast was much larger than she had thought at first. Though it stood very low to the ground, no more than two feet at the highest point of its back, the garim was built broad and flat, with powerful legs that spread out widely from an overly broad body made from gristle and sinew. It probably weighed at least twice what Amara did, and quite possibly more. Its feet were tipped with heavy claws, its head was solid and blocky, distended with the size of the muscles that powered its vicious jaws. It had eyes like beads of black glass, small and vicious and stupid, and its tail, stretching out in length nearly equal to its body, thrashed about with entirely too much power and speed. Its hide was dark grey-green, and rippled with stripes of darker coloration, giving it ideal camouflage in the rain-drenched forest, and the scales looked tough and thick.

If the garim seized her, it would remove her limbs every bit as easily as it had snapped through Gaius's walking staff. She could evade it easily, of course, if she had been on her own-but she wasn't. The creature had deliberately rushed Gaius, and if she did not force it to deal with her, it would only return to its attack on the First Lord. She had to fight, which meant that she had to deal out a decisive, crippling stroke on the first blow or risk being overwhelmed by the beast's power and speed.

She would have aimed for the throat, had this been a thanadent, or a grass lion, or one of the Marat's herdbanes. The garim's neck, though, was covered in great folds of heavily scaled skin, and she doubted her ability to strike through it.

Unlike the garim, which could snap through her neck without any particular effort.

Amara was terrified.

The eyes, she decided. A small target, true, but Cirrus's speed would help with that. A true enough strike had the potential to kill the beast-and even if she only wounded it, that might disable the garim badly enough to prevent it from pursuing Gaius. Though if it came to that, she supposed, killing Amara, dragging her body off into the forest, and devouring her might prevent the garim from pursuing Gaius as well.

Looking at it from that perspective, Amara thought, she couldn't lose.

The garim's broad, vicious head swiveled toward her, and its wide mouth opened, revealing what seemed like hundreds of curved, vicious teeth.

Amara screamed and thrust the blade down, putting all the speed and power she could muster into the blow. The tip of her sword struck just above the garim's beady eye, pierced a thin layer of skin, and scraped along the thick bone of its skull. Her forward momentum carried her on, over the low-slung garim, and she realized with a sick sensation of panic that she was about to fall.

Amara tried to turn the fall into a diving roll, so that she would be able to come up on her feet and running-but halfway through, something struck her in the shoulder and sent her into an uncontrolled tumble. She hit the ground hard, first on one knee, then slammed into the ground with one shoulder, and fetched up against a tree with stunning force. She dropped to the ground, the world rolling back into normal motion again, as she lost concentration on maintaining the link with Cirrus.

The wounded garim lashed its heavily muscled tail, with which it had just struck her, and doubled back on itself with sinuous, liquid speed. It rushed her, fangs bared. Amara fumbled dazedly for her sword, knowing, even as she did, that the weapon would be of little use. She thrust out as the garim closed on her, and the sword skittered off the hide of its chest. She screamed.

And then a length of wood came out of nowhere and landed with crushing force on the creature's muzzle, slamming its jaws closed and into the ground. Its head rebounded from the earth, and the wood landed again, and again, the blows precisely timed and savage.

The First Lord of Alera flung himself onto the garim, slipping his damaged staff across the beast's throat, and with a snarl of effort and a wrench of his entire body, twisted away, taking the garim with him, rolling the lizard belly-up.

"His underside!" Gaius cried. "Countess, where the scales are thin!"

Amara seized her sword, lurched to her knees, and struck down, through the garim's exposed throat, just beneath where Gaius's staff still held back the creature's head. To her surprise, the sword swept cleanly through the finer, smoother scales there, and blood rushed out in a scarlet fountain.

The garim thrashed wildly, but the First Lord had the creature pinned. Though it flung him back and forth, it could not escape Gaius's hold. Amara struck again and again, until the garim's thrashing slowed, and the First Lord rolled clear of the dying animal.

"My lord!" Amara gasped.

"I'm all right," Gaius panted. "The Count."

Amara rose, looked around wildly, and realized that there was something else about the deadly lizards she had not known.

They ran in packs.

One garim hung thrashing fifteen feet above the forest floor in a willow tree, where dozens of the slender branches had seemingly reached down and wrapped around it. Another thrashed and contorted wildly on the forest floor, bounding up as high as five or six feet above the ground. A woodsman's axe protruded from the dying garim's head, where a powerful blow had sunk the weapon to its eye in the lizard's skull.

And the bloodied Count of Calderon himself was locked in combat with a third garim-unarmed. Like the First Lord, he had managed to gain a position on the beast's back, but he had locked his arms around the creature's throat. Amara could see that blood covered one side of his face, his throat, and half of his upper torso, but he was conscious, his face locked into a rictus snarl.

The garim thrashed wildly, rolling over several times, and its tail whipped about with savage energy, hammering Bernard on his legs and lower back. He let out a howl of rage and pain.