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The ground crumpled like wet clay and sank into a fresh crater, and the Ugly Rat slammed deep into the earth.
“Wh-what?” people stammered, as their eyes went wide.
The creature they could barely endure looking at, a thing so powerful and alien that the mind tried to slide off it, had just been punched straight into the dirt. A lone figure dropped to stand on the fresh rim of the pit, dust and vapor curling around his boots.
One of the barbarians recognized the profile and breathed the name as if it might break, “Ketal…?”
“Kaaaa!” The rat shook its head as if to rattle the ringing out of its skull, then lifted its eyes and saw him. Rage flared in the ruined sockets. “You damned barbarian!”
Ketal studied it without hurry. In the White Snowfield, he had crossed paths with it over and over, until even loathing dulled into a hard, practical weariness. The beings of that place were born in the dark age, the first living things in a universe that had not yet learned what rules were. The Ugly Rat was one of them as surely as the White Bear, or the White Serpent. Knowing the root changed the taste on his tongue, but it did not change the choice before him.
“Leave, rat,” he said. He lifted his fist. Power gathered as if the world itself had slid toward his knuckles; veins burst in sharp crimson dots across the skin. “This isn’t a place you get to covet.”
He stepped and drove the punch. Air collapsed before it, then snapped...
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