Page 111 of The Simurgh

He made his attack to the right, slicing in with an accuracy that had the Herlequin dancing on his feet, moving with lumbering finesse to avoid a cut. The Nephilim wasn’t much pleased, releasing a roar as he gathered himself and realigned. His returning blow was vicious and made a mockery of Silas’s premature satisfaction. The leaden ball barely missed Silas’s left shoulder as he made a move no less cumbersome to stay out of harm’s way. His foot slipped at the edge of the dune, where the sand tumbled like soft snow down the face of the slope, and that momentary imbalance nearly saw his head smashed from his shoulders.

‘Shitting hell.’ Silas went low, hands to the firmer section of sand at the dune’s very top, his knees still in danger of joining the slide downhill. He felt the wind whistle overhead as the flail came horrifyingly close again.

Silas dug his fingers in deep, sank his heels till there was a moment of resistance, and propelled himself upwards, keeping low, going into a haphazard roll as the flail tried to find its mark again.

The thump of it in the denser sand sounded all too near to Silas’s ear.

But he was on his feet again, spitting sand and shoving his hair from his eyes.

The Herlequin was lumbering. Giant he may be, but it was not working to his advantage with such close fighting quarters.

Silas adjusted his grip on the hilt and set his shoulders as they circled one another.

All the while the hammering at his mind did not stop. The Herlequin still tried to pin him down with less tangible things than a ball of iron. The creature bombarded Silas with hints of doubt, despair, the air of hopelessness thick. But deflecting the invading thoughts was not so difficult now. They were glaringly obvious, sitting like impostors amongst his own convictions and hopes.

Cuckoos amongst the doves.

The prince will die because of your weakness.

Never.

You are not strong enough.

To defeat a monstrosity? Of course he was.

You truly are a bumbling oaf. This is your next grave you stand upon.

He was not afraid of the grave.

‘That is all you have for me?’ Silas said. ‘You disappoint me,Brother.Not to mention bore me with your childish games of the mind.’

He finally got in a decent blow, shearing off a portion of the creature’s coat. Disappointment swept Silas when it became obvious he’d not cut any flesh as well.

But it seemed the Herlequin was as fond of a decent coat as Silas. The giant glowered, his bloodshot eye wide, his putrid teeth all on show. He roared, yet again. He set both hands to the flail’s handle and threw out a wild shot–a strike so obvious that Silas was already out of its path before the creature’s infuriated cry ended.

Silas spun about, resettling his grasp, catching a glimpse of Pitch down below. The daemon stood with flickering fingertips of flame at his side, staring up at Silas. His eyes were so feverishly green that Silas saw their glow from where he stood.

The Herlequin leapt on the moment of distraction. The point of one of the flail’s spikes cut through Silas’s coat, his trousers, and into the meaty flesh high on his thigh.

‘Bloody…shit…’ he shouted.

‘Your weakness for the prince will kill you both.’

A truly horrific sound came then, like an animal in the slaughterhouse. The Nephilim was laughing, pushing the sound through the slit allowed for his mouth. But had this wretched creature ever known truth mirth?

Pity mingled with revulsion.

How close had Silas come to being just as this creature was? If he had lived that day on the loch, might he have stood alongside the Herlequin here?

The tarry continued, Silas’s fighting stances coming to him as naturally as breathing. He was long past the point of wondering about whether or not he’d ever engaged in hand-to-hand combat in his past lives. The blocks and thrusts, the parries and counterstrikes, were all as familiar to him as his own hands. His body seemed to shift before his mind declared it necessary, his footwork even and measured on the unsettled ground.

‘If we are truly brothers, then you know we have the blood of the purebreds in our veins.’ Silas levelled a slice at the Herlequin’s shin, aiming for a place far more within reach than the creature’s foul head was. ‘Why do you side with those who seek to harm them?’

There was an advantage in being smaller…lesser…for his agility seemed to far exceed that of the Herlequin, whose next twist to evade Silas’s counterstrike seemed slower than the one before. Every shift the Nephilim made, every swing of the flail, came with the dragging weight of being so bloodybig.

‘I side with my true master. It is the angel’s blood that runs thickest in me.’ The Herlequin’s broken nose made his breathing wet and loud. ‘And the purebreds would not have me, even if I sank so low as to wish to move amongst them. I am the nightmares they fear, as are you, ankou. That you were given a gentler face does not change that.’

The Herlequin swung with a vigour that said he sought to change Silas’s ‘gentler’ face eternally. But instead of avoiding the oncoming strike, Silas met it and sent the blade to the chain. The scythe clanged like cathedral bells against the Nephilim’s weapon. The vibrations struck the air, so strong that Silas had to brace against them lest his footing shifted. But the momentum of the Nephilim’s blow was destroyed, the nasty spiked head swinging back towards its master.