The standoff broke before either of them could finish starting it.
The mountains spoke first. A low groan rolled through the rock under my boots, deep enough that I felt it in my teeth, and then both slopes simply opened. Snow sheeted off them in long white curtains, and out of the dark beneath came the rest of it — the part the Hammerfelds had been holding back.
Dozens of summons came pouring down the mountainsides and boiling up out of the plain itself, the white ground splitting and shoving them into the light, and they were not the hunched, dumb things the retainers had carried. These stood on two legs, or four, and they ran.
'Oh, you have got to be joking.'
They were fast. That was the first thing my body understood before my head caught up — the way they ate the distance, the way the snow barely slowed them. Humanoid, most of them, broad and fierce and built wrong in every direction that mattered, all of it pointed at one thing: getting to us before we got past them.
