The crimson witch

snorted.
        The beast marched forward onto the stone after only the briefest of hesitations, waddling step after step across the gorge. On both sides, the possible fall was tremendous and ended not with a floor of flat rock-which would have been bad enough and deadly enough-but in a jumble of broken stones whose pointed ends would make fast mincemeat of anything dropped from the bridge.
        Still, they crossed without incident, reaching the solid ground on the other side without even a single close call or slipped foot. Kaliglia stopped, sighing heavily now that he was sure disaster was about to be theirs. Jake slid down and put hand to eyes to ward off the bright sun, searching the way ahead. A hundred feet on, a thick forest of what appeared to be elm trees stood sentinel over the foothills and the mountains beyond. The way through the woods would be rough, and Kaliglia would have to squeeze through here and there, but there could be no turning back now.
        Kaliglia moaned slightly. “The woods are dark.”
        “See,” Jake said, turning back to his mammoth companion, “I told you we would not be greeted with evil incarnate upon setting foot in Lelar. No kingdom is any more evil than others. This place has as much sunshine and fresh air as we had on the other side of the gorge.”
        Kaliglia snorted, started to answer, but was cut short by a sharp screaming and the flapping of leathery wings…

Chapter Six: MAN BATS
        
        Something dark and solid struck Jake across the chest like a lightning bolt left over from the previous evening's storm, barreling him backwards, head over heels on the hard earth. He rolled sideways, cracking his skull on the hard earth. His ears rang as if a thousand bells were playing in syncopated rime. His vision turned to globs of light without shape-globs of light that spun around and around, up and down, from corner to corner of his eyeballs. He tried to force himself to clear up the jumble of light and see straight, but it was not an easy thing…
        Abruptly, he was aware of a sharp-tongued fire burning in his sides, bursting up through his chest. He felt the warm flow of blood, his own blood, soaking his ragged shirt. With an extra burst of adrenalin, he was able to clear his vision. When he saw what hung before him, he almost wished he had been able to retain the blurred world where shapes and characteristics were unknown. The thing on him was a demon for sure. The face was partly human, but the majority of it had been given over to Nature to play around with in one of her more drunken spells, and she had played quite imaginatively. The broad forehead jutted imposingly out over two narrow, slitted, and deep-set black eyes. There was no white at all to those eyes, just blackness from edge to edge, A deflated nose split the eyes and dropped down the middle of the face, a nose without cartilage, so that it almost did not exist, save for a slight depression in the skin and two ragged nostrils where that ended. Below the nose, just after a short, thin upper lip, was a mouth crammed full of canine teeth that snarled and tangled one another and a purple, darting tongue.
        Jake felt claws against his flesh again, realized the demon was laughing at his weakness. He sucked in breath, shivered from toe to scalp, coughed on the fetid odor of the beast's breath, and kicked upward with all of his might, using his body as a lever between earth and demon. The demon was not particularly heavily built, and Jake flung it aside with little trouble. Had he reacted sooner, he might have saved himself the slashes from the foot claws of the beast, for he was obviously the physical superior to it. He could see now that it was about the size of a twelve-year-old boy and flaunted a pair of leathery wings that stretched from its deformed and withered arms and attached to the flesh at its sides, giving it the look of a bat-a weird, mutated man-bat. It rolled to its feet where he had thrown it and stood facing him, hissing between its rows of razor teeth, dancing irritatedly back and forth on clawed feet so that the claws clicking against the hard earth made the sound of castanets. The end of each wing and withered arm was also topped with four claws on the end of four emaciated, nearly all-bone fingers.
        Jake remembered the knife in his knapsack. Kell had given it to him with the warning that he might find it necessary in Lelar. But this world had proved