There were four of them in total, slithering,
slavering monstrosities both like, and unlike, those that had attacked them on
Lake Nightglass, and they came at him all at once, waving barbed tentacles like
whips, snapping with too many mouths, spitting lumpy gobs of some viscous fluid
that hissed as it touched the sand.
And Ellis evaded all of it. It was easy, somehow. He simply danced - though he had never really
been a good dancer - weaving in and out
of the creatures' attacks as naturally as once might weave in and out of a
reel. And as he passed, his sword did
the rest of the work, slicing and stabbing, severing tentacles until they were
just so much oozing, flopping meat on the sizzling sand. And still they came, undeterred by the
violence he perpetrated upon them, and so he persisted also until, mere minutes
later, he was done and they were dead.
Woah! he
thought, glancing down at the remains of his butchery, How the hell did I do that?
There was no time to ponder such things, however, as
he head a shout coming from the other doorway to the arena. He spun on the balls of his feet, felt the
sand shift beneath them and fell with a thud, his face reddening even though
there was no audience.
Pride comes
before a... But it wasn't pride it
was more like...
The shout came again and Ellis scrambled to his
feet, managing to keep them this time as he dashed for the door and into the
darkness beyond.
Miss Barkcastle and Lord Blood Dragon had somehow
ended up in the same chamber after their mysterious transition into the
obelisk. However long the period of
unconsciousness which this produced actually was, it seemed to affect the
vampire more than it had the elderly engineer and so he roused to see her
leaning over him, as if checking he were still undead.
"Ah, you're awake," she said as his eyes
flicked open with unnatural swiftness.
"It would theem tho," he said, rising
gracefully to his feet, so that, suddenly, their positions were reversed and it
was he who was peering down at her.
"But why wath I not before,” he asked wearily, “and where are we
now?"
"We experienced some sort of Trans-aetherick
shift, I think. Franck would know,
mostly likely. Anyway, it seems to have
been sharp enough a shift as to cause us to black out for a time. I do not know how long."
"Then the plan could be a failure alweady!”
"It could be, but let's try to be
optimistic."
"Yeth, of courthe…" he replied
uncertainly. The whole journey was
starting to become quite tiresome and now, after the chaos and destruction of
Shalereef, he was beginning to think he might be too old for this sort of
thing. Miss. Barkcastle’s youthful (in
comparison) enthusiasm only seemed to make it more plain.
But what did it matter? He was most definitely in the midst of it all
now and had little choice in how to proceed.
Lakhma had to be stopped, he knew that as well as the next man, but… he
hadn’t realised just how much energy it would take…
Staring around the chamber they had found themselves
in, he recognised the glowing stones from the obelisk control rooms they had
already visited, but, even as Ellis was doing the same thing, he found nothing
in them to give any clue as to what they should do next.
"How long have you been awake?" he asked
at last, supressing a sigh.
"Not much longer than you. I haven't had a chance to explore and...
besides... I didn't want to get separated.
I have no idea where the others are."
The vampire sighed for definite this time. It seemed that there were a number of exits
from the room they were in and he had no idea whether any of them was better
than any other for getting them where they needed to be. For just a moment he found himself pining for
his vast, empty fortress beneath the city.
"Well," he said after a moment's pause,
"I thuggetht we jutht pick a diwecthon and thtick to it."
"That sounds like a plan to me," Miss
Barkcastle agreed.
"If you thee anything that might help uth find
where we need to go..."
"I'll shout out," she replied.
"Yeth, yeth, well, let'th go then."
He strode towards a door, confident in nothing and
yet an unnaturally long life of nobility had shaped him to fake it. He didn’t even pause as he stepped through
into-
"Oh blood and bile," he exclaimed.
"What is it?"
Miss. Barkcastle followed through the doorway behind
him and stepped out onto the top of a stairway, but it was not the stairway
itself that had so irritated the vampire, but it's many, many siblings,
travelling in all directions above and below them, often at impossible angles,
defying gravity, with no easy way to untangle the routes. It gave him a headache just looking at them.
"Well that was unexpected," Miss.
Barkcastle commented more calmly than Blood Dragon felt appropriate.
"Indeed!
But what do we do now?" He asked.
"It seems there's only one thing we can
do," the old woman replied, still as calm as if she were sitting at a
table drinking tea, "we take the stairs down."
"But down to what?" the vampire enquired,
"Ithn't thith where we need Ember?"
"Then I suppose we'll have to find him, won't
we?"
"I thuppothe tho,” he said and sighed once
more.
Gulliver found himself in a similar predicament,
only entirely on his own. He too had
woken in a nondescript chamber and stepped out to discover a maze of impossible
steps. His first reaction had been
somewhat different, however.
He had stared at those mad stairways, stretching off
in all directions and leading into none, or so it seemed, he had felt something
give inside himself. His shoulders had
slumped, his legs had felt weak and, before he could tumble down the steps in
front of him, he had taken a seat at the top, then merely stared out into the
unknown.
This has been the worst day ever, he thought, and
for once he didn't feel even slightly guilty for saying so. He knew he could be a bit melodramatic, that
his pessimism wasn't always warranted.
He knew that it was mostly self-indulgent and thus, he knew, he had been
able to get through. It had helped him
cope with those times which were a little difficult, though, perhaps, it had
sometimes created difficulties of its own.
Now, however, he knew he really was at rock bottom, or pretty close to
it. He'd been able to keep himself going
when he'd been around the others, for he knew they would support him but... why
should they?
I could just
stay here and no one would really mind, he thought. I could
stay here and mourn Harker and the world would carry on. There are so many others who are working to
save it and today has just been too much.
It's time to give up.
And yet...
And yet none of that was what Harker would have
done. Gulliver understood, now, that
Harker had only been trying his best, and his best for both of them - that
despite GUlliver's own morose attitude, his inclination to be opposed to all
his beautiful brother achieved, Harker had loved him and had wanted the best
for him. And if it had been the other
way, if it had been Gulliver Blake who had died in that trap, what then?
Harker would have fought on, his grief would have
become fuel for action, because he'd want to make sure that Gulliver's death,
meaningless and brutal though it had seemed, was part of something worthwhile.
And that's
what I 'ave to do, Gulliver realised, even
though all I want to do is curl up and forget about the world.... if I do that,
then what was all this for? Why lose
'Arker? Why any of it?
He wiped his eyes - having only just realised he was
crying, and staggered to his feet.
Before him the stairway stretched down towards who knew what, and
Gulliver took the first step, then the second and after that there was no
stopping him.
Gulliver certainly wasn't the only lost soul within
the maze of the obelisk. Rockspark -
solid, dependable, taciturn Rockspark - was having a crisis of faith as he
wandered, totally without bearings, through an endless succession of short
corridors. He rarely spoke about such
things, not least because he rarely spoke at all, but his primary motivation
for most of his life had been the service of the Feathers, the four supernatural
beings which the Stoneskin race venerated as those through which the world was
created and who founded their ancient lineage.
Blackfeather, Ashfeather, Frostfeather and Purefeather, a monochromatic
spectrum from dark to light, from one order to another through the chaos of
nature. They had once loomed large over
history, now forgotten to all but the faithful and otherwise remembered only in
the names of the regions where once their temples stood before the erosion of
time or the ruin of conquest. Now all
but one of those districts stood empty and the world was falling into chaos.
With Lakhma ruling from above and allies dying down
below, Rockspark was finding that, for the first time in his life, he no longer
believed. Afterall, if they were real,
then how could they have let all this happen?
If the Feathers had ever truly existed, he concluded, they were long
gone now.
It was a radical shift of his worldview, a mental
quake sending cracks through his personality and, though none of this had shown
on the outside, he was falling apart. A
black pall of despair was descending on him.
If nothing he had believed all his life were true, then what could he
put his faith in? What hope was
there? It was enough to make him
question his very mission. Without the
aid of the Feather he had relied on all his life, how could he even continue?
Of course, if there never had been any Feathers then
all he had achieved had either been dumb luck, or up to him, a thought which
ought to have given him confidence, but all that he had faced in the past: the
petty troubles of his tribe, the intrigues of his time spent in the sheltered
streets of Howlinggale, the rebellion against the First Reader of the Silent
Elect in Crimsonshrine - none of it matched up to the madness of what he was
doing right now.
Oh, Feathers, he prayed silently, I no longer
believe you're there, but... but I so want to! I need you to be real... I...
There were no words for the emotions he felt - the
desperate, incomparable hunger for this supernatural reality so he carried
along through the maze of corridors in tormented silence, hoping for company or
consolation and finding neither.
His mental state was mirrored, reflected even -
equal and opposite - by Sarah's, who, at that very moment, was fighting her way
through hordes of Lakhmaspawn, much as Ellis had been doing, only amplified
tenfold.
She was not in an arena, but in the streets of
something resembling a city, made of the same
dark stone with its glowing veins and devoid of any detail, merely
streets and the city blocks between them, no doors, windows, gutters,
signs. It was like it supposed to give
the impression of a city and nothing more.
Above, maybe fifty feet clear of the 'rootfops' was a ceiling of yet
more veined stone, creating a vast chamber for her exertions.
And exertions they were. She fought like she had never fought before,
needing no weapon other than herself.
Her skin glowed with the power of a Slayer and Lakhmaspawn were torn,
pulped and broken beneath her hands ere they fell. They flooded at her from identical bare
alleyways, through streets free from cluttering stalls, pedestrians and cabs,
over perfectly cuboid houses to spill down onto her from above and pile their corpses
in her wake.
It all felt so easy and natural and though in other
circumstances the green ichor that stained her hands would have appalled here,
here it felt right. These creatures were
truly evil, after all, existing only to serve something that had set itself up
as the god of this world, though she now realised she really did know better.
And so an inner glow matched her outer one, and she
basked in a sense of purpose and - yes, despite it all - love. She knew that she was loved and she found
that she could love back, even if only a little.
And then the streets were clear and she was alone
once more.
Thank you,
she prayed silently, eyes closed, for she knew that she had not done it on her
own. She had had help. It was undeniable, for even the layout of the
streets had been to her advantage, forcing the creatures to come at her in
streams rather than all at once. She
felt the silence around her and just let it be for a moment, searching through
it for the source, for the one who had been with her the whole time, for-
She felt the punch to her stomach like ice and fire
and lead all at once, all the worse for being unexpected. She doubled over and opened her eyes wide
with shock and there was a face she had thought she would never see again, one
bitter with betrayal, hungry with revenge, distorted with the torment of
hypostatick experimentation, pierced by glowing eyes, green like emeralds.
Sarah could only gasp in pain, but she didn't need
to say anything at all. The conversation
they were about to have would be much too physical for words and Diana already
had all her responses lined up, one blow at a time.
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