The Empire's Ruin, page 78
She took a step back down the ravine, back toward the monster.
A stone almost the size of her head sailed above, smashed into one of the gabhya’s limbs. Then another. Then another.
“Plenty of rocks up here!” Cho Lu shouted.
“Stop!” Gwenna shouted.
The stones weren’t hurting the thing, not badly enough to stop it, anyway. Mostly, it seemed, they were just infuriating it.
“Is Rat clear yet?” she demanded, not daring to turn.
Pattick was panting with exertion. “Almost.”
“Here.” Bhuma Dhar’s voice. Evidently he’d descended as well. “Tip, then pull…”
Stone ground against stone, Rat screamed, then a large boulder crashed down the slope, a few paces to Gwenna’s right.
“Got her,” Pattick shouted.
Too late.
The gabhya, goaded on either by the sound of its escaping prey or by its own ravenous appetites, surged up the defile. Gwenna could hear the others struggling to retreat, but there was no time to join them, no time to do anything but shift her stance, ready her swords, and prepare to die.
The first of the creature’s arms came at her fast as a spear strike, razor teeth eager and gleaming. She ducked beneath it—no chance of rolling on the jagged stone—pivoted, hacked down with a blade, and lopped it off. Kiel’s arrows might not have done much damage, but her smoke steel carved into the too-human flesh as though it was already rotten. The stump pumped ichor while the severed arm dropped, teeth still gnashing. It might have felt like a victory, she thought grimly, if there hadn’t been another ninety-nine arms already grasping for her.
“Get high,” she shouted over her shoulder. “Get to the top of the ravine. Try to start a slide.”
It was a mad hope, partly because the slope seemed too stable for a true avalanche, partly because even if they managed one, she’d be caught up in it along with the monster. Ugly way to go—crushed beneath a few hundred tons of rock—but a lot prettier than the alternative.
“I’m coming,” Pattick gasped.
“No.” Her own voice echoed off the stone walls. “Get Rat and go.”
She could hear Rat cursing behind her, struggling. “Help Gwenna Sharpe,” the girl snarled. “We must.”
“Pattick,” Gwenna growled, knocking aside another mouth, ducking under a third, then burying her sword down the gullet of a fourth. “You get that girl clear, or I will skin you and feed you to this fucking thing myself.”
If Pattick responded, she didn’t hear it because the gabhya began screaming again. The sound felt like a rusty knife dragged over her skull, along the ridges of her spine.
She slipped to the side as it lashed out for her face, lopped the lower jaw from the mouth, then felt the teeth tear into her calf. Only a lifetime of training kept her from losing the leg. She hacked down with her free sword, sliced halfway through the creature’s limb, felt the hot ichor splatter across her face, almost lost the blade when the thing yanked back.
It hissed from a dozen mouths, reared up once more.
Gwenna gritted her teeth, tested the leg. The muscle felt weak, compromised, but she could stand on it. Poison like fire snaked up her veins, but the tendon was intact—that was the important thing. The venom—if it was venom—might kill her later, but the moment that mattered was now.
Two more arrows flickered past—Kiel had shifted his focus from the body to the limbs—but after another heartbeat the bowstring fell silent. Either the historian was out of arrows or he’d decided to move to a different position. Not that it mattered.
She raised her swords, tried to see some new way to fight the monster, something that might actually work.
The whole miserable situation came down to a simple problem of arms. She had two. The thing before her had dozens. No matter how fast she was with the sword, she couldn’t keep them all back. The starshatter at her belt might slow it, might even kill it, but there’d been no time to reach for it earlier, not to get it free, light a striker, and set it to the fuse. Certainly there was no time now. She grappled with the thought as the monster came on again, lashing out at her with half a dozen arms, all their mouths gnashing.
She battered two aside, dove behind a boulder, landed hard on her shoulder, twisted around to find the sick bug looming over her. She gritted her teeth, dropped her blades, and reached for the starshatter. Too slow—she knew she was too slow—but if she could just light the fucking thing, could just hold on to it while those mouths shredded her, maybe the explosion would take it down, or start a slide, or do something that gave the others a chance. Her blood-slick fingers closed over the munition; she yanked it from her belt. Before she could light it, however, a howl, half pain, half ecstasy, blotted out all other sound.
She thought, at first, that it was the beast keening its delight before finishing her.
Then she realized that the thing was twitching, antennae thrashing the air, rising up yet again, eyeless mouths agape, turning back down the slope.
Starshatter in her hand, Gwenna stumbled to her feet.
The howl came again, louder this time—if that was possible—a mad shriek of such awful eagerness that some animal part of her wanted to dive back behind the boulder, bury her head in her arms, blot out all sound, all vibration. Instead, she forced herself to scour the ravine below.
There.
Still standing on the boulder, his filthy uniform half ripped away, naked cutlass in one hand, Vessik’s bloody sword in the other, head tipped back, throat heaving as though the sound pouring out of it were thick as half-clotted blood: Jonon lem Jonon, once First Admiral of the Western Fleet of Annur.
“Here!” he screamed. “Come here, my beauty. Come to me!”
The gabhya turned, quivered, hesitated. Then, like darkness flooding down over the stone, poured itself downhill at the solitary man.
“Sweet Intarra’s light,” Pattick gasped, somewhere above and behind her.
An old Annurian curse, one she’d heard from the soldier a hundred times, but there was nothing sweet or light about what was about to happen. The gabhya was going to kill Jonon. It was going to swarm down the gully, fall on him, and take him apart limb by limb. There was no way to help him, no chance of getting there in time, not that he looked like he wanted to be helped. As the monster advanced, he stared at it with glittering green eyes, his arms spread as though opening for an embrace. He was going to die, die horribly, but his dying might save the rest of them.
Her hands steady with the focus of the fight, Gwenna slipped a striker from her belt. She tried striking it on the stone before her, but it was wet with blood—her own?—and the flame sparked, then died.
Slowly, she reminded herself as she reached for a second striker.
Down below the gabhya spread its dozens of arms, a grotesque echo of Jonon’s embrace, then reached for the man.
Gwenna ran the striker over the stone. This time the flame held. Carefully, she touched it to the fuse of the starshatter, which hissed to life.
“He’s going to die,” Cho Lu whispered.
Jonon lem Jonon, however, did not die.
As those awful arms closed around him, he shifted, moving faster than Gwenna had ever seen him move, faster than she herself could fight, hacking and whirling and slicing with a speed she’d never witnessed, not even from the Flea or Ran il Tornja. The only thing like it had been Valyn fighting at the height of his powers, but Jonon had none of Valyn’s training, none of the slarn’s blood running through his own. It should have been impossible for him to stand against the monster, but stand he did in a rain of yellow ichor, his mouth pried wide in a smile of delight, his cutlass a dream in his hands as he carved the thing apart.
The sickness, Gwenna realized with horror. The same pollution that had created the gabhya throbbed in the admiral’s veins. What was it he’d said? The water is making me stronger. Faster. I can feel it already. At the time she’d thought that was just the madness talking. How wrong she’d been. Not about the madness, but about the strength, the speed.
For the first time, the monster fell back.
Instead of pausing, taking stock, Jonon leapt from atop the boulder, landed square in the center of its back, then drove his blade down between the overlapping scales. It screamed, thrashed, tried to toss him off, but it had begun to slow. Its balance was all wrong. It had lost too many arms and legs. Ichor poured from a dozen ghastly wounds. What arms were left strained for the admiral, teeth gnashing empty air, but he was out of reach. As the monster writhed, he kept driving, driving, shoving that blade deeper and deeper between the segments of the body until at last the whole thing dropped, shuddered, and fell still.
Gwenna took a deep breath, steadied herself.
A cold wind knifed down out of the mountains.
The world reeked of piss, and shit, and rot, and blood.
“He did it,” Pattick murmured.
It should have been a relief. The thing that had been stalking them lay dead on the cold stones. They’d made it—come through the jungle and survived. They were already free of the sickness. If they could just reach the pass it was downhill, a clear shot all the way to the coast.
All Gwenna could see, however, was Jonon lem Jonon’s face, his bared teeth grinning through the slick muck, his hands twisting the sword in the open wound, driving it still deeper, though the fight was already over. Behind her, Pattick and the others panted their relief, but all Gwenna could hear was the sound of the admiral’s laughter—delighted, crazed, only barely human.
He stopped grinding away at the wound finally, raised his eyes, found hers.
“You see?” he whispered.
The wick of the starshatter hissed wickedly.
Jonon grinned. “This. This is what we were meant to be.” He let out a great, mad whoop of laughter. “Not groveling little creatures, but gods!” A negligent wave of the hand. “Put out your candle. The beast is dead.”
Gwenna reached for the wick, ready to snuff it, then paused.
Jonon’s eyes narrowed.
“Put it out, you foolish bitch.”
For an endless heartbeat she studied him, the man who’d once been an Annurian admiral. Maybe he could still be saved. Kiel had mentioned some artifact in the fortress above. She had no idea how Menkiddoc’s sickness worked. They’d won free of the pollution, after all. Maybe if he stopped drinking the diseased water, stopped eating the rancid meat, found whatever Csestriim remedy had survived all the long centuries …
He bared his teeth as though reading her thoughts. They were bloody as the teeth of the creature he’d slain.
“Put it out,” he said again.
Instead of replying, Gwenna threw the munition.
“Down,” she shouted, rolling behind the boulder. “Get down!”
The explosion came a moment later. The explosion, then the grinding rumble of rockslide, louder and louder as the gully below collapsed in on itself, stones smashing against one another, filling the air with dust and a noise so great Gwenna could feel her own heart trembling. When it finally subsided, she dragged herself to her feet, stared down the slope.
Jonon was gone. The gabhya was gone. Lurie was gone.
“You killed him,” Pattick murmured.
“Killed gabhya,” Rat hissed.
“Not the gabhya,” Pattick said. “The admiral. She killed the admiral.”
“Stupid,” the girl replied. “Admiral was gabhya.”
52
Adare was desperate—though she hid that desperation well—for news out of Dombâng, or the garrisons along the White River, or Mo’ir, or any of the dozens of other places that Annur was slowly crumbling. She had riders and runners, soldiers who reported to the Dawn Palace daily, ships’ captains who bore sealed missives in their hands. The trouble was that their reports were always days or weeks out of date. If the currents and winds weren’t right, word from Anthera and the Bend could take over a month to arrive. Which meant she needed Akiil. He—an orphaned thief from the Quarter—was the single link that could hold together the whole sprawling empire, and so when she sent him back through the kenta he’d nodded his obedience, repeated back his orders, promised to explore the other gates as quickly and safely as possible.
And then went straight back to the Csestriim fortress in the mountain.
Fixing the Annurian Empire was hardly his job.
This time, as he stepped through the kenta into the mountain stronghold, he let the vaniate go. Fear and eagerness, guilt and greed—all the old emotions shivered through him like a fever as they returned. It was tempting to build the trance once more, to climb into that endless empty shell, but if he was going to do this right, if he was going to survive, he needed his emotions. He felt safer inside the vaniate, but that safety was an illusion. Nothing within the hollowed-out mountain was safe—if he knew nothing else about the place, he knew that. He needed his fear, needed all the old instincts of stealth and flight that he’d honed as a child.
Heart thudding, he made his way down the staircase, pausing every few steps to listen. For a while, he could hear the wind moaning through the broken windows above. Then, when he’d descended far enough, even that sound was lost in the cavernous silence, a stillness so deep it seemed to reach into him, spread through his flesh, until he felt only half real, half alive. The place might have been a crypt. All the weapons and artifacts below might have been the grave goods of some long-dead Csestriim prince, except, if he remembered the stories right, the Csestriim didn’t have princes. And they didn’t usually die.
When he reached the landing, he stopped once more.
Argent light filtered through the open door, spilling across the stone.
The air smelled faintly acrid, like steel heated too long in a forge. It hadn’t smelled that way the last time. Which meant … what? Impossible to know.
“Slow is stupid,” he muttered to himself.
It was something Skinny Quinn used to say when they were robbing houses up in the Graves.
He’d never quite agreed. There was a value to planning, to patience, to choosing the best moment. On the other hand, once you were in—through the window, or the busted back door, or the dormer—that was the time to take what you’d come for and get the fuck out. Quinn understood that better than some of the other kids, who liked to hang around, try on clothes, eat the fruit, smear shit on the paintings and scrolls.
A hundred heartbeats.
That was how long Quinn always gave herself, and he’d already been in the Csestriim fortress at least ten times that.
He stole a quick glance through the door. The room was just as he’d remembered.…
No. Not quite. While the silver-blue veins still streaked the ceiling, reflecting off the flat black water, more of the alcoves along the wall were empty. He closed his eyes, compared the memory with the present moment. Three swords were missing, and something that might have been a vase, and the flute thing. Rods and spears, some inexplicable leaf-shaped thing, a breastplate, a gauntlet that might have been carved from ivory … So much treasure, gone. Removed by the woman he’d seen before? By someone else? Were they being taken someplace else to be used? Or simply stolen? It didn’t much matter. If he intended to pry more money out of Gelta Yuel, he’d need to work fast, take what he could get while there was still something left.
He chose the smallest items he could find, something that looked like a shark’s tooth—although the surface swirled as though coated in oil—and a segmented thing halfway between a necklace and a collar. He could have carried more, but greed was almost as dangerous to a thief as moving too slowly. The trick to staying free, to staying alive, was stealing no more than you could carry at a dead run over uneven rooftops. Not that there were any rooftops in the Csestriim fortress, but the principle applied. Plus, there was the not insignificant matter of smuggling the shit back into Annur. The swords were gorgeous, but Adare would have questions if he returned lugging a Csestriim sword.
He’d climbed halfway back up from the great domed room to the watchtower, was just congratulating himself on his discipline, when he heard the noise.
His stomach lurched. Fear spiked his blood.
He ached to run, but forced himself to stop, to draw a long breath through his nose, hold it, and listen.
Footsteps, just as before, but this time they were coming from above, from between him and the kenta.
And this time, they weren’t alone.
Something else—not the leather soles of boots or the slapping of bare feet—was skittering and scratching over the stone. It sounded like someone dragging a dagger across the steps or walls, dragging a dozen daggers, hacking and stabbing at the stairs. Or maybe like some creature trying to claw its way free. Both the footsteps and that other, awful sound were coming toward him, coming fast.
He turned, started back down the steps.
As he ran, his fear molted into a clear, cold focus. It was a gift, one he’d had even as a young child; no matter how frightened he was in the days or hours leading up to a job, no matter the dread lacing his veins as he forced the window and climbed through, if the time came to flee, some older, surer instinct took over. He’d heard priests talk about being inhabited by a god, and while there was no god of thievery—none that he knew of, anyway—he recognized the sensation, the feeling of being guided by something wiser and more confident than his own mind.
On the other hand, he could only run so fucking fast.
He flew down the steps like falling but whatever was behind him gained.
Two hundred more steps to the chamber. One hundred fifty.
He considered darting past it, following the stairwell down into the unexplored portion of the fortress, then decided against it. Someone was being chased—that much seemed clear—someone in addition to him. If that person knew the layout of the place, which seemed likely, they’d know that the domed chamber was a dead end. Hopefully they’d continue on past, drawing along whatever ’Kent-kissing thing followed. He’d be able, then, to double back safely to the kenta. Maybe this time when he escaped he’d be smart enough not to come back.
