Maledysaunte arched against the mud, gagging on a scream. Kaulas leaned above her, holding her shoulders down. Her feet kicked brutally, leaving long gouges where the bootheels scraped.
“O Child,” said the Guardian. “You are blind.”
“Fine,” Bijou said, irritation rendering her incautious. “So tell us what you do want. Did it ever occur to you to ask for help?”
It certainly never occurred to me, a little voice mocked.
“The book must be destroyed,” he said. “That is the only way I can be free of this existence.”
“You must have had centuries to destroy it,” Bijou shot back. “Just getting around to it now?”
“I cannot wield the hammer,” he said.
“And if it can’t be destroyed?” Riordan said, rising up and leaving Maledysaunte to Kaulas.
Oh, Kaalha, she prayed. Don’t let him make the guardian turn around. If he caught sight of Salamander…
But Riordan came around a circle to confront the guardian at her side. “Then better to have it out wreaking havoc in the world than in safe containment, aye? In the witch’s head, it can sit safe forever. Where’s its mischief, in hands like hers?”
Whatever the guardian might have replied, it was lost in Salamander’s scream as she suddenly stood up and hurled her arms over her head. It wasn’t any kind of magic, just sheer stagecraft.
The guardian turned in his footprints, a hand coming up as if he meant to reach out and grab Salamander by the throat.
Something pale and swift struck from the water’s edge, hurling its long length through the mud to sink needle-fine fangs in the guardian’s calf. Bijou had a brief, confused image of hissing and a flickering tongue, a muscular writhing and then a shape like a bent bow as the amphisbaena whipped its other head out of the mud and plunged the second set of fangs into his neck.
He flailed, a hand coming up to grab at the snake’s midsection, but it was already gone—whipping itself end over end to somersault into the darkness like a hurled stick. Bijou had a moment to observe the thin trickles of black ichor that oozed from the bites—something that had not happened when the bullet passed through him—before he turned away to face Salamander over Maledysaunte’s convulsing body and Kaulas’s back.
Kaulas, Bijou realized, wasn’t just holding Maledysaunte down. His hands were inside her waistcoat, rummaging.
Bijou might not be an expert in assessing the emotional states of demigods, but she knew Kaulas. He was looking for a talisman, whatever might hold the secret to Maledysaunte’s immortality.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Bijou spat. “In the middle of a battle? Kaulas!”
She shouted that last as a warning, but the guardian wasn’t looking at the necromancers. His gaze was fixed on Salamander. One hand was raised to his throat; ichor slipped between his fingers and trickled down his arm, dripping from the point of his elbow to the floor.
The hammer rang again. Bijou thought the blows were falling farther apart. Dr. Liebelos was tiring. Prince Salih was lying somewhere in the cavern, possibly broken and bleeding. But he’d proven that without the guardian, they could physically intervene with Dr. Liebelos.
“Riordan,” she said to the bard beside her. “Get the hammer.”
He asked no questions, just stumbling away up the slight incline to the anvil. The mud dragged at his bad foot.
Across the cavern, Salamander shouted, “Natural weapons!”
Of course. The snake’s teeth hurt him. Bullets did not. Fists and feet, then—
Bijou leaned back and kicked the guardian right in the small of the back. Behind her, sounds of struggle rose as the hammering ceased. Salamander bent down, scooped up a rock, and hurled it at the guardian.
Maledysaunte’s hands came up and grasped Kaulas’s fumbling wrists. “Off me, you whoreson sorcerer!”
He didn’t move fast enough to suit her. She twisted against him, using her hips to throw him off—and directly into the path of the guardian as he leaped toward Salamander. Maledysaunte dragged herself up, a terrible figure in her mud-soaked clothing, lurching toward the anvil.
“Can’t beat the guardian,” she snarled, falling in the mud up the hill. “Got to remove his reason for fighting.”
Whatever his other failings, Kaulas reacted to his unexpected impact with the guardian by latching on—and lashing out with feet and fists. Bijou fully expected him to go flying in a moment, as the prince had.
“Mother!” Salamander cried, racing after Maledysaunte. But Maledysaunte was already at the top of the incline, where Riordan had Dr. Liebelos by the wrist. She twisted to get away from him.
Natural weapons, thought Bijou, as Ambrosias reared up out of the muck and sank its pincers into the guardian’s neck, below the base of the skull.
The shearing bite would have paralyzed a human; on the guardian, it only succeeded in connecting because his arms were encumbered by Kaulas. The guardian hurled the necromancer off into the mud, where he crumpled.
Prince Salih came limping out of the darkness, one arm dangling limply, his face a demon’s mask of blood and mud. With his good hand, he leveled a pistol at the guardian.
The guardian reached over his head to grab the articulated centipede. Ambrosias dangled from his fist, rattling like a string of beads.
“No!” Bijou shouted, crouching to scoop up a rock as big as her fist. She wound her arm back—
The guardian stopped. His fingers opened. He dropped the bone and jewel centipede in the thrashed and slimy soil.
Bijou followed the line of her gaze.
Maledysaunte and Riordan stood beside the empty anvil, the hammer slack in Maledysaunte’s hand. Dr. Liebelos was a huddle at their feet. Salamander had stopped halfway up the hill, frozen in horror, hands spread wide as if she could arrest the moment.
“It’s over,” Maledysaunte said to the guardian. “Go back from whence you sprang.”
She let the hammer drop from her hand.
Nine
Riordan carried Dr. Liebelos’s body from the cave. Prince Salih leaned on Bijou, but he walked—and Kaulas and Salamander walked also, supporting one another. Maledysaunte went first, alone.
Bijou thought it was so she would not have to look at anyone.
“What about the blood?” Salamander asked, the only words anyone spoke as they came up out of the belly of the earth, their way lit by many electric torches now that there were no concerns about conserving the batteries.
“It summons myrmecoleons,” Kaulas answered. “Maybe if we’re lucky, we were too far underground for them to notice.”
“And if not?”
“Another fight,” Prince Salih said tiredly.
No one spoke of Kaulas’ attempt to rob Maledysaunte during the battle. No one spoke of Maledysaunte’s killing of Dr. Liebelos. For one terrible moment, Bijou had been afraid that Kaulas would offer to bring her back for Salamander—but apparently even he could read that much in the wind, and he kept silent.
Leaving the cave seemed to take three times as long as coming in, even though they simply followed their own footsteps back.
When they came out by the water, the dead stallion awaited them. Over his protests, Prince Salih was installed as the animal’s rider, as he was the most-wounded. Bijou knew it was the right choice when he slumped with exhaustion on its back, even his iron will insufficient to the task of keeping him erect.
Night had come again in the depths, or at least twilight. But against it, Bijou could see the hunched, scuttling shapes of myrmecoleons lured from their dens by the smell of something wounded. They had humped, chitinous ant-bodies and fierce-toothed cat-heads wreathed in shaggy, sand-matted manes.