The creature leaped at Japheth. It fastened its mouth on his neck. Pain lanced through him. A bitter stench wafted from the wound.
Japheth seized the homunculus's scruff and tried to pull it away. The creature held to him like a leech, biting and scratching. His fingers tingled with sudden numbness. The bitter smell was poison!
"Assassin, let go your master!" Japheth boomed. Almost without conscious direction, the Lord of Bats's cloak plucked him out of the trek bell. A mere blink of darkness and he was back inside the vehicle, three feet from his former position.
Even as the homunculus was still turning around to find its relocated target, Japheth backhanded it with a tingling arm. The homunculus dropped through the bottom of the bell trailing a forlorn wail.
"That answers one question," he muttered. It was possible to fall out of the trek bell.
Japheth grabbed a handle and leaned to watch the homunculus's progress. Its flailing form dropped two or three long seconds before the twisting wall of vapor bowed inward. When the creature struck the wall, it was instantly pulled out of sight. Gone.
The tingling in Japheth's fingers progressed to his arms. The damned thing had bitten him deep enough to get some of its spittle into his blood. It was a familiar feeling. When Japheth first took control of Neifion's domain, a few of the homunculi had bitten him. This one hadn't got enough venom in him for the tingling to lead to numbness and trouble breathing. He'd be fine.
Far more troubling was what the attack portended. It was more than coincidence that a homunculus would attack Japheth now. Its old master was just across the bulkhead. He wondered if Neifion had sensed the conflict and was even now laughing at the warlock's discomfiture.
His thoughts veered wildly. He was fooling himself that he had any control over the unfolding situation. All his many worries ganged up and pounced as one. The concern leading the pack: Anusha's welfare. Was she even still alive?
And if she was alive, would she ever deign to speak with him again?
It was all too much! His hands moved of their own accord. They plucked the silver compact of traveler's dust from a fold in his cloak. Internal conflict died before it was half begun as he dropped a red crystal into his right eye.
A scarlet curtain washed across his vision.
His roaring thoughts drowned, one by one, beneath an oceanic feeling of oneness.
"Better," he mumbled. What had he been so worked up about?
Anusha, of course. She was on his mind nearly constantly. Her face, her hair, the way she used to smile, the faint hint of her perfume, and her pale skin...
She'd become an obsession, perhaps one nearly as powerful as the traveler's dust. He smiled as crimson currents rocked him.
Safely on the road, he allowed himself to wonder how she regarded him. Their last interaction, when he'd pulled her spirit briefly free of its captivity, suggested the infatuation she'd first shown for him had seen its day.
A vacancy in his chest made itself known.
It was the oddest feeling. A sucking, forlorn sensation of anticipated loss. His breath came harsher for a moment. He wondered if anguish over pending rejection was an emotion fit for a curse-spewing warlock whose powers could pierce the very walls of the world.
Apparently, yes.
His dust-hazed mind tried to spin him away from the pain, but his surroundings were too novel to completely ignore. He directed his gaze back into the vortex. He imagined all his worry being sucked down that roaring throat, leaving him free to act without emotional attachment.
He was on his way to save a woman who had trusted him. A woman who, if events would pause long enough, he might forge a bond with that could last a lifetime. He could mentally deny it all he liked, list all the reasons why it could never be, but his body had already decided.
He loved her. "Anusha," he called, his voice taking on an odd timbre that reverberated through the bell, through his dust - charged mind, and out into the swirling space between spaces. "Anusha, I'm coming to set you free."
*****
The yellow aboleth repeated, What is it?
Anusha hissed in surprise. The yellow monster could speak! More than that, speak from its mind into hers.
She'd heard stories of such marvels. The words seemed to crawl around her brain before each one became intelligible. The sensation sickened her.
The many eyes of the aboleth pulsed. Then all five looked at her.
The insidious voice continued, Is it a stray dream, a failed memory jarred loose from the Elder's wakening?
Unknown. Disperse it, lest it rise to the apex and disrupt the ritual of rousing. Nothing must disrupt the ritual of rousing.
The aboleth's "speech" was harsh and odd. It didn't seem to have a sense of its own identity...
Something like a cobweb seemed to brush Anusha's face. It tickled, then fell away.
"The aboleth has noticed us," Yeva said.
"Yes."
"Can you get us away?" Yeva asked, her voice calm as glass.
Anusha followed the woman's suggestion. She and Yeva jerked backward, directly away from the beast.
The voice called after them, no softer or louder than before and just as devoid of identity, It resists dispersion. It ignores the aura of catching. Dispatch sleepers to eat it. Dispatch dreamcatchers to clutch it Summon overseers to enslave it.
Anusha blinked and everything was different. Instead of Yeva and a threatening aboleth, she saw a roiling tornado of infinite length. Something descended that whirling tunnel—a bell being lowered by a fire-winged angel.
"Anusha!" came Yeva's voice, as loud as if she were right next to Anusha. "We must retreat!"
Anusha blinked free of the vision even as a message issued from the strange, hollow bell. It was a promise.
"Anusha, I'm coming to set you free."
Reality reasserted itself. But her concentration on the rope metaphor holding them in midair collapsed. She and Yeva fell like stones.
Their residual trajectory carried them well clear of the aboleths gathered around the orrery hole. They fell and sprawled onto rough stone. Anusha was on her feet a moment later—uninjured, of course. She helped up Yeva, who was shaking.
Yeva said, "I am unhurt!" The woman was still getting used to her lack of a physical body.
The yellow aboleth with its multiple eyes that could apparently see them swooped down. A cacophony of clicks and low, whalelike moans burst from the mass of aboleths around the circular hole in the floor, but apparently whatever they were doing was more important than chasing down loose memories. They continued their strange ritual.
"Look," said Yeva. She pointed. A school of aboleths fell off the ceiling like a throng of leeches abandoning a corpse. They thrashed in the naked air but didn't fall to the floor. Instead they swarmed for a moment, as if relishing their ability to defy gravity.
It is here. It is vulnerable. Destroy it!
As one, the aboleth school surged toward the yellow-hued aboleth, whose eyes remained fixed on the women.
"Run!" Anusha shouted. She still had Yeva's hand from helping her stand. She sprinted toward the opposite wall of the great chamber, pulling Yeva along.
The five-eyed aboleth continued to descend, but its angle of descent changed to follow their path across the chamber's floor. The others fell in behind the lead creature, creating an undulating line in the air like a yellow- headed snake.
Yeva yanked her fingers free of Anusha's grip.
Anusha yelled, "What are you doing?"
Yeva extended both hands, fingers flared, and leaned toward the approaching aboleth phalanx. Her eyes pulsed with energy—one with fire, the other with leaping sparks. She said, "I think only the yellow one can sense us. If I can hurt it.. " Lightning discharged from Yeva's hands and unerringly speared the lead aboleth. Even as the creature's path through the air faltered, Yeva cupped her palms, reared back, and threw. An orb of translucent gray arced upward. It struck the yellow aboleth. White light pulsed from it, briefly enveloping the creature's body.