A clean shot to the pale and vulnerable belly. The monster staggered and fell — wounded, not dead, but it didn’t seem able to do more than lie on its back and flex its claws in the air. Guilford sprinted across a field of granite dust toward the collapsed Dome, anxious to find fresh cover before the sound attracted more of the creatures.
He discovered Tom Compton crouched behind a half wall, hand clutched to his throat.
“Bastards almost took my head off,” the frontiersman said. He spat a red globule into the dust.
So we can still bleed, Guilford thought. Bleed the way we did at Belleau Wood. Bleed the way we did when we were human.
He took Tom’s arm. “Can you walk?”
“I hope so. Too fuckin’ soon to give up the ghost.”
Guilford helped him up. The throat wound was vicious, and the frontiersman’s other injuries were just as grave. Faint light flickered from his ruined body. Fragile magic.
“Quiet now,” Tom warned.
They topped a hill of rubble, all that remained of the Dome that had stood for ten thousand years in the silence of this empty continent. Rifle fire popped frantically to the north and west.
“Head down,” Tom cautioned. They inched forward, breathing dust until their mouths were sandpaper and their throats rusted pipes.
I remember you, Guilford thought: Tom Compton, the First Sergeant who had dragged him through the wheat field toward Château-Thierry, pointlessly, because he was dying… Over these knives of granite until they saw the Well itself, brighter than Guilford remembered it, radiant with light, its crumbling perimeter guarded by a pair of vigilant monsters, their eyes swiveling with a fierce intelligence.
Elias Vale was still able to hold and fire an automatic rifle, though his fingers had grown clumsy and strange. He was changing in ways he preferred not to think about, changing like the men around him, some of whom were no longer even remotely human. But that was all right. He was close to the Well of the Ascension, doing sacred and urgent work. He felt the close proximity of the gods.
His eyesight had been subtly altered. He found he could detect faint motion in dim light. His other senses, too. He could smell the salt-pork smell of the attackers. The rain falling on his pebbled skin was both cold and pleasing. The sound of rifle fire was acutely loud, even the rattle of pebbles a symphony of discrete tones.
More acute, too, was the sense that had attracted the gods to him in the first place, his ability to peer at least a small distance into a human soul. The beings attacking the Sacred City were only partly human — partly something much older and larger — but he felt the shape of their lives, every poignancy and tension and secret vulnerability. That skill might still be useful.
His rifle was not his only weapon.
He huddled behind a granite block while two of the more thoroughly transformed men patrolled the rim of the Well. He felt — but it was indescribable! — the immense living energy of this place, the gods imprisoned in the nonspace deep in the earth, straining at physical incarnation.
An army of them.
And he felt the presence of two half-mortal men approaching from the north.
He picked their names from the glowing air: Tom Compton. Guilford Law.
Ancient souls.
Vale clutched his rifle to his pustulant chest and smiled emptily.
Tom said, “I’ll circle left, draw them off with a couple of shots. You do what you can.”
Guilford nodded, watching his wounded friend scrabble away.
The Well was a pocket of algorithms embedded in the ontosphere, a pinprick opening in to the deeper architecture of the Archive. The god-Guilford’s only way in was through physical incarnation: he had needed Guilford to carry him here, but the battle inside the Well, the Binding, that was gods’ work. But I’m tired, Guilford thought. I hurt. And with the pain and the fatigue came a crippling nostalgia; he found himself thinking of Caroline, her long black hair and wounded eyes; of Lily, five years old, spellbound under the influence of Dorothy Gale and Tik-Tok; of Abby’s patience and strength; of Nicholas gazing at him with a trust he hadn’t earned or deserved, a trust soon breached… he wanted to bring it back, bring it all back, and he wondered if that was why the gods had built their Archive in the first place: this mortal unwillingness to surrender the past, lose love to crumbling atoms.
He closed his eyes and rested his cheek on a jut of wet stone. The light inside him flickered. Blood welled up from his wounds.
The sound of Tom’s rifle roused him.
At the eroded rim of the Well the two monsters swiveled their heads toward the sound of the gun. Tom fired again and one of the beasts screamed, a shriek nearly human in its pain and rage. Bile-green fluid spurted from the monster’s ruptured gut.
Guilford took advantage of the distraction to move another several yards closer to the Well, dodging between man-high columns of granite.
Now both creatures were moving, approaching the source of the gunshots at an oblique angle, offering their dorsal armor against the rifle fire. They were extraordinarily large, maybe specially-appointed guardians. Their walk — bipedal, fluidly balanced — was slow, but Guilford had learned to respect their speed. Claws and forearm mandibles were exposed, bone-white, glistening with rain. Their smaller lower arms, less arms than auxiliary knives, clattered restlessly.
The rain deepened from drizzle to downpour, sheets of it streaming off ancient stone, raising plumes of vapor from the Well.
The monsters weren’t affected by the rain. They paused and rocked their heads, a querulous birdlike gesture. The water gave their skins or shells a polished gleam, raising hidden colors, a rainbow iridescence that made Guilford think of his childhood, of washing pebbles in a brook to see their luster emerge from the dross of dust and air.
Closer now. He felt the heat of the Well, the burned-insulation reek of it.
Tom stepped into the open and fired another shot, maybe the last of his hoarded ammunition. Guilford used the opportunity the frontiersman created and ran for the rim of the Well, glancing backward. Get away while you can, he wanted to shout, but he saw Tom’s left leg buckle under him. The frontiersman dropped to one knee, managed to raise his rifle, but the nearest creature, the one he had wounded, was suddenly on him.
Guilford moaned involuntarily as the monster deftly nipped Tom’s head from his body.
The sheeting rain concealed all else. The air smelled of ozone and lightning.
He shouldn’t have stopped. The second monster had spotted him and was moving now at terrifying speed toward the Well, long legs pumping as efficiently as a leopard’s. Running, it made no sound audible over the hiss of the rain; but when it stopped it released a cloud of stinging solvent vapors, waste products of some unimaginable body chemistry. Its eyes, expressionless and strange, focused tightly on him.
He lifted his rifle and fired two rapid shots at the creature.
The bullets chipped its gleaming armor, perhaps cracked an exposed rib, caused it to stumble back a step. Guilford fired again, fired until his clip was empty and the monster lay motionless on the ground.
Tom, he thought.
But the frontiersman was beyond repair.
Guilford turned back to the Well.
The rim was close. The spiral of stone steps was intact, though perilously littered with fresh debris. That didn’t matter. He wasn’t planning to take the stairs. Jump and let gravity carry him. There was no bottom to this rabbit hole, only the end of the world. He began to run.