The orc woman's hair went first. It fell, strand by strand, onto the rotting garment that covered the wight's shoulders. Then her skin puckered, wrinkling, cracking, flaking away. Underneath, her muscles were taut bands of filaments stretched over bone; but as the seconds ticked by, the tautness eased and the filaments separated from one another, like threads slipped off a loom, one by one.
Layer by layer, the wight's body fell away, sloughed off like unneeded clothes. Nothing decayed entirely – all the pieces remained. It was only the life energy that seeped off, drained from each fiber of flesh… and once the life was gone, the stray bits of anatomy had no remaining cohesion. The pieces separated quietly, like strangers who had no reason to stay together.
Despite the power flooding out of the wight, I could see little improvement in Yasmin. Perhaps the worst of her burns looked a little glossier, covered with an almost invisible veneer of regenerated skin; and perhaps the blood had stopped welling quite so quickly from the knife wound in her back. Even so, her eyes retained a deathly dullness and her hands showed only fatigue as they clung to the crumbling wight. Entropy might be allotting Yasmin a tiny portion of the wight's lifeforce… but it was keeping the lion's share for itself.
Soon, the wight had devolved to nothing but a meatless skeleton. One hand still pressed against Yasmin's stomach, and the other held her arm in its claws; but with a click of bones, it released its taloned grip and lifted its fingers to cup Yasmin under the chin. The gesture was exquisitely tender, like a mother reassuring her child… and then the skeleton peacefully relaxed into a litter of unconnected bones, their fall to the floor muffled by the dry pillow of tissues that had slumped off first.
«More,» Yasmin whispered hungrily. And the next wight stepped up, its face composed in total serenity.
Three more wights. Three more subdued collapses. I think Yasmin could have absorbed the energy of a dozen such donors and still longed for more; but the four who sacrificed themselves were enough to repair the most grievous damage. The stab wound under her shoulder blade was closed and clean. The patches of charred flesh on her arms and shoulders had now coated over with milk white, as smooth as the cataract in an old dwarf's eye. There was even a dark fuzz of hair covering her scalp, like red-brown lichen on a stone – not a fashionable coiffure, but my fingers longed to touch that close-shaven beauty.
«Hello,» she said, a sparkle in her eyes at last. «Hello,» she said again, looking directly at me. «Hello. Hello. Hello.»
«Can I help you up?» I asked.
«Please.»
She reached out both arms, like a child eager for her father to lift her. I had to use one foot to sweep away the remains of wights surrounding her; then I raised her gently, wrapping my arms around her as delicately as I could, no matter how fiercely I longed to enfold her with my full strength. Yasmin had no such reserve – as she rose to her feet, her arms encircled me and pulled me close, squeezing as if she wanted to completely embed her face in my chest. I returned the embrace, clasping her as tightly as I dared and aware of nothing else in the world but the woman I held.
«Honored Cavendish, Honored Handmaid,» murmured Wheezle as he plucked at the hem of my jacket. «We must go now. There is so little time.»
«There is no time,» said a new voice. And suddenly the room was filled with a blinding cloud of fine white dust.
9. THREE DUSTY COMBUSTIONS
Blinded by the dust, I couldn't see for the next few seconds. Kiripao must have tried something, because I heard him utter a cry of attack; but he was answered with a thunderous boom, and he made no other sound.
Yasmin, still in my arms, whispered, «Didn't you have someone watching our backs?»
«Hezekiah was out there,» I replied. «The Clueless little berk…»
«He's hurt,» said Oonah, somewhere in the cloud.
Gradually, the dust settled around us. Every face around me was powdered white; every stick of furniture, every scrap of clothing was clotted with the same white silt. The door to the control room had shut tight – the boom I heard must have been the door slamming. Kiripao was straining to push it open, but without success.
Oonah knelt a short distance from the door, bending over the motionless body of Hezekiah. I could see no wounds on the boy; and as Oonah gave his shoulder a shake, he groaned and rolled over on his back.
«What happened, Kid?» Miriam asked. Her voice was surprisingly full of concern.
«Someone blanked me,» the boy muttered. «Shut me down.» He slammed his fist against the floor. «I hate that.»
«But you're all right now?» Miriam insisted.
«I'll live,» he said. «But… I'm a bit scrambled at the moment. I won't be able to teleport for hours.»
«Don't trouble yourself,» Oonah told him. She raised her staff and pointed its silver-wire tip toward the door. «Now that I'm properly armed, this little cage won't hold us for…»
«Don't!» Wheezle and I shouted in unison.
«Why not?» she snapped.
Wheezle shuffled forward, dust dribbling off his ears like flour. «Alas, honored Guvner, this dust is dangerous… at least if you invoke magic. We must exercise extreme caution.»
«What a shame,» echoed an unfamiliar female voice. «I hoped you wouldn't know what the dust did. It would have been ever so interesting to see what happened.»
The walls of the control room looked like concrete, coated with the chalky powder that covered us all; suddenly, however, the cement-like material turned as clear as glass, offering us a dust-smeared view of the machine room outside. No wonder this control room didn't have any windows: the walls themselves could become windows, and obviously someone outside knew the secret of making that happen. Quickly, I swept a hand across the wall closest to me, cleaning away enough of the dust to see through clearly.
A gang of eight wights stood back five paces from the wall, their faces nearly as dusty as mine and ten times as ugly. All of them were huge bashers, their shoulders wide, their claws the size of pine cones. I saw no hint of friendliness in the expressions of these undead; hate blazed in their eyes. Perhaps the hate was inspired by the people who stood in front of the monsters – two humans who could only be Rivi and the Fox.
I'd seen men like the Fox many times before: grizzled old sods with streaky gray hair and five days of stubble on their faces. This particular example wore an ecstatic leer of madness, and his gaze never stopped swooping about the room, as if he were surrounded by wonders mere mortals could not see. Poor old barmy: his type wandered the streets of Sigil daily, begging for handouts or talking wildly to themselves until they were taken in by the Bleak Cabal and given a bed in the Gatehouse asylum.
Rivi was much more extraordinary. To say she was an albino would not do justice, either to Rivi or to albinos in general. She had the telltale white hair and eyebrows, the unpigmented skin and the pale pink eyes; but she had decided to paint herself, to apply make-up and dyes in a controlled chaos that only emphasized her pallor. Red eyeshadow made her eyes look like blood-filled sinkholes in her face. The merest touch of blue on her cheeks gave her the icy look of a corpse who has lain overnight in the snow. Her long white hair was streaked with bands of red and green, which would look cheerfully festive on some women; on Rivi, however, the effect was harshly lunatic, as if nightmares had bled from her skull and contaminated her scalp.
She wore a gown of clinging black silk, sheer enough to betray the stark whiteness of her body beneath; and like many venomous women, Rivi had the body of a goddess, maintained as carefully as a champion fencer might hone her sword. I could scarcely take my eyes off the play of black silk over white flesh, taut fabric stretching over tauter curves. Some sages claim that the powers of evil take delight in bestowing such visceral allure on the most corrupt of souls… and although I have known many beauties with no great darkness in their hearts, I have met a handful like Rivi, demons sporting the voluptuousness of an angel.