He opened his mouth, and she cut him off. “And yes, I did call you a tool. Grow the fuck up. I’m not in the mood for it.”
I looked around, and I stabbed the machete into dirt to try and see if anything could be uncovered. It was fairly thorough.
“Well?” Evan asked me.
I looked back at the group.
Ainsley was already stepping forward. “Our job, right?”
I nodded.
Her candle was already lit, joining Evan and Paige in lighting up the area, and she advanced to the tunnel’s end, stepping carefully past Green Eyes and the goblins. She stabbed the wall with the candle, and drew a circle with the softer wax.
She shook the candle, hard, and it returned to its full length. With her other hand, she pressed a pocketwatch to the center of the circle.
I could hear the rapid ticking sound that went hand in hand with chronomancy.
“Let’s see if we can get it the way it was,” she said. “Preferably leading up into where we need to be, not into the church.”
The wall distorted, the circle twisting, opening ever wider, like a gate.
“Shit!” Ainsley said. “He’s aware!”
That word, coupled with the fact that we were in a tunnel, proved to be warning enough. We scrambled back, but the dirt above us was already coming down, billowing into choking thick clouds as it touched the floor of the tunnel.
It seemed to take five minutes before the dirt was done falling. It wasn’t actually five minutes, but time yawned on forever when one was being rapidly buried alive.
The dirt and dust still came down in clumps and trickles as I raised my head. I’d stooped over, and I’d done it with Green Eyes beneath me. She was curled up, contorted into as small a shape as she could manage beneath my shoulders, head and chest. In the oppressive darkness, her eyes seemed especially bright.
Looking past green Eyes, I could see Ainsley lying limp in the midst of the fallen dirt. A hole had opened above her, and the hole was ringed with figures. Many of their eyes glowed too. Countless figures there were broken as the four vestige children had been, but the damage was far more severe. The Barber had carved them into pieces, and spirits had flowed in to fill the gaps, making them more like rodents, more like mangy dogs, more like children, in places. Features were distorted and warped.
I forced myself to straighten, a hundred pounds of dirt sliding off my back and shoulders, and Green Eyes lunged, crawling readily and easily over and through dirt.
Evan was right after her.
He knows. Johannes did, the Barber did.
I shot a look behind me, as goblins worked their way free of dirt that ranged from knee to hip depth, using my own body to gauge. For them, it had completely and utterly buried them. Some goblins were bleeding from fallen stones.
The group behind hadn’t been hit as hard. The further back they were, the less dirt there was.
I knew that Green Eyes and Evan were engaging in the fight, but I still let the bundle of clothes fall and reached for Ainsley. I hated to move her, but I knew that if I didn’t, there would be no way to save her. I pulled her free by the most direct means I could, then turned to place her behind me, so she wasn’t right beneath the opening and eager attackers.
Machete in hand, I threw myself forward.
The little warrior.
Reckless, savage, built to destroy myself in battle, and take Rose’s enemies down with her. A viking berserker, without the viking, the anger a much different sort. Buried.
The wretches, whatever I’d said, weren’t weak. The Barber, by vice of being a demon, was capable of breaking rules, and one rule was apparently that he could carve away weakness.
One half left feeble, the other half left strong.
One half left cunning, the other half left dimwitted.
I wasn’t used to this body. How it moved, where the strength lay. How to fight when I wasn’t lightweight, or when I couldn’t practice in between the exchanges of blows.
I would have liked to say I put up a good fight. I didn’t. From the outset, it was an uphill battle. I went after the biggest threat, which was a vestige of a large, heavyset man. His face had broken, and the spirit that lay within him was that of a screaming infant, streaked with mucus, scaled to size. Twisted, oddly proportioned, entirely out of place on his frame, peering past a face that had shattered like porcelain yet still proved capable of bleeding when I nicked it with the machete.
He swung, and I tried to get out of the way. A fraction too slow. With an overlarge fist, he clubbed me. I felt branches break, and fell to one side, landing amid dirt and shattered pavement, just beside where the tunnel had caved in.
Within moments, I was set upon by two smaller wretches. They grabbed for my weapon and the clothes that I had that still remained, and they inadvertently held me down while the overlarge baby-faced man approached.
He brought a meaty fist down, striking me clean in the chest, breaking more branches and bones, then another.
Evan flew past, and the flames and sparks streaked the wretch’s face. The thing screamed, howling in pain.
I hauled the machete closer to me, bringing a scrawny wretch closer with the gesture, then smashed my forehead into the wretch’s face. I stabbed the other wretch before it could scramble back.
I tried to climb to my feet and I failed to do it before the other wretches tackled me. I had a disorienting moment where the fear that ran through Rose’s body slowed me down even more, before I found the simultaneous adrenaline surge to pull free. I twisted around and swung the machete. Not as clean or pretty as it was in the movies. It cut deep for the first two I struck, and left only a graze on the third. Another wretch was already behind me, grabbing at the elbow of my swinging arm. The larger baby-faced wretch was holding one meaty hand to its face, glaring at me with a disproportionately large, rheumy eye.
Green Eyes was in much the same situation I had been in, but she was more effective like that. Her scales and skin were slick, she did damage just through contact, and she had fangs and claws. She didn’t need the reach or space to swing her arm like I did.
Evan strafed the crowd, still just large enough to fight off any wretch that grabbed him, burning on contact, even though he wasn’t leaving a trail of flame behind him.
The goblins were here and there, doing just what I’d ordered them to. Where some of us struggled in the chaos, the goblins reveled in it. They were completely and utterly at home in the midst of all this. They cut and butchered, found weak points and went after them with no hesitation. Just the opposite. With eagerness.
But our enemies were seemingly endless. We were in the middle of a street, not forty paces from the tower, and the bodies had emptied out of every building, as if there were a festival going on. I couldn’t find a gap any wider than an armspan in the midst of the crowd.
Worse than I’d anticipated.
Worse, going by the stirring inside, than Rose had anticipated. It had looked more manageable from a distance.
Or maybe the Barber was drawing them all closer to him.
It wasn’t like the Abyss, I noted. Where the Abyss had been almost eager to destroy and wear away, this was utterly nihilistic. Bleak, more than savage. The wretches destroyed themselves as much as we destroyed them, and it didn’t matter in the slightest, because they covered the streets around us, as far as I could make them out.
I stabbed the great baby-faced wretch in the general vicinity of the heart, swung low to cut at the side of the knee, more a vertical cut than a horizontal one, then spun to shake off others and carve blindly into the crowd. I was separated enough from the others that I didn’t have to worry about accidentally cutting one of them.