One slash of the machete proved too slow. A wretch closed in, and I hit him with my forearm rather than the blade. More closed in, swamping me. Among them was a goblin, biting at a wretch’s spine, pulling free with a bit of bone and strings of flesh clamped in its bulldog jaws.
Not a goblin that I’d seen in the group below. Mags had called it up or called it out or done something, I had little doubt.
Even with the help, we were drowning. This wasn’t water, but we were still drowning.
Light shone, and I knew it was Paige. A beacon, directed to blind the wretches more than it blinded the rest of us.
I wasn’t sure it helped, because even if it only affected me one tenth of the amount it affected everything else, I was left blind, dealing with five or six blind wretches who were trying to pull me to pieces.
Still, if I squinted, it was an avenue for the practitioners to come to the fore, emerging from below. Peter had Ainsley.
I fought free of the weaker wretches, and rather than try to establish space around myself to swing the machete, stabbed the back of a larger one that looked like it was readying to pounce on Green Eyes. It had once been part cat, part woman, it looked like.
The others were saying something, forming battle ranks. Lines drawn out, a perimeter that forced the wretches back. But for every one I cut down, there was another to replace it. I was locked in place.
The lawyer with the hound was there. Fighting Evan.
No, I thought.
I’m too slow, I thought.
Sorry, Rose, I thought.
There was no reply.
I’d changed, my self coming in enough to fill in the spaces around Rose which weren’t enough like me. But I’d stopped there.
I could push for more.
I had Rose in the center. I knew that there was no way to take strength for myself without drawing from her. Just as she’d drawn power from me. Different types of well.
I pushed. As a bogeyman, I’d been hollow. There had been spaces in me one could see through.
Now, as I focused on the matter, I established similar spaces. Much like how birds had hollow bones. I was a shell with Rose inside, and now there were points that one could see through both the shell and Rose.
Almost from the point I made the decision, the dynamic changed. Where one enemy had stepped up to replace every one I cut down, I was now making fractional headway. For every sixth or seventh wretch I struck at, I could make a gap.
With a gap, and a few more spaces made within, I could make headway.
The lawyer reached out and grabbed Evan. The man’s eyes were deep yellow, his hair wild, scruff on his chin, and he seemed immune to the pain as his hands boiled and burned with Evan’s flames.
I was too far away.
Come on, come on.
With headway, I could build momentum.
I pushed past a lesser wretch, hit a wall of the big ones. I barreled into them, cutting to drive them to either side.
I reached the lawyer, and I didn’t get a chance to swing at him, nor the hellhound he was trying to offer Evan up to.
I swung for the chain.
He knew in an instant, what I’d done.
A gesture, and the hound was gone, midway through opening its jaws to take a piece out of its one-time master.
Held in only one hand, Evan was freed.
I stabbed the lawyer.
I stared him in the eye, oblivious to the wretches around me who were clawing at me, trying to drag me down.
He wouldn’t go down with just that. Not with a cut.
I twisted and broke the machete’s blade.
I stabbed him with the broken remainder.
Spikes impaled my hand.
The machete changed.
I’d left the Hyena back in the Abyss, a symbolic gesture, almost.
Now it was back. As much a denizen of the Abyss as I was.
I pulled away, leaving the lawyer a wound he couldn’t recuperate from.
I cut him again, and turned to fight once more against the tide.
Others were shouting, pointing.
In the distance, blades were piercing the earth.
The same scissor blades as before. Striking the people furthest away, then the next line, then the next. The Barber altering his demesne.
Blood roaring in ears that weren’t mine, surrounding by screams and utter death, I fought my way for the tower.
We have to remember we can do this, I thought.
The others were there, ready to enter the building, but in the instant they got that far, blades appeared to block the door, like crossed spears to wall the others off.
The Barber was going to do everything it could to dissuade us of that notion.
16.09
Each of the blades erupted from the ground as if it was stabbed up and through the surface by something that dwelt just below us. Twice as tall as any of the denizens here, rusty, scuffed, but horribly sharp, roughly two out of the three blades were left coated in blood as they tore through members of the crowd, the occasional set scissoring closed with sprays of blood and dust.