He was just opening his mouth to add something else when the lights went out. The building rocked to a distant blast.
Instant pandemonium—somebody stepped on Venera and crumpled her to the floor while some sort of struggle erupted just to her right; one of the machine guns went off, apparently into the ceiling, lighting the space with a momentary red flicker. All she saw was people rearing up, falling down, tumbling like scattered chessmen. She strained but couldn’t get free of the ropes that bound her hands behind her.
Another explosion, then another—how many of those bombs had they said they’d found? She was sure they’d planted at least twelve.
Now somebody fell on her in a horrifyingly limp tangle and she screamed, but nobody could hear her over the shouts, screams, and shots.
More machine-gun fire, terrifyingly close but apparently directed out the door. Venera wormed out from under the wet body and found a corner to huddle in, hands jammed into the spot where walls and floor met. She cursed the dark and chaos and expected to receive a bullet in the head any second.
Silence and heavy breathing. Distant shouts. Somebody lit a match.
Bryce and Thinblood stood back to back. Each held a machine gun. Another gun lay under the body of the commandant, whose lopsided face was frozen in an expression of genuine surprise. The room was awash with men who were holding one another by the throat, or feet, or wrists, all atop the tiled bodies of the soldiers who were still tied up. Dark blood was spattered up the wall and over everybody. Venera looked down at herself and saw that her own clothes were glistening with the stuff.
“Get them untied!” Somebody flipped a knife into his hand and began bending and slashing at the ropes. When he reached Venera, she saw that it was one of the archers. Venera leaned forward knocking her forehead against the floor as he roughly grabbed her arms and cut.
“The prisoners are loose!” Bryce hauled her to her feet just as the match went out. “Somebody find a bloody lantern! We’ve got to get out of here!” They burst into the corridor just as the lights resumed a dim glow. There were bodies all over the place, bullet holes in the walls, and she heard shots and shouts coming from the stairwell.
“Good idea to leave those men in the cells,” she said to Bryce. “A command decision.”
He grinned. They had given two men some spare weapons and grenades and, out of sight of the tied-up guards, put them in a cell with a broken lock. They were to free the prisoners and arm them if the rest of the team didn’t return in good time.
The soldiers recovered their guns and armor from a pile outside the storage room and one by one loped toward the T-intersection next to the stairwell. A firefight had broken out down there. Venera had her pistol in her hand but ended up in the rear, down on all fours as bullets sprayed overhead.
For a few minutes there was shouting and shooting. When it became clear that the men in the stairwell were of Sacrus, somebody threw a grenade at them, but more shots were coming from the side—the top right arm of the 'I from Venera’s perspective. That was the direction the commandant’s men had originally come from. The stairwell was at the very top of the T, the storage room behind her.
Now it was chaos and shooting again. Venera crawled to the left, to the spot where the metal cage had descended earlier. It was gone. She raised her head slightly and saw, through smoke and dim light, that the great metal door to the treasure room was open.
Bryce and the others had made it into the now cleared stairwell, but Venera had been too slow. Soldiers of Sacrus emerged from clouds of gunsmoke, faceless in the faint light. Venera scrambled to her feet, slipped on blood, and half fell through the doorway into the treasure room. Her feet found purchase on the carpet, and she pressed her whole body against the cold door. It slowly creaked shut, ringing from bullet impacts at the last instant.
She spun the wheel in the center of the portal and turned around to lean on it. A sound hangover echoed through her head for a few seconds, or was she still hearing the battle, but muffled by iron and stone?
Stepping forward she lifted her arms, saw blood all over them. Something caught her foot and she stumbled. Looking down she saw that it was another body—a soldier of Sacrus, maybe the very one with whom she’d locked eyes through the little glass window in the door. He lay on his back, arms flung about, and blood pooling behind his head.
His abdomen had been cut wide open and his entrails trailed along the floor.
A new wash of fear came over Venera. She backed against the door and brought up her pistol to check it. Wouldn’t do to have a misfire due to blood in the barrel. For a few moments she stood perfectly still, listening and, finally, looking about at the place she had come to.
The huge square room was lit better than the hallway had been, by small electric spotlights that hung over dozens of pedestals. She had glimpsed those earlier, the canisters and boxes atop them now glowing in surreal majesty. There was nobody else in sight, but she thought she could see another door opposite the one through which she’d entered.
A woman chuckled somewhere; the chuckle turned into a laugh of childish delight.
Venera made her way around the room’s perimeter in quick sprints, ducking from pedestal to pedestal. It was hard to tell where the laughter was coming from because sounds echoed off the high ceiling. Faintly through the floor she could still hear the noise of battle.
The laugh came again—this time from only a few yards away. Venera rounded a broad pedestal surmounted by some kind of cannon and stopped dead, pistol forgotten in her hand.
A big clockwork mechanism had been shoved off the next pedestal and now lay shattered on the floor. Little wisps of smoke rose from it. The pedestal itself was covered with the remains of a man.
Somebody was kneeling in the gore and viscera that dripped over the edges of the pedestal. It was a woman, completely nude, and she was bathing—no, wallowing—in the blood and slippery things she was hauling out of the man’s torso. She stroked her skin with something, squeezing it as if it were a wet sponge, and gave a little mewl of delight.
Venera raised the pistol and aimed carefully. “Margit! What have you done?”
The former botanist of Liris cocked her head at Venera. She grinned, holding up two crimson hands.
“Don’t you get it?” she said. “It’s cherries! Red, red cherries, full and ripe.”
“Wh-who—” Venera had suddenly remembered the commandant’s boast. He had found a hideous death for Garth, he’d said. She stepped forward, staring past a haze of nausea at the few scraps of clothing she could recognize. Those boots—they were Sacrus army issue.
“They trusted me,” said Margit as she lowered herself into the sticky mass she was massaging. “These two knew me—so they let me in. When the bombs went off, the wall and door parted a bit—the hinges sprung! I just pushed it open and ran right out of my little room! Nobody there to stop me. So I came here and brought him with me.”
“Brought who?”
Margit raised a hand to point at something lying in the shadows of another pedestal. “The one they’d just given to me. My present.”
“Garth!” Venera ran over to him. He was on his side, unconscious but breathing. His hands were tied behind his back. Venera knelt to undo the knots, putting her pistol down when she decided Margit was too far into her own delusions to notice.
Far gone she might be, but she’d killed at least two men in this room. “You must have ambushed them,” said Venera, making it into a question.
“Oh yes. I was dressed oh so respectably and had my prisoner with me. They were staring out the window, you people were shooting and thrashing about somewhere out of sight and I just popped up there in front of them. ‘Let me in!’ Oh, I looked so scared. As soon as their backs were to me I mowed them down.”