“Damn it,” she said, “I’m in a sword! What am I doing in a sword?”
Gash had told me Monoch was a soul-drinker; he must have sucked her in while I was distracted and Byron and Iskendarian were playing out their struggle for control of our body. Now the Scapula’s power surge had given enough of a jolt to let her emerge into consciousness.
“It’s sort of a long story,” I said, “and I doubt you’re going to like it very much.”
“To who talking you are?” creaked Haddo.
“Your late boss,” I told him, “Ronibet Karlini.”
“What was that?” said Tildamire Mont, flat on her back on the street, watching a few final blue sparks, the remnants of the brief tempest that had suddenly engulfed them, trickle off the tip of her nose and wiggle their ways footward along her body. Another small squid dropped out of the sky and draped its slimy mantle across her ankle. Next to her and still on his feet, her father batted another falling something-or-other out of the way with the flat of his sword. “Karlini?” She raised herself up and looked around for him.
Karlini was sprawled on the ground too, but he was unconscious again. Even with the sickly yellow cast of his exposed skin and the even brighter yellow in the white of his lolling eye, which she pulled back his eyelid to view in the light of the lantern, he still seemed happier to be rid of his sense than he had all day being awake. Whatever had just transpired surely had nothing direct to do with them; it would be as well to let him sleep -
“What’s that?” the Lion said sharply.
Deep in the wreckage they were guarding, a pearly glow was seeping up out of the ground, enough of a glow to cast shadows upward amidst the remaining scorched beams. The light was shifting and waving, as though shining through a pool of rippling water, and the ground appeared to be... bubbling.
Tildamire yanked Karlini forward by the shoulders and began shaking him vigorously. “Karlini!” she yelled in his ear. “You better wake up and see this!”
“Allow me,” said Gashanatantra, and with a wave of his hand the ground in front of them exploded into the air in a shower of churned mud and pulverized stone. Picturesque, thought Shaa as the mud glopped down around and on top of them, but the stroke for all its lack of moderation had been efficacious, for revealed before them, sunken into the earth with its hardened ceiling now peeled back in a large jagged hole, was what apparently had been his brother’s hideout. Arznaak, however, was not personally in evidence.
With the volume of mud still slumping into the small pillbox, though, Arznaak could easily be swimming about beneath the surface. On the other hand, if the backlash from the severing of Arznaak’s transmission link with the Corpus had been harsh enough he could be unconscious somewhere in the gloop, too, breathing the stuff - with terminal implications - into his lungs. Of course, Arznaak might no longer be anywhere in the vicinity; there must undoubtedly be an exit from the facility which he could have taken, conscious or not. Arranging for conveyance in the midst of adversity was characteristic of solid planning.
Given that Arznaak was still being as undetectable to Shaa’s tentative probe as he had proved himself earlier, the manner of resolution for any of these possibilities was the same. A morose expression on his face, Shaa swung himself over the edge and slid feet-first into the bog.
The slime moved up his legs and past his waist before stopping halfway up his chest when his soles finally encountered solid floor. The chamber was small, perhaps ten feet on a side, and square, and the surface of the mud was showing no indication of someone breast-stroking about beneath it. Moving as quickly as possible across the floor, which considering the adhesive effect of the sludge was not quickly at all, Shaa encountered first (amidst the more solid clumps of dirt within the mud and the rubble from the traumatically ruptured roof) an overturned and splintered chair, and finally, set into the far wall with the curve of its top edge barely peeping above the mud, an exit hatch, closed and dogged and tingling to the touch with guardian energies.
“Did you find the body?” Gashanatantra shouted down at him from his perch on the ground above.
“I’m afraid not,” said Shaa, backing away across the floor from the hatch, careful to avoid tripping over the submerged chair. “Perhaps you would be good enough to pry open the door in that wall, preferable without shredding me in the process.”
Gashanatantra let fly. His effort this time was rather more modulated, however, Shaa was pleased to see, and so rather than finding himself separated into an assortment of smaller pieces (which had of course been a distinct possibility) he was instead watching the basin of muck slump away from him through the punched-through door into whatever passage lie beyond. Watching, and feeling the viscous pull himself, so having little alternative he let himself be dragged forward.
Ten feet or so into the dark tunnel beyond the door the mud had subsided enough for Shaa to easily squelch his way free of it and continue carefully ahead. The sides of the passage could be brushed without fully extending his arms, and if the low ceiling had not already been swept free of dangling cobwebs by someone’s earlier traversal Shaa knew he would have been well-festooned in no time at all. The shaft ran straight back under the stands, and although it would undoubtedly angle up at some point to burrow up from the sunken level of the parade ground Shaa had not yet reached that location as he hurried along when he found himself stifling a yawn, his eyelids growing suddenly heavy. It was after midnight, and the last days had been characterized by a frenzy of activity at all hours and with precious little diversion for sleep, but still it scarcely seemed an appropriate moment for a nap. Behind the still-cascading roar of the crowd he suddenly thought he distinguished the barely musical skirl of a pipe somewhat closer to hand.
A pipe?
Feeling increasingly sluggish and clouded of thought, Shaa dug furiously in his pockets. Surely he still had them; surely they had not slipped out during one mad scramble or another; surely they were not buried with so much else beneath the mud of the parade-ground field - ah! here they were! - fouled with soggy grime no less so than the rest of him, but it was not a moment to stand on fastidious ceremony, he thought, cramming the plugs deep into his ears.
There was light up ahead now, too, actually in fact ahead and above, spilling down through a vertical shaft and picking out a strange latticework of intersecting lines; a circular stair, that was it, coiling itself upward toward the unquestionable sound of Jurtan Mont. Shaa began to creep carefully forward again, then paused, as he heard from behind him another rapid squelching of muck-laden footwear, turning from a deliberate jog to an erratic wobble, followed by Gashanatantra’s spacy utterance, heard distantly through the earplugs, of, “What - what is that?”
“Cover your ears,” Shaa hissed, watching the shadows shift at the base of the stair as someone came down it toward them. There were at least two of them moving, the one with the lantern and another one advancing below - and now that the light was becoming more distinct it became clear that there was another person in sight as well, this one slumped at the base of the staircase with his upper body trailing upward along the lowest curve. If one of the folks advancing down the stair was Jurtan Mont, it seemed likely the other would be Svin, and - leaving aside totally the matter of what they were doing here, and what had become of Dortonn along the way - it seemed reasonable to hypothesize that the fallen form at the bottom was that of his own erstwhile brother.
Shaa edged forward as behind him Gashanatantra’s efforts to block out his ears seemed to be proving inadequate to the need, judging by the clatter of him sliding limply to the ground. Shaa was almost at the upward branch of the tunnel when he realized, virtually simultaneously, several things.