“I believe the blood is mine,” Phlinn Arol gargled to Max. “I didn’t want to survive all this only to have you hunt me down and cut off my head.”
“Good thinking,” Max told him. “You okay?”
Before either of them could answer, the ground shook again, and a section of structure not far away detached itself and went rolling away down the side of the hill.
“Down?” Leen said, deciding not to climb all the way to her feet. “Or up?”
“Let me check out up,” said Max. “Be right back.” He clambered his way over a knot of groaning Imperial guards, that decaying greenish-yellow glow beckoning the way to the highest point. Kicking aside an errant banquet table bearing only the stained remains of the refreshments it had recently displayed, the source of the radiance was revealed.
The Emperor was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, thoroughly dazed. Max creaked over to him, realizing that his black armor’s chest plate had been pretty well cracked in by the grasp of the bird. The Emperor rolled his eye at Max as he loomed overhead, and made a gargling sound.
“Yeah,” Max said to him, “so what about those terrorists?”
That must have been the Corpus, thought Shaa, watching the wood and iron scrap that was the remains of the circular staircase continue collapsing in front of him down the vertical shaft that was the exit from the tunnel. The horizontal section of the underground passage he had traversed a mere moment before was clogged with rocks and earth a few paces back, and for all anyone knew could have pancaked the whole way out to its start. It was quite annoying to have the whole long business grind to its climax in such a base manner, lacking all subtlety and grace, distinguished solely by a surfeit of mindless action, but there you were; and on the other hand it was not at all clear that all the climaxes had already been performed.
“If anyone has a plan,” said Shaa, “this would be a reasonable time to reveal it.”
Actually, the situation might not be as bad as all that. Svin, who had been here a moment before, was now gone, which meant he must have found a way down into the tunnel, which meant that the tunnel had not collapsed, not completely, anyway, although sections of the ceiling had clearly come down when the seismic shock had rolled through, and other areas were undoubtedly weakened and awaiting their chance to do likewise. Since that had also been the direction of the earthquake’s epicenter conditions were likely to be worse further along.
Not as much worse as they were ahead of him, though, where the circular staircase had largely fallen in. It was impossible to worm one’s way through the mangled wreckage to determine the condition of the vertical exit shaft itself. Still, lacking the always-pending development of a practical mode of levitation, whose realization seemed all the more distant given the current state of collapse of the magical environment, and lacking as well the services of a professional mountaineer, even if they could reach the chimney shaft and even if it did not immediately afterwards cascade down around their ears, there wasn’t much they could do but stand at the bottom craning their necks up at the sky. And then, of course, there was also the matter of the cast of characters they had here on hand.
This active cast was fewer in number than it had been even several minutes ago. In the brief moment that Shaa had had to examine his brother before the earth began to shake and the premonitory rumble of the circular staircase pulling itself free of its moorings in the rocks had led Svin to yank him clear with one huge grab-and-fling, it had been apparent that Arznaak was suffering from insults to multiple systems. Arznaak’s skin demonstrated widespread burns and surface trauma consistent with backblast from his own power beam being reflected onto him. The more significant affliction, however, and presumably the one that had brought him down in a seizure state alternating between rigor mortis-style rigidity, widespread clonic tremors, and primitive reflexes of forebrain-release characteristic, all beneath a face-full of writhing muscles of expression and rolling, vacant eyes, was whatever malign force was wracking his brain. It was mild to say Arznaak had no shortage of enemies, though, especially when one incorporated into their number not only the full roster of extant gods, however short that list might be, but the surviving population of Peridol to boot. Shaa was perfectly happy to have yielded the right of coup de grace to whichever one had laid him low. Of course, Shaa had been the one to be standing mere feet away as whatever remained of his brother had been entombed beneath a rain of stair risers intermixed with what was undoubtedly tons of wrought-iron supporting structure.
For some reason, Shaa could not find it in himself to dig him out. So perishes another solemn vow, he mused. Yet in this at least Max had been clearly right; Shaa’s father had had no business demanding such a deathbed oath in the first place. Shaa had been free to acknowledge that it had not been inappropriate for he himself to share the blame. Romantic notions of chivalry totally unreciprocated by their beneficiary had no place in their scurrilous modern world, replete as it was with all manner of chicanery, venality, and downright backstabbing cussedness. But now Arznaak was off the table, oath or no oath, and even if their father had been around to do something about it, even he might have been able to see the consequences that had flowed from his irrational coddling of his eldest son. In any case, it was not worth losing sleep over.
Which meant, of course, that Shaa well knew he had plenty of late nights and bleary-eyed mornings to which to look forward, the rightness of the situation notwithstanding. That would do for later, however - and would also demand that he get on in the meantime with the matter of surviving, in order to have the option of sleepless nights to come. There was still the business of the two members of that small band of god-survivors who happened to be doing their own surviving at the moment in their midst, and were attempting to resolve between them the question of whether their ranks were about to be reduced by yet another one.
Gashanatantra had shaken off the aftereffects of Jurtan Mont as well as a first-timer could typically hope, which meant that even without the upheaval of the earthquake, the ear-boggling collapse of the staircase, and a section of tunnel ceiling just above his head coming down on top of it, he would have been somewhat addled and lethargic for a few moments yet to come. Instead, Shaa observed him to have been simultaneously invigorated by the adrenaline rush and scrambled by the environmental convulsions. At least Gashanatantra had been sufficiently oriented to begin digging his way out, and having been in the shielded lobe at the time of Arznaak’s power pulse he still had the strength to make a good show of it. Of course, having Shaa, Svin, and Jurtan Mont available to shift rocks and earth from the other end had unquestionably been essential to his escape from asphyxiation.
Pod Dall, on the other hand, for all his pointedly menacing remarks to Gashanatantra seconds before, had fared in all regards worse. Whether due to his traumatic recorporation in a body near death (more Arznaak here, without a doubt, from the story highlights Jurtan Mont had hissed to him during the moving of earth), his debilitation from his sojourn in the ring, the effect of Arznaak’s overload pulse, some unrevealed chicanery of Gashanatantra’s (which could scarcely be ruled out), or any number of factors together, he had gone down beneath the cascade of earth and had not budged again. Even after he had been dragged free of the fall by a fortuitously protruding digit, gasping stentoriously, he gave every appearance of being out for a fairly long count.