“That looks bad,” said the Lion.
“Have you ever seen anything like it, Dad?” Tildamire asked.
“No,” the Lion told her. “But I learned a long time ago never to trust anything escaped from a vat. Gray goos are bad business.”
Karlini made a gurgly sort of sound. Had there been a word in there, perhaps with the inflection of a question? He was up now on his hands and knees, his head hanging down toward the ground, but he was shaking his head as though trying to clear it, and if his eye, when he rolled his face far enough to the side to peer up at Tildamire, was not completely focussed or any less bleary, it was still no longer the empty vacant blank that had been the case a few moments before. He gargled again, and this time his utterance sounded more like “Goo?”
The Lion grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, hoisted him to his feet, and pointed him at the mounting foam. Karlini stared for a moment, at the mound of ooze in the wreckage, already easily twice their height, at the sheen covering the buildings behind it, and at the waving sheets of foam sailing off down the alley and over the tops of the structures and out of sight. “Damn,” Karlini said.
“Can you stop it?” said Tildamire. “Or kill it? Or whatever?”
Karlini raised a limp hand, looked at it, then forced his fingers into some sort of spell-sign. A sickly green wisp puffed out of his fingertips and faded out, and at the same Karlini uttered an involuntary grunt of pain, as though someone had punched him in the stomach. “Lemme sit down,” he mumbled at the Lion.
“No,” the Lion said. “Go ahead and kill the slime first.”
“I can’t,” Karlini said, sagging even more.
“What the hell kind of talk is that?” snarled the Lion, with the look of someone who is just about to wallop his conversational partner over the head.
“Burnout,” mouthed Karlini. “Power pulse hit hard. Can’t probe - remote sensing channels are out. Can’t call for help - carriers are down. Magic’s useless till things settle down, maybe longer than that.”
“Arr!” the Lion growled, and shook Karlini hard enough to make his teeth actually rattle. So that really could happen - Tildamire had always thought it just a colorful turn of phrase.
“Dad,” she said, “that’s not going to help anything. Karlini, is that bubbly stuff what I think it is? The material from Roni’s vats alive and growing again?”
“Hoped it was all dead,” Karlini mumbled. “Couldn’t detect anything. Must have been almost dead, must have been only a few drops of it dripped down into a crack in the ground, saved it getting sterilized by the fire. Would have finished dying if that power pulse hadn’t come through, give it a major transfusion. Burnout for me, energy to grow for it. Should have died out of the vats anyway, lacked essential nutrients - told Roni not to let them mutate.”
Magic-generating organisms, Tildamire thought. Magic-using organisms. Each one of them might be too small to see, but put enough of them together... “But Roni was developing them as tools, right? To respond to your commands, something you could tell to do spells on its own instead of having to do it all yourself, right? So why not command them, tell them to kill themselves off?”
“They’re not listening. Must have mutated, must have gotten rid of the self-destruct -”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said the Lion. “They’re magic. Magic’s your job. I can’t cut it with a sword, it’s goo. So start doing your job. Shaa thought you could handle it or he wouldn’t have sent you. You said fire kills it? Then let’s start lighting off buildings. Somebody’s got to stop it. That stuff’s got to be dangerous.”
Before Karlini was able to respond, a bat came toward them into the nearest light, the paper-dry rustle of its wings erratic and its flight path lurching, until abruptly it careened head-first into the light standard with an audible thwack and fell limply to the ground. The bat’s skin had blotches of an iridescent sheen, and through its skin, the bones seemed to glow a pale yellow. “Why does that thing still look like it’s moving?” said Tildamire.
It wasn’t moving, not exactly, but areas of its skin did appear to be... foaming. “Let’s get out of here,” said Karlini. “Now.”
CHAPTER 22
“Something’s happening out there,” said Max, as they jogged and weaved down the alley, “something that’s not good. I can feel it.”
“How?” said Leen. “How can you feel it?”
“Intuition,” Max told her. “That pulse of Arznaak’s was bad medicine, the kind of thing that sets off chain reactions nobody can see the end of.”
The exit from their current alley came into view around another twist, and they saw yet another wider street filled with yelling, shrieking, stampeding people. The revelry of the past several days had now clearly tilted over from the riotousness of celebration to the riot of panic; it was now no news to anyone in the area that the gods had been at each others’ throats in their very midst, and that the general public had been placed on the playing field themselves. The hysteria was being spread by the realization that the imminent fate of the masses was not merely a matter of the dire threats of folklore or even the cautionary tales of ancient history, of the collapse of empires or the devastation of continents; no, the casualties in the midst of the city - at the Knitting itself - were plainly in the thousands, and blood-soaked but still ambulatory victims were spreading the graphic image in their flight across the city away from the stadium.
As if that were not message enough, the rain of prodigies from the sky had not entirely ceased either, and the evidence of its landing was impossible to overlook, whether it took the form of a thirty-foot boulder freshly embedded in a ripple-edged crater straddling a boulevard and an adjoining building, surrounded by what must have been a lethal spray of cobblestones; or a fishing net still slick with sea-wrack and crammed with expiring skipjack; or the numerous structures along the streets with their roofs caved in and flames mounting through the shattered beams; or the rampant evidence of wild sorceries, uncontained and uncontrolled, their control logics scrambled and even the characteristics of their manifestation transformed. The wizard lights, for example, so common a feature of Peridol’s streets as to be unremarkable, had now become a constellation of miniature suns, comets, flares, and diving torches, any of which might unexpectedly swoop down from the sky and explode into a building or pounce incidentally on an unlucky pedestrian, burning their skin or blinding their eyes or - as in several cases they had passed - immolating the victim in a spontaneous sooty pyre.
Max and Shaa and Phlinn Arol, each of whose power was still reasonably intact due to the shielding effect of their proximity to Arznaak’s inner lobe, and whose minds had not been reduced to mush in the manner of so many others they had passed, without obvious wounds yet still crumpled on the pavement or clawing at their eyes or baying at the sky, drooling with dedication and incoherence covering their expressions, had been maintaining a common shield over the group. This barrier had not been subjected to direct attack but had been proving effective in deflecting the swooping passes of errant aerial hazards. Svin’s sword had been equally convincing for those hazards of a more concrete nature.
Svin, in the lead now, slowed at the alley’s exit and leaned out into the street. Even in the midst of flight, it was prudent to look ahead to see if you were rushing into something worse; after all, the throng trampling ahead of them might be in active flight from some fresh immediate menace. Indeed, almost as soon as the two groups had linked up on the battleground of the stadium floor and had launched their escape from the arena through a grandstand tunnel now emptied of spectators still able to walk, they had suddenly heard again the tumult of pounding feet and the shriek of voices, and had seen ahead of them a shifting light, now gold, now red. Flattening themselves against the wall, they had let the terrified pop-eyed pack swarm past them without sweeping them off their feet. Behind the ragged mob, though, was the source of the light, revealed to be a humanoid creature of flame, accompanied by a smaller flame-cloaked familiar projecting the general aspect of a terrier. Within each could be glimpsed the remnant of a corporeal form; a sorcerer caught in the midst of a spell, perhaps, which had blown back over him and the dog at his feet. Max’s first thought had been to try to snuff the fires and see if the person within could be saved, and Phlinn Arol and Shaa had similarly shifted into readiness for some sort of operation, but - almost faster than the eye could follow - Svin, in a broad horizontal two-hand sweep followed by a tight overhand loop that converted his blade’s trajectory to the vertical, had rendered the issue moot. Eyeing the heatless flames as they churned along the remains of the carcasses, Svin had said, “Emergency conditions apply. Any questions?” and that, rightly enough, had been that.