Lalique died next, trying to shield Ivalee from the monster’s attack. She howled as the venoms took her, and the serpent beast descended upon Ivalee.
Vivyen closed her eyes, but heard the girl’s pitiful shrieks of pain over the screams coming from the crowd...
Vivyen’s eyes snapped open.
Those were screams as terrified as her own.
People were running and crackling bolts of lightning exploded throughout the chamber, arcing from its giant columns and girders. She caught a glimpse of a grey giant in scorched armour as he threw himself at a tall robot with only one arm. She lost sight of him as the lethal serpent reared up in front of her, its bloody gullet open wide.
‘Please, no!’ she cried as it whipped forward.
A hand flashed out and caught the serpent around its neck, its fangs snapping shut a hair’s breadth away.
Furious, it twisted and bit Vivyen’s saviour’s forearm.
Alivia slammed its head down on the packing crate altar.
The monster thrashed, its tail lashing like a bullwhip.
Alivia jammed the barrel of the Ferlach serpenta against its pinned skull and pulled the trigger.
Its head exploded in a welter of blood and bone.
‘You don’t get to hurt my daughter,’ she said.
The pain was incredible, like nothing Alivia had felt in all her long life. It coursed around her body like a white-hot electric charge, burning as it went. Her inhuman metabolism, numinous and all but immortal, fought the serpent’s kiss, a venom born in cosmic fire.
The sounds of screaming and gunfire faded out.
Her vision greyed and the muscles in her legs spasmed as her synapses fired crazily. She held onto the crates, purpled bile retching up from her gut.
‘Mama!’ cried a voice next to her.
She looked up, but could only see a blurred shadow. She knew the voice, but couldn’t place it.
‘Rebekah? Is that you?’ she gasped, her throat feeling like it was closing up. ‘Milcah?’
‘It’s me, mama. It’s Vivyen.’
Alivia nodded and a gush of purple-black vomit erupted from her. Her chest heaved like a bellows-press and yet more nightmarish venom was expelled, a squirting flood that spilled over the crates.
Alivia blinked tears from her eyes as she heard sickening cracks and the wet meat sound of flesh detaching from bone. She heaved a breath, one rancid with necrosis and raw newness. She was weaker than she could ever remember, barely able to keep a grip on the serpenta.
Alivia wrapped an arm around Vivyen, her poisoned flesh a bloated mottled mass of purple and yellow. She kept her daughter pulled tight to her breast, keeping her back to the horror unfolding upon the altar.
The envenomed children were changing.
Remade by an invisible sculptor.
Transforming.
Swollen with immaterial toxins, their bodies split and cracked, jerking with unnatural vigour to an unseen design. The empyrean imparted renewed ambition to their flesh, meat running molten from the bone and melding in unholy union.
A second coming, an immaculate birth of nightmare.
It grew swiftly, sculpting the offering of dead flesh into a form both wondrous and repulsive; gracile limbs bearing supple flesh of ivory and mauve. Glossy and smooth, clawed and feline of eye, it was horned, yet beautiful. Its wet tongue promised heights of pleasure and undreamed torments in equal measure, a succubus nurtured in the womb of a dying race and fathered by forbidden desires.
A daemon.
And yet it was unfinished, a work in progress, its metamorphosis incomplete. It limped towards Alivia, one leg too slender, its remade flesh and bone only half-formed. It reached for her with chitinous claws of purpled ebon.
Alivia lifted the serpenta and pulled the trigger.
Her bullets tore through the newborn daemon, carving lambent furrows through its body. It shrieked, in pleasure and pain both. Phosphor-bright ichor spilled from its wounds, yet it kept coming, moving in stuttering, unfinished pain.
Its black eyes promised an ecstatic death.
‘Your flesh is promised,’ it said. ‘Give it to me.’
The serpenta’s hammer snapped down on an empty chamber.
‘You want it?’ said Alivia. ‘Take it. It’s yours.’
Severian twisted the burning arm of the Thallax around its segmented plastron. Fire crackled along the weapon’s length. The thing inside was fighting hard and even with only one arm, it wasn’t giving up.
It rammed a shoulder into him and he went with the blow, dropping and rolling, pulling it with him. The Thallax toppled, and Severian wrenched its arm back. Metal buckled and tore. The arm came loose.
Severian rose to one knee and jammed the flaring end of the barrel into its helmet. A blazing plume of light engulfed its conical headpiece. It ran like heated wax, and boiling amniotic fluids gushed out in a stinking rush.
Beneath the cracked visor, a fleshless skull screamed.
Encased in a bronze headpiece of melting wires and invasive neural spikes drilled through the bone, the Thallax spasmed as its life finally ended.
Severian sprang away, revolted by the sight.
His threat awareness told him there was nothing left alive that could hurt him. The Thallax were down, as were the few mortals who’d been stupid enough to face him.
Severian turned to where Alivia had gone.
And saw he was wrong.
There was something that could still hurt him.
The daemon had claimed Alivia.
Its claws dug deep, and she felt its warp-stuff bleed into her, taking the final piece of what the living cadaver had promised it.
Their union was one of pain, but also one of promise.
The powers of those possessed were myriad, and the temptation to wield them burned hot in Alivia’s breast. For all the cunning wrought into her kind’s making, they were none of them above such bargains, nor above mortal ambition or physical desires.
They were, after all was said and done, still human.
But Alivia had become so much more than that.
She was a mother.
Alivia let the daemon in, let its essence consume her.
Then slammed the door behind it.
‘No way out,’ she said.
Severian walked slowly towards the makeshift altar, a blade in each hand. Alivia floated alongside the wretched architect of this slaughter, but where chains supported his paste-white form, Alivia needed nothing so prosaic to remain aloft.
Her outline wavered in the air, like identical picter negatives placed fractionally out of sync and trying to realign. Two beings struggling to occupy one body.
Like the corpse of Serghar Targost aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Alivia Sureka was now host to a warp beast.
But she was fighting it.
He saw pleading behind her eyes, a restlessness beneath her numinous skin that threatened to erupt at any moment.
‘Get. Her. Away.’
The words were forced out from behind clenched teeth.
And in that instant, Severian understood the truth of what he was seeing. The battle within Alivia wasn’t her fighting to hold on to her humanity.
It was the thing inside struggling to get out.
She saw his understanding and nodded.
Severian bent his back and made a quarter turn.
His right arm snapped forward and Proximo Tarchon’s gladius spun through the air. It buried itself in Alivia’s heart.
The young girl they’d come to save screamed, calling her name as if that might somehow bring her back.