Chairs and trunks were splintered. Slashed cushions exuded cotton like tissue dribbling from open wounds. Even the fireplace grate had been uprooted, cast aside and the ashes excavated carelessly as if by an unruly dog.
Sena turned to the rolltop desk. It had been shattered. Broken ink bottles and papers where distributed without consideration. The drawers were emptied and tossed aside.
The C
srym T
was gone.
Sena gasped.
She held her stomach. She looked at the exact place she had left it. Defiantly, as though she could bullwhip reality for misbehaving, she pawed through the nearby refuse. From fast-flowing undercurrents of thought, she drew up a bucket full of aching icy acceptance that she would not find it.
As the slow realization began to sink in, anger seemed amphigoric. She couldn’t alter what had happened. But what now? How could she get it back?
Her thoughts leapt to the four men that had left the bedroom just before she came in. She tried to remember clearly. But second-guessing herself was useless. She knew none of them had carried the book.
She couldn’t think. The Csrym T’s absence filled her mind like a yawning chasm. Years of legwork sifting information, clues, rumors and outright prevarications had been wasted. As if she had been sculpting a masterpiece for the past four and a half years and some vandal had come along with a sledge.
Sena couldn’t breathe.
She sank down amid the ruined room, stunned.
I have to leave, she thought. I have to follow the men. Nothing else made sense. There was nothing else to do.
She jumped up and bolted from the room, sprinting down the center of the hall, sticking to the narrow strip of carpet that swallowed up the beating of her feet.
She hadn’t even grabbed a pair of boots. She had no time. The men had already disappeared.
Caliph heard the sound of fighting. It echoed strangely through wood and marble halls, faint shouts that hinted at profound urgency. The clang of ringing steel like a bell. He did not wait for Zane.
He tore off down the hall, sword in hand, looking for a place to stick his boiling rage.
As he ran, the sound grew louder. He could hear yelps and cries and strange inhuman grunts. After turning several corners left and right he barreled directly into the fray.
He had come up behind the enemy. A group of guards to the west held their ground against a trio of tall thin men nearly identical to those Caliph had seen at the opera. The guards were cut off. They faced the man-things head-on, sword to hand. They saw Caliph appear on the far side but they couldn’t reach him.
Caliph sailed into battle. He had arrived with such velocity that his presence went unnoticed until he had already run one through. The broadsword Zane had handed him slotted neatly into the center of the creature’s back, made its legs to go pliant.
Caliph drove the sword out through the belly and wrenched it back, pulling it from the terrible wound before the creature fell sprawling to the floor, its spinal cord severed.
Caliph turned and set upon another savagely. His sword struck the rib cage but seemed to glance as if from glassy steel, turning the sword in his hand and nearly forcing it from his grasp. His recovery was awkward and slow.
The men, cowering and nearly beaten, rallied. They rushed forward, taking advantage of the hole Caliph had created in the enemy line. For a moment, the man-things thrashed and floundered as the soldiers surrounded them.
But the thing on the floor was still crawling, pulling its useless legs behind. It reached out huge hands and pulled one guard’s feet out from under him.
The ghastly mouth opened to reveal a picket fence of yellow teeth. It bit ruthlessly through the guardsman’s leather, eliciting a scream.
Caliph lost his footing as the half-paralyzed creature lurched around the floor. He reeled backward, crashing into the west wall and heading for the carpet.
Blades were glittering with their own vibrations as they struck and glanced off the strangely deflective hides. The creatures’ clothing had been hacked away. Ragged and snarling they endured a hail of blows.
The guards hewed with all their fury but only one stroke in three drew blood.
Caliph looked up to see one guard’s sword turn aside so abruptly that it struck another guard and cut him deeply on the upswing. It chopped through his pectoral muscle, up into his armpit, deep enough to sever the subclavian. The man screamed as a fountain of red burst from his arm, an unstoppable rhythmic torrent.
Another blow landed on the man-thing’s hide and Caliph watched again in horror as the strange mechanism of its armor swept the stroke aside.
It was miraculous to see all the strength and momentum of the guard, focused in a falling edge of steel. It bore down on the creature’s unprotected flesh, intent on parting skin from bone. But the thin tissue did not resist. It gave to the blow like limp sausage casings filled with barely enough water to make them buttery along internal surfaces. As though fluid rather than muscle lurked just below the epidermis. The skin sank and traveled in a ripple along the bone.
The force carried laterally, following the length of the creature’s arm. When the sword had moved a foot or more along the skeletal frame of the monster it must have met the smooth ramp of an inhuman condyle like a toboggan going off a jump. The weapon went flying back out harmlessly into space. Caliph sat where he had fallen, stunned.
His fascination was broken by the thing on the floor flinging itself around on powerful arms. It was trying to attack him.
Caliph snarled and adjusted to his new understanding of the creature’s anatomy. He stabbed instead of slashed. The sharp point punctured the creature’s chest, darting between ribs, deep into a lung. The thing gasped and recoiled.
“Stab them!”
His men, grappling with faint understanding, obeyed. They brought one to its knees almost immediately with concerted thrusts.
Zane Vhortghast had finally appeared. In actuality, he was less than twenty seconds on the High King’s heels but much had happened in the intervening moments of melee.
He fell on the back of one of the creatures, driving his knife down with anatomically educated precision. Despite the violent thrashing of the creature he managed to bury the weapon in the thing’s heart on his second attempt.
There was one left. Caliph met its eyes and pulled his sword across his own hand, using his blood to power something raw and brutal he had heard long ago in his uncle’s house. The Unknown Tongue gurgled in Caliph’s throat as the monster fell toward him, murderous fingers spread.
The creature hit Caliph with force. It plowed into the High King and sent him sliding back across the marble floor, skidding on guardsman’s blood. His men looked on in horror, certain that the creature’s fingers had torn through Caliph’s body like steel cables.
Slowly, friction took hold in the stiffening smear of gore and the two bodies agglutinated, coming to a viscid stop.
Everything was still. The creature moved slightly but very strangely as though something were inside it. A bulge moved around like a large mole burrowing just below its skin. With shock, the bewildered guards realized it was Caliph’s fist, pushing up from below as against a flimsy membrane.
The creature gave a gurgling scream and seemed to roll sideways like a bag of jelly, slipping off Caliph to flatten against the floor.
Caliph stood up and stabbed it with his sword. The sack of skin popped with a liquescent slurp. The sudden abruption of tissue spilled a tide of gray-and-red fluid out from the amoeba-like blob, issuing liquefied bones and body fluids all across the ghastly floor.