At first it was sinister but ultimately incomprehensible. Eventually, however, the necromancer with the dagger-she had the impression he was the senior of the pair-crouched down beside her and dipped his forefinger in the black cup. It came out red. He rubbed her lips with it, then her gums, then worked it past her teeth to dab at her tongue. She tasted the salty, coppery tang of blood.
After that, she could somehow perceive the power gathering in the air and conceived the crazy, terrifying notion that the chanted incantations were a thing unto themselves, a living malignancy that was simply employing the mages to further the purposes implicit in the tercets and quatrains. She still couldn't comprehend them, but she felt the meaning was on the very brink of revealing itself to her and that when it did, she wouldn't be able to bear it.
A mass of shadow seethed into existence above her, thickening until she could barely see the ceiling or Xingax peering avidly down at her through a pair of lenses positioned one before the other. The clot of darkness took on a suggestion of texture, of bulges, hollows, and edges, as if it had become a solid object. Then it shattered.
Into an explosion of enormous bats. The rustling of their countless wings echoing from the stone walls, they flew in all directions. Xingax cried out in excitement. The Red Wizards, for all that they'd conjured the flock and were presumably in control of it, retreated to stand with their backs against a wall.
A bat lit on a zombie's shoulder and plunged its fangs into its throat. The animated corpse showed no reaction to the bite, but despite its passivity, the bat fluttered its wings and took flight again only a heartbeat later.
Three bats settled on a second zombie, bit it, and abandoned it immediately thereafter. Because they crave the blood of a living person, Tammith thought, her heart hammering. Because they want me.
She made a supreme effort to roll over onto her belly. If she could only move a little, she could crawl away from the middle of the floor, then… why, then nothing, she supposed. The part of her that was still rational realized it wasn't likely to matter, but she needed to try. It was better than simply accepting her fate, no matter how inescapable it was.
Her limbs trembled. The effect of the vapor was wearing off. She felt a thrill of excitement, of lunatic hope, and then the first bat found her. Cold as the zombies' fingers, its claws dug into her chest for purchase as its fangs sought her throat.
As it sucked the wounds it had inflicted, the rest of the flock descended on her, covering her like a shifting, frigid blanket, the bats that couldn't reach her shoving at the ones who had like piglets jostling for their mother's teats. Scores of icy needles pierced her flesh.
Had she ever imagined such a fate, she might have assumed that so much cold would numb her. Somehow, it didn't. The assault was agony.
The bats tore at her lips, nose, cheeks, and forehead. Not my eyes, she silently begged, not my eyes, but they ripped those too, and then she finally passed out.
Tammith woke to pain, weakness, searing thirst, and utter darkness. At first she couldn't remember what had happened to her, but then the memory leaped at her like a cat pouncing on a mouse.
When it did, she decided Xingax couldn't possibly have intended to create the crippled, sightless creature she'd become. The experiment had failed as he'd warned it might.
"So kill me!" she croaked. "I'm no use to you!"
No one answered. She wondered if she actually was alone or if Xingax and the Red Wizards were still present, silently studying her, preparing to put her out of her misery, or-gods forbid! — readying a new torment.
Suddenly she was frantic to know, which made her blindness intolerable. She felt a flowing, a budding, in the raw orbits of her skull, and then smears of light and shadow wavered into existence before her. Over the course of several moments, the world sharpened into focus. She realized she'd healed her ruined eyes, or if the bats had destroyed them entirely, grown new ones.
It suggested that Xingax's experiment hadn't been a complete failure after all, but she appeared to be alone nonetheless. Her captors had deposited her in a different chamber, a bare little room with a matchboarded door. Up near the ceiling, someone had cut a hole, probably connecting to the ubiquitous system of catwalks, but if the aborted monstrosity was up there peeping at her, she couldn't see it.
Which, she recalled, didn't necessarily mean he wasn't. He'd concealed himself easily enough when taking stock of the new supply of slaves. She wheezed his name but received no reply.
She supposed that if she did constitute some sort of glorious success, and he wasn't here to witness it, the joke was on him. But in fact, she doubted it. The Red Wizards had managed to stuff a little magic into her, enough to preserve her existence and restore her vision, but accomplishing the latter had left her even weaker and more parched than before. She stared at the myriad puncture wounds on her hands and forearms, willing them to close, and nothing happened.
At that point, misery overwhelmed her. She curled up into a ball and wept, though her new eyes seemed incapable of shedding actual tears, until a key grated in the lock of the door. It creaked open, and an orc shoved Yuldra through and slammed it after her. The lock clacked once again.
Tammith extended a trembling hand. She knew the other captive couldn't do anything substantive to ease her distress, but Yuldra could at least talk to her, clasp her fingers, or cradle her, perhaps. Any crumb of comfort, of simple human contact with someone who wasn't a pitiless torturer, would be better than nothing.
Yuldra flinched from the sight of her ravaged body, let out a sob of her own, wheeled, and scrambled into a corner. There she crouched down and held her face averted, attempting to shut out the world as she had before.
"How many times did I take care of you?" Tammith cried. "And now you turn your back on me?"
Nor was Yuldra the only person who'd so betrayed her. She'd spent her life looking after other people. Her father the drunkard and gambler. Her brother the imbecile. And what had anyone ever done for her in return? Even Bareris, who claimed to love her with all his heart, had abandoned her to chase his dreams of gold and excitement in foreign lands.
She realized she was on her feet. She was still thirsty, it was a fire burning in her throat, but she'd shaken off weakness for the moment, anyway. Anger lent her strength.
"Look at me," she snapped.
Her voice was sharp as the crack of a whip, and like a whip, it tangled something inside of Yuldra and tugged at her. The slave started to turn around but then shook off the coercion.
"Fine," Tammith said, stalking forward, "we'll do it the hard way."
She didn't know precisely what it was. Everything was happening too quickly, with impulse and fury sweeping her along, but when her upper canines stung and lengthened into fangs, their points pressing into her lower lip, she understood.
The realization brought a horror that somewhat dampened her rage if not her thirst. I can't do this, she thought. I can't be this. Yuldra is my friend.
She stood and fought against her need. It seemed to her that she was winning. Then her body burst apart into a cloud of bats much like the conjured entities that had attacked her, and that made the world a different place. The sense of sight she'd so missed became secondary to her ability to hear and comprehend the import of her own echoing cries, but the fragmentation of her consciousness was an even more fundamental change. She retained her ultimate sense of self and managed her dozens of bodies as easily as she had one, yet something was lost in the diffusion: conscience, perhaps, or the capacities for empathy and self-denial. She was purely a predator now, and her bats hurtled at Yuldra like a flight of arrows.