Taur leads the mass of freed prisoners, with Liana at his side as they descend the steps down to the second floor. I don't take the steps, but crawl along the wall, keeping just ahead. The group tries to move silently, but there are just too many of us. By the time we reach the second floor landing, the noise of thumping steps has grown.
Taur breaks, thundering down the stairs into the reception area of the prison, where jailers sit on chairs with mugs of ale. A battle cry erupts from the stampeding mass of escapees who are desperate to regain their freedom. The giant bull man charges across the entryway.
One jailer's chair is on two legs, comfortably leaned back against the stone wall behind him. He spews his beer in his panic, and leans forward until the upraised legs of his chair snap onto the floor. He starts to rise, but Taur is on him, seizing him by the throat with two muscular arms and wiry fingers like steel cables. The giant man slams the jailer into the stone wall, crushing both his skull and rib cage.
Another jailer reaches across his body for the truncheon on his waist, but Taur barrels toward him, hitting him with a forearm across the throat, which sends the man staggering across the floor until he trips and slides on his back.
The ragged prisoners swarm the remaining jailers. The convicts are armed with nothing other than their rage and the possibility of freedom. The jailers are beaten, strangled, and torn at by a flurry of hands, and disappear as they are engulfed by the unkempt mob.
The door to an office swings open, followed by a uniformed jailer emerging with a cutlass in one hand and a wavy blade kris dagger in the other. He moves to thrust his sword into the back of the nearest convict, who is beating an already senseless jailer, but I leap from the wall above the door. My snout clamps onto his sword arm, and yank him downward as I fall.
The officer goes with the motion, turning into me to thrust with the dagger in his left hand, but I am spinning and throw him back in the direction from which he came.
His shoulder pops audibly, even in the bedlam, and he strikes the floor at the feet of his companion entering the fray. The second officer jumps, but his boot catches the body of his companion rolling over the floor. When his boot snags, he falls face forward, and the overhead cut that he has launched with the cutlass in his right hand falls short.
The officer is well-trained, because he tucks in his sword arm and rolls rather than trying to catch himself by shooting out his arm, a move that's instinctive. The swordsman rolls, but I'm on him, landing with all fours on his back to pin him to the ground while my jaws crush his head.
The officer of the guard is wearing a plume on his hat, which tickles my throat, so I cough and gag, nearly throwing up, until I'm able to successfully spit it out. I want to kick him in the crotch several times, but he's already dead, so I reluctantly decide against it.
“All right, everyone!” I yell and rise up on two legs. “You need to go upstairs and throughout this floor to release everybody. I know you want to run out the door and be gone, but the more of you there are running loose, the greater your odds of survival.”
Taur has moved to the door to block the only exit, forcing the prisoners to turn around and go about releasing all the convicts. The men hurriedly file past me as Liana emerges from the office where the two officers came from. She is wearing her dress and sandals again, and carries Taur's iron club. His fur cloak is draped over her shoulders.
“Thanks.” Taur takes his cloak from the albino girl and drapes it over his shoulders, which makes him look even broader. As tall as he is, maybe 6'7”, his horns make him look even taller. When he takes his club and rests it over his shoulder, he is a fearsome opponent. The scar between his horns is more intimidating than the tattoo of the bull god Baal.
“You look lovely, Liana,” I tell her as she goes to the fallen officers and gathers their wavy blade kris daggers and sheaths.
“Thank you, Vic,” the pale girl with the snow white hair says as she works to remove the officers' daggers from their belts, but they're dead and uncooperative. “You look very, uh, lizardly.”
I laugh, and I see a hint of a smile on Taur's grim face. “I'm flattered.”
A swarm of men comes down from the stairs and pour out of the door at the end of the room leading to a long row of cells on the first floor, until the reception area of the prison is full.
“Is that everybody?” I ask.
“We're all here, and took out a few guards trying to hide.” Despite the man's haggard appearance, with matted hair and beard, and black grime under his long fingernails and toenails, he is well spoken.
“Didn't go well for them,” another chimes in.
“Stay quiet, stay low.” I climb up onto a chair. “If you have the chance, kill anyone in the red mob and any member of the daywatch or nightwatch. As long as they're alive, no one is safe. May Lord Riyel watch over you.”
On my signal, Taur opens the door, and the ragged band of freed prisoners streams out into the night.
When the last of the convicts has escaped, Taur asks me, “Are you sure about that? How many of those are rapists or killers?”
Liana approaches, and I see that she has placed the daggers in their sheaths into the sash that cinches the waistline of her dress.
I drop down from the chair. “When a society starts to fall, the police stop going after real criminals; it's too dangerous, and criminals fight back. Criminality is rationalized: people steal because they're poor, kill because they're oppressed and discriminated against. The police now focus on good citizens who step out of line, saying the wrong thing, supporting the wrong party, or wanting to arm themselves for protection against increasing lawlessness.”
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“I think you're right,” Liana adds. “Having been demon possessed, I can sense evil. I can smell it, I swear. Not a single one of the prisoners gave me that vibe.”
“How are you?” I reach up to the gash on her head, but my stubby arm comes up short. I scoot a little closer to her, and reach up again to gently brush my hand over the scabbed cut on her forehead, which is a crusty dark red crease on her pearl-like skin.
“I was out for a while,” Liana explains, “then in and out of consciousness on the way to the prison. I've still got a headache. Look at you.”
I see that my skin is dotted with clotted gashes and thin cuts. Nothing is more obvious than a bruise on a white belly. “And you, Taur?”
“My cape keeps them covered, which is why I bought it.” He swings his metal club upward to rest it over his shoulder. “What's next?”
“We take out the red mob,” I shake my right leg, which stubbornly remains sore.
“Shouldn't we get some rest?” Liana asks.
I get her point, because all three of us have taken a beating. “We can't move during the day. We're too conspicuous. A huge gecko, an albino girl, and a giant man with bull's horns—we're too easy to spot. And the red mob is the real threat. Once we appear, they'll gather on the sly, surround us, and kill us unhindered.”
Taur looks confused. “How is a mob allowed to kill people? I don't get it.”
“The sovereign wants it. They serve as her enforcers, calling themselves the Red Riot,” Liana explains. “The public is scared into submission by increasing lawlessness and an anonymous army that materializes at any sign of resistance.”
Taur loosens up his shoulders and swings his club as a warm-up. “How do we find them? They're all masked. I couldn't identify a single person who attacked us today. Well, the headless body, that I could identify.”
“When I didn't know about the Red Riot, I couldn't identify them.” Liana moves to the doorway and looks out. “Now I know what to look for. I think a lot of prayer is ineffective because you don't know enough to ask for the right things.”
I pause for a moment, and the fortune-telling girl doesn't know how right she is. “We've got to kill as many of the Red Riot as we can before sunup. As always, I'll be on overwatch. Liana?”
The albino girl leads the way down the streets. I scramble up to the rooftop, where I can see far ahead of the group. We wind through the streets, and at one point Liana and Taur duck into a darkened alleyway just before two of the nightwatch round the corner, bearing pike axes. The first of the two catches a club to the forehead, which comes hurtling out of the shadows. The second starts to whirl around and cry out when a thrown dagger bounces off of his teeth, causing him to sputter and bring his hands to his mouth. The falling dagger catches in his breastplate, where it lodges. His pike axe is falling, but Liana catches it.
The horrified guard tries to cry out as the giant bull man approaches, but he can only spray blood out of his mouth. He brings up his hands to his face, but Taur's iron club, driven by both brawny arms, smashes through his hands and the bones of his face. The soldier goes stiff and topples backward like a fallen tree.
Liana gathers their weapons while Taur drags the two into the shadows. My two companions have taken out the two soldiers so quickly I haven't had time to intervene.
Liana motions to a doorway, the entrance to a boarding house. Testing the door, Taur finds that it is locked, so I slither through the second-floor window. I pass through a kitchen, crawling to stay low, and slink down the stairs to unlock the door from the inside.
Taur pushes the door inward with Liana close behind, then closes the door behind them. Their eyes slowly adjust to the dark interior of the building, but I can already see that there are four bunk beds, all of them occupied, with two sharing a bunk to my right.
The albino girl draws both daggers, which gleam faintly in the dark room. She draws a large circle, indicating everyone in the room. She then points the tips of both daggers downward. Taur and I nod in agreement and position ourselves. Liana has just indicated that everyone must die.
When I was Vic on earth, super salesman, I couldn't have killed anybody—other than myself, of course—but a stint in purgatory will inure you to the prospect of death and toughen you right up. I'm remembering Liana lying unconscious, dead for all I know, with blood streaming from a gash in her delicate brow, and I'm ready to kill.
Taur launches the first blow, smashing through the skull of someone on the top bunk with enough force to send the top bunk crashing onto the bed below it. Liana neatly cuts one throat while I seize a skull and crush it.
Someone shoots up from a bed only to catch a dagger under the chin, and thrashes around until she goes still. Taur stomps the bed, crushing whoever is sandwiched between the collapsed top and bottom bunks. Another boarder stirs on a top bunk, but catches an iron club across the teeth, and I can hear bone crumple. There are murmurs as members of the red mob rouse themselves, while I'm tearing the throat out of another, but humans have such small throats compared to the size of my snout that I've got to struggle to chew out someone's windpipe.
A man covered with tattoos and glistening bits of metal in his face stands, but catches a dagger coming up under his ribcage and into his heart. I expect him to scream, but the pain is too intense. He collapses, and Liana's kris slips out of his torso.
Someone has managed to get upright, and shouts as she lunges for the door, but my tongue shoots out, and a blob of sticky flash stifles her like a softball shoved into her mouth. I reel her into my jaws, and her cranium collapses like an eggshell. Or as Rachel Carson would allege, an eggshell thinned by DDT.
Liana ducks as Taur's club sails over her, and nearly takes off the head of the wiry guy holding her in a rear bear hug. A few more dagger thrusts and cuts, a few more blows from an iron club, and the room is still.
“Him,” Liana says, pointing with the tip of her dagger at what looks like a corpse on the floor. “He's pretending to be dead.”
Taur smashes his skull with his club, and we're done.
Upon leaving the house, I return to the rooftop, and am scampering over the wall near the eaves when I hear a little boy's voice from a window.
O, gecko of God,
Vigilant in the depths of night
Watch over me as I rest
Guard my spirit from the dark beings
Your call is the cry of God
to my soul
I realize he's saying his prayers.
“Fear not,” I tell him, speaking from outside the window, “God the Healer hears your prayer.”
I pass over the window so that he sees my form.
I climb up to the rooftop, and I'm vigilant, but I don't look above me. Something pounces on me, and for once I'm the prey, as talons grip me and carry me high above the street.
Gritting my teeth, I summon the flames, causing my hands to catch fire. I grip the talons clutching me, and with a sizzle, I am released.
I'm free falling, too high up to survive a landing.