Some have tried to explain the Spontaneous Human Combustion phenomenon, wherein a person catches fire and burns completely, but without setting anything else on fire, as a person drinking too much and falling asleep while drinking, at which point the cigarette ignites him. I have found from experience, though, that every time I catch fire I become wide awake. I am awake now, even if a little weak from blood loss as Taur carries me through the forest, which has become a raging inferno. The flames behind us are tall, rolling upward like silk streamers in front of a fan, while the sky behind them is blackened by thick smoke. Did I say, “Flame on?” That I don't remember.
Taur is running just fine, despite carrying a six-foot gecko on his shoulder and despite sustaining a life-threatening injury when some poorly fed marsupial dog that would take a great deal of imagination to recast as a “tiger” nipped him in the ankle. Liana is just ahead of us, carrying her daggers, and I'm thinking that if running with scissors is a bad idea, running with two daggers is much worse.
Well, it looks like I've killed two birds with one stone, so to speak. When my thigh burst into flame, it cauterized the wound in my leg, solving that problem, plus the fire soon spread, forming a barrier between the three of us and the pursuing freak brigade.
“Just don't catch on fire again,” Taur says as we run through the forest, descending gradually until we are hiking toward the base of the mountain.
I feel like telling Taur that I don't “catch on fire,” but intentionally set myself aflame, like the Human Torch in the Fantastic 4, but without any copyright infringement.
We're now hiking down the trail. The smell of smoke is heavy in the air, making Liana and Taur wipe their watery eyes.
There. There it was. I just licked my eyeball. If my eye was dirty, I don't see how licking it with my tongue cleans anything.
I'm bouncing up and down, flopping on the horned guy's back with Taur's every stride as we return to camp. “You know, you two, later we should go back to the where the fire is, I mean after everything burns down. I bet there's a ton of roasted meat there—snakes, lizards, a couple of deer, some marsupial tigers, the works. It's already caught and cooked, and it'll go bad in a day or two.”
* * *
It's a simple matter to scale the walls of the castle at the heart of Sugbu. This was once the Basilica of the Holy Child, but now it's been converted to the residence of the king of the city. I'm carrying a knotted rope in my jaws, and I could easily scale this wall even if it were as smooth as marble, but given its pitted surface and brick-like structure of uneven stones, it's the easiest wall in the world for a gecko to climb.
From my vantage point on the wall I can see across the city, see hearth fires glowing on the distance while oil lamps predominate the closer one gets to the city center. I know where the colossal idol of Molech sits, but I can't see it because it's made of onyx. Instead, I see a dark outline where the statue blots out the lights behind it.
Once I reach the railing of a walkway along the third floor, I slip the hook over the edge of the baluster. With several tugs, Taur fixes the hook and begins the hand-over-hand climb up the knotted rope, aided by his feet. Liana grips him with her arms over his shoulders and neck. She is light enough that she isn't much of a burden for the muscled giant to carry as he climbs the rope..
Liana's biggest problem, though, is a lack of night camouflage. Her skin reflects light like a snowbank, while her hair is pure white. To remedy that she is dressed in black pants and a shirt like a North Vietnamese soldier, with her hair wrapped up in a black cloth. Both she and Taur have disguised their faces and patches of exposed skin with black greasepaint.
The two of them reach the railing where the rope is anchored. Taur steps up, allowing Liana to climb over, step down onto the railing, and hop down. Taur himself now climbs over the railing. He slides the hook down toward the nearest pillar, so that it is less conspicuous but ready in case we need to make a quick escape. The albino girl, who is dressed all in black like a ninja, removes Taur's iron bat from her back and hands it to him.
Liana looks at the doors at either end of the walkway and points to one. Taur and I are counting on her gift of clairvoyance to help us find our way in the castle.
The two of them walk along the corridor, while I crawl upside down on the ceiling above them. We pass through the door and find ourselves in living quarters. Judging by the velvet drapes, the gilt frame paintings, and the elaborately brocaded chairs, we are in the king's residence, or perhaps the residence of extended members of the royal family. The interior is dim, lit by oil lamps on the periphery.
Liana gestures to the stairs, where two guard with breastplates and greaves on their shins stand watch, but facing in the direction of someone coming up the stairs.
Taur looks up at me on the ceiling, and I hope I'm not damaging the stucco painting I'm clinging to, where several nymphs are bathing naked in a stream. The colossus of a man gestures to himself, then to the left. I nod my head. The man on the right is mine.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Taking careful steps, Taur creeps as close as he can until the two guards are alerted to his presence. The horned man explodes, just as one of the men starts to cry out, throwing his bat forward in a straight line. The metal club slides through his cupped fingers until the wide end strikes the guard on the left in the mouth, smashing his teeth and knocking them down his throat.
The guard on his right also opens his mouth in an involuntary shout of surprise, but the blob at the end of my tongue hits his open mouth, stifling his exclamation like a stopper in a bottle. I spring from the ceiling, rolling as I fall, and engulf his head with my jaws. The taste of a copper helmet is awful, but I can't left myself get distracted. I squeeze my jaws, but only succeed in closing his helmet against his skull, so I throw in a kick with the venomous spur, which catches him under the armpit. He starts thrashing, then spasming. I land on my hind feet to gently set him onto the floor where he flops for a few moments, take a deep breath, and expires.
Taur has recovered from his initial thrust to the guard's mouth, pulling his bat backward for the finishing blow, but the soldier's lance is falling. Liana dashes forward, ducking under Taur's mighty swing and catches the spear before it strikes the stairs. The war club lands, catching the soldier at the junction of his jaw and neck, and he falls down the stairway.
The three of us pause at the noise, but fortunately the stairs are carpeted with a decorative rug, which deadens the noise of the dead guard falling and rolling.
Taur climbs down the steps and lifts his dead sentry in a fireman's carry. I drop down to all fours so Liana can roll my victim onto my back. I descend the stairs slowly on all fours with Liana balancing the corpse on my back. Once we reach the second floor landing, Liana steers us to a pantry, where the dead guards are stowed away.
We pass through a huge library, with books on shelves from floor to ceiling. To our left is a room with a hexagram visible on the floor, punctuated by candles at the six points. What is that, the séance room? Spell casting room?
We continue downward to the ground floor, where the chapel has been converted to a throne room, with cushioned chairs in front of the dais, and a throne with a snake coiling above it. We follow along the wall, passing among towering purple banners descending from the ceiling, bearing the image of the serpent. If it weren't for the troops posted outside the castle, we might have saved ourselves a lot of trouble by coming in through the front door in the first place. The soldiers are thick outside at every ground-level door, but there are few guards inside.
I pass under the banner, clinging to the wall as Taur and I follow Liana, who climbs up the dais and goes behind the throne to a door hidden behind the curtain. She tries the door, then looks up at me, mouthing the words, “It's locked.”
I clamber down to stand beside her.
“I need something thin, strong, yet flexible to pick the lock,” she whispers.
The end of my tail snakes out and hovers in front of her face, waiting until she can make out the black tip of my tail in the dark throne room. She grabs my tail and inserts the very thin end into the keyhole. It doesn't matter that she can't see the crude pins, because she knows what's inside the lock. With a click, the bolt draws back, allowing us to enter the narrow stairway behind the throne. I stay up on the ceiling, where I'm comfortable, and it gives us the strength of numbers, enabling us to get two men into an area that normally can only be occupied by one.
I'm feeling uneasy, because the air is getting humid, and we're descending underground, until the walls dotted by torches in sconces become damp. Eventually we emerge into a room dominated by a statue of Molech, with his black stone wings spread and his arms and hands gesturing down to a stone table. Oddly, I see two sloped rests in an inverted 'V' until I realize that they're stirrups like one might find in an obstetrician's table. In front of the table is a pit, a circle of an even deeper black, and I remember the last city where I fell into a pit of vipers.
The wall is lined with glass jars, and because I can crawl on the wall perpendicular to the floor I see that the jars contain tiny feet, and another one full of tiny hands, or arms or legs. Some jars contain pickled internal organs, then the line of glass jars is interrupted by a mummified fetus on the wall, resting like a saint in a niche. The creepiness factor has just been ramped up to ten.
The door slams shut behind us. Lines of men in purple robes merge from doorways on both sides of the Molech altar, forming one continuous line behind and to the side of the Molech statue. One robed figure climbs the stairs and stands beneath a gold statue of a woman, but with horns on her head, and tentacles replacing her hair, arms, and legs. The statue stands with her breasts jutting forward and her tentacled “arms” outstretched.
The man on the platform removes his hood, revealing the dark face of the king. “The offering to Molech is tomorrow, so we knew you'd come, like moths to the flame.”
The king spreads his arms wide. His black hair frames his charcoal features, where his eyes catch the light of the torches like glass beads. His robed followers hold their sickles at the ready.
“Are you ready for the harvest?” The king asks. “There is tremendous power in harvesting the young, who grow at a tremendous rate. That is the power to heal, to restore, to create the runaway growth of pestilence. And the best sacrifices are innocent, always. Look around you—the walls are full of thousands of offerings to Molech, who rewards sacrifice.”
“Molech isn't a god, just a demon,” I tell him from the spot where I'm clinging to the wall. “Demons always promise big, but don't deliver. You'll find that out when you die.”
“Oh, really?” He crosses his arms and removes a flaming dagger from within his robe, causing his men to gasp and chant. He now turns like a televangelist, speaking as the organ music plays softly in the background, only in this case it's the chanting of the Molech worshipers creating an unsettling feeling. “I'm the king of this city, and we defeated the holy child, and thousands like him.”
I'm just starting to feel I can take him out when all of the robed devotees draw sickles from within the dark folds of their robes, holding their scythes so that the curved blades glint in the torchlight.