Ushna’s key took them to another room, and another after that, and another after that … in a very short while, Ram forgot how many they had been to. Each was basically the same as the last, with only the number of bazuu inside it varying. All were equally helpless in the face of Ki’s light; they screamed, fled, and died with hateful monotony, and all that changed was the number of eldritch trinkets stuffed in Ushna’s coat. As they went on, the bazuu grew more decorated, with gilded crests on their chests or foreheads, or rings around neck or tail. Apparently they were slaughtering their way up the hierarchy.
At last Ushna said, “All right, we’re just about done here. Only … let’s see.” He held up his key, letting Ram see it clearly at last—it was a silver rod about a foot long, set with several small jewels. “One room left.” He glanced down at his dulsphere; it was noticeably brighter than it had been before they came in. “I’d say we’ve got a couple of hours till dawn. Easy.”
The three of them stood back-to-back—Ram had learned his lesson—and Ushna did something with the rod. When the fog of transition cleared, they were in yet another vast undecorated room. But this time, the room had only a single occupant.
“Those sons of bitches,” Ushna declared when he saw it. “Didn’t tell me there’d be one of those. I do believe I’ll be charging them extra for this.”
The bazu—if it was in fact a bazu—was twice the size of any of the others, with a less grotesquely proportioned body. Where the others had been naked and ugly, it was covered all over with glorious plumage of every color, shading gradually from its bright scarlet head to its deep violet tail and wingtips. Two long, graceful limbs projected from its torso under the wings; the digits at the end looked powerful yet dexterous, with three clawed fingers opposing a thumb in a shape like a bird’s foot.
It was magnificent, but all its many colors shone with the painful Kur-light. And it didn’t seem perturbed by their spheres at all; it looked directly at them as it opened its beak and screamed a challenge. The air began shaking at once, twice as violently as it had before.
“Rammash,” Ushna said calmly, “we’ll be needing to change tactics here. You’ll want to spread out. Get nice and far away from us—quickly, now, that’s right—and do what you can to keep everyone in this room in sight. Especially big boy there, he’ll be—shit!“
The creature screamed again; the air around it condensed into a thick vapor, then shot forward, past Ushna, and knocked Bal flat on the ground. He started shaking violently at once, just as Ram had before. Ushna spared his partner only the briefest of glances, then whipped back around and threw a spur at the monster’s head. The air clenched down around it before it had gone half the distance, freezing it in place, then slowly twisting and snapping it into little splinters.
“Ushna? What do we—“
“Hell if I know. Improvise!” He had no time to say anything else. Bal abruptly stopped shaking and rose to his feet, drawing a sword in each hand. For an instant, Ram was encouraged—was that all the thing could do?—but then Bal ran at Ushna, brandishing both blades. His steps were sluggish and ill-coordinated, far from his usual murderous grace, but his intentions were clear enough. Ushna backed up, his own weapon at the ready.
What could Ram do? He couldn’t reach the bazu with anything he had, unless he wanted to try throwing his sword. He might help Ushna, maybe trip up Bal from behind, but Bal was staring right at Ushna’s sphere, and failing to snap out of it. They would have to knock him out or kill him to actually stop him, and then what was to stop the bazu from doing the same to one of them? Ram had no idea how this worked, but he didn’t care to bet that the critter couldn’t keep this up as long as it liked. Past sunrise, for certain.
Bal swung at Ushna, who stepped easily back out of the way. Whatever was in there making him do this, it didn’t control him very well. That was encouraging, sort of. And the bazu was focusing all its attention on him. It looked like its nasty trick had its limits, even if it could ignore Ki-light. If it could control more than one person at a time, it would have grabbed all three of them, and had them kill themselves. Unless it was just playing with its food?
Bal swung again, following up with a lunging stab from the sword in his other hand. Ushna barely dodged that time; it seemed the bazu was learning. Ushna spared Ram an an irritable glance as he jogged back a half-dozen steps. Yes, now would be an excellent time to help. If only he knew how. Nothing to throw, and it didn’t seem to care about his dulsphere at all—
The dulsphere! He wasn’t sure if it would do anything, but it certainly wasn’t much use otherwise. And the bazu was distracted. Ram slowly pulled the cord off from around his neck, letting the cradle end dangle in his hand like a sling. He’d never had much practice with a sling, back at the hearth—but then, he’d never had such a large target.
Across the room, Ushna had found breathing room to throw a spur, hitting Bal in the left bicep; the arm dangled uselessly. He ignored it, swinging wildly on with the other hand. Ushna could only duck and retreat.
Ram took a deep breath, then whipped the dulsphere up over his head and around in two tight circles before throwing it, netting and all, at the giant bazu’s chest. The bazu turned its head at the sudden motion, but no shield appeared from the air. The sphere struck it dead-on. Unfortunately, its feathers weren’t any harder than they looked—the sphere bounced off, fell to the floor, and shattered with a brilliant flash.
Several things happened in rapid succession. The giant bazu shrieked and flinched; Bal staggered back, belatedly clutching his arm; Ushna spun around and shot off another spur, hitting the bazu very close to the spot where Ram had aimed the dulsphere. And then, from the mess of broken glass and cording on the floor, there rose a little golden spark of light.
The haranu sun-spirit that indwelt a dulsphere couldn’t live for long outside a host. But it was the child of a pyre, and it knew its enemies. It bobbed in the air a moment before hurling itself at the bazu’s face. The bazu tried to dodge, but it was too big to flicker the way the little ones did, and the haranu easily swung around and dug into its eye.
All the screeches it had made before were nothing to the horrible racket it created now, thrashing so hard that it nearly fell to the floor before catching itself. The wavering in the air turned into a storm, twisting and howling along with it. All three humans were knocked flat on their backs. The tempest didn’t die down for a full minute; by the time Ram got back to his feet, the bazu was high up in the air again. Its once-majestic face was a burnt wreck, the spur half-buried in its chest, but it was still alive and, Ram guessed, quite thoroughly pissed off.
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Another wave of turbulent air congealed into a bolt and flew at Ram, far too fast to avoid. With no dulsphere to protect him, the spasms were fast and brutal; he pulled several muscles flopping on the floor, but rose again almost at once, picking up his sword as he did. He did not try to stop himself, or even feel anything like fear; something had simply shoved the active parts of his mind aside and taken over. Only sense and awareness were left to him, so that he could watch dispassionately as he turned the sword about in his hands and pointed the tip at his own belly. It occurred to him that this would be a painful way to die, but the part of him that wanted to avoid such things was fast asleep.
But now Ushna had his own sphere off from around his neck. He gave it three hard twirls, and it shot directly into the bazu’s burnt face. Whether Ushna threw it faster or the creature was simply too enraged to pay attention, it didn’t flinch. There was another blinding flash, and the bazu fell to the floor with its chest on fire.
Ram was simultaneously struck by a brutal headache, severe nausea, and a random cascade of cramps all over his body. He fell down on hands and knees, attempted to vomit up his empty stomach, then collapsed onto the floor. He barely noticed the storm of the bazu’s rage passing overhead. When he was able to focus on anything but his pain again, he looked up from the floor to see Bal skidding across the floor on his back.
The bazu rose once more, a smoldering wreck of its former beauty but still somehow alive. It left all of one wing, half of another, and the lower part of an arm behind on the floor, along with most of its feathers and much of its flesh. What remained was naked, burnt black, shedding a dark dust of dead matter behind it as it rose, like the shabti Ram had killed not twenty-four hours earlier. Motes of it floated in the pools of silver blood, a bare three seconds of Bal’s vengeance at work.
It glowered at them with its one remaining eye, a cold blue like a shab’s, and roared. Not a scream or a screech, but a low, reverberating roar. A thousand darts of hard air shot out with it, like shards of broken glass; Ushna was caught by three, clean in the chest, and fell hard. Bal was still down, and didn’t look like getting up soon.
Ram didn’t want to get up. His first impulse was to lie flat and wait for his chance to run. But that was no good. He couldn’t leave the room without Ushna’s key, he didn’t know how to use it if he got it, and the bazu would follow him to kill him if he left. The only way out was to kill the thing.
Besides, he’d taken on a job here. A man had his pride.
He was up on his knees when the bazu hit him, not with sorcery—it was too angry for that—but physically, swooping like a falcon to grab him with its one good arm. The weight of it knocked him flat down again, but then the claw closed tight around his waist and picked him up, holding his face inches from the wrathful dead light of the eye. He’d dropped his sword, couldn’t move his arms, and the claws were clenching down tighter and tighter. The bazu opened what little it had left of its beak to roar again; Ram closed his eyes—
There was no roar, no scream. Only a sudden gurgle, and the claws released him to drop three feet to the floor. The bazu landed beside him a half-second later with a spur sticking through its throat. Weary as he was, Ram took ages just finding his sword again, while the bazu choked and gasped and flailed about shedding more black dust. His first blow was sloppy, bashing the creature in the face with the flat instead of edge-on. The second hit true, slicing through the ruins of the skull and putting out the hideous blue light. That might have been enough, but he stepped aside, raised the blade high, and brought it down on the neck. Head and body crashed separately to the floor. Ram sat down hard beside them, ignoring the fresh flow of silver blood.
Bal and Ushna approached a moment later, holding each other up. Ushna appraised the carcass. “We’ll say three gold just for this one, and split it even. Plus an additional gold penalty for failure to disclose critical information, to be distributed along the customary lines, and three to replace our spheres. That seem fair to you, Ram?”
Seven gold—a ludicrous sum. Even Mother’s father barely made that much in a month. And, at that moment, he couldn’t have cared less. “Sure,” he said. Then, “You going to be okay?”
“We’ll live long enough for our man to patch us up.” He looked at the body again—it was disintegrating more slowly than the others had—shook his head, and laughed. “Put down by humans! He won’t be living that down any time soon.”
Ram tried to grunt something that sounded like agreement, but it came out as more of a groan. Bal’s sphere was the only light left in the room, and it was brighter than Ram liked. He staggered over to join them so they could leave.
But Ushna said, “Just a second, now. This one should be worth a little more wait. Let’s see what our late acquaintance was carrying, shall we?” He hobbled over to the remains with obvious difficulty—had he cracked ribs? How was he talking so much?—and hacked a disc-shaped ornament out of its chest, where the heart would be in a human. It was clearly the same sort of work as the shabti, a flat black with a ring of little stones around the rim and one large gem in the center, all gleaming the usual pale shade of blue. “See? Eye of Nidriz. Only the third one I’ve ever gotten my hands on. We almost left a fortune behind. Move promptly but without haste, that’s another lesson for you.”
Ram leaned against Bal; now that the excitement was wearing off, he could feel every bruise and pulled muscle. It was an effort just staying conscious while Ushna did his vulture’s work with the corpse. But in the end he finished, and used the key, and they were out in the desert feeling the gentle breezes of the pallid dark before dawn. The moon was almost entirely set now, the night cold. Ram started the painful, cumbersome process of lowering himself to the sand so he could sleep, but Ushna caught him by the back of his shirt.
“No, sir. That would be profoundly misguided. Have you forgotten what your compatriots will be doing here in a few hours?”
Ram thought he was almost too tired to care. The rest of the militia had been sleeping all this time. Swallowing any number of curses, he suffered his cousin to lead him some ways off, consulting his little silver oracle all the while, until they were far enough away not to get a nasty surprise. Then all three of them fell to the ground and passed out.
He slept long and deep. He slept through the arrival of the army, barely heard their victory hymns as an echo in his dreams. He lifted his head from the sand at a sudden noise, and saw, by the light of sunset, a fresh rain of fire from the heavens. Under fire, the rookery was revealed at the moment of its death: enormous but insubstantial, the shape of an impossibly tall tower rose over the sands, a mile-high sketch against the sky that did not collapse under the onslaught so much as fade away, becoming dimmer and more ephemeral with every flash of flame. A dark dream that died in daylight.
It didn’t matter, anyhow. Let them crack their empty shell. The sand and the air were warm, the pleasant, gentle heat of the desert in autumn. He laid his head down on the welcoming earth, and went back to sleep.