Shara flew back air as the pulse from the pylons tossed her aside like leaves in the wind, and then hit the stone floor hard enough to force the breath from her lungs. A skid, a roll, then one more skid before she ground to a stop, and she gasped for air while she forced herself to lift her head.
Just what in the hell was that?
Shara froze as a multi-segmented, chitinous leg covered in small mouths stretched down through the glass ceiling like it wasn’t even there. Water dripped from the dark shell, while tiny, spiked tongues tasted the air from within the mouths, and the tip of the leg reached out for…
“Gevar!” Anad shouted, too late, as the chaos beast touched the Tailcoat almost gently.
And then it vanished.
Is… is that it? That wasn’t so bad.
“AAAAAAAAAAAAAH,” Gevar screamed, tossing her head back. Liquid pink light erupted from her mouth like a volcano to strike the glass ceiling and gush outward, while lines of pink crawled under her skin like burrowing worms.
“Door!” Tel shouted, and Shara tore her eyes away from the glowing Tailcoat to find a stream of monsters rushing into the room. More and more came, then paused and staggered as a pulse washed out from the pylons.
Staggered, but didn’t explode, and within another second, they were already shambling forward again.
“There’s too many,” Tel said, lifting his silver arm. The metal surface of it seemed to shiver, but nothing else happened, and the Clocksmith grimaced. “We need to leave, now.”
“Gevar,” Anad said, leaning on the wall to Shara’s right, his eyes locked on where the other Tailcoat kneeled on the ground and screamed. Whatever the creepy-leg touch did to her, it wasn’t pleasant. Then he shook his head and looked at Shara. “We can’t leave her… or any of this… like this.”
Shara’s eyes went to the other exit, opposite where the monsters streamed in. The answer to all their problems was down that hall… if they could make it that far.
“We won’t,” she said, standing and pointing. “We need to get through that door. It’s our way out.”
“I just said we can’t leave things like this,” Anad snapped.
“And we won’t,” she snapped right back. “I have a plan.”
“A plan? We’re doomed, aren’t we?” Tel said, joining the other two of them while keeping a watch on the monsters. They seemed more interested in whatever was happening to Gevar at the moment, but that could change at any second.
“We’re not…” Shara started, but just stopped and reached out to hug Tel, somehow relieved to hear that snark in his voice. “You have a lot to explain when we get out of here.”
“If we get out of here,” Tel said as they disengaged, looking at his silver arm. “I’m afraid I’m not going to be much use in a fight.”
“So, pretty much the status quo then,” Shara said.
“You’re so funny,” he said flatly. “Anad, are you coming with us?”
Anad looked hard at Gevar, then straightened himself up, and nodded at Tel. “Through that door you said? Okay, follow me.”
The Tailcoat stepped away from the wall and started towards the door, and all at once, every monster’s head turned in their direction.
“Oh… shit…” Shara said, spinning her fist at her side, and then the monsters broke into a run straight for them.
“I’ll handle the ones on the left,” Anad said, then vanished, lines of silver smoke hanging in the air where he’d just been.
“The left of what?!” Shara shouted after him, but didn’t have time to quibble, and stepped out in front of Tel and swung her whip around in a wide arc. Whomp, the metal fist smacked into the side of the closest monster, sweeping it to the left to collide with a couple more, and they all fell in a flailing mix of spiked arms and ugly tongues. “Tel, go! Now!”
Tel looked down at his silver arm, the surface of it rippling and nothing more, but then he gritted his teeth and started for the door. He didn’t quite run, his left leg seeming like it didn’t work right, and it was more of a hobbling, stiff-legged jog.
A handful of the monsters were already moving in their direction, the rest occupied by the silver dervish that left streamers of blood in its wake, and Shara set her whip to working. Out for a small whomp, back to her side, spin and swing, another whomp, back and over her head to rotate, rotate, rotate, then out ahead of Tel. A charge of power ricocheted it back across the room, fist glowing pink, then another charge to shoot it back in the other direction so a pair of sawing chains split the room at waist-height.
That wouldn’t be nearly enough to stop all the monsters, so Shara kept the fist pinballing around while she dashed after Tel. A small whomp here and there nicked monsters as they ran at her, but she kept it to glancing blows, just enough to keep them off-balance and away from Tel. She didn’t need to kill them, just buy enough time for everybody to escape.
A few more bounces and she’d moderately partitioned the room, giving her and Tel a clear path to the door. Anad didn’t have the same luxury, but he cheated with the Trance anyway. He’d find a way past the chains. Hell, even the monsters would, given enough time, but just a little bit more and they’d be in the hallway. There, she’d weave a solid net of chain and be done with it. It was a damn good plan…
Tel glanced back, then slid to a stop and lunged back towards her, silver hand open and reaching for her face.
Shara slid to a stop and recoiled at the sudden action, but then a spike twitched in front of her, and only Tel’s metal fingers closing around it stopped it from driving straight through her face.
“I can’t hold it,” Tel shouted, and Shara did the only thing she could think of with her metal fist out in the middle of the room – she kicked it in the crotch.
It… didn’t have any effect, and the thing shifted its arm and hurled Tel away like he weighed nothing. Then it swung that spike back around to impale Shara, but she stepped around it, taking a grazing cut across her collar bone while coiling her chain around its arm. Pulling hard on the hilt of the weapon, she tightened the sawing chain around its arm, flesh immediately gouging out in great chunks, then swiveled back-to-back with the Twitcher and tossed the chain up and over her head to loop around its throat.
As soon as she felt the whip tighten, she dove forward into a roll, just in time as the monster swung around with a backhand over its other arm. All this did was bring its flesh in contact with the ever-moving chain, and a quick flick of Shara’s wrist spun another coil around that arm. Then, with a pulse of magic, she willed the chain to maintain its ever-growing path – like a flowing river of sawing metal – practically locking the monster in place.
Muscles flexed under mottled flesh, but it wasn’t able to break free, and the chains tore it to the bone in seconds. Blood gushed from its throat and arms, but it just stood there while it got ripped apart.
“Your chain is stopping it from twitching,” Tel said, limping back over to join her. “Come on, we need to keep moving.”
“Not even a ‘wow Shara, you kicked its ass?’? she asked, but quickly followed him after one more look at the Twitcher.
“Wow, Shara, you kicked its ass,” he said flatly, getting to the door, then he turned and looked back to the room. “Anad! We’re out of time.”
Out of time…?
Shara followed Tel’s gaze to the center of the room where Gevar stood. She’d stopped spewing pink vomit, but the glow under her skin hadn’t dulled in the slightest. If anything, the worms under her flesh were even brighter, and when she lifted her head, her eyes were gone – replaced by the same spiked mouths and tongues found on the monsters’ chests.
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An involuntary step back, her chain still whipping across the room, and Shara pushed Tel through the door. “Anad will come if he’s coming,” she said, giving him another push.
The Clocksmith didn’t seem to need any more urging, and hobble-jogged down the hallway as quickly as he could.
Shara followed a step behind, glancing back to see Gevar’s mouth-eyes tracking her movement. They needed to move faster. Much faster. Her hand tightened around the hilt of her weapon as she locked eyes with Gevar, but she didn’t bring the fist into the hallway with her.
She should close it off, prevent any of those things from coming after them, but that would also trap Anad in there with them. And, while she wasn’t the Tailcoat’s biggest fan, he’d fought with them more than once, and leaving him to the same fate as Gevar seemed both dangerous and cruel.
“Damnit,” she cursed, turning away from whatever Gevar had become, and looked down the loooooong hallway ahead of them. A few steps further, she spotted one of Count’s scorched glyphs. Was that the only one he’d put in? Or were there more ahead of her? If she screamed the code word now – She looked at how slowly Tel was moving – they’d never make it.
A little longer, she had to wait a little longer.
Another glance back, and Gevar wasn’t inside the ring of pylons anymore.
Instead, the woman with glowing worms crawling under the skin of her face stood at the entrance of the hallway. She’d already gotten past the hanging net of chains Shara had left in the room.
“Going somewhere?” Gevar asked, her voice cracking and echoing on itself, and the sound of it carrying like she was speaking right beside Shara’s ear.
Then lines of silver crashed into her from the side, and she was gone.
*
Anad attacked the monster-Gevar-had-become with everything he had.
It wasn’t enough.
Despite pulling on the Trance as hard as he ever had – his blade practically exploding with silver light and moving in a blur – Anad just couldn’t get past her sword.
Sheathed in sickly yellow light lined with pink, Gevar’s blade was always exactly where it needed to be to parry his strike – all without seeming to ever move. It was like her sword just appeared in front of his, and no matter where he struck, there it was.
Thrust for the face – batted aside. Cut for the lead thigh – cleanly deflected. Thrusts for the shoulder, chest, hip – parried, parried, parried.
Why can’t I hit her? Am I too slow? Am I holding back because it’s Gevar?
Looking at the thing in front of him, it wasn’t the latter. That thing may have been Gevar at one point, but there was nothing left of the woman behind those mouth-eyes. And it wasn’t his speed – the two of them were moving so quickly that everything else in the room seemed locked in the moment.
They danced around monsters frozen like statues, the arcs of their blades drawing lines of blood as they passed, Anad constantly on the offensive. Attack / parry / step, attack / parry / step, attack / parry / step, attack / parry / step, Chronosteel swords crashing together so quickly it sounded like a constant hum echoing through the room.
Gevar side-stepped between a pair of the monsters, and Anad followed, sword going wide right, wide left, wide right, all in quick succession. As before, her blade was miraculously where it needed to be, but there was no trail of yellow light following behind it. No, her arm twitched, vanishing from where it was to appear where it needed to be – just like the monsters. Even more proof she wasn’t the Mediator Anad had…
Had what? Respected? Looked up to? Loved?
The thoughts and hurt burned in Anad’s chest, pushing him harder, the Trance suffusing every muscle in his body, and he struck, struck, struck. Every thrust was a memory bubbling up in his mind, the dinners they shared, the stolen moments alone, the lessons she’d given, and the smiles just for him.
Every parry was a doubt at what those memories really were. Dinners to manipulate a young man with little experience in the real world. Stolen moments so other Mediators couldn’t influence him. Lessons to mold him into her tool, and smiles… to herself… at how well she’d done.
How could I fall for it? How could I not see it?
Anad gritted his teeth so hard his jaw hurt as he lashed out at her with all his strength, a powerful overhead chop that would just get parried anyway… but didn’t.
He stumbled forward as his sword passed through empty air, no sword parrying his strike, and Gevar was simply gone.
Where?
Anad’s head swiveled left and right while he struggled to get his feet back under him, and the woman twitched into being on his left side, yellow-glowing sword already arcing in to cleave him in two. Off-balance and with few options, Anad stopped moving his feet, letting his body fall forward, and twisted as much as he could to bring his cane and sword up in an ‘X’ between him and Gevar.
Her sword hit Anad’s meager defense like a wrecking ball into paper, crushing his parry back into himself, and catapulted him away. One second he was beside her, and the next he hit a distant wall with a tremendous crack, pain radiating out through his body in a wave that tore away the Trance.
Numbness rushed in to fill him behind the pain, body and mind, as he rebounded from the wall in a heartbeat, his shoes hitting the floor and his legs stepping to absorb the momentum out of instinct. He still had his sword in his right hand, blood on the back side of the blade where it had been pushed against him during the parry, but his cane was nowhere to be seen.
Sluggishly, he raised his eyes to Gevar, still standing across the room…
…and then he blacked out.
*
Shara slung Tel’s silver arm over her shoulder as she ran, getting her a surprised look from the man, but they needed to move faster. Thankfully, he seemed to get that just as much as she did, and he let her take some of his weight as they hobbled down the hall.
“Another thousand feet to the stairs,” Tel said, small chaos butterflies flickering to life at the measurement. “Rounded down, of course. Are we going to make it?”
“We’re going to make it,” Shara said, shifting her neck at the uncomfortable heat coming from the silver arm, and Tel’s surprising weight. “We’re going to make it.”
“You’re not going to make it,” an echoey voice said, like it was right beside Shara’s ear, and both she and Tel stumbled in surprise, falling to the stone floor.
Heads turning in unison, they looked back to find Gevar once again standing at the entrance to the portal room, eyes and sword glowing yellow. Even as they watched, lines of pink peeled out of the yellow glow of her sword to weave into a ring of energy circling her at shoulder height.
“Oh that can’t be good,” Shara muttered. That ring looked far too much like the ones Tel used to make his toys fly.
“Shara, whatever your plan was, we can’t let her get out of here. And we can’t let them have the portal,” Tel said, and Shara looked up to find Tel looking at her.
Shara focused on his good eye, his real eye. “It’ll probably kill us too,” she said, a buzz like a swarm of bees building in intensity down from where Gevar stood.
“And she will definitely kill us. Or worse. If you can do something, do it,” Tel said, reaching out and taking her hand with his flesh one. “I’m sorry it came to this.”
“Me too,” Shara said, squeezing back. “And I’m pretty sure that’s number three for the day.”
“That’s fine, I’ve got a great secret to tell you,” Tel said.
Pressure building behind her eyes and regret in her chest that she’d never actually caught up to her stupid mother, Shara swallowed it all down.
Then she screamed, “EXPLOSION!”
*
The world seemed to crawl to a standstill before Tel’s left eye, more then a dozen concussive blasts of magic and fire ripping through the hallway on both sides of him. Stones and dust exploded out of the walls where the scorching magic sigils tore the walls apart, water burst from the collapsing ceiling, and the floor bucked like a wild horse.
Tel’s eye saw it all, capturing measurements of speed, pressure, volume, temperature, and a dozen other different things – all the things that would kill them. Chaos butterflies spawned in a swarm at the different readings, power surrounding him and Shara in a pink hurricane, but there was nothing he could do with it.
None of the machines in his mind could save them. What would happen to them when he died? Would they vanish forever with him? Or would they spill out of him like some kind of overfilled wagon, only to be immediately crushed by the collapsing tunnel or lost at sea?
Tel pondered the thought as his head turned in slow motion away from Shara, his eye alighting on a new reading. Something was moving beyond the hanging wall of dust and rock – at an incredible speed – and heading straight for them. He started to open his mouth to warn Shara, but he was too slow, and something crushed into his chest, lifting him into the air and blasting the wind from his lungs. And then he was flying down the hall, numbers of distance and speed scrolling past his eye.
But those numbers weren’t what caught his attention. No, it was the lines of silver trailing behind, and he looked down to find a black-sleeved arm around his chest. To his right, Shara was likewise bent double, her arms, legs, and hair waving back the way they’d come as they raced down the hall.
As they were carried down the hall.
Between exploding shrapnel, geysers of water, and clouds of dust. Between seconds.
Tel caught his breath just as they hit the stairs, and whoever was carrying them finally faltered, stumbling halfway with a grunt of pain. The world still shook, dust, flame, and force barreling down the hallway like a cannonball. Without words, he and Shara grabbed the Tailcoat’s arms – Anad’s arms – and hauled him to his feet as they raced up the last few stairs.
Stone shook under his silver foot, heat reached for his back, and the noise of it all drowned everything else out, but Tel leapt for the blue sky gaping above.
His head turned as he flew, finding Shara looking back at him.
Then she winked, and they hit the ground at the same time the tunnel entrance ejected the bottled-up energy with a deafening boom. On and on the tunnel roared, like some titanic beast screaming its fury at the world, but even it eventually had to run out of breath, and a loud gurgle finally signalled the end of its rage.
Taking a deep breath and making sure the ground had stopped trying to toss him into the sky, Tel finally rolled on to his back and looked up.
Neela stood over them, Born and the others at her side, and she had one of her swords pointed at Anad’s face. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now,” she said coldly.
Tel rolled his head to the side to look at Anad, and despite the blood and dust covering his face, the Tailcoat was smiling.
“Because I’m the only one who knows where Shara’s horse is,” he said.