There was a sharp clack! from far behind her and one of the creature’s eyeballs erupted in a font of jelly and viscera, a crossbow bolt buried up to its fletching in the gooey mess. It gave a wet gurgle of pain and stumbled, breaking the impetus of its charge. Tirce snapped free of her unnatural stupor and dashed back up the passage. Ravelin had reappeared with the others, bent over with one foot in the stirrup of his crossbow as he yanked up the sinew for another shot.

“What did I say?” he scolded, “What did I say? But you just had to go waking up a wriggoth, didn’t you? Pull up your socks,” he added, taking careful aim. With a yelp Tirce dove forward as the second bolt flew straight towards her, whistling a hairsbreadth from her ear before thudding into its target, drawing another unearthly howl from the wriggoth.

Tirce’s lantern fell and sank into the mire, the flame sputtering out with a pathetic whimper. Blind, she went headfirst into the current and swallowed a mouthful of unspeakable foulness. Almost immediately she began to sink deeper, the ordure closing over her with the insistency of quicksand.

A vicelike grip seized her by the collar and dragged her back onto the walkway, kicking and scrabbling.

“Next time you drown, I’ll throw you a cinderblock,” Ravelin hissed into her ear, “Now move it!”

He gave her a shove to get her going, and together they pounded after the others, the ground shuddering beneath their feet as a nightmare from a bygone age lurched in pursuit.

#

The trouble with wriggoths, Ravelin decided, was that they were so terribly predictable. They mostly confined themselves to the same canals they’d roamed these past few centuries, feeding on sewage and singing their endless, depressing dirges. Chancers quickly learned to mark their territory by the clearness of the water and avoided them altogether. Ravelin himself had gone years without seeing one.

Until today, that is. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle and ducked as a forearm the width of a tree trunk missed him by inches, crunching into the wall and sending chips of shattered stone flying in all directions.

He put on a burst of speed, raking his fingertips across the inner lining of his coat and recalling by touch the equipment he’d prepared for the journey.

He considered first the two dense metal tubes weighing down his front pockets. Viago’s asking price for these darkflares had been uncharacteristically generous. Why had the hetman been so keen on him taking this job? God’s grief, but he hated driving meat wagons.

The wagon in question running some distance ahead of him now, their shouts of confusion and terror echoing down the corridors in every direction. Ravelin slid the darkflares back into his pocket with disgust—even a blind man would find this pack of fools what with all the noise they were making.

Perhaps a taste of solefire would whet its appetite? Ravelin reached into another pocket and clutched a ceramic ball the size of a goose egg, its insidious warmth seeping into his palms.

Why yes, Ravi, he could almost hear Spade sardonic reply, “And risk igniting a pocket of swamp gas while you’re at it. What surer way to kill a wriggoth than to bring a city block down about your ears? Use your head for once, why don’t you.”

Ravelin’s fingertips brushed the pouch of sparkies. And just like that, he knew what to do.

“Hang a right!” Ravelin yelled to his charges, “Right I say, and damn your eyes!”

“My right, or yours?” came Kyber’s hysterical reply.

“We’re facing the same way, you knobhead!” screeched his wife, who was running with the tyke Neisha slung over one burly shoulder like a side of ham.

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By some miracle they all heard and obeyed Ravelin’s command, though the knobhead in question still managed to drop his lantern on the ground, where it smashed to pieces and covered the path in a spreading pool of burning oil.

Ravelin leapt over the flames with a curse, heard a muffled whumpf a moment later as the wriggoth’s rolling bulk extinguished them. He could sense it gaining on him, its stride lengthening as it gathered itself for a killing leap. He saw the archway of the corner fast approaching and seized the jutting stonework, swinging himself around to make the turn at breakneck speed. The wriggoth barreled past him with a wail of frustration, claws scrabbling on stone as it fought against its own unstoppable impetus to circle about, a struggle which ended in spectacular fashion as it went skidded and went crashing into the waters with a titanic splash.

“Hah!” Ravelin let out a reckless laugh, “Break your ankles, did I?”

Kyber tapped him on the shoulder.

“I don’t mean to dampen your spirits, young Ravelin,” he said, “But we’ve run into a bit of a problem—”

“Dead end, chancer,” Tirce quickly summarizing the situation, “You’ve killed us all.”

She was right: the passage had abruptly terminated with another lowered sluice gate. Modlin was cranking its control lever up and down, but it wasn’t budging.

Ravelin elbowed him aside and drew a knife from its shoulder strap. He groped at the wall until he felt a hairline seam. Remembering what Viago had done, he placed the tip of his knife into the crack and levered open the panel. As he’d predicted, the slot was filled with a spent sparkie, its coils eaten away by corrosion. Ravelin tore it out and hastily filled the slot with one of his own.

“But of course!” cried Kyber in relief, “By completing the series, we restore the mechanism’s functionality! How very ingenious!”

Ignoring him, Ravelin slammed the lever. There was a moment of anxious silence, then a hum as the lumonics stirred from decades-long slumber.

A stentorian roar shook the chamber and the wriggoth dragged itself back onto solid ground, its cluster of eyes casting about in all directions for the source of its murderous irritation. There was a groan of rusted metal as the sluice gate rose, inch by painstaking inch. Instantly the wriggoth’s head swiveled towards the sound, all three dozen of its pupils narrowing into hateful pinpricks as it spotted them.

Kyber gulped.

“Crawl, you worms!” Ravelin barked, startling them into action.

They went on their bellies and wriggled into the slowly widening gap, Neisha yelping as her parents heaved her bodily through.

The wriggoth charged. Ravelin grabbed the legs of the stragglers and forcefully bundled them before reaching across to slam the lever back down.

Writhing mouthparts folded him into their embrace, the full weight of the creature bearing Ravelin to the ground. Snarling like a cornered rat, Ravelin rode the momentum and fell onto his back, rolling sideways as the heavy sluice gates banged shut.

Wails rent the air as the bars impaled the wriggoth’s intruding head, its tendrils thrashed in frenzied abandon and smashing Ravelin’s face repeatedly into the floor. Stars burst into Ravelin’s vision and his spine creaked in protest as the enraged wriggoth sought to wrench his torso to pieces. He sawed at the tendrils with the knife, cutting, cutting and cutting till the severed stumps drenched him in gore. The world was beginning to get fuzzy round the edges when twin arcs of steel flashed overhead, bright and clear.

Abruptly the pressure eased and Ravelin’s consciousness swam back into painful focus. Tirce was crouched over him with a matching pair of sickle blades in her hands.

“Guhg?” Ravelin managed to utter through his swollen, bleeding face.

Tirce never spared him a glance. She was staring at the wriggoth pinned beneath the iron bars, rivulets of blood and purple brain matter trickling from its head wound. A thin mewling bubbled from its mouth and petered out as the creature breathed its last.

#

Images shuttered through Tirce’s mind like the pages of a book flipping in rapid succession. Teeming masses of toad-things bathed in the shores of a vanished sea with their wriggling tadpole children, warbling joyful hymns unto the dreaming god of the deep. For beneath the waves stood a shrine, ancient and unknowable even by the reckoning of the toadmen, rooted amidst flowery anemones and coral reefs, the altar crowned by the effigy of a limbless, eyeless shape to which the toad-things made yearly pilgrimage.

Once more she saw the burning spires of the Nameless City belched smoke and ashes. Haggard lines of refugees fled the conflagration and streamed into the very same tunnels in which Tirce now stood. Entire lifetimes of misery passed as the bodies of their offspring adapted to their new home, subsisting on filth and rats, their intelligence dimming with each succeeding generation as they sprouted horrific mutations with which to survive in the long dark.

But what never faded was the sense of harrowing sorrow, sorrow for the memory of the city that was. Pity overcame her fear and revulsion, and Tirce reached out to place a gentle palm on the wriggoth’s forehead while its many eyes drew shut.

Crunch!

A hatchet came down and split the wriggoth’s skull open. It gave a final paroxysm of agony and Tirce spun round to find Ravelin already walking away, his axe dripping and matted with gore.

“Well that settles it,” he said over his shoulder, “You coming?”