Elder Race(35)

“It knows we’re here,” she understood.

“It has detected something, even if just the absence of itself in our shadow. I hear it interrogating me again. We have very limited time.” Nyrgoth took a deep breath. “I said you couldn’t do this with a blade.”

“You did, yes.”

“I was wrong.” There were odd muscles twitching about his face, and she realised with fascinated horror that she was seeing the real man, the bitterly unhappy victim of his own mind, trying to make himself known. What would that man say to her? Not to listen to the calm words his lips were telling her. “Lynesse Fourth Daughter, now is the time to do exactly as I say, and no more or less.” And he was fumbling with his clothing, to her incredulous horror. He was fiddling with the bindings and fastenings, that were all in the wrong place, until at last he had them free and had pulled back his robe and tunic and shift, shrugging them off his shoulders to reveal a lean chest and soft stomach. All around them the demon-marked mounds were shifting and swaying, and parts of them seemed to be bulging up as though the tangled mass was trying to give up the forms of animals and people. She saw a brief suggestion of limbs, of faces, and looked away hurriedly, meeting Nyrgoth’s eyes.

“You must do it,” he told her. “I can’t do it myself. Not even with the pain hidden away from me. I lack that kind of courage.” In three steps he was before the arch, watching the hungry feelers and barbed vines rise up from it like serpents, questing curiously through the air. Nyrgoth turned back to her, arms out. “Take your steel. Cut here.” The place he marked was beneath his ribs, close to where the demon’s servant had gutted him. She could just see the pale line of the wound, as though it had happened a generation ago. “Cut, and what you unleash shall undo the demon, if anything can. But be swift.”

“I don’t know if I can,” she whispered, but she had her blade out, tip scratching a bead of blood from his belly. There were stories, of course: one hero of the ancients had to unseam the Firebird that had carried them across the night, to release all the good things of the world that it had swallowed. Another had gone across the world cutting apart scattered seeds of the Tree of Changes to birth the first Coast-people. Stories, myths, contradictory parables. True without being real. But this was real.

“Lyn,” he said, “I have been without purpose for a long time. At least let me be useful to your world in this way.”

“Tell it to me without your shield. Tell it to me in your real voice, with your real self behind it,” she challenged him. She was having difficulty keeping the sword steady, her own hands were shaking so much.

“This is me, all of me.” Behind her the metal servant righted itself abruptly with a tremendous rattle of loose plates, and she twitched and drove the blade two inches into his gut. His face went white, but somehow he conjured a smile.

“Yes. But all at once, please. There’s a limit to how much I can hold back the pain and still function.” He reached out with his fingertips and touched her hand, clenched about the weapon’s hilt. “Lyn . . .”

She lunged, driving the weapon into him and then drawing it out with a twist to free it from his flesh, as she’d been taught. He made a soft sound, almost of revelation. Then she had staggered back two steps, feeling the crawling horror of the demon clutching for her from behind, the horror of what she had done from the front.

Nyrgoth reached with crooked fingers, driving them stiffly into the wound, clawing into his own body and fumbling there, teeth gritted, eyes clenched shut. Then, with a great cry, he tore something free, that was the size of Lyn’s fist and ragged with gore.

“Lie there, no matter what happens to my body,” he got out, and dropped the bloody trophy before the arch, and then howled at the sky, at the demon, at the world, “Do it now! Now!”

He dropped to his knees and she was rushing to catch him, feeling his long, awkward body slump into her, shivering and twitching. All around her there were things breaking away from the demon’s massed corruption, shapes part-human, part-beast, merged, blended, clumsy on too many limbs or too few. She lifted her red sword and resolved to make them pay dearly for her last moments.

Then the servant, the worker, had lurched over to her, almost knocking her down. She struck at it with her sword, carving a bright scar on its metal hide, but it just stood there, whining and whirring. Incredibly, Nyrgoth pawed at it, painting it with his blood. His lips moved, and she read one word there.

On.

He tried to fight her, when she hauled him up. That might have been because he wanted her to leave him; it might have been because the pain had broken through his barriers so that being bodily dragged over the back of his servant was agony to him. She had no time for niceties. By the time she was astride the creature herself, she didn’t know if he was alive or dead.

“Whatever you’re going to do,” she told the thing, “do it now.”

She almost fell off, when it lumbered into the air, every metal part of it protesting and its innards roaring as though it shared all its master’s pain. She clung to it and to Nyrgoth’s body, watching the eye-twisting arch recede, watching long flailing tentacles thrash from the demonic overgrowth to reach for her, then fall back down like cut ropes. The servant carried them away, shuddering through the sky, losing height abruptly with stomach-lurching drops, then clambering skywards again, listing perilously to one side.