Sword and Pen (The Great Library #5)(80)

It’s up to me.

Wolfe took a breath and pulled at a hard angle. He scraped an inch of arm free, and the sphinx screamed and tried to claw him again. Shreds of cloth flew from his jacket, and the thing narrowly missed his right leg. Don’t think about the arteries that might have been sliced. Now or never. He set his teeth and pulled, hard, and got himself free. Jess jammed the rifle in harder, holding the sphinx in place.

Wolfe ran. He was no athlete like young Brightwell, no trained High Garda like Glain, but he’d survived a long time in a dangerous world, and he knew what was coming. Stay alive. Stay alive for Nic, if not for yourself.

Dying in a graveyard seemed like the most ignominious end of them all. He wasn’t having it.

Run, don’t think. He heard Jess’s raw shout behind him and hoped to all the gods that the sphinx hadn’t turned on the boy, but there was no time to check. He twisted around a looming gravestone, ducked beneath a low, carved arch. The path was clear but hardly straight; it wandered between stark monoliths and carved monuments, miniature temples and houses full of the dead. The reek of this place seemed almost familiar now, but it was tainted by his own fear. His desperation. He heard the Minotaur’s dull bellow; it was ahead and to the left. The path turned again, and now he heard the metallic crunch of the sphinx’s paws on the path behind him. It couldn’t fly, but it could leap if it chose, if he left it an opening. If it landed on him, it would sever his spine with one bite.

The path twisted right. He plunged on left, weaving between narrow spaces he knew the sphinx’s bulk couldn’t manage. This was a risk, a huge one; in spots the tombs and monuments were thick as teeth, and if he got slowed down, caught in that trap . . . He dodged a thicket of cenotaphs and around a looming statue of Anubis, whose palms held eternally burning lamps. Did it just move? Could it? He had no time. He ran in the direction of the Minotaur’s frustrated cry.

The sphinx had kept to the path, and as he burst out ahead he saw it just coming around a turn. His lungs burned, his legs felt light and fragile, but he forced more speed from his body. The Minotaur couldn’t be far. On his right, mirrors flashed at the center of the spiraled array, and he averted his eyes from the glare.

He nearly missed the Minotaur’s approach as it blundered out of a blind alley of tombs with its thickly muscled arms scything the air. Searching for a victim. He ducked and avoided it, rolled clear, and right on cue, the sphinx shrieked as it came on after him.

The Minotaur turned toward the sound, and the sphinx leaped past it to get to Wolfe. Well, tried to.

The Minotaur’s searching hands brushed a wing, grabbed, and tore. It smashed the sphinx out of the air midleap to roll on the ground, and as the wounded automaton scrambled to get up, the Minotaur grasped it by the neck.

As Wolfe caught his breath, it struck him that the Minotaur was treating the sphinx like an intruder. Why, if it’s on the side of the Archivist? And then he realized that the Minotaur wasn’t, or at least, wasn’t anymore. Jess’s bullet must have damaged something in it more than its eyes. It had reverted to base instructions: kill intruders.

And the sphinx wasn’t meant to be here.

The battle was horrific. The sphinx gouged long, ragged scrapes into the Minotaur’s metal skin, severed cables, bit at exposed tubing. One of the Minotaur’s legs stopped moving—frozen in place. The fight was a blur of claws, teeth, battering fists, and then the Minotaur finally got a good grip with both hands on the sphinx’s neck. It applied brute strength to twisting the sphinx’s shrieking head relentlessly around until the noise stopped, and then ripped it completely away from the body in a spray of pale fluids and snapping cables.

The bull-headed monster raised the head in one hand as the sphinx’s red eyes faded to black. It bellowed its defiance in a shocking roar.

Wolfe backed away slowly, careful to make no sound as the Minotaur tore pieces away from the metal corpse. He finally felt safe enough to run again, and wove through a thick forest of memorials to where the path came clear again. Walked the rest of the way as the fear subsided, and shock began to sink a chill into his skin. His arm ached, and when he stripped off the jacket he found a hand-span red bruise starting to ripen. Lucky bones hadn’t shattered.

Lucky in general.

Jess and Glain were coming down the path, which didn’t surprise him; they saw their duty as his guardians, and he saw his going in the opposite direction. Good they could meet in the middle, he supposed.

Glain, always reserved, stopped and nodded after giving him a thorough sweeping glance. “It worked,” she said.

“Must have,” Jess said, “since he’s not dismembered.” But Jess looked tired and worried. “Did it? Really?”

“More or less,” Wolfe said. “Word of advice: in a battle between those two automata, do not bet on the sphinx. Now let’s leave this palace of bones before one of us ends up staying.”

Coming out of the main entrance of the Necropolis—not the massive marble gates cranked open only for grand funerals, but the smaller side door that locked from the outside and required a Codex authorization to open—felt like being reborn, and Wolfe thought about Orpheus emerging from the underworld. Had Orpheus also emerged into darkness, rain, and slashing lightning? Perhaps he had. By no means am I looking back and tempting the Fates. He ushered his two young High Garda ahead of him, just for superstitious certainty, and as Glain had promised there was an armored High Garda carrier on the road, with two armed soldiers standing next to it in rain gear. The downpour was breathtaking in its intensity and chill, and Wolfe was sodden and cold in half the distance.