Chapter 21 #2
So, I thought. He could get out.
I turned to Fotia. “Fo? Listen. Can you help him?”
Despite everything, Fotia swallowed, steeled herself, and said, “I…I can get him to a medikker. But it will be slow going alo—”
Then Trikao pushed past me. With surprising strength, he reached forward and pulled Seriv over onto his shoulder, like a farmer carrying the day’s harvest back from the field. Seriv groaned mightily, gasped, and then appeared to lose consciousness from the pain.
“I will take him,” Trikao said hoarsely. “I am no use, standing before my son’s cell.” He looked at me, his face anguished. “I do not know what is happening here. But please—save Ippeas, if you can.”
“I will if fate permits, sir,” I said, bowing. Then I turned to Fotia: “Go fetch Tauri, quick as you can. He will be at the Orbiis offices. Do it now. But listen—listen! When you get back, look about the jail! Look for anyone strange lingering—or playing a pipe.”
“You think…”
“I think someone nearby did this to Castus, yes, whatever it is,” I said. “Now go, all of you!”
Together, she, Trikao, and Seriv trundled down the passageway of the jail. I grasped the hilt of my sword and let the memories seep into my muscles. I turned the hilt this way and that, unlocking it, and drew my sword, the bright green blade glimmering even in this dim place.
It would be tight environs in the lading deck of the infirmary. Not good for long blade work. But I had little else.
With a grunt, I ripped my coat from my arms, balled it up in my free hand, and entered the infirmary.
Another scream from down the darkened passage. I steeled myself, darted through, and peered about, waiting for my eyes to adjust.
Then I cried out in horror.
The lading deck was quite small, as I had worried.
But about a third of its space—specifically, the top far left third—was filled with coils and shafts of a great, trembling fungal growth, the clutches of shivering bulbs dancing with misty spores.
It was as if an enormous sea creature had sprouted there in the corner and was picking its way up the walls and across the ceiling with its tentacles.
I stared at the fungal stalks, astonished.
My eye followed their lengths down and I saw that they originated from the side of the head of Castus Armenta, standing with his back to me.
His neck and shoulders were streaked with gore, yet this did not seem to bother him at all: he was bent over a young man and was trying to pin him down so he could continue calmly sawing through his midsection with a long, serrated medikker’s knife.
I screamed at him—what I said, I did not know—and darted forward and slashed at the back of his left leg, hoping to cripple him.
The hand with the knife came flashing out at me. If I had not trained in such cramped combat—indeed, I’d trained in nearly every manner of combat available—it would have cut off a good bit of my scalp. Yet I was already drawing away.
I noted the speed of the blade, the swiftness and power with which it cut. Not natural, not normal. Something else was animating him now. Though, I noted, it did not perform a combat attack: he was still going through the motions of gutting a cow, just…stranger. Faster. Stronger.
Castus turned to me, the fungal stalks skittering and scraping across the ceiling as he moved. His nose and mouth were streaming blood, and the eye on the side that had sprouted was bloodied and dark. The other eye flickered and danced in its socket, taking in everything about it.
Then he moved forward.
He slashed at me, trying to drive his blade into my belly.
My sword was longer, and I bit at him each time, cutting his arm, his knee, his leg—but he did not stop.
I found myself falling back, back through the infirmary and into the corridor of jail cells.
The pain meant nothing to him, it seemed, and his infested head cared not at all for slashed tendons or ragged muscles.
I kept stepping back, and back, and back.
I heard Ippeas screaming behind me, much closer than I’d thought he’d be. I was losing ground, I realized, even though I had the better weapon and training.
How to kill a man, I wondered, who is already dead?
I eyed the massive, tumorous growth of fungal stalks.
A neuro-fungus, then, that infested the brain.
I narrowed my eyes and studied his neck. Then I feinted, letting my guard drop.
He rushed forward.
As he did so, I flung my balled-up coat at his face. He reacted too slowly with the other arm—I had done enough damage to his shoulder to manage that, at least—and the coat covered his face, blinding him.
I slashed down. The titan-bone blade bit through his forearm, severing the hand with the medikker’s knife. Then I turned again, coiling upon my back foot, and slashed forward and across, pushing the blade through the base of his neck.
I had never beheaded a man with my weapon before, and did not find it an easy task, even with a sword like mine.
My blade bit into his neck and cut into his vertebrae, yet there it became lodged.
Castus began thrashing and spasming and shivering.
He ripped himself free of my sword and collapsed to the floor, limbs flying out madly and striking the bars of the other cells, his bare feet slapping the fretvine, the fungal stalks whipping about and releasing yet more clouds of spores.
I raised my blade, waited for my moment, and brought it down, cutting through whatever was left of his neck underneath the blue Iudex fabric.
He froze. His body twitched twice more. Then he went still.
Ippeas was screaming behind me, crying out, “What was that? What was that?” I did not answer. I swallowed, wiped my face, sheathed my sword, and dashed outside.
—
I emerged to find that a crowd had gathered about the cell, drawn by the screams—and, I saw, by the bright, flickering flares arcing through the skies. The source of these proved to be Commander Tauri, who was already dashing up to me with Fotia at his elbow.
“I have sent the signal,” he said tersely. “The Apoths and Orbiis shall be here shortly. What is the situation?”
“Castus fruited, sir,” I gasped. “Sprouted. A medikker attendant is badly injured. He needs care.”
Tauri took a step, then froze. “Castus’s infection fruited? Despite our treatments?”
“So it seems.”
He paused a second longer, then dashed inside.
Fotia stared at me. “Din. Are…are you…”
It took me a moment to realize why she was so alarmed: though Castus had moved relentlessly, indifferent to the wounds I’d given him, he’d still bled like a mortal man, and I was coated in his gore.
“It is not…I’m fine,” I said. “Did you see anyone about, Fo? Anyone with a pipe?”
“No,” she said. “There was no one! I checked every alley, every lane, but we were alone here!”
I wavered slightly where I stood. That could not be so: someone, I knew, had played those notes I’d seen in the booklet, the tune titled LYSIS. It had begun something in Castus, catalyzed the fungus’s growth, perhaps, until it had overtaken him.
I staggered away from the jail, my breath hot in my lungs. Fotia called to me, but I could not hear her. I whirled about, staring and peering into the shadows, but it was as she said. We were alone.