Chapter 54 No Dying Allowed Tonight
No Dying Allowed Tonight
“It wasn’t a bad plan,” Robert husked.
“Stay still.” Sara’s hands plunged into the bleeding mess of his abdomen before she exhaled hard; Daniel, his hand on her shoulder, closed his eyes and swayed, a bright white bandage wrapped about his head. Looked like he’d been hit with flying debris, but he was grimly determined to stay upright.
Not only had the adult shoggoth chewed through bedrock with something prodding it from behind, but another of the foul things had taken wormshape and drilled up onto the temple grounds, leaving a ragged icy hole to belch forth the main attack.
The creature down here had groped blindly for the Flame-mouth, and the sucking sounds as it roasted to death while attempting that nourishment—as well as the gusts of caustic black smoke and thin nauseating steam—weren’t good for lirai.
Still, none of the Sons made a move to drag them to safety. There were larger matters afoot. “Who was it?” Daniel murmured. “Tell us, Father.”
Robert coughed. Erik, temporarily frozen with Liv’s oneiros cupped in one nerveless hand, stared at a dead, savaged mess—the slime-drenched shoggoth, not to mention the nthlei hounds with their crop of parasitic tendrils—had made of a fellow Son.
Casualties weren’t heavy, but that was no comfort. Especially to this poor bastard, or the ones up top.
The gem in his fist sang unhappily, a low note of strain. Of course the traitor could break a meteorite-iron chain; weaving an oneiros setting was a Son’s sorcery, after all.
Dakshi staggered, leaning heavily on another Younger’s shoulder—the one with the short braids and the slow sweet smile, sealed to Daniel. “The entire wall,” he repeated. “Just… the entire wall.”
Erik didn’t blame the Younger. Seeing a fucking shoggoth up close was enough to put a dent in anyone’s evening. The rushing in his ears wouldn’t go away, and the sick sensation under his ribcage wouldn’t either.
He eyed the hole—oval, big enough to heave a giant snout through—on one side of the vaulted room.
The breach outside was a feint, but a good one.
They’d been so busy responding to it nobody had thought about down here until Erik, hoping he was wrong, had battered down the door he’d insisted Robert and Dakshi bar.
He’d delivered her right into the traitor’s hands.
The body of the shoggoth slumped further in the throat of the Flame-well; the golden light, burning away corruption, spilled through rents in its protoplasm.
The last of the nthlei dogs squealed as it died upon a Father’s blade, the lean man in a scorched jacket leaning hard to drive steel completely through, killing the tentacled parasite as well as the canine host.
Both were equally dangerous.
“One… of us,” Robert said. His eyelids drooped, and that was a bad sign. So long as he was even fractionally conscious the lirai could work wonders, but when a Son gave up, very little could be done. “Grey hair. Far gone. Corpse-eyes.”
A Father, then. A fresh shiver passed through Erik from crown to sole, and he tucked the dreamstone absently in his jacket pocket while edging soundlessly for the hole in the wall.
The shoggoth-sludge at the bottom, opalescent when there was something to eat through, was blackening in wisps as the Flame’s influence spread, soft and inexorable.
Someone who guessed I’d bring her down here, knowing the usual places wouldn’t be safe.
Put that way, it was academic, wasn’t it? Like one of Liv’s lists, the shape of her thoughts lying under neat vertical rows, one item attached to the next, a daisy chain of coping mechanism.
The only question was whether or not the bastard had help.
“Stay with me,” Sara murmured. “I’m not going to lose anyone else tonight, Robert. Stay with me.”
“My… lady…” Robert’s eyelids fluttered. The lirai swore, softly, and her fingers tensed.
She pulled the last sharp, glassy nthlei tooth out of a mess of pulsing guts and tossed it into a small pile of similar obsidian triangles.
Then her bloody fingers descended again and the Flame responded, bubbling to the lip of its enclosure, eating fully through the shoggoth’s corpse, sending tiny rainbow tendrils up through the smoke, valiantly attempting to consume and purify that pollution as well.
The pulse—lirai calling upon the cleansing fire and the heartbeat of the planet itself responding—passed through every Son crowding into the vault, the ones in the halls, even those sweeping the temple grounds and using sorcery to close the great black gash in snowy earth where the second shoggoth had breached.
Robert gave a barking, agonized cry. Gut wounds hurt like a sonofabitch, but at least with a lirai arriving so quickly the Father had a fighting chance.
Dakshi was debriefing at high speed as he swayed, a knot of Fathers around him. Grigori, though, fell into step next to Erik.
This Father wasted no words of greeting, or of anger. “Can you track her?”
Meaning, are you sealed?
“No,” Erik said, heavily. How long ago did he turn? There was no time to think about it; the only how long that mattered was the one leading to his lirai. “And they stripped her dreamstone. But I can track him.”
“Right into an ambush.” Grigori glanced around the Flame-vault, and one eyebrow raised a fraction. “This was a good plan, though. It would have worked.”
Except he knows me. Knows how I think. Well, that blade cut two ways. Of course, Ignatius only had to mention Control often enough to keep suspicion pacified, and there were many ways of acquiring money—nothing was easier, especially with the Mad God’s help.
Erik had fallen for it, of course. Going along dumb and happy, too busy running patrols in an infested frontline city, hoodwinked and misled for years.
Then they’d found a potential, and it had all unraveled. Had the traitor been waiting for the event, or had he been hunting different prey each night while his Elder and Younger were busy patrolling? How often had Liv eluded his grasp; had he sensed a prize temptingly out of reach?
How fucking long had Ignatius expected the mad, utterly repulsive situation to last?
It didn’t matter. Not now. “We have no time.” Erik had been hoping to get to the hole before anyone noticed he was moving; backup would follow so long as there was a chance a lirai was still alive. “He won’t have struck without a plan, and a place to do his dirty work.”
“Probably deep, and the trail laid with traps.” Grigori didn’t quite hesitate, but he did ask again, as if he couldn’t quite credit what he was seeing. “Are you certain you can track him?”
“I can.” Erik plunged into the ragged, chewed oval opening, its bottom fringing as the shoggoth’s slime-trail ate at rock. Cleaning and closing it up was going to be a bitch.
If she’s alive, I’ll do it myself. And I’ll sing while I work.
“I can,” he repeated. The oneiros was a heavy weight in his pocket, crying out with tongueless distress.
“And when I find him, the god himself won’t recognize that traitor.
” Not to mention whoever’s helping him—maybe Jake, maybe really a control liaison gone bad, maybe all the Mad God’s minions at once.
I will kill them all.
“Careful, Elder.” Grigori nodded at another knot of Fathers, who didn’t waste time questioning, simply began working their way through the crowd for the breach. “The lirai is of primary importance. Not wounded pride.”
She’s probably already dead. He won’t want to waste time. But Erik couldn’t make himself say so.
Instead, he lengthened his stride, and as he hopped into the aperture, boots sinking into decaying sludge, another pulse of strong, soft, undeniable power roared through him.
“That’s right,” Sara said, crisply. “No dying allowed tonight, Father. Come on, fight. For me. Fight for me.”
When a woman put it like that, there was nothing else a man could do.
Erik’s stride lengthened, Grigori at his shoulder. The last thing he heard was Dakshi’s raised voice.
“I don’t care, dammit! My lirai’s down there, my Elder’s going to go get her, and I am too.”
“Little brothers,” Grigori muttered, but very quickly there was no more breath for commentary.
They were moving too fast.