Chapter 33 #2
The edges of her vision warped and bulged. She rocked on her heels.
“I have your life already,” King Sorrow assured her. “I’ll tear this wall apart and burn you and these other fools to cinders.
The only riddle worth pondering is what you imagined you might do—all of you—to stop me from killing you where you stand.”
“Feed me and I live,” Donna muttered. “Give me a drink and I die. What am I?”
“That’s your riddle?” he sneered. “Oh, Donna. That makes me sad. That one was old when Judas Iscariot counted his silver. Everyone
knows the answer to that one.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Fire. Okay. You knew it. Here’s your prize, you cocky bitch.”
She sucked a deep breath, her chest filled with sweet flame, and she blew with all her might. Fire flashed from her mouth
and into King Sorrow’s staring eye. She saw it blacken before he could snap his head away and to the side; a nictating membrane
flashed up to protect the eye itself, but by then she had scorched it to ruin. She laid the flame down the side of his face,
to the corner of his mouth, and along his throat, blackening and melting his gleaming coat of shifting scales. He let go of
the tower and flung himself away.
He shrieked. The scarred wooden tables in the tower jittered as if a train were passing just feet away. The glass wall in
the back of the room shook in its frame.
King Sorrow swooped out and away in a tight circle that launched him straight back at the tower, and he smashed into it with
all his force. The entire library seemed to jump.
Donna was lifted off her feet, flew back and to her right, crashed down on one of the tables, bounced and spun off, landed on her stomach.
King Sorrow screamed again, a sound like attack jets screaming off the runway.
He propelled himself free of the tower to circle and strike again.
And then, an awful thing. Allie cast off her robe, flung it aside, and leapt to her feet. Tana rose as well, grabbed her hand,
tried to pull her back. Allie slipped loose and went on. She was halfway to Donna when King Sorrow smashed into the tower
yet again. The shockwave of the impact lifted Tana and Allie both right off their feet. Allie landed hard, a few feet away.
Tana went down on her back, her skull ringing off the stones with a sharp crack.
Donna reached for Allie’s hand. It seemed a long way away. The thrill—that nerve-ringing thrill that had gone through her
when she first swallowed the tears—was fading. Each time her heart beat, it was like someone bringing a hammer down on her
chest . . . but the hammer didn’t fall often now, no more than once every ten seconds or so.
“Donna,” Allie said. “Stay here, Donna. Stay.”
The hammer fell again and this time the pain was very bad. Donna squeezed Allie’s hand and Allie squeezed back. Blood roared
in Donna’s ears, a tidal crash. She shut her eyes. She didn’t think she could take much more. She needed air. She had never
needed air so badly. This was what drowning was like.
Then someone was pulling, pulling hard, pulling her to her feet, out of the roar and tumble of the surf, and Van said, You’re all right, you’re all right now, I’ve got you, and she opened her eyes and found herself wading in the ocean, the waves falling in a bright crash of foam around her thighs,
and while she caught her breath, her brother draped a necklace of sand dollars around her throat.
It didn’t hurt anymore. Gwen felt like a ghost of herself as she walked toward the wall of glass where Arthur was frozen, staring back at her, holding out his lacrosse stick.
From the edge of her vision, she saw Robin snatch the martyr’s robe from the floor.
She leapt to Gwen’s side and flung it around both of them as the room filled with fire, flame pouring through the windows in great red streams. Flame engulfed them, but Gwen felt no heat at all beneath the robe.
That yellow Biko hoodie was soaked with sweat and blood, but she did not feel the sharp, tearing pain in her abdomen now.
She might’ve been gliding on roller skates.
Arthur’s face loomed before her, close enough to kiss. His lips moved. A thousand times she had watched this video and she
had not been able to tell what he was saying, but now it was perfectly clear, so clear, she didn’t know why she had ever been
confused. Take it, he said.
He held out the lacrosse stick, and this time she saw two inches of golden handle extending through the crack in the wall.
She reached and gripped the hilt and drew Arthur and the stick right out of the glass wall. Only when she pulled it free,
it wasn’t either. It was a blade of light, half the length of her own body. She should’ve been too weak to hold it, that shining
yard of mirrored steel, but it seemed to have no weight at all.
“I’LL TEAR YOU APART,” screamed King Sorrow. “NASTY BITCHES! I’LL BURY YOU IN STONE!”
Allie rocked back and forth, clutching Donna in her arms. Tana pushed herself up off the floor and stumbled toward Allison,
caught her from behind. To what purpose Gwen couldn’t know. Only to hold her, perhaps. Donna’s body was twisted at the waist,
her eyes open, her face blank, already gone. Her hair was windblown, prettily tangled, as if she had spent the day at the
beach.
King Sorrow threw himself at the side of the tower for a third time. The floor shuddered. He gripped the outside of the stone
and two talons slid inside an embrasure and he pulled. Stones grated and three big blocks of granite squalled free, flew into the night. His open mouth appeared on the other side
of the hole for an instant, a maw filled with great teeth. He roared, producing a foul, hot shockwave of pulverized air that
flipped tables and flung them against the far wall.
“Where are you, Gwen Underfoot?” he roared. One side of his face was blackened, the eye sealed shut, but he turned his head the other way to peer into the
opening. His eye shifted this way and that, searching for her. “I may not see you, but I smell you. Do you really imagine whatever puny little enchantment you have will keep you from my grasp?”
He shoved his claw through the now four-foot hole, grasping inside the tower.
Gwen brought the blade out from under the robe, lifted it over her head, and scythed it down in a bright arc. It felt less
as if she were swinging three feet of steel, more like she was only holding on while the sword swung itself, and she thought,
Of course, because it’s Arthur, because it’s my hands and his blade, my eyes and his strength. At first she thought she missed, because the edge of the sword rang hard against stone and threw sparks. Then she saw the
severed dragon digit, nearly four inches of talon, fall to the floor in a gush of blood.
King Sorrow shrieked again—a mad shriek of pain. Gwen was deafened by the sound of it. It was like a cannon going off. She
recoiled, almost fell, and Allie caught her, having risen to steady her. When she had her heels under her, Allie let go and
nodded and reached past her, reached toward the wall of glass.
“GWWWWWWEENNNNNN!” King Sorrow screamed. “I’LL BITE YOU IN TWO, YOU WICKED WHORE! I’LL BURN YOU TO ASH!”
Flame poured in through the ruin of a wall, but this time Allie repelled it, saved them all. She reached into the wall of
glass, into the past, to take the shield from Van’s outstretched hand, a great sheet of hammered steel, stamped with the image
of a sand dollar, and she turned and held it up just as the fire flooded in about them. The blaze struck that shield—a shield
as bright as the sea flaring in the morning light—and was repelled, thrown straight up toward the ceiling, where it blackened
the stone roof. And Gwen thought Allie had never been more beautiful, her feet spread, knees bent, braced against that whirling
blast of fire. With her jaw set and her eyes shut, it seemed as if Allie could stand there, repelling King Sorrow’s flame,
for a thousand years.
Gwen wasn’t looking when King Sorrow’s tail pulled away a yard of stone wall on the other side of the room, directly behind
her—smashed through one embrasure and yanked, prying blocks loose in a shattering tumble.
The tail coiled back and snapped in at them, striking Gwen and Robin both.
Gwen felt a bitter, almost blinding shock of pain, a final fatal tear somewhere deep in her abdomen.
She was driven straight back and struck the wall of glass behind her.
It exploded, fissuring into a thousand pieces of green rubble.
Robin was spun, whirled aside as if she had been clipped by a passing bus, hit a wooden table, and went down.
Gwen struck the floor with a bloody cough and dropped the sword. The martyr’s robe fell upon her and she sprawled beneath
it, a field mouse that has squirmed in beneath the carpet.
“You’re there, YOU’RE THERE,” King Sorrow exulted. “I felt you go smash.”
Allie was screaming Gwen’s name, but her voice was a mile away, hardly audible through the ringing in Gwen’s ears. The tail
rose, flailed about, and slammed down on her. Ribs shattered. The withered, half-healed left lung popped. Gwen could feel
it go. It was like a paper bag, filled with air, when some class clown clapped his hand down on it.
“There you are, you scrabbling chancer,” King Sorrow cried.
She was bleeding badly now. Blood spread beneath her, expanding in a red, shimmering pool across the stones. His tail wavered
in the air nearby, then dropped to the floor and began to move toward her, slithering across the floor like an anaconda.
“Killed you, bitch,” King Sorrow said. “Happy Easter.”
He pushed the unburnt half of his face to the hole in the north wall. Gwen thought he had been hurt quite badly, that the
other side of his face had been scoured down to the muscle by Donna’s flame. Gwen had an idea it had been centuries since
anyone had hurt the King so.