Chapter 21 #2
The statue on the wall behind her is a man with a long beard and a holy expression, hands clasped before him in prayer.
He shudders, lifts his face, lifts an arm, and then — as my skin crawls up my back — he draws his sword, steps forward, and leaps.
The statues on both sides leap with him.
Their weapons flicker as they move so quickly, stone legs launching them forward.
They are larger than life — giants made of white stone and whatever wild magic has brought them to life.
The Saints on the walls have come alive.
Some of them, at least.
I think the ones with pipe organ mouths remain fixed to the walls, but it’s hard to tell in the sudden maelstrom of white marble bodies, carved to perfect human form, white marble weapons braced in marbled hands.
They stalk toward us from every side, some slow and ponderous, others moving quickly, dashing across the cups, crushing and shattering and destroying as they race.
If this is a race to find the true cup, it’s almost certainly over with half the cups crushed. Somehow, I don’t think it was ever that.
The dog barks sharply — twice, and then no more — as he leaps between towering white bodies, darting towards his mistress.
When the Engineers curse and begin to haul on the chains holding their platform, I realize that they’ve seen what I failed to see — that the chains are part of a ratcheting pulley mechanism, and as they fly through the old men’s hands, the platform begins to ascend above the fray.
Should I do the same?
Before I decide, it’s already too late.
A whoosh of air rushes past me and I move, led by instinct and sudden battle fever.
I whirl, duck, and pop up just in time to avoid a blindfolded Saint who tries to harvest me with his great marble scythe.
His blank eyes drive a spike of terror straight into my spine.
How do you reason with mindless antagonism?
How do you fight stone with steel? I don’t want to break my sword, but it’s all the weapon I have.
There’s no time for qualms. He’s already moving again in the space of an exhale, slicing toward my head.
It’s a game of leap and dodge now and I will either be quick or I will be dead.
Hefertus curses in the background, and it worries me enormously that his curses seem to be quieter the longer they spin out. I hope he’s not already overrun. I’m not sure I can get to him in time to back him up. He was midway around the circle when this began.
I need to see.
In a feat I haven’t tried since my squire days, I concentrate all my efforts and leap up onto the cupped hand of my stone image.
Letting my momentum carry me, I launch from there to the shoulder of the blindfolded statue with the scythe, dodge a stone arrow that narrowly misses my shoulder — how does it even shoot?
— and then pivot from the shoulder, spinning through the air to land on the back of a stone tiger ridden by a Saint who seems to think one carefully draped cloth is all the clothing he needs to wear while he tames the beast.
“The poem, my children,” Sir Coriand calls down to us. “Blood and sorrows. The cup needs blood and sorrows.”
Easy to say from up there. Down here, we’re fighting for our lives. There will be blood — oh yes, and sorrows plenty — but there won’t be much riddle-solving.
It’s not easy to keep your balance on a stone tiger sculpted at one and three-quarters real size while its rider reaches a massive stone hand back and tries to throttle you.
I do it anyway, fighting to hold on as I keep out of the reach of his grip.
At least his arms are subject to the normal rules of anatomy.
I turn a blow from a stone sword streaking toward me from my left.
There’s so much power behind it that even turning it sends quivers up my arm, but the force breaks the stone blade, and that blank-faced Saint with a ram’s curling horns upon his tousled head must attack the second time with no weapon but a stub.
Unfortunately, it’s just as deadly broken and even harder to defend against.
When your enemies are stone and half again as large as you are, all the rules you’ve learned fighting men must be thrown aside.
My heart is racing with the intensity of the moment, every muscle straining with what I demand.
Part of me loves this — the exertion, the pushing myself to the edge — but the rest is just gasps of thought between near misses and a barrage of sensation I must translate and make sense of before I miss the one thing that kills me.
I leap from the tiger, trusting years of experience to help me land. I almost twist an ankle, but I roll at the last minute over a clinking, shifting floor of crumpled and broken cups.
By now I’ve lost all sense of the battle as a whole. I’m just one man weaving out of the way of a Maiden-Saint as she tries to skewer me with her trident, her fishy face implacable right down to the gills in her neck.
I’m running with high knees over the multiple arms of a tentacled stone creature — no, wait, this is the bottom half of one of the so-called Saints. No Saint of our faith has ever reached rippling arms toward the innocent, scowling through a seven-braided beard.
I don’t have time to shudder. This is the madness of nightmares and curses. This is the power of the dark realm beneath the earth where those damned by the God play out their wickedness.
The sound of this battle is almost creepier than our emotionless attackers.
It feels all wrong. There is the occasional cry from one of the others, but mostly all I hear is the grind and smash of stone on stone or stone on steel.
There are no screams or curses, no desperate exhales or wheezing gasps.
It’s not human. It’s not like any battlefield I’ve ever been on.
Does it make it more or less horrible not to slip in blood and over corpses?
More or less horrible not to see flashes of humanity in the faces you cleave in twain?
A man with shells in his long flowing beard and a crown on his head bears down on me with a club fashioned to look like shells but made — of course — of marble.
I try to dodge his attack, but my spin is caught short by the movement of a female Saint, face swathed in carved scarves.
She tries to grasp me, stone fingers raking across my side, and I’m forced back with a grunt of pain into the path of the shell club.
It glances off my sword arm, sending me gasping, but long training takes hold and I channel my pain into awareness. I need higher ground.
I slip through a gap made by two statues — the shortest of them is still a head taller than me and my metal blade is notching and chipping as I turn strikes.
I feel the damage as if it is damage to my own body.
If this sword fails me, I have no backup here.
Everything was left above thanks to Sir Kodelai, may the God shelter his soul.
I’m slowed by the injuries I’ve taken already and my arm screams with every movement.
Through the gap, I spin and leap again, attaining the platform where my avatar swings. There are too many of them on the ground. I need to get up high if I want to see what’s happening.
I sheathe my sword, kicking a grasping stone hand away while ducking under another, and haul the chains through the pulleys with a desperation born of pain and weariness.
As my platform wobbles upward, the pipe organ begins to play again — a hollow, spooky sound that makes me think of walking among the dead at night after a battle.
The stanzas tumble over each other, keening and crying.
I know this song. I’ve heard it once before and it has haunted me in sighs and snatches ever since.
The chain won’t budge, jamming in my hands like a choked wheel.
I spin.
A stone Saint hangs off the side, making my platform rock wildly.
I snatch up my sword seconds before it rattles off the side.
I barely have it in hand before the Saint rushes me.
He’s hooded and reverent, eyes downturned, features smooth of emotion, but he claws at me with a stone hook, aiming for my shoulder.
I duck under his strike, twist my body roughly to the right so that I lead with my left shoulder, and with all my weight I slam into him.
Pain splinters through that shoulder — it’s as if I fell from a sharp slope and crashed into rock … which of course is what I’ve done. It’s enough, though. It knocks him backward and he slips — stone on stone — and falls from the platform without a cry.
The organ cries for him, soaring now in a melody too bittersweet for this world.
Someone screams from below. A masculine cry of torment. Every call is one of us. I don’t dare ignore any of them when I’m the only one who can save a life.
I’ll deal with it in a moment.
I need to solve my riddle first and look over the battlefield — even if that battlefield is more akin to a church sanctuary than a muddy strip of land.
My arm throbs as I hurry to my owl cup. I think I know what I must do. I slit my left thumb on one of the notches in my sword blade and flick a drop into the cup before I spit into it.
I’m my own adversary, so this is my blood. And I’m made of sorrow from bones to skin. I can put any part of myself in that vessel. What I give to it now shows what I think of this madness.
Go ahead, revile me. I care not.
My cup gives off a slight glow. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or annoyed that my efforts have accomplished the task.
I’m not enchanted by the puzzle, or the battle, or the trickery that brought me here.
I feel like a goat tied in the middle of a cage of lions — offering, tribute, sacrifice.
I’ll gore them all before I agree to go easily down their throats.
I spin and scan for the scream. The Engineers are so high up that I can only see their grim faces looking over the edges of their platform. Not them.