Night & Demons (33 page)

“This way,” Cormac said, loping off the ramp and along the quay. “We’re going to pull one of the
pillars farther down the tunnel.”

“With ourselves beneath it?” Wulfhere muttered. There was a touch of perverse pride in his voice. “Well, I said I’d follow.”

There was no sign of the centipede. The creature had a huge area to patrol. They could do their work and be out before it found them.

“What’s wrong with this one?” Wulfhere asked peevishly as Cormac led him past a pillar. The Dane didn’t like to run any more than he liked climbing.

“Not far enough,” Cormac said, though it was a pity. The top half of the pillar was skewed at a 30-degree angle, and a vertical crack ran from there to the ground. It would be easy to complete the job earth tremors had started; but that wouldn’t do any good.

“Why didn’t you tell the folk above what you planned?” Wulfhere said. “Why make a secret of it?”

“They wouldn’t have helped,” the Gael said. The truth was that his paranoid need for secrecy was deeper than his rationalizations of it, though there was truth in the rationalizations too. “They might have tried to hinder. Our reasons aren’t theirs.”

The next pillar was 50 yards farther on. Cormac hoped it would do. Each echoing clack of his hobnails flashed an image of the centipede into his mind.

“This one!” he said. He thrust his prybar between two tilted courses of the pillar’s masonry.

The savages made their tools and weapons from the cladding of ruined buildings—bronze, tin, copper, and brass so pale it might almost pass for gold. They had no iron or steel, but this bar was of sturdy bronze stiffened by cruciform ridges.

Perhaps the centipede wouldn’t be able to sense the reivers because its antennae were injured.

Perhaps a Druid would appear, make a pass with his golden sickle, and snatch Cormac and the Dane back into the world where they belonged.

Wulfhere eyed the situation, then thrust the point of Aslief’s spear beside the prybar. He twisted and, without seeming effort, levered onto the floor an ashlar that outweighed him.

The block hit with a crash, skipped on one corner, and finally lay flat. Cormac inserted his bar vertically between stones of the next course up. He pried, easing his weight onto the tool until the full tigerish strength of his muscles was deployed. The bronze bent, though he’d inserted the bar deep enough that the fulcrum was on the fat part.

Wulfhere thrust, leaned into his spear, and grunted. The block sprang free. The stone beside it sagged loose and followed. A quick jerk from Cormac’s tool wrenched a block from the lower course.

The masonry was set without mortar. The pillar’s core was concrete and aggregate, shattered ages past by the torquing as Atlantis sank. All the reivers had to do was to strip a course from the ashlar sheathing and the ceiling’s weight would—

The centipede, a darkness spattering glowing dollops of fungus from its claws, swept down on them.

“Finish the job!” Cormac shouted. He dropped the prybar, drew his sword, and reached behind his left hip for the slung buckler. The command and the complex of movements came from his subconscious. “I’ll hold him!”

“No!” boomed Wulfhere, dragging the spear free of the crevice into which he’d inserted it for the next stage of the demolition work.

“Our only chance is to bring the roof down, you boneheaded Dane!” Cormac screamed. Waving his shield high above him, he took three accelerating steps to meet the centipede.

The creature paused, lifting its head and three foremost body segments against the shield’s perceived threat. Cormac ducked low. Mandibles clashed above his head.

He was in a forest of legs, hair-tufted and jagged with chitinous edges. The Gael cut to the right and backhanded left. His bright steel bit through the flexible membrane covering a joint.

Ichor, transparent and of no color but that of the fungus glow, dripped from the rent. The lower leg dangled limp.

The centipede curled back on itself like a wave rebounding. The mandibles were cocked for another stroke. Jawplates clashed and reopened behind the poison-dripping points. As soon as the creature attacked, its limited brain function put in motion all the apparatus of eating.

Cormac dived, shouldering aside the injured limb. He rolled to his feet again just clear of the centipede’s flowing form. Its head slid beneath body segments in a chitinous knot. The centipede’s damaged eyes and antennae—the olfactory receptors—prevented it from spotting its prey again for a moment.

Masonry crashed in a miniature avalanche, a dozen blocks or more in rapid succession. Wulfhere worked with spear and prybar simultaneously. The Dane was attacking the pillar with the same precision and casual strength that he would have displayed while demolishing a hostile shield wall.

If he was aware of Cormac and the centipede, he gave no sign of the fact.

Cormac breathed in shuddering gulps. The centipede located him and came on again. The stumps of its antennae waved.

The Gael stepped toward the creature. His stride wasn’t as firm as he’d expected. His right boot slid on the fungus coating.

The centipede’s head whipped around in a quick arc, slamming its mandibles into Cormac from the left side. The shield held, but the arm holding it went numb. The blow flung him down, skidding and spinning across the stones.

The centipede came on. Its claws clicked like blades of the mechanical harvesters of Northern Gaul. Cormac kicked, trying to swing so that his armored torso protected his bare legs from the yard-long mandibles.

Wulfhere grabbed the Gael by the shoulder and dragged him clear with neither hesitation nor delicacy. The centipede’s tons of rippling mass hit the pillar with the violence of a ship being launched.

The wobbling masonry collapsed, showering down in chunks that would crush any man, armored or no. The centipede’s legs continued to row the creature forward, unaffected by the blocks and massive fragments which glanced from its chitinous back.

Cormac scrambled away on all fours—his boots, his shield, and the knuckles of his sword hand. The buckler rang like a gong each time it hit the floor, but not even Cormac could hear it over the continuing destruction of ancient Atlantis.

The metal ceiling sagged after the crumbling pillar, then tore. Water sprayed down, increasing to a torrent. The reivers had succeeded: the caverns here lay beneath the moat, not solid ground.

It remained to be seen whether the two of them would escape to savor their victory.

The Dane was kneeling nearby, gripping to his belly a block with one concave side. It had been part of the pillar’s flaring capital.

For an instant, Cormac couldn’t imagine what his friend was doing. Then he realized that the massive stone had taken a hop toward Wulfhere and that the Dane had trapped it between his torso and the ground instead of letting it smash over and past him. The shock knocked the breath from his body.

Cormac lifted his friend, though he didn’t dare sheathe his sword or drop the buckler. He thrust his blade and right hand beneath the Dane’s arm and dragged him up, off the block that had nearly killed him.

“Come on, you lazy scut!” Cormac shouted. “How am I supposed to get out of here without you to carry me?”

Mud, reeds, and something that flapped in and out of the fallen water like a tossed coin cascaded with the torrent through the ceiling. The spread of the influx was easily measured by the degree to which darkness displaced the fungus glow. Faint phosphorescence glimmered through the first touch of water, but any quantity of the muddy fluid choked and poisoned the light.

Wulfhere staggered forward, though he was bent over and breathed in short gasps. He’d lost Aslief’s spear. His left hand lay on Cormac’s hip so that the Gael could guide their paired flight. Wulfhere’s mind and body had both been stunned by the blow. He could follow a friend’s lead, and at need he could fight.

The axe was in the Dane’s right hand. Wulfhere Skullsplitter could always fight.

Water raced ankle deep over the cavern’s floor. The surface was even more treacherous than the slime of fungus had made it before. Sharp tearing sounds punctuated the roar of water. The torrent was expanding the hole through which it drained, gouging out the ring’s underpinning fabric once its integrity had been breached.

A blaze of purple-green light marked their goal. The illumination was almost painfully bright to eyes adapted for the soft omnipresence of the fungus. The rope ladder swayed gently in a breeze driven by the rush of water displacing air from the cavern.

Wulfhere took his hand from Cormac’s side and turned with his axe lifting. Cormac felt his friend’s motion and rotated with him reflexively, as the two of them had done on a hundred battlefields before.

The centipede rushed toward them in a spray thrown by its pulsing legs.

Cormac shouted and waved his shield in the creature’s face. The centipede reared as it had done before. The bundles of ganglia that served it as a brain were able to react in only one fashion to a stimulus, no matter how frequently that stimulus was repeated. Wulfhere, swinging with both hands and stepping into the stroke, sheared off the right-side leg of the fourth body segment.

The centipede came down on the Gael, ignoring the sword slash aimed between head and body. Cormac’s blade nicked the chitin of the headshield, but the joint was too well-protected to be damaged by a sword.

Legs pinned Cormac on his back in slopping water. The mandibles scissored together. His buckler’s plywood core shattered under the repeated contact. The right mandible pierced it, tearing along Cormac’s wrist. The Gael snouted and stabbed upward, blinded by his buckler jerking in front of his eyes on the poison fang.

Wulfhere chopped, drew clear, and chopped again. Each blow left a leg dangling by a few shreds of chitinous armor. The Dane was withdrawing his axe for a fourth stroke, as methodical as a woodcutter, when the centipede whipped to escape an attack that even its mass was forced to recognize.

The Dane helped Cormac up with his left hand. He held the axe raised in his right and never took his eyes off the centipede. The creature circled the two men and the pile of rubble. Its long body had a brownish cast in the light falling through the hole in the cavern roof.

“You all right?” Wulfhere asked. Back to back, the companions began to climb the ramp. The centipede rippled past, its legs pulsing hypnotically. At any moment it would come on again.

“I’ll do,” Cormac said. He flexed his left hand. The mandible had bruised him when it smashed through his shield, but the skin was unbroken. He was limping slightly. Foreleg pincers had torn the muscles of both thighs.

The pair reached the top of the rubble pile. As soon as one of the men started to climb the ladder, the centipede would be over the other like surf on sand.

“You get up that ladder,” Cormac ordered harshly. “I’ll be right behind you.”

“Your mother’s a whore,” said the Dane. “You were first down, you’ll be first up. Get moving!”

The water was knee deep across all visible parts of the cavern. Its rushing flow ate at the edges of the ramp. A further section of roof followed the fallen pillar into the cataract.

The centipede drove up the ramp on scores of uninjured legs, its mandibles wide. The reivers shifted apart, giving each room to use his weapon unimpeded. Wulfhere lifted his axe two-handed over his right shoulder.

Cormac braced his right foot behind him, prepared this time to thrust with the full weight of his body behind the swordpoint. He didn’t know whether his steel would turn or break or drive straight through the headshield, and he was sure that even with what passed for a brain removed the centipede would live long enough to kill and eat the both of them. A man must fight, even when he knows he cannot win.

A small figure dropped from the rope ladder and darted between the men: Loughra, the wand in her right hand. Its blue glare lighted her body as it wrapped the oncoming centipede in threads that not even the monster’s armored strength could break. The girl aged as swiftly as salt melts in a puddle.

Cormac started toward her. Wulfhere grabbed the Gael’s arm with his left hand.

Cormac turned. “Let me go!” he shouted.

Wulfhere dragged him back toward the ladder. “Come on!” he said. “It’s too late for her.”

Cormac tried to club the Dane with the pommel of his sword. Wulfhere blocked the blow with his axe helve. “Come on!” he repeated.

Wulfhere was right. Loughra, a 17-year-old girl when she jumped from the ladder, now crouched as a toothless crone in the blaze of her wand. The centipede’s legs thrashed furiously, unable to break the grip of the blue web clinging to its head and forward body segments. The power required to freeze the tons of rapacious carnivore was enormous—

As was the cost of that power. A surge of water driven by a further collapse of the ceiling tugged at Loughra’s waist and almost dragged her down with it.

Cormac sheathed his sword and leaped for the ladder. The rungs were set a foot-and-a-half apart. Cormac took them two at a time, hurling himself up onto the surface like wax blown from a jar of beer stoppered too early. The battens flexed but did not break under his step.

An ongoing geyser of muddy water spewed from the belt of water, high enough that Cormac could see it above the vegetation surrounding the sinkhole. He drew his sword. None of Loughra’s tribe was present.

Wulfhere clambered up to the surface beside him, panting like a blown horse. The Dane’s legs were wet to the knees.

The ground shook. An enormous jet of water shot twice as high as the previous norm, then sank back out of sight. The bottom must have dropped from acres of the ring lake. Water surged nearly to the sinkhole’s lip.

“Now’s the time to cross on the dry bottom,” the Gael said. He bent and braced his hands on his knees to make it easier to draw in the breaths for which his lungs burned. “Before they’re expecting us. Creon and Antheia.”

A four-horned deer sprinted through the undergrowth, thrown into blind panic by destruction on a geological scale. Cormac didn’t know what draining the lake into the cavern would do to Atlantis in the long term, nor did he care. In the short term, it would permit Cormac to get within the length of his sword of the Greek who brought him here.