Night & Demons (34 page)

The centipede, swirling in the currents raging below, gripped the lip of the sinkhole with a foreleg. It had managed to shed Cormac’s shield from its mandible. Its jawplates worked furiously on the remnants of Atlantis’s last queen.

Cormac’s sword slashed the joint articulating the pincered foot. Wulfhere reversed his axe and drove the back of it as a hammer into the creature’s headshield. The chitin around the right-hand cluster of eyes, damaged by the Gael’s sword in the cavern below, shattered like a terra cotta pot.

Another leg reached up to replace the first. The Dane had in the cavern severed the forelimbs on the other side.

Cormac sliced this leg off at the last joint also. Wulfhere brought his blade around in a figure eight, cutting the edge deep into the pulpy mass where he had crushed the armor.

The centipede slid away from the opening, rolling onto its back as it disappeared. The jaws still masticated their prey, but Loughra had defeated the monster before she died.

“Yes,” said Wulfhere through his gasping inhalations. “Let’s go kill Greeks. Would there were more than two.”

The bed of the ring lake was knee deep in soupy mud. Eventually the sediment might dry out or slurp after the water into the caverns, but Cormac hadn’t had the time to waste. Cursing and holding his sword high to keep it clean, he tramped toward the central citadel with Wulfhere beside him.

A fish five yards long flopped wildly nearby. Its jaws could easily swallow a man. A bad hop might bring the fish down on top of the reivers, but its mind was no longer on food. The false sun threw a sickly hue across the creature’s silvery scales.

The carrion feeders would feast tonight.

They were hallway across the ring. The march was exhausting and had already taken far longer than Cormac had allowed for. Creon and Antheia would have time to prepare for the reivers’ return, though the Gael could hope that other aspects of the disaster would absorb the Greeks’ attention.

It didn’t matter. The way Cormac felt now, he would have charged a shield wall, naked and barehanded.

“That wand is well-lost where it can’t kill more folk the way it’s done so many,” he snarled suddenly. “She didn’t have to do that!”

“Nor did we,” the Dane said. “Who knows why a man does a thing? Even a
man.”

Wulfhere’s boots squelched up and down in a steady beat. Cormac rushed forward in bursts of twenty yards or so, then waited panting to recruit his strength before sprinting another stretch.

The marble coping which surrounded the central island had stood a foot-and-a-half above the previous water level. Now the men could see that in addition there was twice that height of stone discolored by algae, and the glistening depth of muck besides. The whole combined in a sheer height greater than Cormac wanted to clamber after struggling in armor through the gooey bottom.

A hundred yards to the right of the reivers’ intended approach stood a half-ruined marble gazebo, above a staircase down into what had been the water. The Gael changed his angle to intersect the structure. Beyond it loomed the back of a silver-clad building which he supposed was the palace.

A shelled and tentacled creature lay half-submerged in the mud nearby. More than a score of ten-foot arms lay flaccid on the surface. Cormac thought for a moment that the creature was dead, but he noticed that the pupil of its lidless eye was tracking him. He made sure that their path was beyond the arms’ radius.

Wulfhere nodded toward the creature. “I suppose I’d rather tramp through mud,” the Dane said, “than swim with things like that.”

A scaly head appeared over the curve of the land. One eye caught the wading men. The head swiveled on a neck holding it ten feet in the air; both eyes focused on the potential prey.

The Kronosaur hooted angrily and came slithering across the mud toward them.

“Or swim with that one,” muttered Wulfhere. “Though walking with it may not be much better.”

“Run!” Cormac shouted.

The men were a hundred yards from dry land where the advantage would be theirs. The Kronosaur was at least five times as far from them, but the fifty-foot monster’s paddle feet propelled it with reasonable efficiency through the mud. The beast couldn’t survive the draining of the lake indefinitely, but it was alive now and furious as well as hungry.

Maybe if he and Wulfhere stood still where they were?

But the Kronosaur had already marked its prey. Besides, their dragging footprints trailed through the mud behind them like a frozen wake.

The men shambled across the muck in slow motion. There was nothing heroic about being drowned in a slough or disappearing down a gullet sized for vastly larger fish.

“If we—” Wulfhere called.

“—reach the steps—” he went on. Words spurted out in clumps each time the Dane’s right boot slopped down.

“—can you hold—”

“—the thing alone?”

“Yes!” Cormac snarled.

His world was fire, not mud. The muscles of his legs burned, his pumping arms burned, and the flames from his blazing chest curled up and threw a blood-red filter across his eyes.

The Gael didn’t know what Wulfhere intended, nor did he care. He was completely focused on reaching the protection of the gazebo before the Kronosaur gulped him down. He was also completely certain that he wouldn’t succeed, that he would die in a lizard’s gut and worse, that he would
fail
—

Cormac’s hobnails clashed on the marble stairs. Up two, up two more. Well out of the mud, firm footing for a battle.

Cormac spun. The Dane clumped past him, splashing mud on the steps as his boots slammed down. The Kronosaur, heaving a ten-foot bow wave through the greasy muck, darted its head toward the men. The tongue shot out. It was forked and black-veined against spongy magenta flesh.

Cormac’s sword described a perfect arc that flicked off one lobe of the tongue. Blood sprayed.

The Kronosaur jerked back its head and clopped its long jaws shut over the damaged organ. Its chest throbbed, expelling waste air in twin funnels of vapor from the nostrils above its eye sockets. The flaps that closed the air passages during dives pulsed open and shut within each breath cycle.

Cormac backed two steps upward, then two more. The monster came on again. Its back was covered in black scales with a green undercoat. Rosette patterns glowed in the light of the false sun.

The tip of Cormac’s blade ripped across the gums of the Kronosaur’s upper jaw. It wasn’t a dangerous wound, but nothing the Gael could achieve with a sword could endanger a something the size of this creature.

Pain snatched the huge head back with a high-pitched bellow. Unlike the centipede, the reptile had enough brain cells to react to being hurt. Sword pricks, however expertly placed, wouldn’t stop the Kronosaur forever, but they encouraged the beast to caution.

Cormac backed, placing each foot precisely. If he slipped, it would be over in an eye blink. He reached the top of the staircase. The gazebo’s domed roof had collapsed, but most of the columns still stood. They offered protection against the creature’s darting thrusts.

The Kronosaur hunched, then advanced like a land slip. It propelled itself by matched rearward strokes of its front paddles. The smaller hind paddles provided little besides rudder effect. The great body crashed into the staircase, shattering and displacing the ancient marble. The head lanced down like that of a starling taking a grub.

Cormac jumped forward beneath the attack and thrust up into the Kronosaur’s throat. The beast’s powerful neck muscles were iron-hard. The Gael’s point bit but turned a hand’s breadth deep, gouging a broad bloody track instead of cutting a vein or the windpipe.

The creature shrieked in fury and tossed its head. The jaws had found a pillar when they missed their intended prey. The Kronosaur’s teeth were squat cones with rounded tips, very thick at the base. They were optimized for crushing the shells of armored cuttlefish like the creature the reivers had skirted near the shore.

The teeth ground marble with the same relentless power that was intended for calcite shells. Stone flaked and crumbled. The shaft was constructed of separate cylinders connected internally by lead cramps. The Kronosaur shook its head, flinging the stone barrels wildly as the metal tore.

The beast humped its body for a further advance. The Kronosaur was clumsy on dry land, but it was by no means inert. The paddles swept forward, throwing the Gael twenty feet up the slope when one chanced to swipe him as he tried to thrust again.

The Kronosaur’s eyes and instincts tracked Cormac as a motion. The head swung in, jaws open. The teeth would make as little account of chain mail as they did of powdering a stone pillar.

An arrow pinned the forked tongue to the lower palate.

The Kronosaur screamed and raised its head to locate the new enemy. Wulfhere stood on a walkway of overgrown marble slabs, halfway down from the palace. His bow was in his hands. As Cormac scrambled to his feet, the Dane loosed another arrow into the reptile’s open mouth.

The Kronosaur bellowed and heaved itself through the ruined gazebo, smashing the still-standing eight-inch columns in its haste to reach its tormentor. It hurt the beast to shift its weight on dry ground with paddles, but the creature moved with clumsy speed nonetheless.

Cormac stabbed behind the ribs as the creature wallowed past. Because he thrust against the grain of the scales, his blade sank nearly the length of his forearm into the reptile’s flesh. The wound had no evident effect.

Wulfhere held his ground as coolly as he would in the face of a charge by armored cavalry. The long Danish bow snapped an arrow deep in the ridge of bone above the Kronosaur’s right eye socket, then another into the eye itself.

The beast twisted its head and slewed right. Its primeval brain was unable to compensate swiftly for the loss of binocular vision.

Wulfhere, regular as the drips of a waterclock, shot into the creature’s throat. Arrows sank to their fletching when they struck the creases which permitted the neck to flex.

Cormac set his right boot against the Kronosaur’s side for the leverage he needed to withdraw his sword. He succeeded, but it was like pulling the blade from living rock.

The beast turned toward him with the massive abruptness of a landslide. The Gael made an instant decision. He hurled himself toward and under the huge body. Belly plates scraped his boot as he rolled clear. The Kronosaur’s bulk slammed down on the spot Cormac had been standing a moment before.

It hadn’t been attacking him: it was trying to get away. Wulfhere’s arrows had the effect of hornet stings on a human; and, like hornets, they were as potentially lethal in sufficient number.

The Dane paused. He had an arrow nocked, but he wasn’t tensing the bowstring of human hair. The Kronosaur hurled itself back onto the lakebed with a vast outspewing of cushioning mud.

“Good work with that—” Cormac began.

Wulfhere lifted and drew the bow with a smooth motion, his arms working together. He loosed the shaft at the moment of maximum tension. The arrow’s flight was almost too swift for human eyes to mark. A tuft of goose-quill fletching sprang from the back of the Kronosaur’s head, where the foramen magnum opened to pass the spinal cord into the skull.

The beast continued to flop forward across the lake bottom. Its muscles were controlled only by the autonomic nervous system, the way a headless chicken runs.

Wulfhere cast down his bow. That had been his last arrow.

Cormac massaged his right wrist with his left hand. Stabbing so deeply through tough muscle had put enormous strain on those muscles and small bones. “It was already running away,” he said.

“Yes,” the Dane said. “Now we know that it won’t come back.”

Cormac shrugged, then stripped a handful of leaves with which to clean reptile blood from his blade. “Let’s go find some Greeks,” he said.

Earthshocks made foliage tremble as the reivers approached the rear of the palace. A thick silver plate shook from its mounting rivets and clanged to the walkway ahead of them.

Wulfhere chuckled. “They think we’re come to collect a debt owed,” he said.

“And so we are,” Cormac said. His voice was as thin as the light dancing along the edge of his sword.

The door was a recent replacement panel of wood and leather. It hung open as the Dane had left it when he rushed through to retrieve his bow and quiver. He hadn’t had time to worry then about what was waiting within. The reivers entered now with tense caution, weapons ready and bodies tautly prepared to spring into lethal action.

No one was in the service suite just inside the door. The next chamber was the dining room. The bodies of savages killed during the raid had vanished, but blood and the wrecked furniture remained. Heavy rubbish—broken marble statues and the base of a large column—had been piled over the hole in the flooring.

A pair of stunted servants stood looking out through the far door, whispering to one another. They squealed and tried to run when the reivers appeared behind them. Cormac made a tigerish leap and caught the female before she could escape.

Wulfhere bent toward the captive. “Where are your masters?” he shouted. The Atlantean covered her face with both hands and keened in a high-pitched voice.

“I’ll handle it,” Cormac said. Though they didn’t have a language in common . . .

He lifted the servant to her feet. She weighed no more than a normal child. For that matter, she might
be
a child. All her folk had wizened features, reminding Cormac of the toll exacted by the wizardry used here.

“Creon?” he said, trying not to snarl in a threatening fashion. “Antheia? Listen to me, child.”

He tried to keep tone soothing though the words themselves could not be. She ought to recognize the names, at least.

“Where are Creon and Antheia?”

The captive continued to cry. The male servant unexpectedly poked his head around the doorjamb and chittered. He pumped his small arm, pointing behind him with his index and middle fingers extended together.

Cormac released the female servant. The reivers glided together through the door. Their Atlantean guide scampered ahead, giving the bigger men looks of obvious terror over his shoulder. He ran out the front door of the palace and pointed again, this time toward the temple beyond.