Chapter Fifty-Seven
“Hey, Philosopher,” shouted Ahearn from the rim of the pool at the far end of the main chamber, “I think you’ll want to see this.”
Druadaen glanced at the promising scrolls two cubbies above him, sighed, and abandoned the precarious perch from which he had hoped to reach them. “What is it?” he shouted back as he began approaching down the walkway.
S’ythreni was standing beside Ahearn. “Something…strange.”
Not reassured by the tone in her voice, Druadaen ran the rest of the way—and skidded to a stop when he saw what they were staring at.
The amber liquid in the pool was rising. Rapidly. And as it did, it became increasingly obvious that it was not anything like water; it had a viscosity almost half that of rapeseed oil. No wonder they hadn’t been able to see the bottom of the pool. “When did this start?”
Ahearn shrugged. “Can’t say for sure. It was very slow at first, so slow I didn’t notice.”
S’ythreni was staring down into the pool, squinting. “It began shortly after you and Elweyr opened the codex you found. At least, that was the first time I heard the gurgling.”
“What gurgling?” asked Ahearn.
“The gurgling which I guess you still can’t hear.”
Druadaen saw the hint of incoming ripples where the liquid entered through the portal in the wall. “Any better sense of where that leads?”
“Downward,” S’ythreni said. “The ceiling of the tube starts sloping down after five yards. After thirty more, it disappears under the liquid.” She wrinkled her nose at it.
“Do you detect an odor?” Druadaen asked.
She shook her head. “No, but that is what’s strange. Water may not have a scent of its own, but it always carries one. Whether the brine of the sea or rain on the trees or the dank of a leaky cellar, you almost always know if there’s water around because it spreads the smell of what it has touched. But this”—she shook her head again and took half a step away from the still-rising fluid—“nothing. Although the color is changing.”
Druadaen saw it a moment later. “It’s becoming more yellow. And more opaque.”
Ahearn fingered the hilt of his sword. “So what do we do?”
Druadaen looked back at the library doors. They were solid, but hardly watertight. If the liquid kept rising, it would eventually spread all the way across the room and get under them.
S’ythreni looked at him. “Should we save what we can and leave?”
Druadaen put his hand to his head. “Even if we could, we don’t know what to save, yet. That alone will probably take an hour or two. And I’m not sure if there’s any way—”
The yellow liquid became level with the top of the onyx rim, edged out onto it…and stopped rising. A thick, distant gurgling followed a moment later.
“I heard that!” Ahearn exclaimed, drawing his sword.
S’ythreni laughed. “And what do you expect to do with a yard of steel?”
Umkhira looked from her post back at the main doors. “What is happening?”
“Unsure,” S’ythreni shouted without turning around. “But I think…”
“Yes?” Druadaen and Ahearn chorused.
“It’s starting to recede again. And the gurgling has resumed.” She listened carefully. “But this time, it is the gurgling of liquid running out, not in.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Ahearn.
Druadaen nodded but said, “Let’s wait and see.”
Ahearn had taken a more relaxed stance. “Well, at least the library is sa—”
A high, metallic peal cut at Druadaen’s ears like a razor of sound. It was as if a silver bell had been hit so hard and so sharply that it rang and shattered in the same instant.
“What the hells—?” snarled S’ythreni—who flinched back as the velene flew past her to land on Druadaen’s shoulder. The creature—object?—was noticeably warm.
“Is the velene all right?” shouted Elweyr from the doorway of the library.
“Why?”
“Because that sound—it was him!”
S’ythreni turned, stare at the rigid, almost pensive dragonette. “You mean, it screamed?”
“No, it…well, the sound just came out of it. From its whole body, I think,” Elweyr replied as he began moving quickly toward the pool. Umkhira had already drifted halfway there but kept glancing over her shoulder, torn between standing guard near the stairs and helping her friends.
Ahearn leaned forward to check on the fluid that now resembled yellow syrup. “It’s going down very quickly. I think in a minute or so, it will—hey-a!”
Ahearn jumped back as the syrup abruptly became thicker and, instead of draining toward the bottom of the reservoir, was sucked back out of it. The suddenly gelatinous mass disappeared down a vertical shaft at the back of the tube, making a slurping sound as it did. All the surfaces with which it had been in contact were completely dry.
But it had left something behind…or perhaps was simply revealing what had been there from the start:
A crude tan statue of a large, four-legged creature. It had the lean torso of a predator, but the head was still uneven and the tail—if it was a tail—was largely indistinguishable from the body. At best, it was an unfinished study, abandoned halfway to completion.
In the same moment that Druadaen got his first impression of it, the velene streamed down across him, from right shoulder to left hip, and looked up at him.
It had wrapped itself around the scabbard of his sword.
A rattle of sharp snaps echoed up from the onyx basin and Umkhira roared, pointing down into it.
The statue quaked, cracked, shook, and fault lines raced across its surface, fragments flying wherever they intersected. The entire surface began to shatter.
Except it wasn’t the surface of a statue; it was a thin, brittle coating, spraying away from a violently flexing creature within it.
Its form was unlike anything that Druadaen had ever read about, dreamed, or imagined. The front of its body vaguely recalled the heavy limbs and claws of a bear, tapering into a torso with the same sleek, sturdy musculature of a great cat, but it was not derived from either of those species. Its fur was patchy on its apparently scabrous foreparts and upper spine, and its tail was surprisingly heavy, resembling ones he had seen—from a safe distance—on the supragant sloths of Solori.
But what held them all frozen for a moment was the head: it was a distorted, lopsided amalgam of scarred ape and unblemished toddler. But the eyes were alert, calculating, and—above all—maniacal. And without a blink, the beast was in motion.
Druadaen leaped backward, yanking his sword free as he did, damning himself for not having it out already. He recalled and dismissed his parrying dagger in the same instant: useless, against this opponent. Instead, he snugged his left hand upon the grip just beneath his right.
Ahearn got his bastard sword up in time to meet the beast’s leap up out of the pool, smiling, holding it forth so the creature would wound itself upon the blade…but the point skipped aside. The monstrosity’s foreparts were not scabrous after all, but plated like a pangolin, its irregular fur springing out from and obscuring the junctures between the segments.
As the velene swooped and darted around the creature, S’ythreni readied her crossbow. But the beast’s tail came around, twisting, feinting, and then slashing—just as it unfolded a pair of opposed bone spikes.
S’ythreni dodged even as she fired, desperately bringing up the crossbow to block the heavy tail. It hit her ironpith weapon like a double-headed miner’s pick as it discharged; a quarrel whined over the beast. The crossbow clattered away, still intact, but the string broke with a high-pitched screech. Thrown back by the blow, the aeosti turned her fall into a roll and came up with both shortswords drawn. Panting but with eyes narrowed, she was already looking for an opening.
Druadaen barely had time to swallow. In less than one second, the monstrosity had driven back two formidable foes, broken the weapon most likely to penetrate its armor, and had gained a foothold on the pool’s onyx lip. And it was still in motion. So the very best tactic—
—would take too long to determine. Druadaen leapt toward it, bringing the sword’s hilt above his shoulder while keeping the blade level and point forward.
The creature’s reflexes were not merely daunting; they were terrifying. At the same moment its right paw recontacted the ground, its left whipped out at him—but not with a raking overhand blow typical of animals. This was a hasty sweep: low and fast, long claws scything toward Druadaen’s left calf.
He saw it and adjusted without thinking; his readied attack became a plunging, point-down guard that just barely managed to deflect the paw. And as it did, fragments flew up.
Both Druadaen and the creature started, staring at the falling chunks. The gleaming sword had clipped the ends of several of its armored plates and cut a deep groove into the thickest parts of others. On the hideous face, shock became terror which became redoubled fury—all in the space of half a second.
But that briefest pause was precisely what S’ythreni was watching for. She lunged toward the monstrosity’s unplated haunches—and crashed into Umkhira who was charging in toward the same vulnerable spot, battle-axe raised high.
Both sprawled. S’ythreni’s crouched posture sent her tumbling farther forward, closer to the creature. Swifter than thought, its tail snapped toward her, a thin rush of air trailing the spikes—but they glanced off Umkhira’s shield, who dove to cover her aeosti comrade.
The velene swooped in at the monster’s head. It noticed and jerked in that direction—in the very instant that the velene darted away.
The creature howled in frustration, its tail already swishing through a tight turn to make a return swing at the two women, but not before Ahearn and Druadaen charged it.
Eyes flicking toward the sword in the latter’s hands, the beast sidestepped away from that mirror-bright threat; in that moment of distraction, its tail missed the two women, whirring a foot over their heads. It got up a paw in time to bat away Ahearn’s two-handed cut, the forward momentum of which brought the swordsman perilously close to the monster.
Their faces barely a foot apart, its fast smile revealed two rows of hooked fangs, close kin to those Druadaen knew from the gaping maws of tiger sharks. The beast’s neck cocked back and then snapped forward, jaws widening as they reached toward the swordsman’s head.
Which was not there. The confusion on the hideous face became pain as Ahearn, who’d ducked forward and under the creature’s jaw, brought his head up sharply, butting its chin with a percussive crack! It staggered back. So did Ahearn—just as Elweyr called for Druadaen to stand his ground.
The next moment, the mantic unleashed a thaumate; the beast’s fur ignited, covered with small, dancing flames—which disappeared as if the universe itself had snuffed them out. Elweyr sagged and stumbled, cursing as he did.
As Druadaen angled in toward the flank of the rapidly recovering beast, he glimpsed several dire details. Its rear legs were no longer poised uncertainly on the lip of the pool. Umkhira and S’ythreni had jumped beyond the sweep of its tail but also beyond the reach of their weapons. And Ahearn was still recovering.
In that split-second assessment, the beast’s eyes cleared and bored into Druadaen’s.
He switched grip and gathered himself to leap forward against the now-advancing creature…
The velene darted past the creature’s head, then spread its wings, turned, and was suddenly reverse-flapping away in the same moment it emitted another sharp pulse of sound: a piercing, painful cross between a ringing and a hum.
Druadaen resolved to ignore it as he engaged the creature but discovered that it had stopped and was writhing in agony. It staggered sideways as the velene hovered, as if centering itself to prepare another burst of sound…just before the tail swung around in a sudden, desperate swat.
One of the bone spikes connected. The impact snapped it off; the velene was catapulted away from the combat.
But in that unguarded instant, Druadaen had the opening for the two-handed thrust he’d been readying. It wouldn’t be as powerful as a full swing from over his shoulder, but the creature’s armor seemed more likely to deflect some or even most cutting attacks. Better to gamble that it was more susceptible to being pierced, particularly if hit at the juncture of two plates.
As Druadaen leaped forward, shoulder and arm muscles bunching, he caught a brief whiff of a completely unexpected odor: the almost chemical scent that immediately follows a lightning strike. Ignoring it, he focused on where he meant to drive in the point of his sword—
Which impossibly, but unmistakably, became slightly longer. And now tapered to a much narrower tip.
The stiletto-point slipped between the scales protecting the juncture of the creature’s left leg and torso and effortlessly slid into the flesh beneath.
The creature jerked and yowled—more infant than ape—and turned sharply toward Druadaen, driving the blade in even deeper before that sudden spin slung his attacker sideways.
Druadaen clung desperately to the sword. As it came free of the ugly, maroon-leaking wound, he reached back with his legs, trying to find purchase, to stay on his feet to drive the blade home a second time.
But there was nothing under his feet, just empty air. Having been swung through a half circle, he came free of the creature just as he was passing over the pool.
An instant of confusion. Then an instant of reflex: old training of how best to fall—
But Druadaen hit the basin’s onyx bottom before the reflex had completed. He felt something crack in his chest, lost vision for a moment, swam back to awareness—and realized his hands were empty. He tried to focus his eyes, fought against blackness, saw his sword lying against the side of the pool, but was distracted by movement in his returning peripheral vision.
On the onyx rim above him, the creature had staggered about to face him, every move wringing a gasp or shriek from it. Faltering at the edge, its eyes met Druadaen’s and its face contorted with rage. And something very like longing.
Druadaen rolled to his knees, scrambled unsteadily toward his sword. The creature’s powerful hindlegs bunched and released into a pounce down at him.
But a blur of motion hit the creature in its side. A battle-axe flashed and crunched into its lightly armored haunches, Umkhira’s exultant war cry drowning out any sounds of surprise or agony the beast might have emitted. Slammed against the wall by the blow of the axe and then her body, it hit so hard that it bounced off and rolled to a stop near the opposite side of the basin. Umkhira flew back from her impact against the creature’s armor plating and hit the floor of the pool with a suppressed groan.
Druadaen got one hand on his sword, swayed up to his feet, and discovered that the beast was already rising. Umkhira’s battle-axe had cut a seam in the creature’s scales and it was wheezing deeply, but its tail was already beginning to thrash and, skew-eyed, it began to track him uncertainly, warily.
Druadaen brought back his sword with his right hand, drew the parrying dagger with his left. If he could just deflect or even reduce one more blow, stay alive long enough to work around to the flank again—
The beast’s eyes drifted back into synchrony and it smiled. It began to limp in sideways, circling to deny him the wounded flank as its tail’s movements became more steady, more deliberate.
Druadaen realized that if he had to finish this fight on his own, time favored the creature. It’s preternatural vitality, speed, and toughness were likely to prevail, even against the sword’s startling capabilities. He drew a deep breath that told him he had indeed broken at least one rib, and then began circling as well, hoping he’d prove less injured and could turn the beast’s flank before it could get much closer.
The creature evidently intuited the tactics behind the move and launched into a clumsy forward rush, tail drooping as its focus narrowed upon intercepting its target.
Druadaen saw he would no longer have an opportunity to attack the flank, switched stance so that the parrying dagger was slightly forward to deflect a first attack and hopefully create an opening that the sword could exploit. He put his weight on his back foot as the creature closed, saw its tail starting to flinch fitfully—just as a shadow flickered over both of them.
Druadaen glanced up.
Ahearn completed his leap down from the lip of the pool, both hands coming over his head to drive the point of his bastard sword straight down into the beast’s unarmored lower back.
Blood flew up. The beast writhed, spun, threw the swordsman off into the nearest wall. Ahearn staggered to keep his feet, failed, slipped down to one knee, as the spasming beast dragged itself around to close with the newly vulnerable foe that had wounded it so badly, readying its tail for a vengeful, killing blow.
Until Druadaen, having used those two moments to gather his wits and regain his balance, took two fast leaps to close with the creature and drive his sword—which now grew wider than usual—into the gap he’d already opened in its armor.
Because the beast was fixated upon the attacker who’d left a bastard sword sticking up alongside its spine, it did not hear Druadaen’s movement in time; it was still turning when the suddenly incandescent sword’s point drove at it again. The point nicked and skipped off the inner margin of one of the armor plates, which guided it straight into the original wound.
The sword went in up to the hilt. Blood—violet, this time—gushed out, followed by a suffocating odor that reminded Druadaen of patchouli, cinnamon, and decay. The creature staggered, fighting to stay on its feet as it sent up a long, despairing wail in the voice of a small child. Then the cry constricted into a rattling gargle and the beast collapsed.
But it had not expired. Ahearn swayed to his feet as S’ythreni let down a rope and started down to check on Umkhira. Elweyr peered into the pit, sparing occasional glances back toward Umkhira’s now empty rearguard post.
They slowly gathered around the dying abomination. Druadaen held his sword’s now normal tip at its wrinkled and scarred neck. “If you move, you will die.”
It growled and chewed at its lips before spitting out, “I’m dying anyway. So kill me. Kill me now, damn you! Why do you hesitate? Do it! End it!” When surprise at its vehement death wish stunned them into another moment’s silence, it spat blood at them and tried to move its tail; it barely tremored. “Damn you all! Damn you for living! Damn you for a life without torment! I’ll kill you! I swear it! I shall rend you limb from limb! I shall feast on your entrails. I shall—!” It coughed up a gout of blood. “Kill me,” it wept.
“You shall get your wish soon enough, you bloody monster,” Ahearn muttered through gritted teeth. He peered more closely at the peeling skin on its neck and loose, discolored plates on its flank. “Certainly before you get a chance to shed into a new skin, or body, or however the hell you restore yourself.”
“Yes! Kill me now! Before the pain starts! I can’t—not again! Too many times. Too many years—”
“Ever since you were made the sentinel of this library?” Druadaen prompted.
“Longer. Far longer than that.” It groaned as older scales rattled, fell off.
“Not possible,” Ahearn snapped. “Nothing can live that long.”
S’ythreni’s glance was disapproving. “And how can you be sure?”
Ahearn’s retort was swift, even bitter. “Well, why should we believe anything it says? Besides, you’ve heard it rant; the beast is mad.”
“I am no beast!” it frothed and screamed. “Or was not always. I am no longer sure. But when the skies fell and the moons rained down war, I was already old. Too old. Sleeping through changes. Each more horrible than the next.” The creature’s eyes refocused as it returned from whatever dark reverie had momentarily overtaken it; red-rimmed and bulging, one slipped sideways again, roving out of synchrony with the other. “Why do you stand and stare? You have me. Finish, brave heroes!” it spat through an agonized cackle. “Do what none could do before you!”
Druadaen shook his head. “I will not kill an adversary who cannot defend himself.”
“Fool!” the child’s voice screamed as the fanged mouth struggled to snap at him, teeth flying loose. “I will teach you—!”
Ahearn stepped in quickly and plunged his longsword into the wound Druadaen had inflicted. Repeatedly.
Druadaen rounded on him. “Damn you! Now we shall never know!”
“Know what?”
“What we came here to investigate: if Saqqaru has always existed or was added to the surface of Arrdanc at a later date. And how old the world truly is!”
Ahearn shrugged. “Druadaen, whatever this monstrosity might have seen through the ages, you couldn’t trust its answers. And good luck sifting out truth from ravings like those. He was as mad as a snake in a rolling barrel.”
Druadaen barely heard him, staring down at the body of a beast that, despite its malign madness, had lived through the times when Saqqaru was first recorded. Maybe had lived before it even existed.
As S’ythreni climbed up out of the basin to check on Elweyr, Umkhira put a hand on Druadaen’s shoulder. “Ahearn’s final blows were necessary. There is no way to know how quickly it might have healed. Or what it might have turned into.”
“Turned into?”
Umkhira shrugged, favoring her left arm. “Beastkynde can change shape when all three moons rise. S’ythreni’s people are said to enter a tree with their old body but emerge with a new one. Insects transform within their cocoons. Are you so sure this creature could not have done something similar?”
Druadaen struggled to find a reasonable objection, but finally sighed and shook his head.
Umkhira nodded, stepped aside, and with a one-handed sweep of her axe, severed the monster’s head. She picked it up. In response to their stares, she explained, “When fighting magical foes, it is best to be sure they will stay slain.”
Before the echo of her axiom had died out, a deep groan welled up from the rear of the tube beyond the portal. Druadaen had heard a sound like that once before: when a mass of water had rushed into a stone conduit that could barely withstand the sudden surge in pressure. They turned to look up at the round opening above them.
Perched on the rim, S’ythreni squinted into it, then stepped back, eyes widening. “Get out of the pool. It’s coming back.”
“Trying to slurp up its dead pet,” Ahearn snarled as he headed toward the rope, urging Umkhira before him.
“Or us,” S’ythreni muttered.
Druadaen turned to follow…but the sword dragged in his hand as he did, as if something invisible was holding it fast.
“No time for observations and investigations, Philosopher,” Ahearn cried back at him. “Get up the rope! Now!”
But the sword would not move. He brought his second hand to the hilt to tug on it, and as he turned at the waist to bring all his strength to bear, his torso moved slightly closer to the portal.
So did the sword.
“Druadaen!” cried Elweyr. “What are you waiting for?”
He shook his head. “It’s not me; it’s the sword.” As if to prove he was telling the truth, the blade’s deep-mirror surface took on a faint blue sheen.
“Drop it then!” Ahearn roared, halfway up the rope.
Druadaen shook his head. “I think…” He took a step up the sloping bottom of the basin, coming closer to the portal until he could just barely see into it. The sword not only moved but seemed ready to go further.
“You’re thinking?” Ahearn shouted. “Now?”
“About what?” Elweyr added, panicked.
“I think…I have to do this.” Druadaen leaned forward, raising and extending the sword. Or was he following it?
“What the hells are you—?”
The gurgling became slower, almost sullen.
“It’s coming,” S’ythreni muttered from overhead.
Druadaen nodded…and watched a trickle of yellow slime trickle toward him out of the darkness.
He stretched the sword point toward it.
The trickle became a tendril, probed toward the blade, and just before touching it, yanked back as if scalded. With a thin slurp, it pulled back into the darkness. A moment later, there was a final gurgle; a great gulping sound, like a huge mass of water suddenly draining out of a plugged pipe.
“Now,” he said with a smile at the sword in his hand, “I believe we can get what we came for.”
“And then what?” asked S’ythreni. “Or have we finally finished your mad quest?”
“Not quite yet,” Druadaen answered. “There’s just one last visit I must make.”
“What now?” she screeched. “To find more dragons or direkynde? Or maybe to go see one of the chthonic cryptigants that live in volcanos or beneath polar ice?”
“No, just a nice old man,” he answered with a small smile. “Who lives in Saqqaru.”