Time to do some damage. Locking one arm around the monster’s leg, I swing my blade inward, driving it into the dredwurm’s armor-plated side. Melos power flares and crackles, but the energy skitters along the surface, scoring a line into the dull black armor without punching through. The dredwurm, still focused on Aifin, doesn’t even seem to notice.
I close my eyes for a moment, concentrating, and refine my power into the penetrating shape I used against the blueshell. It still doesn’t come naturally, but I can force the energy into new channels, flooding into my right hand until my skin crackles, uncomfortably hot. The long Melos blade shifts into a short, pointed spike. I wind up, pushing away from the dredwurm’s skin and swinging back down with all my weight behind the blow.
This time, the energy blade sinks in, until my knuckles scrape against the dredwurm’s skin. I release the pent-up energy inside the creature, braced for a furious reaction. But the blast feels muted, contained, as though the monster didn’t have any insides to shred, only more layers of armor. It barely reacts, shuddering slightly, legs still churning in its wild pursuit of Aifin.
Well. Rot. Now what?
Aifin is having trouble. He rounds a corner, and the dredwurm follows, slamming itself against the wall and scraping away a carpet of mushrooms. I hang on for dear life, armor flaring to protect me from countless minor impacts. Aifin’s golden aura is flickering, sparks of bright energy exploding off it, and he’s slowing down. He turns again, and I see we’re headed back toward the room where we left the others. Meroe is visible in the doorway, waving Aifin frantically to one side.
“Now, Berun! Stop it!” Meroe screams.
“I—I can’t.…” Berun hesitates, hands raised.
“You can!”
Berun’s hands close into fists. Blue energy sparks around him, and Tartak bindings wrap themselves around the dredwurm’s head, trying to lock it in place. I see them snap under the thing’s enormous momentum, magic shattering in showers of sparks, and with every sundering Berun winces as if he’d been struck. But he keeps trying, lashing out again and again, and the dredwurm slows. Steam is rising from Berun’s clothes as the heat plays over his body.
I push off from the creature’s side again, bring the armor-penetrating spike around in another roundhouse swing. Once again, it sinks in, but the blast of energy that follows doesn’t seem to have any effect. This isn’t working, and I need to move. Taking a deep breath, I put my weight on the embedded blade and use it as a handhold to swing forward, grabbing for the next ring of legs. I get a grip and clamber through as they swing and strain, trying to drive the creature onward against the flaring pressure of Berun’s magic.
The dredwurm has nearly halted, pulling itself forward only inch by inch, its head wrapped in a coruscating aura of brilliant blue. Berun’s mouth is open in a soundless scream, enveloped in a matching nimbus of scintillating energy, but he’s got it stopped. Aifin is still on his feet, golden sparks gathering around him, holding his remaining sword in both hands. I swing forward again, pushing through another ring of squirming, straining legs, only one segment back from the creature’s head.
The eye. That red jewel. If the dredwurm has a weak spot, that has to be it.
Then it all goes wrong.
The dredwurm twists, folding itself nearly in half, with more agility than I thought possible. With its head locked in place, its tail comes around with lightning speed, striking Berun in the stomach with the force of a cavalryman’s lance. The long spike goes all the way through him, emerging dripping crimson from his back. With a flick, the dredwurm throws him off, his limp body slamming into the mushroom-covered wall and flopping bonelessly to the deck in a pool of gore.
As his bindings vanish, the freed dredwurm rolls over, swinging me toward the deck. I have to leap free or be crushed, hitting the deck with a painfully hot flare from my armor. The thing’s tail comes around again, sweeping back toward Aifin. He dodges the tip with preternatural speed, but there’s nowhere he can go to avoid the length of the thing, and it catches him in the midriff. He folds up around it with an oof, and the monster slams him into the wall with a spray of broken pieces of mushroom.
Meanwhile, its head turns in my direction, and it advances on me as I struggle back to my feet. Free to move, its spiked legs screech horrifically against the metal of the floor and ceiling as it drags itself forward. Around its three mouths, the smaller limbs reach out for me, tight nests of interlocking blades. In the center of that horrible shape, the eye, glowing a deep, malevolent red.
Suddenly I know where I’ve seen that eye before. When I met Hagan, in the Deeps. The angel’s eye glowed blue, but otherwise it looked the same.
The angel—
The dredwurm isn’t a crab at all. However monstrous they look, the crabs are animals, with muscles, organs, and brains. This is something else, something animated by the same forgotten magic that powers Soliton.
Rogue, Hagan had said. A rogue angel. He’d tried to warn me.
Which means …
Well, it means we’re all in the Rot.
* * *
Meroe is shouting my name, though she’s barely audible over the dredwurm’s screeching.
“Get the others clear!” I shout back. Assuming they’re still alive. Aifin’s impact with the wall might have been cushioned by the mushrooms. Berun—I don’t want to think about Berun.
Survive first.
The dredwurm comes forward, and I step up to meet it, blades slashing. I manage to sever two of its spikes as others slash across me, held away by shimmering Melos energy. The pressure has already made it hot enough to hurt, though, and I back away, breathing hard. Armor or not, I can’t fight this thing head on.
Which means, since it doesn’t show any signs of being distracted, that I can’t fight it at all. Rot, rot, rot. If Jack were here to get its attention, or Thora to pry its limbs away—
If I’d told the Scholar to shove his offer up his arse—
Focus, Isoka. You’re not dead yet. Neither is Meroe.
I feint to the left, and the dredwurm follows the move, coming on slowly but steadily. It has no eyes, but it’s clearly able to see me. Or hear me, like the crabs.
It’s an angel. No wonder my bursts of power didn’t hurt it. The thing must be solid, no guts or muscles or skeleton, like a statue come to life. It doesn’t even bleed.
Hagan had stopped the angel, back at the ruined village. So where in the Rot is Hagan now?
The thing lurches forward, backing me toward a corner. I parry a half-dozen slashing strikes, sever a spiked limb on the riposte, and feel another blade slam into my armor. Heat and pain shoot across my body. I see Berun behind my eyes, impaled and limp, blood spurting as he flies through the air. I’d been frustrated with his cowardice. For a moment, the image twists, and it’s Meroe I’m looking at, her body shuddering, the life draining from her eyes.
Focus, Isoka.
The Scholar said this was a power I had, too. Even if he’s mad, even if his notion about the spirits of the dead is insanity, maybe he was right about that.
Maybe I can use it.
I try reaching out to the dredwurm. I can feel my heart pounding, blood rushing in my ears, my armor crackling and spitting with power. The strange gray energy is there; I can feel it, even see it—tiny motes, coursing through the dredwurm like blood. But no matter how I strain, they don’t move.
Hagan had spun ribbons of the gray light to wrap around the angel. I try to remember what it felt like, watching him.
The dredwurm lashes out, and I take another step away. My back comes up against the wall, my armor pressing into the mushrooms. Green lightning crackles across them, leaving scorched, blackened trails. The puffballs burst into phosphorescent shards.
Nowhere left to run.
I try to remember what it felt like in my dreams, the dead watching me, the hovering motes of gray.
Something shifts, a tiny break in the flow of gray light. The dredwurm halts for a moment, its movement stuttering, like a clockwork toy with a stripped gear. The light from the red gem flickers.
I reach out again, as though this were a dream, straining to hold on to that sense of unreality. It’s a strange, transient feeling, a state of mind that will disappear if I look at it too closely. Like making two people overlap by crossing your eyes. I can see the flow of energy through the dredwurm, a ludicrously complex pattern of gray light that animates it, moves its limbs, drives it to kill. As I thought, it’s not alive, not really. It’s a machine made of magic and stone, and it has gone horribly wrong.
I don’t think I could understand the structure of the thing in a thousand years of study. Fortunately, fixing something is never as hard as breaking it. I reach out, take hold of the delicate filigrees of light, and pull.