Rot. I don’t have time for this.
Elegant forms have their advantages, but so do street brawlers.
I surge to the side, switching my shield back to a blade and driving Erin away with a furious combination. She backs up for a moment, and I turn on Arin. This time, I’m watching her shadow. She’s expecting the first strike, which she evades by shifting postion; expecting the second, which she blocks, her blade held vertically. She’s not expecting me to bull forward afterward, my knee coming up hard into her stomach. She doubles over, gasping, and I spin around her, driving my blade into the small of her back. I rip it free with a twist and a spray of blood, and she collapses onto her knees, then falls forward.
“Arin!” Erin’s scream is high and piercing. Golden light flares around her, speeding her up until she’s a blur. She comes at me at a run, subtlety forgotten, trying to push through my defenses with brute force. I fade sideways, and it’s barely any effort at all to leave one blade hanging in front of her. It punches into her chest, my clenched fist pressed against her sternum as the spike of Melos energy emerges from between her shoulders. She coughs blood on my arm, where it sizzles against my armor, and then I step back, dismissing my blade. Erin staggers drunkenly for a moment, and then falls shuddering across the body of her sister.
I step around them, toward the Scholar. He’s watching me through his spectacles, unconcerned at the demise of his servants. Still too confident. Which means he still has a trick—
There’s a crack, like a tree branch breaking. The red glow from the dredwurm’s eye in the Scholar’s hand is matched, suddenly, by another. The great gray egg, behind the pillar, has sprouted a crystal like the one the Scholar holds, pulsing with crimson light in perfect time.
With another crack, part of the egg separates from the whole. It shudders, changing shape, becoming a leg, long and multi-jointed. Another crack, and another, as the thing comes apart.
Slowly, the angel rises to its feet.
* * *
Too late, I lunge for the Scholar.
A slender leg of hard gray stone comes down between us before my blade reaches him. Melos energy slashes against the angel’s flesh and rebounds, leaving little more than a burn scar. I dodge around it, but another leg intercepts, and then another comes straight at me, tipped with a vicious claw. I jump backward, and look up.
The angel is a sphere, held off the ground just a bit higher than my head. The glowing red eye pulses in the center, while around it the stony flesh is shaped into a sea of twisted, screaming human faces, one melting into the next, covering its entire surface. The faces shift as I watch, mouths widening, eyes darting, one swallowing the next and being swallowed in its turn. From the churning mass extend long, stick-thin legs with five or six joints, spread evenly over the surface like a halo of pins sticking in a pincushion. Underneath the angel, the legs fold in on themselves to support its weight, while those protruding from the sides and top hinge down to jab at me with horrible agility.
“I hope you didn’t think I was relying only on those two to protect me,” the Scholar says. He steps sideways as the angel advances, its legs passing neatly around him in a complex ballet. “I may not have control of the whole ship, but it’s simple enough to use the dredwurm’s eye for this.”
I keep retreating, drawing it forward. A leg swipes at me, then another, and I block them with my Melos shield.
The dredwurm was a rogue angel. I killed it, so I should be able to deal with this one the same way. I don’t have Aifin to attract its attention, but—
Focus, Isoka. I reach out to the thing, feeling for the currents of Eddica power that animate it. Last time, I gave those a twist, and it froze the creature in place. Just a little twist—
When I take hold of the energy churning inside it, it feels like being slapped in the face, a jolt that leaves every muscle twitching. I stumble, and the angel swats me, a claw scraping across my armor. Heat ripples through my chest, and I feel myself tumbling through the air, landing hard against one wall.
The Scholar is laughing.
“I imagine that’s how you killed the dredwurm,” he says. “I should have known. A good try. But a dredwurm has nothing driving it, no force behind it, just a leftover loop of energy cut off from its natural state. This is an angel, and the will behind it is mine.” He grins nastily. “You will not be able to subvert it so easily.”
Rot. So much for that plan.
I get up, my back to the wall. Eddica energy pulses through the metal behind me, and I can hear tiny almost voices, like whining gnats. The angel, moving ponderously on its folded legs, swings a dozen limbs in my direction, closing them around me like the jaws of a trap. I duck, dodge, and swing both blades against one leg, right into the joint. My arms get hot as I pour in power, and with a mighty crack the joint gives way, the last third of the leg sheared off and crashing to the floor. The angel twists, swinging the damaged leg away and bringing a dozen fresh ones to bear.
One down. At least twenty to go, and the skin on my arms is already burning. This is not going to work.
The eye. If I’m going to kill it, it has to be the eye. I push away from the wall, dodging claws or letting them scrape my armor. I grab a leg and lift myself up, swinging closer to the angel like a monkey pulling itself through the jungle canopy. More legs close in, the forest getting tighter and tighter around me, until I’m facing a solid grid of gray stone. Through the gaps, a foot away, the angel’s eye gleams mockingly. For a moment I’m poised there, straining, the angel with all its legs folded inward like a dying insect. Then it uncoils, hurling me across the room.
I do my best to brace, wincing at the impact and the blast of heat it sends through my armor. Eddica power pulses in the wall where I hit, rising briefly before returning to its regular rhythm. I stagger back to my feet and start to run, straight for the Scholar, ignoring the angel.
“You tried that already, Deepwalker,” he says. Legs snake out, blocking my path like reaching vines. “Getting desperate?”
He has no idea. I shove my arm through a gap in the wall of limbs, one blade reaching toward the Scholar’s head. Letting the other blade vanish, I pour power into the outstretched weapon, lengthening it into something closer to Karakoa’s two-handed sword. The blade grows, stretches, and the Scholar jerks backward as the crackling tip swings wildly in front of him.
But it’s not enough. I can’t make the blade any longer, and the angel has ahold of me now, throwing me backward again. This time, when I hit the wall, I’m not so quick to get up. My limbs feel like lead, and the skin of my back and shoulders is already charred from powerburn. I just manage to get to my feet as claws arc down toward me, blocking the strikes with my Melos shield. Each impact rings me like a gong.
Hagan is hanging limp in the luminous gray bonds. His body is flickering, blurred, as though on the other side of lumpy glass. But I hear his voice, just for a moment.
“… Isoka … follow…”
There’s a familiar tug in my chest. For a moment, I think a claw has taken hold of me, but I see the thread of gray light that led me to the Garden has gone taut again. It wraps around me, leading into the wall.
The wall—
Not just into the wall. It leads to a large, cylindrical strut, which pulses with gray light, heavily loaded with flowing Eddica power. I risk turning my head, and see the thread join the flow, right where the big strut meets two smaller ones. They merge in a complex knot of power.
Time to place the big bet.
The angel rears back, raising four legs at once to batter my shield. I spin sideways, letting the shield fade away, summoning both my blades. Instead of slashing at the enfolding legs, I swing both blades against the wall, right where the thread from my chest joins it. Melos energy cracks, and there’s a rush of heat along my arms as my blades cut into the metal. The knot sags for a moment, and then gives way.
Like water spilling from a broken pipe, a torrent of Eddica energy blasts from the shredded metal, spraying into the air in a million tiny gray motes. I reach out and take hold of the flow, bending it with all my strength. It twists, fighting like a raging python, but just for a moment I manage to direct it where I want it to go.
Right against the eye of the angel, looming over me.