“These are all that are left, yessir,” he said.
Findo Gask nodded patiently. “Left of what?”
“Them that was guarding the children.”
“And the children are where?”
Arlen shrugged. “Gone. She took them out while we was breaking down the gates. Took them out some tunnels, says these two. The whole bunch of them.”
“The female Knight of the Word?” He spoke quietly, but from between clenched teeth. “She took all of the children?”
The other demon nodded eagerly. “Sure enough. Took ‘em all. Must have come in another way.”
Findo Gask picked up the length of chain knotted about the woman and drew her back to her feet. His eyes locked on hers. She was shaking all over, but she could not look away.
“Where did the Knight of the Word take them?” he said.
“Please,” she whispered.
He gave her one moment more, then snapped her neck and threw her aside. He reached down and yanked the man to his feet. “Can you tell me where they went?”
“Out the tunnels . . . that lead to the streets,” the man gasped.
One eye was gone and the other swollen shut. His face was a mask of blood.
“She told us ... this would happen. We .. . should have listened.”
“Yes, you should have.” He dropped the man in a heap and looked at Arlen.
“Where are these tunnels?”
Arlen shrugged—one shrug too many to suit Findo Gask. Quick as a snake, his hand shot out, fastened around the other’s neck, and began to squeeze.
“Maybe you had better organize a search party to go down into the lower levels of the compound and find them.”
He emphasized each word without raising his voice, then threw the hapless Arlen down beside the chained prisoner. “Maybe I should arrange for you to change places with him. Maybe I will if you don’t find those children.”
Arlen crawled a safe distance away on hands and knees, then came to his feet and staggered off without looking back. Findo Gask let him go. In truth, he didn’t really care about the children. There were always other children. What he cared about was discipline and obedience. What he cared about was respect born of fear. Let them think he was soft or indecisive, and they would rip him apart.
There was danger of that happening as it was.
Where, he wondered suddenly, was Delloreen?
*
IT TOOK ANGEL a long time to get out of the city. She was too sore and too tired to move quickly, so beaten up from her encounter with the demon that she could barely put one foot in front of the other. If she was to meet resistance from another demon now, or even from a band of once-men, she wasn’t sure she had the strength to stand up to them. So she kept to the alleyways and shadows, skirting anything that seemed like danger, conserving what strength remained to try to catch up to Helen and the children.
More than once, she looked back to see if that demon from the hotel was following. She had never encountered anything quite so ferocious. That the demon was female only made it seem more odious made it feel as if it were a perversion of herself as a Knight of the Word, a monster with no other purpose than to destroy. She hoped she had killed it, but she didn’t think she had.
Worse, she knew that if it lived it would come after her, probably with once-men to support it this time, probably with that old man as company.
When it did, she wasn’t certain what she was going to do to save herself.
If not for the stairway collapse, it would have had her. She had been lucky this time. She couldn’t expect to be that lucky again.
Behind her, black clouds of smoke billowed from the Anaheim compound. The demons had broken through the gates and were inside. The last of the defenders were being slaughtered; she could hear their screams rising with the smoke. She felt curiously numb to what she was witnessing, perhaps because she had grieved already or because she had endured it so many times already.
Why hadn’t they listened to her? What more could she have done? There were no answers, and asking the questions only served to point up the futility of her efforts as a Knight of the Word.
She stopped a moment and looked back at the shattered landscape. It didn’t help knowing what was going on now inside the compound. The lucky ones would be killed; the unlucky would be taken as slaves. If there were any children left, they would be taken for experimentation. She hoped they had all gotten out. She wished she could go back to make sure. She wanted nothing so much as to save one more tiny life.