Wax ran and, despite his earlier bravado, found he had real trouble keeping up with TenSoon. The stone around them didn’t contain any metals, at least not in a pure enough form for him to Push on. Besides, the tunnels twisted and turned too much for long Pushes.
So he ran, holding on to his lantern with sweating fingers, listening as the things behind seemed to grow more excited. Distracted as he was, he almost crashed into TenSoon when he caught up to him standing still in the tunnel.
“What?” Wax asked, panting from his run.
“It smells wrong ahead,” TenSoon said. “They’re waiting for us.”
“Great,” Wax said. “What are they?”
“They smell like men,” TenSoon said.
More howls came from behind.
“Those,” Wax said, “are men?”
“Come,” TenSoon said, turning and scrambling away, his claws scratching on stone.
Wax followed. “Another way out?” he asked again.
TenSoon didn’t answer, instead leading them in a sprint through small caverns, around corners, through tunnels. They stopped at an intersection, TenSoon considering their options while Wax fingered his gun nervously. He swore he could see something moving down the tunnel they’d left behind, the one where TenSoon claimed to have spotted an ambush.
“TenSoon…” he said, nervous.
“This way,” the kandra said, dashing off.
Wax followed, entering a longer tunnel. Perfect. He let himself lag behind, holding up the lantern, trying to get a glimpse of whatever was following.
His light reflected from eyes in the shadows. Figures that were bent low, scrambling on all fours, moving in a distinctly inhuman way. Sweating, Wax dropped a shell casing and shoved it with his foot into a cleft in the rock. He Pushed, throwing himself down the corridor to catch up with TenSoon, landing just before they took a corner at speed.
“They’re not human,” Wax said. “Not completely.”
“Hemalurgy,” TenSoon said. “This is terrible. Paalm … She has gone further than I had assumed. She doesn’t just kill. She Ruins.”
“They’re almost upon us,” Wax said, clutching gun and lantern. “How do we get out?”
“We don’t,” TenSoon said, ducking to the side and into a small chamber. “We fight.”
Wax followed, but stopped in the doorway, gun at the ready. They’d passed this room before, or one like it. It was filled with small baskets—glancing at them now, he could see they were full of bones.
The things chasing them had started yipping, but he could hear them scrambling on the stone—could hear them breathing in excited gasps—as they drew close.
Inside the room, TenSoon transformed.
It happened in a burst, the kandra’s skin sloughing off his canine bones and splashing to the ground like a bucket of slop tossed out the back of a kitchen. The muscles and melting skin slapped against one of the baskets, tipping it, dumping bones.
MeLaan had said he was fast, but that word didn’t begin to describe the sudden motion as TenSoon absorbed the bones. Arms sprouted from the side of his mass, then lifted it into the air even as legs formed beneath, thick like those of a wrestler. A skull emerged like a bubble rising through molasses, filling in with muscles stretched against bone, a jaw shifting into place.
In seconds, a short but robust figure stood in the chamber. The face of stretched skin and muscle reminded Wax of a koloss, but those forearms were like hammers, and the chest superhumanly powerful. It was nude, though the crotch lacked genitals of either variety.
Wax looked back down the corridor outside and raised his pistol, sweating. The things prowled closer. Heads emerged from the darkness, faces that twisted human features into something more canine. He counted five total. These creatures were no longer bipedal, but traces of humanity laced them—fingers that were too long, hands with opposable thumbs. The joints bent the wrong way at the elbows and knees, and the eyes … the eyes were dead. Pure black.
“What has she done to you?” Wax whispered at them.
The creatures didn’t respond. Either they could not think, could not speak, or didn’t care to do either. Wax fired upward, half hoping that the sound would scare the things away, send them scuttling back into the night.
The greater part of him hoped they would remain, so he could finish off every last one of the poor bastards.
The single shot rang loud in the tunnel, but the beasts didn’t flee. Instead they surged forward, their reluctance giving way to frenzy. Wax leveled Vindication and unloaded at the first creatures, aiming for skulls. Flashes of gunfire lit the tunnel. Though his bullets tore off skin and left streaks of bleeding muscle, not one of the creatures dropped.
Wax ducked back into the room, holstering Vindication and setting his lantern on an outcropping. “Their skulls have been thickened,” he shouted to TenSoon while reaching for his Sterrion.