An ombrikos.
It did not come quietly. It ripped a hole into the world, clawing at the flesh of reality to impose itself into the fabric of the moment. Indigo recoiled as if its existence stabbed her through the heart. Beside her she heard the Androktasiai hiss. But the murder golem murmured a word in some unknown language, and whatever it was, Damastes loaded it with bottomless venom and hatred.
The crowd in the chamber gasped, and for a moment they froze, eyes wide, mouths gaping.
Then they cried out in passionate glory, shouting, screaming, jumping up and down, waving their arms, laughing, weeping.
Andel Edwards stood holding the dagger, and suddenly tendrils of blackness whipped out of the ombrikos and wrapped themselves around him, covering him as thoroughly as the ivy covered the tombstones outside. The boy shrieked in pain, but Rafe held his arm steady. Graham shook his head like a man coming out of a stupor and stared at his son, and for a moment—for one flickering, fragile moment—Indigo thought that the man was going to stop what was about to happen. That he would slap the knife from his son’s hand, snatch up his children, and run.
That hope was too fragile to support the reality of what Graham Edwards wanted from life. It could not bear the weight of what Rafe desired.
So Graham took his son’s wrist from Rafe’s grasp and guided it—and the knife—out so that the point of the blade hovered over his young daughter’s defenseless chest.
Indigo whipped around to tell her team to go, to fight, to stop this, but she never got the chance. The murder golem threw back its head and let loose with a roar of such unbridled rage that the sound of it drowned out all of the chants and cheers and cries. The roar was so loud that the slaughter nuns reeled back, blood starting from their ears. Cracks whipsawed along the walls, and the torches flared as if doused by gasoline.
Then Damastes shoved Indigo out of the way and charged.
Indigo reached out to stop the murder golem, but even as her fingers closed around the Shelby-shaped wrist, the wrist changed. In the space of a single step the golem stopped being Shelby at all. The flesh seemed to boil, and Indigo heard bones cracking and tendons popping as the body changed and changed, becoming something else, something unknown. Becoming a monster.
Damastes stepped down onto the stone stairs with hooves instead of feet. His legs twisted into a parody of goat legs, and wiry black hair sprouted from the changing skin. The torso changed from female to male and blossomed with hard muscles covered by a scaled hide from which spikes emerged, their points dripping with sizzling venom. Damastes’s head dropped low between muscular shoulders, and a pair of curling horns thrust outward from a broad, sloping brow, and teeth like boars’ tusks filled the snarling mask.
Xanthe tried to stop the monster from rushing down and revealing their presence, but Damastes struck her a savage blow that sent the slaughter nun crashing into the doorframe. She rebounded with a deep grunt of pain and nearly toppled down the stairs, bit Megaira darted out a hand to catch her. The monster roared again and charged down the stars toward the shocked crowd of Phonoi.
Rafe saw the monster, and for a moment his face went slack with mingled fear and incomprehension, then his gaze shifted to the cluster of women behind Damastes and his eyes sharpened. Indigo saw how realization changed the man’s expression into a mask of cruelty and hatred. There was fear, too, because this was such a crucial moment for him and so much of what he had worked for could collapse.
But he was also amused, as if the challenge of this attack sent a sexual thrill through him.
On the floor of the chamber the Phonoi were rushing to meet the oncoming monster, and blades, sickles, spiked truncheons, and other weapons appeared as if by magic in their hands. They had come to this ceremony armed for the murders they prized so deeply.
And murder in its more savage form rushed at them.
“Let’s go!” yelled Indigo, and she charged down in Damastes’s wake. Megaira and Selene pulled Xanthe to her feet and they followed, weapons drawn, cries rising to their lips.
Damastes struck the wall of Phonoi like a tsunami, and Indigo saw bodies and parts of bodies go flying, trailed by sprays of dark red. Then she was in the thick of it.
Suddenly the world fractured, becoming less a straight series of events but more a kaleidoscope of bizarre images. Or a movie montage whose sound track was screams and the clash of blades.
Selene leaped from the third step and snapped out a brutal kick that caught an Asian woman on the point of her chin with such force it sent the Phonoi into an awkward backflip. The woman landed badly and did not move again.
*
Two African Phonoi, both wearing Somalian tattoos, charged at Megaira, and within an instant the three of them seemed to fade inside a whirlwind of flashing silver blades.
*
Damastes did not stay in the form of a demonic satyr but changed and changed as he fought. One moment he was manlike, with golden skin and eyes filled with actual fire; the next he was a Gorgon, with heavy breasts whose nipples leaked boiling venom and whose head was a writhing mass of copperheads, cobras, and coral snakes; then he became a towering troll with massive arms; then a goblin-shaped imp with swords for arms. Changing over and over and over again, as if the murder god’s mind had fractured. With each change someone died or staggered back with a terrible wound. And throughout the carnage Damastes laughed for the pure joy of bloodshed.
*
Behind the altar Graham Edwards swayed, his face twisted with fear and doubt. His chained daughter lay screaming, his son struggled to break free of his father’s grip, and Edwards was clearly torn between whatever love he had left for his children and his duty to the cult who owned his soul. Rafe stood nearby, a curved kukri in his hand, eyes wild and feral. Indigo thought that he was as ready to defend the ceremony as he was to kill Edwards if the man waivered too far. Rafe’s eyes roved across the sea of battle and found Indigo. He smiled an inviting smile.
“Get him!” cried Selene, but Indigo was already moving toward the madman behind the altar. A Phonoi with a thick black beard and hook nose came at her with an old-fashioned scimitar, and the curved blade sheared through the air, missing Indigo’s throat by a hairsbreadth as she suddenly lurched backward. She took the fall of her weight to put power and speed into a crouching turn, and as the man checked his swing for another cut, Indigo rose up inside the arc of his attack and drove a shadow dagger into the softness of the flesh beneath the man’s jaw. The blade punched all the way up so that the tip burst through the top of his skull, and she saw the lights in his eyes change from madness to surprise to a terminal vacuity.