Because Varney’s attention was no longer focused on Cranswell at all. It was directed instead at the three monks standing in the tunnel just beyond the doorway, holding their poisoned knives. The one in the middle had something staining his blade all the way to the hilt and beyond, black in the cyan light, glistening on the man’s knuckles. Still wet. As Cranswell watched, a drop ran down the edge of the blade, paused for a moment, swelling at the tip, and fell silently to the floor.
Ruthven took a step toward the door, hands curling into fists, and Cranswell had time to see the silver eyes blaze scarlet before a voice like a thunderclap spoke in his head.
Look at me, it said, buzzing in his teeth, his bones. Look at me, look into my light.
He could not stop himself from turning. He felt his tendons creak like dry leather straps. He was suddenly and completely aware that if he fought against that pull hard enough, he would break his own bones.
Look at me, said the thing inside the glow, and Cranswell’s eyelids would not obey his frantic efforts to close them. Look at me.
He had no choice. He looked. He saw.
All the world went blank and terrible blue.
The pain was huge; the pain filled all the world, on every plane; every sense, every way of seeing was flooded solid with raw, agonized sensation.
Fastitocalon lay on the gritty tunnel floor, one wing broken and twisted under him, and felt his own blood moving warm and liquid in his lungs: heard the bubbling of air escaping the wound in his back, breath he could no longer draw.
The pain was not the worst of this. He could bear pain. Had borne it. The worst was the sure and certain knowledge that he had failed—failed everyone: Ruthven and Varney and Cranswell, who were certainly the returning monks’ next targets; failed Greta, who had been counting on him to help the others; failed the two young men whose pneumic signatures he had been attempting to free before the crossblade buried itself in his back. Failed himself, even, not that that mattered in the slightest.
He coughed, bringing up dark and bitter blood, and thought: Asmodeus was right, after all: I was a mistake.
The thought brought with it less pain than he expected. In fact, Fastitocalon realized, the pain was receding, drawing away from him like a slow tide, and in the darkness around him one by one he could see stars. One by one, and then ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand stars, blinking into existence, scattering the dark tunnel with points of diamond light.
He could not feel his hands, his feet. As he watched the stars come out, the numbness crept over him, taking away pain and sorrow and grief. He rolled over to look up at the brilliant constellations above him, the wound in his back no longer hurting at all.
It’s so beautiful. Like Hell, a spring night in Hell, with all the crystal spheres chiming as they turn, and the flames of the lake like a floor of moving opal. He tried to reach up with one hand, to see if he could touch them, but he couldn’t seem to move.
Oh, Sam, he thought, thinking suddenly, vividly of Samael standing on the water stairs at the lake’s edge with a wreath of pale flowers in his hair, all gold and white and blue, lit by the rippling glow of the water itself and by his own warm light. The image took his breath away. Oh, Samael, how I miss it. How I miss it all.
Around him the wings were slowly fading out of existence—but the feathers remained, dropping one by one to the tunnel floor in soundless drifts of white. Samael, his mind echoed. Samael, distant now, the word and the name going away from him, out of one world, into another.
Oh, Sam, I want to go home.
Fastitocalon watched the stars and thought, dimly, of a white sky and crows calling. Thought of Greta, far away now, of the determination of her, that cold morning; and, still thinking, began to drift away.
In the end Mewleep carried her as they ran: carried her on his back, like a child, because ghouls were designed to run through low tunnels in pitch blackness, stooped over, carrying heavy weights. They would have lost time Greta was certain they did not have to lose if the party was limited to a pace she could manage on her own two feet.
It was not the most pleasant experience of Greta’s life, bumping and jouncing along on Mewleep’s back in complete and utter darkness, having to trust to ghoul sight and ghoul instinct. Akha and her baby—who did not yet have a name, apparently; they did not name children until a certain age because so many ghoullets died in infancy—ran behind them. The only sound in all the world was the slap-slap of feet on the tunnel floor and their quick, sharp breathing. She had not realized just how fit they were; Mewleep had been running hard for maybe ten straight minutes, carrying a heavy weight, and while his respiration was rapid it was in no way distressed.
Greta had no idea where they were, or what the tunnels actually were that they ran through. Without light one hollow black space was much the same as another. Several times they had turned left or right down winding ways, and once they had had to slow right down and negotiate a passageway so low Greta’s back scraped along the ceiling. She had squeezed her eyes shut and hung on very tight and waited for it to be over, and when they emerged into a much larger tunnel bore and Mewleep could straighten up she had been very strongly aware of her own heart racing much too fast, sour adrenaline and fatigue poisons sloshing in her brain.
She had no way of knowing how much time had passed, either, when he finally slowed to a trot and then to a walk, and then let go of her legs; she half-slid off his back and had to steady herself against the unseen tunnel wall. A moment later he took out the sliver of glowing wood again, and in its feeble light she could make out the fact that they were in a cast-concrete corridor rather than a brick-arched tunnel. Wires and conduits draped in multicolored swags along the walls, and there was—
—there was a shoulder-high metal box against one wall, its color indistinguishable in the faint glow of foxfire, but Greta knew it would be the blank grey-green of electrical equipment housing all over the world.
The corridor shook as a train passed by in a tunnel very close, very close indeed. Dust sifted down from the ceiling as the last of the cars went rattling past, the sound fading off into the distance. We must be just below the Underground, Greta thought, and looked back at the metal box standing against the wall, at the fat electrical cables that fed into it on both sides.
“In there,” Mewleep said. Behind him Akha was watching her intently, more intently than Greta would really have liked. “The men in the deep tunnel are saying, in the box in access corridor north of the shelter is the cutoff switch.”
It was locked, of course, heavy padlocks preventing any unauthorized entry. “To the whole station, or just to the shelter?” she asked.
“Shelter,” he said, and then turned and said something to Akha in ghoulish, his tone completely different. Greta heard both reassurance and what sounded like the ghoulish version of Please?