David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

Thirty paces across the field, Lord Kintiniklintit dropped his battle arms and buzzed his wings, taking to the air for the attack. A tide of voices rose with him, a million dronon clacking their praise in unison.

At just that moment, the sun cracked over the horizon, shining over the field. It lit Kintinikiintit so that he seemed to have risen, gleaming blackness made alive from the shadows, and it lit Gallen’s upturned face, white like a flower petal. Clouds were racing in from the North, but for a few moments, the sun would yet shine.

The Lord of the Seventh Swarm circled the huge field once, his wings rumbling. The swell of dronon voices thrilled Maggie somehow, despite the fact that they came from her enemies. Maggie looked across the field, saw the morning sunlight shining on the Golden Queen and her little white attendants.

Kintiniklintit circled the entire field, and as he passed over each Vanquisher, they each raised their incendiary rilfes in the air and shook them, so that it almost appeared as if each arm magically kept the great Vanquisher aloft.

As he circled once, he built up speed, then came round half a circle again until he lined up with the rising sun, then veered toward them.

Maggie had been watching Kintiniklintit’s progress from the corner of her eye; now she turned to Gallen. She wanted Gallen’s face to be the last thing she saw.

“My love,” he whispered.

Thomas gripped his pulp pistol with both hands. Dozens of sfuz scampered along the ceiling, whistling a strange, frenetic call, issuing from a wide passage that led lower into the city. Their purple-black eyes gleamed in the light of Felph’s glow globe.

Felph dropped into a crouch and fired rapidly. Black gobbets of gore blasted from the sfuz. Felph screamed in fury, as if possessed, “Back me, back me!”

Thomas stood at Felph’s back, firing over his head. Something heavy hit Thomas, knocking him forward, and a searing pain in Thomas’s ribs told him he’d been stabbed.

He fell into Felph, knocking the lord headlong, but Thomas had the presence of mind to spin as he fell, firing twice.

A sfuz stood over Thomas.

The creature’s lower jaw disintegrated under the force of the gunfire.

Thomas whirled again, opening fire on a sfuz on the ceiling directly above.

The thing exploded, dropped like a bag of warm mud, knocking Thomas backward, so his head slammed into the floor.

Everything went dark for a moment, and he woke to Felph shrieking, shrieking, firing his weapon. Thomas pushed a dead sfuz off his face with one hand, rolled to an elbow.

Felph stood, ringed by four sfuz. One had tossed a sticky net over him, so Felph’s left hand lay pinned to his body. Felph screamed, desperately fired his weapon. His gun was empty.

Thomas snapped a shot at the nearest sfuz. The shot hit the floor and exploded into shrapnel. Perhaps that saved them. If he’d hit the sfuz directly, the shell would have exploded within the creature. As it was, the shell sent fragments into two sfuz, so they dropped to the floor.

More importantly it sent the last two racing out of view just as Thomas fired again, only to find his pulp gun empty.

Thomas stood taking stock of himself. His back hurt. The wound felt deep. Blood ran down his spine, and that firghtened him. He couldn’t see the wound and he was so much in shock, he could hardly feel it. It seemed he stood outside himself, recognizing something was wrong, not knowing what.

Lord Felph, who crouched on the ground, did not glance at Thomas as he reloaded his pistol. He pulled off the spent clip and dropped a full one in reflexively, then charged forward.

Thomas wanted to ask Felph to turn around, to examine his wounds. He wanted to know if he bled badly, but his Guide would not let him speak.

So he staggered onward woodenly, impelled only by his Guide. Damn it , Thomas thought. If Karthenor doesn’t free me, he’ll use me up without knowing it .

Thomas imagined clutching Karthenor’s throat, imagined the revenge he’d extract when he got free.

Lord Felph clutched his glow globe so tightly, it lit like a star, and he rushed forward, excited, darting from side to side, glancing down each adjoining passage. He found a path that corkscrewed deeper into the city, till at last it opened onto a wide landing.

Here, a great battle had occurred. Dozens of dead dronon littered the floors, some with their carapaces split and spilling vile fluids. Sfuz lay among them, some crushed under Vanquishers’ battle arias.

But most corpses showed no external sign of damage. The limbs were horribly twisted and clenched, as happens when a creature suffocates. The air here was choked with smoke. Even now, hours after this battle, Thomas could hardly breathe. The corpses so cluttered this corridor-in many places stacked three or four deep.

In this battle, no one had emerged victorious.

Felph clambered over the bodies, forging down a long corridor whose sides rose up like canyon walls. Identical images had been carved in bas-relief on both stone walls: a birdlike creature, flying through flames, writhing in agony.

At the end of the corridor, the sfuz corpses lay piled so deep they blocked the passage ahead. Felph ran to them, climbed to the top of the heap, and pulled several dead sfuz away.

Thomas began clambering over the bodies, his feet sinking into the soft flesh, his hands punching into the warm fur as he dropped to all fours. The bodies shifted beneath his weight, making his feet sink in deeper, as if he climbed up sand.

Felph moved several bodies, enough to reveal a passage. Behind these corpses, in a darkened corridor, Thomas glimpsed a curtain of green light, green raindrops that glowed with their own light, falling into a vast pool.

“Here! Here!” Felph shouted. “The cisterns are here!”

Felph dropped his glow globe, pulled more sfuz aside.

Thomas suddenly felt as if he were being watched.

He spun, saw nothing but sfuz corpses, all lying so quietly. They terrified him. The sfuz, with their soft dark fur, felt warm, to his touch. Thomas knew they were warm because of fires that had burned here within the past hour or two. Marks from incendiary rifles scored the walls.

Yet Thomas feared that the sfuz would leap at his touch.

He couldn’t bear to pull at the corpses as Felph did. He felt trapped.

He whirled again, thought he caught a movement from the corner of his eye-the wispy gray shape of a sfuz, leaping away. But this shape had no body, only a shadow.

I’m imagining things , Thomas told himself.

Thomas shivered, looked down at his hand. His hand was on the belly of a sfuz, its legs curling helplessly up, like a dead spider’s. Its four eyes stared at him, undimmed in death. Perhaps this bothered him more than anything, to see these eyes, still glowing with life, even in death.

Up ahead, Felph finished pulling corpses away, began climbing down the bodies on the far side of the corridor. “Come on!” he shouted.

Thomas followed unwillingly, a human machine, scrambling over sfuz corpses, till he half-slid, half-tumbled down some bodies to stand beside Lord Felph at the opening of a vast chamber.

The green rain showered in a thin curtain before them, baffling his eyes so that Thomas could not see well beyond the opening of the chamber. Instead, his eyes were drawn to the curtain of dancing lights. The falling droplets made no sound as they dripped to the floor, nor did the huge droplets of light bounce on the stone and splinter under the impact.

Beyond this curtain of liquid light, Thomas could see an enormous cavern. The green rain did not fill the chamber. Instead it only showered along the wails, in a great irregular circle. From this, Thomas guessed that the far wall was back a quarter of a mile or more; the chamber rose hundreds of yards to the ceiling.