Paul Witcover - The Emperor of all Things

These stones, half again as tall as a man, stood straight and true, as if they had been erected yesterday. There were twelve of them, irregular in shape but evenly spaced, forming a circle that must have been at least fifteen yards in diameter. They had been polished to an extraordinary shine, like obsidian; yet they did not seem to reflect the light of the mushrooms so much as swallow it, giving them the look of empty, gaping holes, doorways cut into the air. There was something familiar about the shapes of the stones, but he could not quite bring it to mind.

What held Quare frozen in place despite Tiamat’s clear instructions to make for the centre of this strange and imposing edifice was less the shock of coming upon such a thing deep below the metropolis of London than the sight of her at work amidst the mushrooms, single-handedly fighting what appeared to be at least a dozen robed figures. They looked like monks in heavy brown cassocks but moved more like soldiers … or, rather, like seasoned regulators: men trained to fight and to kill with brutal economy and grace. Yet they might have been blind bumblers compared with the grey-clad demon who moved among them like a tiger – or, he thought, like a dragon.

He had never seen such fighting skill. He had never imagined it. Even Longinus would have stood no chance against her – and he was by far the best swordsman Quare had ever faced. She fought with a peculiar short sword in one hand and a long dagger in the other. The two weapons wove about her in a blur that no assailing blade or whip – for the men fought with both swords and braided ropes worn about their waists like cinctures – could penetrate. Yet notwithstanding the completeness of her defence, she somehow found or made opportunities to go on the attack. And in this she was more impressive still, as the blood of her enemies attested. She was in constant motion, her entire body a weapon: darting, tumbling, leaping, at times seeming almost to fly. Her speed was uncanny; there were moments it seemed that her opponents were standing still. This was death-dealing brought to the highest level of art … or even beyond art, to a kind of mechanized perfection. It was beautiful and terrible to watch. Her brown-robed adversaries were brave: they did not cry out, did not make any sound at all, as if they had taken vows of silence. They continued to fight even after it must have been plain to them that they stood no chance. Quare could not help but pity them. Yet he did not tear his eyes away as they fell like stalks of wheat before a merciless scythe.

So engrossed was he in this consummate display of killing craft that he forgot about the pursuing Morecockneyans until a crossbow bolt clattered off the wall beside him. Looking back, he saw a group of palely glowing men charging up the passage – which, luckily for him, was so narrow as to compel them to come in single file. That was why he had faced only a single bolt rather than half a dozen. But his pursuers would soon have ample room to spread out and fire upon him without fear of shooting each other. Cursing under his breath, he turned and ran into the cavern, making for the circle of stones.

It was not easy to run through the mushrooms; his boots crushed them into a slick paste that made every step perilous. His progress consisted more of slipping and sliding than it did of running. But he managed – just – to keep his feet. The constant rain of glowing spores from above, added to those stirred up by his passage, had soon turned his grey clothing into a suit of light. He could not help breathing the spores in; their brightness seemed to concentrate inside him, coming together into a single point of light behind his breast, hot and focused as a small sun, and it occurred to him that he might be turning into a spore himself and would soon float up from the ground. But then he thought that must be the influence of his fever rather than any transformation effected by the spores.

As he ran, too intent on keeping his balance to spare a backward glance for his pursuers, one of the remaining brown-robed men noticed him and broke away from Tiamat, angling towards him through the field of mushrooms. He was not glowing as Quare and Tiamat were; the brown robes, it seemed, were proof against the shining of the spores, which winked out like sparks settling on water upon alighting there. Quare did not think he would reach the stone circle before the man was upon him, and in any case he had no reason to believe the monument would afford him any protection from attack. Tiamat had told him that she had come this way to find him; he wondered how – assuming that were true – she had managed to avoid these silent, stalwart defenders. It was beginning to look as though he would not have the opportunity to ask her, however, for the man was close enough now that Quare could make out his features: a bulbous nose, dark eyes that regarded him with fierce, unreasoning hatred, lips bared in a soundless howl, displaying teeth filed to sharp points and an empty space where a tongue should have been. The man had lost his sword in the fight with Tiamat but was whipping his cincture in a wicked circle over his head as he came on; the thick hempen rope, Quare saw now, had an iron clasp at the end. It filled the air with a low, ominous thrumming that he felt in the very marrow of his bones.

As he tried to swerve aside, Quare’s feet shot out from under him and he went down, hearing, even as he fell, something whistle past his head. He hit hard and slid on one hip through the mushrooms, still moving in the direction of his attacker – who, he was certain, would have gathered the cincture back by now and made ready to cast it anew. But when he had slowed sufficiently to look up again, holding his bloody, rag -wrapped stump out before him as if to deflect the blow by a mute appeal to the loss he had already suffered, he saw, instead of the iron clasp descending towards his skull, his attacker falling backwards, clawing at a crossbow bolt buried in his throat. Had Quare not slipped when he had, the bolt would have struck him between the shoulder blades.

The stone circle was close now: no more than fifteen or twenty yards away. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen those shapes before. They were the same as the symbols on the hunter. And, like those symbols, the more he tried to focus upon them, the shakier they became, like living things intent on eluding his grasp, even if it were only visual. The stones, he realized, were moving, vibrating, spinning so fast that they appeared to be standing still.

He tried to pick himself up and go on, but he had landed badly, twisting his ankle, and it would not support him. Nor, he found, did he have the strength to crawl. He felt weak as a newborn babe. He lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling of the cavern, which was lost in the sunny glow of the mushrooms growing there and in the steady downward drift of spores. There was something restful about it, like lying at the bottom of a huge hourglass as warm golden sand trickled down to cover him.

Then he was being lifted in strong arms. It was Tiamat. She did not speak, but swept him up and ran for the stone circle, shielding him with her body. Quare felt the jolt of crossbow bolts hitting home – once, twice, three times – and each time she was struck, Tiamat grunted in pain … but it was a sound that did not have much that was human about it, not at first and even less each subsequent time he heard it, as if she were casting her humanity aside like a hindering cloak, shrugging out of it as she ran. And indeed the arms that held him seemed to be changing, becoming larger, fingers lengthening into claws, the grey costume of Grimalkin toughening into leathery skin.

But was Tiamat shedding some fleshly disguise, or, instead, was the stone circle stripping it from her, skinning her alive? For the closer they drew to it, the more the air resisted them, as if the spinning stones had conjured a wind, a gale that pushed back unrelentingly. Tiamat snarled and pressed on. It seemed to Quare that she was trying to force herself through a space too small to admit her, a narrow opening or channel in the world … or rather out of it, the sides of which were scraping her raw. And yet the shape that was emerging seemed larger by far than what had contained it. It made no sense. Quare could not tell any longer what was real and what the product of his fever. The spores that had been falling like a gentle dusting of sand now pelted them like hailstones, forcing him to bury his head in the crook of his bandaged arm. Then he heard Tiamat snarl again as her body shuddered with the impact of more bolts than he could count. She gathered herself and, with a deafening roar, gave a mighty leap.