Mark Newton - The Book of Transformations

Her left leg ached from the fall, but she ignored it, removing the scarves of the strangers — two men and a woman — and recognized none of them. The female did not fit the description of Shalev at all. They were all still alive, so she heaped their bodies in the corner and ripped the now empty hessian sack into strips. She bound them tightly around their wrists and ankles.

Scooping up the discarded sword she sprinted around to the front of the structure, where citizens were pouring out from the iren’s main entrance and into the wide Maerr Gata. Three of the recently spawned beasts were attacking people as they fled.

Lan drew on her reserves of energy, and projected herself into the air. She made a huge arc and came down on top of one of the beasts, driving her sword through the back of its skull: the thing heaved, groaned and shuddered into stillness. As she stumbled around to its front, people lurched away in horror — there was a human leg hanging out of the beast’s jaw, and four corpses lying around in close proximity, each with a limb missing. At least the military was present and they were busy escorting people away to safety, apparently unconcerned with stopping the beasts.

Another beast was dispatched in the same way: a sword to the skull, blood pooling across the cobbles, and this time blood beetles arrived in their droves. Rarely up this many levels of the city, the insects were a glossy black tide devouring chunks of flesh and feasting on blood.

The final beast gave more of a fight. It threw itself at her; Lan jumped, drew up her legs so she was almost horizontal and thrust the sword into the side of its head. It wasn’t quite dead; she hadn’t used enough force. With a gaping wound, the creature hobbled in a circle, unable to control its movements. Spasmodically, it snapped at anyone nearby. Lan skipped up onto its back, fell to one knee and drove the blade through the thick hide on the top of its neck. The thing collapsed with a thunderous wheeze. She faced the front of the iren, this glorious structure of modernity, and she noticed that two black banners were now fluttering down from one of the windows.

How have the anarchists got there, too?

She ran towards the entrance, shoving her way through the crowds and, when it became too congested, stepping up through the air to run above them. She descended to land by the main entrance, by two sets of open double doors.

Lan paused in shock to regard the horror.

The opening event had been turned to carnage. Blood pooled thickly on the ground whilst crossbow bolts showered down from the tiers above, hitting innocents and the ravening monsters alike. There was screaming and chaos as the surreal hellions lunged and surged across the marbled floors, snapping at any pieces of moving flesh, sliding in the blood, and tearing apart whatever they could fit into their maws.

Vuldon was making his presence felt. He was at the far end of the ground floor, a sword swinging in each hand, lashing out at the vile freaks. Tane seemed to be everywhere at once, using his speed and agility to haul people out of the way of certain death, and raking his claws repeatedly through the beasts’ thick hides to render them useless.

The creatures, while vicious, succumbed quite easily; they possessed little awareness or control, nothing in the way of guile. The creatures died, one by one, and very quickly there was just the aftermath, people sobbing, the injured calling for aid and a mass of blood and bone scattered across the once pristine floor. There were around twenty of the monsters, each considerably bigger and broader than Vuldon. He dragged the carcasses into a heap while Tane stood idly, drenched in blood that wasn’t his, contemplating the event with something akin to disbelief on his face. Up above, Emperor Urtica stumbled forward from his military shelter overlooking the blood-soaked scene.

Although some distance away, Lan could tell how horrified the man was. A skylight suddenly shattered. Glass buckled and fell in large shards to disintegrate on the marble surface, while purple light flared in the gap; and down came a solitary figure, a woman with no hair, her dark cloak fluttering as she drifted softly to the floor on a line of light. Shalev.

On his lofty tier, Urtica recoiled into his metal shell and Lan sprinted towards the criminal cultist, desperate to intercept her. Vuldon and Tane were already running to protect the Emperor, yelling ‘Get him the fuck to safety!’ and urging the guards back, whilst snipers fired at Shalev to stop her.

The woman crouched to one knee, drew up a bent arm as if for protection, and then flicked some device with her other hand. The bolts pinged off an invisible field, and pausing on their rebound, as if time was stilled, they fell harmlessly to the side.

Lan darted in front of Shalev, around thirty paces away, the Emperor somewhere above and behind. Shalev stood up and pointed a relic at the protective box of soldiers. Lan tuned into the apparatus installed within her body, the same field that pushed away fire, allowed it to layer and accumulate within her until she felt she would burst, and waited.

As Shalev detonated her relic, Lan jumped upwards and held out her arms and released all her pent-up energy, shuddering in mid-air.

An aggressive pulse spat out from her hovering form and intercepted the flash of light extending from Shalev’s relic. Lan felt as if her breath was being sucked from her body. She convulsed, allowing the internal, implanted mechanisms to take over.

Lan saw purple sparks.

Heard screams.

Her world faded to black.

Fulcrom found the priest later that day. A messenger brought immediate news of his return to the hotel, and Fulcrom sped across the city on foot, under brooding, darkening skies.

‘Ulryk,’ Fulcrom said from the doorway of his room. ‘What the hell have you been doing? You set the dead free.’

The priest seemed unsurprised, and sighed. ‘You have noticed, I see.’

‘Damn right I’ve noticed,’ Fulcrom snapped, ‘as have a good slice of the populace.’

The priest turned away sheepishly, meandered back to stoke the fire. He waved Fulcrom in, and the investigator closed the door behind him.

Bizarre pieces of vellum were scattered about the room, as were half-melted candles wedged into bottles. Fulcrom glanced at some of the parchments, many of which were nailed to the wall, some stuck to the window, but he couldn’t even recognize the text on them let alone read them. He was no expert on such matters, but the ductus of the script seemed utterly alien on some pieces, yet on others was vaguely familiar, a distant echo of Jamur. Arcane symbols and sketches and woodcuts crowded him.

Ulryk continued poking the flames absent-mindedly.

‘Why the hell did you do… whatever it was you did to bring such spirits to the city?’ Fulcrom demanded.

‘It was not, admittedly, my original intention,’ Ulryk replied. ‘I hope I have not done anything illegal. You are not here to arrest me, are you?’

Fulcrom chuckled glumly. ‘I’m not sure what I’d arrest you for exactly.’

‘Very well,’ Ulryk replied. ‘If you are not here to do so, would you at least like some tea? We make it quite differently out in the east.’ Ulryk moved towards a small pot kettle hanging above the fire.

‘Tea, yeah,’ Fulcrom said. ‘And then you can tell me about what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, because I thought I just showed you around an old library, not to new levels of existence.’

‘That shows how much the people of the city know about their own libraries,’ Ulryk replied. Eventually, with a cloth covering his hands, he carefully lifted the pot to one side, and poured the tea into small porcelain cups.

He handed one to Fulcrom, who took a sip. It was one of the tastiest drinks he’d ever consumed, warming and soothing. Fulcrom was forced to let his inner rage calm a little.