Lianshi looked at them both, pale-faced. “The hatred,” she whispered. “Did you feel that? She truly loathed us.”
“I know her,” said Scorio, tone wondering. “She’s a Red Lister, like me. Escaped at the same time I did. Nissa. She was…” He trailed off, shocked, unable to put his roiling emotions into words.
“A Red Lister?” Leonis let out a low whistle. “That’s not good. We need to tell someone.”
“No.” The intensity of Scorio’s emotions surprised him. “I mean - we can’t. About her, specifically. She was thrown down there with me. Showed me this list of names…”
The other two were staring at him strangely.
“Look, just let her… I don’t know. Be part of this revolution. If anyone has reason to be upset, it’s her, and…”
“You’re not making sense, Scorio,” said Lianshi. “She’s whipping that crowd into a mob. If she’s a Great Soul, then there’s no telling how dangerous that could get.”
“I know.” He raked his hands through his hair roughly. “It’s just that… what happened to me, it’s the same thing that happened to her. It wasn’t fair. And… I just want her to have a chance, you know? If the revolution gets crushed, she can be crushed with it. But the thought of handing her over to Praximar to be thrown back through the Final Door for another hundred lives is just… I can’t take on that responsibility.”
His friends exchanged a dubious glance, then slowly nodded.
“Regardless,” continued Leonis, “this anger in the street’s been building. Each time we come out, it’s gotten worse.”
Scorio nodded reluctantly. “Ever since the prophecy failed. And then Imogen’s attack. They know they’ve only got a decade left before Bastion is consumed. Doesn’t look like Praximar and the other Autocrators have been very good at working with them.”
Leonis rubbed at his beard. “You heard the man. He’s invited community leaders to attend the tournament celebrations, and the Houses are spending money on repairs and so forth in the city.”
Scorio resisted the urge to spit. “He says that, but I’ve not seen anything like that out here. And since none of the other students ever leave the Graveyards, how would anyone know better?”
“But they have to know this anger is out here,” said Lianshi, hurrying to catch up. “They have to know the people are upset.”
“Sure,” said Scorio. “The question is: do they care?”
“They might if they knew a Red Lister was riling them up,” said Lianshi quietly, but Scorio scowled and marched on. They continued in silence and reached the ruins shortly thereafter to work their way across the blasted urban landscape.
Other than a few deviations due to incipient dangers, they reached the monolithic bridge without trouble. Scorio ran steadily across, feeling no fatigue, his whole body thrumming with intent. This was it. This was the moment he’d been angling for, his sole hope, his outside chance of even being in the running.
As they reached the bridge’s far side, Scorio slowed, sensing that both his companions had done the same. Turning, he frowned at them. “What’s wrong?”
Lianshi was studying the ruins off to the left, while Leonis had turned completely around to stare behind them.
“Something is different,” said Lianshi. “Emberling senses. I can’t tell what, but something is close.”
“Same here,” said Leonis, “but I’m just feeling uneasy. The Coal mana in the area is incredibly dense. Feels like a beacon.”
“Feels like we’re being watched,” said Lianshi.
Scorio didn’t question them. Instead, he strode off the bridge, moving toward Nox’s collapsed mound.
The ground shivered, a slight tremble that caused fallen stone around them to grate in complaint.
“Earthquake?” asked Leonis.
Movement within the burrow. Nox. The toad came bounding out, his movements galvanic, frantic. “Favorite friends! Below! Below! Kushiwillow eating Black Stars!”
Kushiwillow. Scorio had never heard the term, but whatever it was had the Imperial Ghost toad fleeing instead of fighting it off. Scorio bared his teeth, felt his face flush as fury flooded him, and with a cry, he ran forward.
The ground shivered once more.
Nox leaped atop his plinth, cocked his blind head to one side. The toad’s whole body radiated alarm.
“That the kushiwillow?” yelled Leonis, rushing in behind Scorio. “It’s shaking the earth?”
“No,” said Nox, his voice suddenly very small, very quiet, very afraid. “That much worse. Alben Worm. Come for mana. Flee, favorite friends, flee!”
And with that Nox sprang into the air, an incredible leap that carried it clear from the tip of its plinth, across the square, and onto the closest rooftop.
The three of them froze.
“We need to get below,” choked out Scorio. “We need to protect the Black Stars.”
The ground shivered again.
“We need to get out of here, Scorio,” said Lianshi, tone strong, brassy with fear and conviction. “We need to run!”
“No!” Scorio’s voice shook, and his fingers twitched of their own accord. “Below! Now!”
Everything was happening too quickly, all at once. The air felt jellied, the red light from the sun-wire painting the world in blood, the shadows over-thick, the situation sliding so rapidly out of his control that Scorio wanted to scream. He turned toward the burrow, but a hand clasped his shoulder, held him fast.
With a snarl, Scorio wheeled about, went to knock the arm away, but saw Leonis’s expression. The large man was staring, aghast, at the square’s far side, where something was rising out of the ground.
Scorio felt nausea sweep through him as his throat cramped.
It was a massive white worm. It had somehow burrowed its way right out of the rock to rear up a good ten yards into the sky. Arms hung from its snout, pallid, human arms, whose fingers grasped and flexed as if in anticipation.
But it was the almost-human visage at the very tip of the worm’s snout that caught and held Scorio’s attention. Skin as pale as alabaster, eyes a peerless sky blue without iris or pupil, expressive brows, the scalp bald, the face that of an older man, wrinkled and aged.
But there was no snout. The worm’s head was the man’s torso, massive and muscular, and the seams of his mouth carved down his chest to where his waist blended with the worm’s body. A mouth that peeled open like a flap of raw flesh being flensed from the flank of a corpse, revealing the entire chest and abdomen to be the underside of its lower jaw, from which lolled a massive, sensual, and utterly repulsive tongue as thick as Scorio’s thigh.
“Alben Worm,” said Lianshi, tone lifeless. “We need… we need to go.”
She was right. But Scorio couldn’t. He was rooted to the spot. All his being was drawing him to the burrow, to where the kushiwillow was devouring his precious mana beads.
The Alben Worm licked its disgusting tongue about itself, leaving a glistening smear of slime over its pale flesh, and then began to surge forward, the rest of its body emerging from its hole.
“Damn it, Scorio,” shouted Leonis, tugging at his shoulder. “We need to leave, now!”
And then, there was a flicker of movement. A dark shape leaped off a rooftop, blurring through the air as it arced out, a languorous somersault that dropped it square in the Alben Worm’s path, the impact on stone causing a cloud of dust and debris to blast out.
Angular, black-formed, her tail lashing out with its wicked blade point, the Nightmare Lady stared at the approaching fiend.
“Go below!” she shouted, voice cracking out across the square like a whip. “Save your plants, Scorio. I’ll hold it off.”
Madness. Fierce as she was, the Nightmare Lady was dwarfed by the behemoth that was the Alben Worm. Its arms reached for her, the human visage leering spasmodically, blue eyes glowing with hunger.
Scorio hesitated. The Nightmare Lady could hold it back, couldn’t she? Give him just enough time to go below and fight off the kushiwillow? She was nimble, fast; she just had to keep it distracted for—what—five minutes? Leonis and Lianshi would help him turn the tide below, then they’d return, return in time to save Naomi—