“It worked, didn’t it?” asked Leonis, smile shaky, then Lianshi grabbed him around the neck and hugged him tightly.
“It did work!” she said. “Brilliant!”
Naomi sniffed and turned to the door that had materialized beside them. “Scorio, you ready?”
“One moment,” he said, and exhaled. He closed his eyes and set to re-saturating his Heart. Again. Once more he felt a glimmer of bitterness, but he banished it and worked on the Coal mana in the room. Ignored the Copper, elusive and mercurial as it was. When his reservoir finally felt packed again, he gave another nod. “Let’s go.”
Naomi nodded curtly, touched her wounded hip in an almost absent-minded manner, and stretched up into her Nightmare Lady form. Tail coiled close behind her to avoid the ever-smashing blocks, she pressed through the archway into the blackness beyond, and was gone.
“Room six defeated,” said Leonis, catching his breath, a sheen of sweat gleaming on his brow. “Onto room seven.” And with that, he went through.
“We’re doing great,” said Lianshi, reaching out to squeeze Scorio’s arm, her smile nervous, encouraging. “We’re doing really, really well.”
“Don’t say that,” Scorio wanted to protest, her words somehow making him certain that tragedy awaited them in the next room. But then she stepped through the archway and was gone.
Deep breaths. A final glance at the smashing blocks, and then he, too, stepped through and into the seventh chamber.
Chapter 73
The stench in the next room was acrid, a pungent, burning smell that immediately caused Scorio to recoil and wrap his good arm over his mouth and nose. Eyes watering, he realized that he’d stepped through and onto a narrow ledge; beyond it, a forest of narrow stone stilts arose from a swirling pool of faintly luminous green liquid some fifty feet below, fumes rising noxiously from the eddying surface.
“Gah,” he protested into his sleeve, turning to glance at his friends. Lianshi was equally dismayed, but the Nightmare Lady seemed unperturbed. “Now they’re throwing stinky rooms at us? That’s just underhand.”
“Look,” said the Nightmare Lady, pointing a curved talon.
Scorio saw a cluster of leathery beasts hanging upside down from the rafters that crossed the ceiling, each perhaps three feet long, their wicked talons punched into the wood, their heads hidden behind their black wings.
“Great.” Scorio winced as he lowered his arm. “So we have to navigate over these poles to the far side of the room while fending off those creatures?”
“Ravenna would deal with them right from here,” said Lianshi, as Leonis stepped through and immediately gagged. “But we’ve no long-ranged attacks.”
“That’s what we get for all being heart-centered fools,” said Scorio, turning to examine the stilts. They were a uniform six inches or so across, rose to uneven heights, some clustered closely together, others standing in splendid isolation. “Look, see there? If you follow where the poles are closely gathered, they form a kind of winding path.”
“Making it twice as long to cross the room,” said the Nightmare Lady.
“More room for error.” Leonis had summoned Nezzar and propped it now on his shoulder. “If one of those… bats? Whatever they are, knock us off our pole, there’s a chance to grab at another.”
“They’ll have more time to knock us off, if we take the long way,” said the Nightmare Lady again.
“Or we could just focus on killing them,” said Scorio. “Then cross slowly and safely.”
Lianshi grimaced through the haze at where the beasts hung. “You’re assuming they only attack with their claws. What if they can, I don’t know, spit acid at us or the like?”
“Then this will be the room in which we die,” said Leonis with faux cheerfulness. “But I say we move slowly, carefully, and try to kill them as we go. If we find that to be a bad plan, then we just cross the room as quickly as possible.”
The Nightmare Lady stretched, reaching for the ceiling, then winced and recoiled down protectively over her wounded hip. “I’ll cross first. Draw their attention. You three make your way over when you see them focused on me.”
Scorio wanted to protest, but she was the most adept at this kind of terrain. “Fine. But no heroics. You find yourself overwhelmed, either make for the door or retreat to us.”
“How steady are these stilts?” Leonis reached out with Nezzar and tapped the closest one. The column shivered slightly but didn’t sway; immediately, however, the bat-like monsters stirred. “Steady enough.”
“Let’s go,” said Lianshi. “My eyes are starting to burn.”
The Nightmare Lady pointed. “I’ll go wide to the left. You head to the right along the denser area.”
“All right. Good luck out there.” Scorio paused, a second from igniting his Heart, and watched the Nightmare Lady as she moved as far down the ledge as she could before nimbly leaping out to the first pole.
She landed neatly, and several things happened at once.
For one, the pole immediately began to sink rapidly, forcing the Nightmare Lady to leap again. The second was the explosion of screeches that came from the bat-like creatures, who unfurled their wings and dropped into the air, revealing not furry, rat-like bodies, but rather bloated, baby-like torsos, their heads bulbous, eyes almost hidden between fat folds of flesh, their skin pitted, their mouths distending as they shrieked.
“Go!” shouted Scorio, igniting his Heart and leaping for the first pole, embracing his power so that his form warped mid-jump. He landed nimbly atop the narrow pole, and only his expectation that it would sink allowed him to keep his balance. The winged baby—monster—things swooped down at the Nightmare Lady, buffeting at her and lashing out with their claws. Out of the corner of his eye, Scorio saw her whip her tail at them as she scampered across the poles, leaping from one to the next with her incredible agility.
Scorio focused on his own path. Even in his enhanced form, the way was treacherous. Fortunately, the poles began to rise the moment he stepped off them, giving his companions a means to follow, but he hurried on, occasionally being forced to leap more than a yard from one narrow pole to the next, painfully aware of the huge drop into the green, glowing fluid below.
The Nightmare Lady screamed. Scorio glanced over, and saw her fall, only to catch hold of the pole as if it were a tree trunk, her talons sinking into the ancient stone. It continued its descent, but she simply leaped from it to the next, grabbing its body in a similar fashion. The winged monsters, prevented from getting at her by the profusion of poles, vented their frustration with more shrieks and then flew at the three of them.
“Here they come!” shouted Scorio and moved quicker, taking more daring leaps, striving to not use the more obvious poles to save them for his friends. Heart hammering, he lurched from one to the next, then ducked as the first fiend flew down at him.
Reflexively he flailed at it with his good arm, and nearly overbalanced as his claws connected; the impact nearly knocked him over, such was his surprise at striking true. The baby monster burst into green liquid, as if its bloated body were little more than a thin skin stretched to breaking over its oozing innards.
A blanket of white, enervating light settled over his shoulder, arm, and side, and he felt his robes burning away, felt his flesh begin to smolder and sear. With a cry he yanked his upper robe off, his movements clumsy with his bad arm, his whole body swaying atop his sinking pillar, but then he had the acid-soaked garment off and tossed it away, to drop flapping and burning to the pool far below.
“Scorio, jump!” shouted Lianshi, and with a jerk, he saw that he’d already dropped some ten feet. Around him were the pitted and scored sides of the pillars. Panicked, he leaped at the closest one, sank his claws into its surface, and wrapped his legs around it at the same time.