The boundary between the Sisterhood and its ancient enemy passed behind her as Miriam skimmed the trees, eyes focused on the flawless, which were still wolfing down human-shaped bites.
The flawless were not half-breeds. These eel-headed hulks had erupted from bygone cisterns like ancient gods. As bewildering as it was that these fables should reveal themselves here and now, Miriam’s time for idle thought ended as her feet touched the ground. Her momentum carried her into a run.
On her left, marked out by their use of velvet guns, the last three of the spymaster’s handpicked agents were fighting alongside him. Fighting was inaccurate. What Alani and his agents were trying to do was slow the flawless down. It wasn’t working. The flawless moved unhindered, relentlessly eating their way through the last people standing. But they seemed distracted.
Miriam tried to understand what they were looking at. Her eyes rolled up.
It was the Odalisque.
Some of them reached into the sky, twenty feet or more, pawing. One tried to jump. It was futile. The ship was far out of reach.
Miriam looked away as she raced toward Caliph Howl. Combat was not the answer here. Her only goal was securing the High King. If he died, the chase for Sena would be over.
Miriam motioned toward Caliph’s idle form at the edge of the cement. Her ancillas, like her, were already sprinting toward him. Then, across the expanse of cement, Miriam locked eyes with the spymaster. She saw him through the mutant limbs of one towering flawless. His knives gleamed in his hands. The next instant, he held only one.
Miriam tried to steer her momentum but he had gauged his throw too well. The knife struck her like a brick. She went into a roll, tumbling over the slab. Clearly, he had seen her heading for the High King and misinterpreted her intent.
Miriam blinked. She was on the ground. Her body ached from several more or less vague locations. The knife still stuck in her back, point embedded in her shoulder blade. Gravity tugged it. So did her movements. When her scapula slid beneath her skin, the blade cut her again.
She reached back with her other hand and wrenched it out.
Already he was coming for her. Or was he?
She had never seen an old man move so fast, cutting a half-circle out from the tangle of enemies. Nearby, one of his remaining agents floated above the ground. Oozing bulbous tendrils around the monster’s upper jaw guided the agent to a quivering pink conclusion.
Miriam saw another flawless reach for the spymaster. Its arm stretched several yards but Alani’s feet hiccupped, popping him into a jump that propelled him just out of reach.
The spymaster wasn’t coming for her. He was running for Caliph Howl and her ancillas. His second knife had already left his hand. It was better aimed and took Medea in the back, through vital organs. She dropped instantly which pulled Anjie, Miriam’s second, up short.
Miriam cursed. She could read the stunned look of fear in Anjie’s eyes as the girl registered what had just happened. Anjie found the source of the knife. She understood who was coming for her.
Miriam’s diaglyphs calculated for her as she palmed the old assassin’s knife. The other qloin had touched down not far away and was trying to reach her from the direction of the palace. This was the agreed course of action, but when they met the flawless, the other qloin stopped dead.
Miriam’s dash toward the king faltered as her legs spasmed. Her body tensed under the shrieking sound of hydraulics. It was very close to that sound. One of the flawless had barked. The blast of sound put her on her kneepads. She skidded to a stop, hands over her ears. Her cheek coursed with blood.
She took two deep breaths but couldn’t hear a thing. Massive frog feet were moving toward her. The concrete cracked. In mundane dissociation with everything else, a colony of insects whose nest beneath the slab had been broken open, poured out like a spreading stain.
The flawless’ great weight had broken through the stone. It mounted a slab of jutting cement and looked in her direction.
Miriam got her legs moving. They carried her as if she clung to someone else’s back. In front of the pain there was fear and fear was the trigger for her training. Most of the hardwired responses—screaming, folding up in the fetal position—had been ripped out and replaced with other options. The one that served her best at the moment was run.
She hit the ground as hard and fast as she could. Both feet pounding. She looked back to see a curtain of metallic-gray skin stretch between phalanges and thighs. The enormous candy-sucker eyes glared at her as she tore over the cement. The singular horn of the flawless’ right hand pulled it into a leap, using the sundered skyward slab of concrete for leverage.
Airborne and impossible, like a dead tree in a cyclone, it hurled toward her.
When it landed, it broke the cement again, lifting a new section out of the ground. Miriam catapulted off the end, an athlete hoping to clear a chasm, sailing over the grass, trajectory uncertain. She flew past the desperate battle between her ancilla and the spymaster, toward the oblivious High King.
In an unintended excess of accuracy, she landed so close to Caliph Howl that she stumbled into him. The impact sent the sword in his hand dipping toward the ground. It made a dull, loud thump and steam or smoke rose from the sod.
He spun on her with a confused look in his face, thumb flicking the end of his weapon. It popped, crackled almost, and began humming again. He lifted it menacingly.
“King Howl, we have to—”
And then the silence was back, deeper and more profound. Her head felt like it was underwater. She lifted a hand to the side of her face. She was bleeding from her left ear and the sun had gone behind a shadow, as if the Odalisque had moved in front of it.
But it was not the Odalisque.
The High King’s jaw was set as he powered his black sword into a swing aimed just right of Miriam’s head.
Miriam dropped Alani’s knife and tried to get out of the way. What greeted her was the horn-like appendage of the flawless falling shy, spare inches, and lodging in the ground: incongruous as a giant stalactite taken from a cave and hurled into the sod. Maybe it was intentional. Maybe it was another act of the ancient Lua’groc leveraging its enormous body.
Maybe it had missed.
On the other side of the horn and the arm it was attached to, Alani had just driven his long-knife up below the creature’s sternum, under its alien rib cage.
The eel head gave no indication of pain. Its barbels flexed and Miriam felt her boots lift off the ground. The thing was levitating her into its mouth.
She cried out but Anjie could not assist. She had refocused on the king, determined to follow through with the plan, determined to get him out of here alive. Ignoring Alani’s knife, which was still buried presumably in its soft organs, the flawless opened its mouth to receive Miriam and at that instant the High King’s sword hit bone.
Miriam saw a flash of light. She went blind. Her eyebrows singed. Unable to see or hear, she lost all sense of balance. Her body promptly fell to the ground and slid down the slope. She smelled dirt and grass and felt loam pack itself under her nails.
She blinked, scrambling. On her feet again in an instant.
The world was coming back in bleached panorama, faded tints and shapes that gradually made sense.
She lurched back up the slope. Only a few feet. She hadn’t fallen far. The smoking body of the flawless had collapsed into a kind of massive tripod, bones and cooked flesh propped up somewhat by the weight of the limbs. The whole hideous shape seemed anchored by the creature’s horned hand: still stuck fast in the dirt.
Caliph Howl was clicking the end of his weapon but the thing no longer hummed. Its battery was spent. He looked drugged and did not seem to notice that the same massive electrical burst that had fried the Lua’groc had also charred his spymaster, who had been caught weapon in hand, fully intersecting the creature.