You will not think me too big of a sissy, I hope, when I tell you that despite my lack of tear-ducts, I did my best to weep like a disappointed kindergartener. Well, in between bouts of coughing up blood.
The cable attached to the harpoon yanked tight again, dragging me back from the edge. Through the horrible agony I reached up to grab the rope as I struggled to roll onto my back where I had a chance to defend myself. I had no strategy. All I could think of was that I didn’t want anyone to yank on that barbed harpoon ever again until the universe ended.
Niloch was coming toward me past the creature who’d speared me, a squat, troll-like thug wearing a proud if unevenly-toothed grin. The commissar followed the tight, vibrating harpoon line like a child coming down to the tree on Christmas morning. His head had mostly regrown.
“And what do we have here?” Niloch murmured. “Oh, goodness me, oh, look! It is the Snakestaff creature, the one who ruined my beautiful, beautiful Gravejaw. I think that before we bring you back to the Mastema, we must make you answer for that, mustn’t we? I think all we have to do is bring back a good-sized portion of you to be tortured by the Inquisitorial Board, hmmm? The head and a few dependent bits, perhaps? And after we have played with it, the rest can go into the mortar for rebuilding Gravejaw. That would be appropriate, would it not, my rude little guest?”
It took me a moment to figure it out, because so many parts of me were sending back messages of terrible, overwhelming pain, but I was lying on my gun. I reached under myself as unobtrusively as I could, meanwhile closing my eyes as if I had just given up, trying to get Niloch to move closer. One shot left. It wouldn’t save me—there were too many other hunters behind the commissar—but I could at least take Niloch out.
When I thought I was in position to move quickly despite the pain, I tugged the revolver out from under me, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The noise was surprisingly loud for a place with no ceiling, the echoes snapping back off the cylindrical walls, over and over. It hurt a lot to roll and move so violently, so quickly, but it would have all been worth it if I hadn’t missed.
Niloch didn’t seem disturbed that a bullet had just flown past his bony head. “Tch,” he said. “So unpleasant. First you destroy my sweet hounds, now you would attack me, too? For doing my civic duty? Shame on you, Snakestaff, shame.”
I think the rattling noise was him laughing, but I was a bit distracted by the glow now hovering in the air just behind him. Several of Niloch’s nearest soldiers were also staring. At first it was only a fizzle, no more than the smolder of a road flare, but then that fizzle suddenly dove down toward the ground, leaving an unstable streak of light hanging in the air. Just as Niloch himself realized that something was happening, a glowing hand appeared from the jagged, midair stripe of light; a second later Smyler bounded out of nothingness and onto the bridge beside Niloch. Even as the commissar opened up his bony jaw to shout an order, and well before his astonished soldiers could do anything, Smyler grabbed Niloch and jammed his four-bladed knife into the commissar’s neck, then began to twist it around in a way that couldn’t have been pleasant even for an arch-demon. Niloch screeched in pain and surprise. His men came crowding in around him, trying to pull loose the scrawny thing, but they couldn’t get a decent grip. Smyler was literally climbing around on Niloch, clinging like the commissar was a bunch of bananas and he was some kind bionic-murder monkey.
I realized I was staring at all this with my mouth open when I should be running like crazy. I tried to get up, but the heavy rope still ran from the harpoon in my chest and all the way back into the melee, and now it was wound around several people. Every tug as they fought with Smyler made the harpoon twist in my bloody chest, an agony I won’t insult with the weak word “pain.”
“Now it sees!” Smyler screeched from the middle of the tangle. Niloch’s men were fighting desperately to free their master, but they were limited by the narrowness of the bridge and Smyler’s astonishing, horrifying quickness. “It sees now. The reason. You are the reason. That is why you came before you should—it sees!”
At the edge of the fight, the demon soldier holding my harpoon suddenly grunted, staggered, then tumbled off the bridge in a spray of his own blood. I had only a split-instant to brace myself against being yanked over with him, but to my grateful astonishment the rope lay slack on the bridge, a bloody meat spider still clutching its far end: the harpoonist had gone, but his hand had stayed behind, thanks to Smyler’s crazy knifework.
Given a second’s reprieve, I did my best to break the rope, because I couldn’t run with that thing trailing behind me. It was going to be bad enough with the harpoon still waggling around in there, probably tearing the shit out of my demon lungs and demon heart. As I struggled to free myself, I backed carefully away from the melee. The space left by the harpoon-demon’s sudden exit had given Smyler more room to work, and work he did. It was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and I don’t care if you pardon the expression.
Imagine a world-class but spastic ballet dancer. Now run the video in your head about three or four times faster, and try to imagine that ballet dancer carries a long sharp blade, and when it uses that blade on flesh it believes it’s praying. I have never seen anything so horribly brutal that I could also call beautiful. I know it sounds weird, but it was art, like the wildest improvised solo you’ve ever heard spun out, sped up, and then landing at the end with a crash right back on the main riff. Everything happened so quickly it was hard to tell it wasn’t planned. But nobody, not even a demon, ever planned to die like that, on the murderous blade of that giggling, rubbery thing.
Two more of Niloch’s soldiers staggered bleeding off the bridge into nothingness. The whole pack of them now were converging on my unexpected savior like piranha in a feeding frenzy, but I didn’t think it was Smyler’s blood I saw fountaining in the air, or Smyler’s fingers and ears flying out of the scrimmage.
“Run!” he shouted. “Run, angel!” Then, as if to prove Smyler’s kind intent, something else came flying out of the ruckus and rolled to a stop near my feet, blood dribbling from it to join my own good-sized puddle. It was Niloch’s long, skull-like head, the jaws snapping at nothing, slow as a dying crab. The wet red eyes rolled up, and it saw me. Somehow, despite no longer being attached to larynx or lungs, it said in a near-whisper, “I . . . will . . . !”
I didn’t think, just stomped on it as hard as I could, feeling the bones smash beneath my foot. “Shut up,” I said, then kicked the broken, oozing lump off the bridge. “Just. Shut up.”
I ran then, although it was more like hobbling, blood and brain matter still oozing out of the back of my skull, clutching the harpoon stuck through my chest in both hands to minimize the horrible pain from its every movement—a picture William Blake might have painted after a really bad Saturday night. I ran until the bellows and squeals of Niloch’s soldiers had fallen away behind me, then ran on, through a darkness I can’t even remember now. I vaguely recall reaching the elevator, but I think I kept running even after that, throwing myself blindly against the sides of the coffin-shaped box until I understood I was safe, or at least as safe as I’ll ever be in this life, until I could finally say the words Temuel taught me and lay aside my demon body, until I could leave Hell behind me and surrender to blessed, blessed blackness.
I’ve never seen Smyler again since the Neronian Bridge. I don’t know whether he survived. I’m not sure how I feel about that, but I am sure that he saved me when nothing else but God Himself could have done it.