She groped for the light switch. Crane said sharply, “Don’t.”
Lily lowered her hand. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Too late. Too late for both of us, I’m afraid. I have my spies too, you know. Little Flea had a Littler Flea on her back when she visited the museum yesterday.”
I could run
, Lily thought.
But then, would he shoot me?
Hard to think. The chemical stench was making her dizzy.
“We know what we are,” Crane said. “That makes this easier.”
“Makes
what
easier?”
“Think of us,” Crane said wetly. He coughed, bent double for a moment, straightened before Lily could take advantage of his weakness. “Think of us together all these years, Big Flea and Little Flea, and to what end? What have I accomplished, Lily? Diverted a few weapons shipments, shared state secrets, did my small part to keep the civilian government preoccupied with wars or doctrinal disputes, and now the battle is being waged…” He made a gesture that might, in the darkness, have been a shrug. “Far from here. My god, why hast thou forsaken me?”
“That’s not funny.”
“I agree. I’m changing, Little Flea, and I don’t know why.”
He stood up and came a little closer to the lamp — to the pistol. He let his long overcoat fall away. The stench intensified. Lily was able to see the pebbled skin beneath the tattered shirt, the pustulant eruptions, the skin of his face separating like torn tissue paper. His skull had begun to take on a new outline, the jaw thrusting forward, the braincase writhing beneath islands of blood and hair and thick yellow plasm.
Lily gasped.
“As bad as that, Little Flea? I don’t have a mirror. But yes, I suppose it is that bad.”
Her hand groped for the door.
“Run,” he said, “and I’ll shoot you. I really will. Point of honor. So let’s make it a game instead.”
She was as frightened as she had ever been — as frightened as she had been that dreadful night in Fayetteville. Then, the enemy had at least appeared human. Crane didn’t, not anymore, not even in this dim light.
She breathed, “A game?”
“Forget how I look, Little Flea. That wasn’t supposed to happen, I think, at least not yet. I have no control over it. Oddly, neither does my god.”
“What god?”
“My absent god. Absent. That’s the problem. That still, small voice falls silent. Busy elsewhere, I suspect. Unscheduled emergencies. Your people’s work. But this…
process
…” He held out his blistered hands. “It
hurts
, Little Flea. And as much as I pray for a little relief… those prayers aren’t answered.”
He paused to cough, a long liquid spasm. Drops of something pink and watery landed on the desk, the carpet, her blouse.
Now
, Lily thought, but her legs felt paralyzed.
“Before long,” Crane said, “I won’t be myself anymore. I should have known. The gods, whatever else they may be, are hungry. Above all else. They don’t want Matthew Crane to survive any more than they want
you
to live, Little Flea. So you see the position I’m in.”
He took another shambling step forward. His legs bent in the wrong places. Flesh cracked with each step; yellow bile leaked out of his cuffs.
“A contest. The pistol is loaded and ready to fire. Ugly as these fingers of mine are, they can still pull a trigger. And so can yours, of course. I’m not as agile as I might have been, but you’re not young, either, Little Flea. I reckon you’ve entered the support-hose and orthopedic-shoe stage of a woman’s life, correct? Maybe you’re even a little arthritic on damp nights. You don’t care to run for a bus these days.”
All true.
“A game. Called ‘grab the pistol.’ I think the odds are more or less fair. Just don’t wait for me to say
go
.”
She didn’t. Lily moved at once, one furious step after another, but it was like running in a dream; her limbs were dead weight; she was under water.
She saw the pistol in its circle of light, gloss black on buffed mahogany, lamplight catching the notches and angles of the weapon in bright constellations.
The stench of Crane’s transformation was thick in the air. He made a sound Lily barely heard, a shrill animal screech.
Her right hand touched the grip of the pistol. It slid away from her a precious inch. She felt Crane’s proximity now, a sulphurous heat.
But suddenly the pistol was hers. She closed her fingers on the grip. She took a step backward from the desk, tripped on a heel, found herself sitting on the blood-stained carpet with the pistol in both shaking hands, holding it in front of her like a dime-store crucifix.
Matthew Crane — the thing that had once been Matthew Crane — reared up before her. The desk lamp fell sideways, raking harsh light across his blistered face. His eyes were cherry red, the pupils narrow black slits. “
Little Flea!”
he cried. “
Good work!”
She fired the pistol. Her aim was low. The bullet clipped a rib, spraying a gout of bloody substance against the far wall. Crane reeled backward, supporting himself on a rack of congressional reports. He looked down at his wound, then back at Lily.
She stood up cautiously.
He smiled — if that was meant to be a smile — past the stumps of his teeth.
“Don’t stop now, Little Flea,” he whispered. “For god’s sake don’t stop now.”
She didn’t. She didn’t stop until the pistol was empty, not until what remained of Matthew Crane was motionless on the floor.
Chapter Forty
A spasm of mortar fire collapsed what remained of the Dome of the Well. Vast intact slabs of shaped rock fell and shattered, lofting pillars of dust into the autumn air. Guilford advanced through the rubble, rifle in hand. His wounds were grave and his breathing was ragged and painful. But all his limbs worked and his mind was as clear as could be expected under the circumstances.
A reef of cloud had drifted in from the mountains, turning the day cold and wet. Drizzle chilled the City and painted the ruins a drab, slick black. Guilford darkened his face with a handful of mud and imagined himself blending into these tortured angles of broken stone. The enemy had abandoned order and were stalking the human intruders almost at random — an effective strategy, since there was no guessing which corner might conceal a demon. Only their stench betrayed them.
Guilford put his head around an intact foundation stone and saw one of the monsters less than a dozen yards away.
This one had left its human origins far behind. The transformation was nearly complete: it stood over seven feet tall, its rounded skull and razor jaws similar to the specimen Sullivan had shown him in the Museum of Monstrosities. It was systematically dismembering a man who had stumbled into its clutches — no one Guilford knew personally, small consolation though that was. It razored the body apart, inspecting and discarding the pieces methodically while Guilford choked back nausea and took careful aim. When the monster reared back with some fresh nugget of human flesh, he fired.
A clean shot to the pale and vulnerable belly. The monster staggered and fell — wounded, not dead, but it didn’t seem able to do more than lie on its back and flex its claws in the air. Guilford sprinted across a field of granite dust toward the collapsed Dome, anxious to find fresh cover before the sound attracted more of the creatures.
He discovered Tom Compton crouched behind a half wall, hand clutched to his throat.
“Bastards almost took my head off,” the frontiersman said. He spat a red globule into the dust.
So we can still bleed
, Guilford thought.
Bleed the way we did at Belleau Wood. Bleed the way we did when we were human.
He took Tom’s arm. “Can you walk?”
“I hope so. Too fuckin’ soon to give up the ghost.”
Guilford helped him up. The throat wound was vicious, and the frontiersman’s other injuries were just as grave. Faint light flickered from his ruined body. Fragile magic.
“Quiet now,” Tom warned.
They topped a hill of rubble, all that remained of the Dome that had stood for ten thousand years in the silence of this empty continent. Rifle fire popped frantically to the north and west.
“Head down,” Tom cautioned. They inched forward, breathing dust until their mouths were sandpaper and their throats rusted pipes.
I remember you
, Guilford thought: Tom Compton, the First Sergeant who had dragged him through the wheat field toward Château-Thierry, pointlessly, because he was dying… Over these knives of granite until they saw the Well itself, brighter than Guilford remembered it, radiant with light, its crumbling perimeter guarded by a pair of vigilant monsters, their eyes swiveling with a fierce intelligence.
Elias Vale was still able to hold and fire an automatic rifle, though his fingers had grown clumsy and strange. He was changing in ways he preferred not to think about, changing like the men around him, some of whom were no longer even remotely human. But that was all right. He was close to the Well of the Ascension, doing sacred and urgent work. He felt the close proximity of the gods.
His eyesight had been subtly altered. He found he could detect faint motion in dim light. His other senses, too. He could smell the salt-pork smell of the attackers. The rain falling on his pebbled skin was both cold and pleasing. The sound of rifle fire was acutely loud, even the rattle of pebbles a symphony of discrete tones.
More acute, too, was the sense that had attracted the gods to him in the first place, his ability to peer at least a small distance into a human soul. The beings attacking the Sacred City were only partly human — partly something much older and larger — but he felt the shape of their lives, every poignancy and tension and secret vulnerability. That skill might still be useful.
His rifle was not his only weapon.
He huddled behind a granite block while two of the more thoroughly transformed men patrolled the rim of the Well. He felt — but it was indescribable! — the immense living energy of this place, the gods imprisoned in the nonspace deep in the earth, straining at physical incarnation.
An army of them.
And he felt the presence of two half-mortal men approaching from the north.
He picked their names from the glowing air: Tom Compton. Guilford Law.
Ancient souls.
Vale clutched his rifle to his pustulant chest and smiled emptily.
Tom said, “I’ll circle left, draw them off with a couple of shots. You do what you can.”
Guilford nodded, watching his wounded friend scrabble away.
The Well was a pocket of algorithms embedded in the ontosphere, a pinprick opening in to the deeper architecture of the Archive. The god-Guilford’s only way in was through physical incarnation: he had needed Guilford to carry him here, but the battle inside the Well, the Binding, that was gods’ work.
But I’m tired
, Guilford thought.
I hurt.
And with the pain and the fatigue came a crippling nostalgia; he found himself thinking of Caroline, her long black hair and wounded eyes; of Lily, five years old, spellbound under the influence of Dorothy Gale and Tik-Tok; of Abby’s patience and strength; of Nicholas gazing at him with a trust he hadn’t earned or deserved, a trust soon breached… he wanted to bring it back, bring it all back, and he wondered if that was why the gods had built their Archive in the first place: this mortal unwillingness to surrender the past, lose love to crumbling atoms.
He closed his eyes and rested his cheek on a jut of wet stone. The light inside him flickered. Blood welled up from his wounds.
The sound of Tom’s rifle roused him.
At the eroded rim of the Well the two monsters swiveled their heads toward the sound of the gun. Tom fired again and one of the beasts screamed, a shriek nearly human in its pain and rage. Bile-green fluid spurted from the monster’s ruptured gut.
Guilford took advantage of the distraction to move another several yards closer to the Well, dodging between man-high columns of granite.
Now both creatures were moving, approaching the source of the gunshots at an oblique angle, offering their dorsal armor against the rifle fire. They were extraordinarily large, maybe specially-appointed guardians. Their walk — bipedal, fluidly balanced — was slow, but Guilford had learned to respect their speed. Claws and forearm mandibles were exposed, bone-white, glistening with rain. Their smaller lower arms, less arms than auxiliary knives, clattered restlessly.
The rain deepened from drizzle to downpour, sheets of it streaming off ancient stone, raising plumes of vapor from the Well.
The monsters weren’t affected by the rain. They paused and rocked their heads, a querulous birdlike gesture. The water gave their skins or shells a polished gleam, raising hidden colors, a rainbow iridescence that made Guilford think of his childhood, of washing pebbles in a brook to see their luster emerge from the dross of dust and air.
Closer now. He felt the heat of the Well, the burned-insulation reek of it.
Tom stepped into the open and fired another shot, maybe the last of his hoarded ammunition. Guilford used the opportunity the frontiersman created and ran for the rim of the Well, glancing backward.
Get away while you can
, he wanted to shout, but he saw Tom’s left leg buckle under him. The frontiersman dropped to one knee, managed to raise his rifle, but the nearest creature, the one he had wounded, was suddenly on him.
Guilford moaned involuntarily as the monster deftly nipped Tom’s head from his body.
The sheeting rain concealed all else. The air smelled of ozone and lightning.
He shouldn’t have stopped. The second monster had spotted him and was moving now at terrifying speed toward the Well, long legs pumping as efficiently as a leopard’s. Running, it made no sound audible over the hiss of the rain; but when it stopped it released a cloud of stinging solvent vapors, waste products of some unimaginable body chemistry. Its eyes, expressionless and strange, focused tightly on him.