The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,219

from Tiamat, angling towards him through the field of mushrooms. He was not glowing as Quare and Tiamat were; the brown robes, it seemed, were proof against the shining of the spores, which winked out like sparks settling on water upon alighting there. Quare did not think he would reach the stone circle before the man was upon him, and in any case he had no reason to believe the monument would afford him any protection from attack. Tiamat had told him that she had come this way to find him; he wondered how – assuming that were true – she had managed to avoid these silent, stalwart defenders. It was beginning to look as though he would not have the opportunity to ask her, however, for the man was close enough now that Quare could make out his features: a bulbous nose, dark eyes that regarded him with fierce, unreasoning hatred, lips bared in a soundless howl, displaying teeth filed to sharp points and an empty space where a tongue should have been. The man had lost his sword in the fight with Tiamat but was whipping his cincture in a wicked circle over his head as he came on; the thick hempen rope, Quare saw now, had an iron clasp at the end. It filled the air with a low, ominous thrumming that he felt in the very marrow of his bones.

As he tried to swerve aside, Quare’s feet shot out from under him and he went down, hearing, even as he fell, something whistle past his head. He hit hard and slid on one hip through the mushrooms, still moving in the direction of his attacker – who, he was certain, would have gathered the cincture back by now and made ready to cast it anew. But when he had slowed sufficiently to look up again, holding his bloody, rag-wrapped stump out before him as if to deflect the blow by a mute appeal to the loss he had already suffered, he saw, instead of the iron clasp descending towards his skull, his attacker falling backwards, clawing at a crossbow bolt buried in his throat. Had Quare not slipped when he had, the bolt would have struck him between the shoulder blades.

The stone circle was close now: no more than fifteen or twenty yards away. Suddenly he remembered where he had seen those shapes before. They were the same as the symbols on the hunter. And, like those symbols, the more he tried to focus upon them, the shakier they became, like living things intent on eluding his grasp, even if it were only visual. The stones, he realized, were moving, vibrating, spinning so fast that they appeared to be standing still.

He tried to pick himself up and go on, but he had landed badly, twisting his ankle, and it would not support him. Nor, he found, did he have the strength to crawl. He felt weak as a newborn babe. He lay on his back, gazing up at the ceiling of the cavern, which was lost in the sunny glow of the mushrooms growing there and in the steady downward drift of spores. There was something restful about it, like lying at the bottom of a huge hourglass as warm golden sand trickled down to cover him.

Then he was being lifted in strong arms. It was Tiamat. She did not speak, but swept him up and ran for the stone circle, shielding him with her body. Quare felt the jolt of crossbow bolts hitting home – once, twice, three times – and each time she was struck, Tiamat grunted in pain … but it was a sound that did not have much that was human about it, not at first and even less each subsequent time he heard it, as if she were casting her humanity aside like a hindering cloak, shrugging out of it as she ran. And indeed the arms that held him seemed to be changing, becoming larger, fingers lengthening into claws, the grey costume of Grimalkin toughening into leathery skin.

But was Tiamat shedding some fleshly disguise, or, instead, was the stone circle stripping it from her, skinning her alive? For the closer they drew to it, the more the air resisted them, as if the spinning stones had conjured a wind, a gale that pushed back unrelentingly. Tiamat snarled and pressed on. It seemed to Quare that she was trying to force herself through a space too small to admit her, a