for it with exaggerated sluggishness. She had kept it close in anticipation of the formula that would help Caliph win. She had been planning to perform it . . . right now . . . or earlier. She couldn’t remember. Why hadn’t she done it earlier? Instead of wandering aimlessly through the castle halls?
She didn’t know.
She pried the potion’s cap off like a clumsy drunk and watched the crimson fluid purl upward in the air. That shouldn’t be happening, she thought dreamily.
A shadow, like a brushstroke, had appeared beside her. It hung just above the left side of the battlement in her peripheral sight, smoky and gaunt and curled. Black, with a vague wisp of white hair and within it, a hint of cimmerian eyes, burning through the cold, staring across the empty gulf between the tourelle and the thing that boiled on the wall.
“Nathan?” she asked. But the specter only watched. Sena felt like laughing, everything was so bizarre. She opened her mouth to speak, trying to gather holojoules from the weightless potion. Panic. She couldn’t breathe. The heavy invisible slime poured into her mouth. Into her nose and throat. She couldn’t speak. She struggled. She thought she heard an old man humming far away.
Sena twisted as her feet came loose from the stone. She flailed. Floating. Fighting for her life. She couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she began to choke. As the jellied air poured in, deep inside her throat, she felt something bite.
On the side of the castle, the godling-stain bubbled, a black honeycomb of flesh pouring from its hole, plasmoid, tentacular, hideously fast, a complex mollusk unfolding.
The black pseudopodia foamed toward her, silent as thrown ink, glistening with deep cribriform patterns. There was a burst of prurient pink, an outward thrust of bright color trimming those impossible lobes. The pseudopodia didn’t move in concert. They were not like the anemones from Desdae’s biology labs or any other creature with a cognizant grasp. The outpouring flesh, if it was flesh, moved like an abruption . . . like something that had exploded from a wound. Mentally, Sena screamed.
The blood potion floated in front of her like the glowing tube at Grouselich Hospital, the disgorged red contents hovered, roiled, and remained suspended. Her eyes glazed, her throat relaxed, the slime-thick air poured into her lungs. Something bit deeper, like serrated teeth, slicing into the soft tissue of her pharynx, biting, slicing, she could taste her own blood.
Those ebbing holojoules . . . waiting for her voice. She thought of Megan’s transumption hex, of the Devourer: Gr-ner Shie.
In the distance, the sound of thunder or zeppelin guns tortured the sky. Sena’s body convulsed from lack of oxygen . . . the black flesh was all around her. And she was floating, stuttering. Catapult. Zoetrope. Where was Caliph? The Thae’gn’s sweet mucus filled her sinuses with incomprehensible alien dreaming, scent-shadows of her own death. The curl of smoke that was shaped like an old man did nothing.
Snow fell. Odd. It seemed unaffected by the thick air. Her vision was blurring. Then suddenly, she was assaulted from every direction, both internally as well as all across her skin. Her jacket tore away in parallel strips. Her clothing disintegrated. She could suddenly breathe but the pain was exquisite. Black tendrils sliced gill-like slits into her skin. Those arms that looked so slippery, surprisingly powerful . . . and rough. Like coarse sandpaper grit. They snagged and tore at reality. She could see them shredding the fiber of space with every subtle movement that they made, reality turning to mist, threadbare wisps that dispersed slightly, revealing glimpses of someplace else . . . someplace hidden . . . hovering just behind. Space closed as the arms moved, re-weaving, healing, but vaguely warped . . . vaguely scarred.
She was breathing through her skin . . . or maybe she had stopped breathing altogether. Her body had been filleted, every part of her exposed, like a child’s snowflake cut from paper. She hung in tatters in the air, bones and organs twisting. A gory paper doll.
Black filaments of something like mist condensed, forming webs below her dangling guts. They braided, wound up, tugged gently at her tattered flesh. She felt the manipulation, not from without, but from within, at a cellular level, a molecular level.
Her smallest parts, the fibers of her tissue, the atoms themselves were grinding against each other, turning, realigning, tuning themselves to some new atomic pole. They snapped suddenly, locking together,