It feels eerily like the moment before Sir Kodelai died.
The Majester laughs a little nervously, and his laugh bounces back at him from every wall and up into the cobwebbed ceiling.
And then a whisper bursts from the mouths of the not-Saints. It’s half sigh, half song, and just at the very edge of hearing it carries words. Words I cannot understand, though I feel as if I know what they say. They are telling us it has begun. They are telling us we are accursed.
A subtle shudder runs up my spine and an echo in my unconscious mind whispers, run.
Sir Coriand is yelling at us — a translation, perhaps?
“Give us your rival’s blood and your rival’s pain, but choose with care or you’ll see no gain. For the cup you desire, the cup you’ll receive, in sacrifice, you’ll learn to believe.”
Trite, but threatening.
For the first time since we arrived, I think that perhaps this is no monastery. This is no ancient place of worship. At least, not to the God. And whatever pretender made this place is powerful and terrible and he wishes to make us powerful and terrible, though we are but motes of dust in this yawning mouth of a monastery.
I want none of it.
It’s the Majester who moves first, shouting as he half claws his way up the arm of his image. He starts chanting and I feel his blessing settle over us — the one only Majesters can give. A blessing for a whole group.
He’s given us acute awareness, and with it, I see what he has seen, and my gaze snaps straight to Victoriana. She draws her sword with easy fluidity, raising it grimly as I draw my own, but she’s so far away. Too far away. As if someone planned, knowing we were partnered together, to force us apart.
The statue on the wall behind her is a man with a long beard and a holy expression, hands clasped before him in prayer. He shudders, lifts his face, lifts an arm, and then — as my skin crawls up my back — he draws his sword, steps forward, and leaps. The statues on both sides leap with him. Their weapons flicker as they move so quickly, stone legs launching them forward. They are larger than life — giants made of white stone and whatever wild magic has brought them to life.
The Saints on the walls have come alive.
Some of them, at least.
I think the ones with pipe organ mouths remain fixed to the walls, but it’s hard to tell in the sudden maelstrom of white marble bodies, carved to perfect human form, white marble weapons braced in marbled hands. They stalk toward us from every side, some slow and ponderous, others moving quickly, dashing across the cups, crushing and shattering and destroying as they race.
If this is a race to find the true cup, it’s almost certainly over with half the cups crushed. Somehow, I don’t think it was ever that.
The dog barks sharply — twice, and then no more — as he leaps between towering white bodies, darting towards his mistress.
When the Engineers curse and begin to haul on the chains holding their platform, I realize that they’ve seen what I failed to see — that the chains are part of a ratcheting pulley mechanism, and as they fly through the old men’s hands, the platform begins to ascend above the fray.
Should I do the same?
Before I decide, it’s already too late.
A whoosh of air rushes past me and I move, led by instinct and sudden battle fever. I whirl, duck, and pop up just in time to avoid a blindfolded Saint who tries to harvest me with his great marble scythe. His blank eyes drive a spike of terror straight into my spine. How do you reason with mindless antagonism? How do you fight stone with steel? I don’t want to break my sword, but it’s all the weapon I have. There’s no time for qualms. He’s already moving again in the space of an exhale, slicing toward my head. It’s a game of leap and dodge now and I will either be quick or I will be dead.
Hefertus curses in the background, and it worries me enormously that his curses seem to be quieter the longer they spin out. I hope he’s not already overrun. I’m not sure I can get to him in time to back him up. He was midway around the circle when this began.
I need to see.
In a feat I haven’t tried since my squire days, I concentrate all my efforts and leap up onto the cupped hand of my stone image. Letting my momentum carry me, I launch from there to the shoulder of the blindfolded statue with the scythe, dodge a stone arrow that narrowly misses my shoulder — how does it even shoot? — and then pivot from the shoulder, spinning through the air to land on the back of a stone tiger ridden by a Saint who seems to think one carefully draped cloth is all the clothing he needs to wear while he tames the beast.
“The poem, my children,” Sir Coriand calls down to us. “Blood and sorrows. The cup needs blood and sorrows.”
Easy to say from up there. Down here, we’re fighting for our lives. There will be blood — oh yes, and sorrows plenty — but there won’t be much riddle-solving.
It’s not easy to keep your balance on a stone tiger sculpted at one and three-quarters real size while its rider reaches a massive stone hand back and tries to throttle you. I do it anyway, fighting to hold on as I keep out of the reach of his grip. At least his arms are subject to the normal rules of anatomy.
I turn a blow from a stone sword streaking toward me from my left. There’s so much power behind it that even turning it sends quivers up my arm, but the force breaks the stone blade, and that blank-faced Saint with a ram’s curling horns upon his tousled head must attack the second time with no weapon but a stub. Unfortunately, it’s just as deadly broken and even harder to defend against.
When your enemies are stone and half again as large as you are, all the rules you’ve learned fighting men must be thrown aside.
My heart is racing with the intensity of the moment, every muscle straining with what I demand. Part of me loves this — the exertion, the pushing myself to the edge — but the rest is just gasps of thought between near misses and a barrage of sensation I must translate and make sense of before I miss the one thing that kills me.
