I leap from the tiger, trusting years of experience to help me land. I almost twist an ankle, but I roll at the last minute over a clinking, shifting floor of crumpled and broken cups.
By now I’ve lost all sense of the battle as a whole. I’m just one man weaving out of the way of a Maiden-Saint as she tries to skewer me with her trident, her fishy face implacable right down to the gills in her neck.
I’m running with high knees over the multiple arms of a tentacled stone creature — no, wait, this is the bottom half of one of the so-called Saints. No Saint of our faith has ever reached rippling arms toward the innocent, scowling through a seven-braided beard.
I don’t have time to shudder. This is the madness of nightmares and curses. This is the power of the dark realm beneath the earth where those damned by the God play out their wickedness.
The sound of this battle is almost creepier than our emotionless attackers. It feels all wrong. There is the occasional cry from one of the others, but mostly all I hear is the grind and smash of stone on stone or stone on steel. There are no screams or curses, no desperate exhales or wheezing gasps. It’s not human. It’s not like any battlefield I’ve ever been on. Does it make it more or less horrible not to slip in blood and over corpses? More or less horrible not to see flashes of humanity in the faces you cleave in twain?
A man with shells in his long flowing beard and a crown on his head bears down on me with a club fashioned to look like shells but made — of course — of marble. I try to dodge his attack, but my spin is caught short by the movement of a female Saint, face swathed in carved scarves. She tries to grasp me, stone fingers raking across my side, and I’m forced back with a grunt of pain into the path of the shell club.
It glances off my sword arm, sending me gasping, but long training takes hold and I channel my pain into awareness. I need higher ground.
I slip through a gap made by two statues — the shortest of them is still a head taller than me and my metal blade is notching and chipping as I turn strikes. I feel the damage as if it is damage to my own body. If this sword fails me, I have no backup here. Everything was left above thanks to Sir Kodelai, may the God shelter his soul.
I’m slowed by the injuries I’ve taken already and my arm screams with every movement.
Through the gap, I spin and leap again, attaining the platform where my avatar swings. There are too many of them on the ground. I need to get up high if I want to see what’s happening.
I sheathe my sword, kicking a grasping stone hand away while ducking under another, and haul the chains through the pulleys with a desperation born of pain and weariness.
As my platform wobbles upward, the pipe organ begins to play again — a hollow, spooky sound that makes me think of walking among the dead at night after a battle. The stanzas tumble over each other, keening and crying. I know this song. I’ve heard it once before and it has haunted me in sighs and snatches ever since.
The chain won’t budge, jamming in my hands like a choked wheel.
I spin.
A stone Saint hangs off the side, making my platform rock wildly. I snatch up my sword seconds before it rattles off the side. I barely have it in hand before the Saint rushes me. He’s hooded and reverent, eyes downturned, features smooth of emotion, but he claws at me with a stone hook, aiming for my shoulder. I duck under his strike, twist my body roughly to the right so that I lead with my left shoulder, and with all my weight I slam into him.
Pain splinters through that shoulder — it’s as if I fell from a sharp slope and crashed into rock … which of course is what I’ve done. It’s enough, though. It knocks him backward and he slips — stone on stone — and falls from the platform without a cry.
The organ cries for him, soaring now in a melody too bittersweet for this world.
Someone screams from below. A masculine cry of torment. Every call is one of us. I don’t dare ignore any of them when I’m the only one who can save a life.
I’ll deal with it in a moment.
I need to solve my riddle first and look over the battlefield — even if that battlefield is more akin to a church sanctuary than a muddy strip of land.
My arm throbs as I hurry to my owl cup. I think I know what I must do. I slit my left thumb on one of the notches in my sword blade and flick a drop into the cup before I spit into it.
I’m my own adversary, so this is my blood. And I’m made of sorrow from bones to skin. I can put any part of myself in that vessel. What I give to it now shows what I think of this madness.
Go ahead, revile me. I care not.
My cup gives off a slight glow. I’m not sure if I’m relieved or annoyed that my efforts have accomplished the task. I’m not enchanted by the puzzle, or the battle, or the trickery that brought me here. I feel like a goat tied in the middle of a cage of lions — offering, tribute, sacrifice. I’ll gore them all before I agree to go easily down their throats.
I spin and scan for the scream. The Engineers are so high up that I can only see their grim faces looking over the edges of their platform. Not them.
Sir Sorken is shouting to someone below. The Penitent, I think. At least he’s being helpful.
I follow his gaze and see Sir Owalan stab his belt knife entirely through his forearm. His back arches and his mouth opens in a pained rictus.
I’ve never liked Penitents. They’re always pulling stunts like this, forever acting dramatically to draw the attention of the God.
His arms reach up as if in prayer and my heart is stuck in my chest. I almost forgot they could do that — that the God gives them blessing in proportion to their self-inflicted wounds. My mouth twists involuntarily. I wish they could keep it to themselves and I wouldn’t have to remember. Either way, this isn’t an injury I need to concern myself with. The Penitent can fend for himself with that.
One of the statues tries to hit him, but the blow glances off the Penitent as if it is a feather smacking into him rather than stone. Though Sir Owalan is clearly in agony, sweat breaking out across his brow and blood flowing from his wound, a second attack also fails to injure him. He is immune to any assault other than his own.
