“Where’s the relic?” Janx demanded.
“There—over—” the man said, pointing to some strange, alien-looking artifact Avery hadn’t noticed before. Shaped like an urn, it was surrounded by unfamiliar equipment, some of it plugged into or attached to the urn.
“Is that the artifact from the Ysstral monastery?” Avery asked.
The scientist seemed too petrified to answer. Irritated, Janx released him.
“That’s it,” the man gasped.
Now that he saw it, Avery felt unnerved by the relic. “Is it safe? In Mago, it had been shielded by a box.”
“The Master funneled off its energies for his project,” the technician said. “It’s safe now.”
“What project?”
“Sending out his broadcast. He activated it about two weeks ago.”
Avery felt cold. “What ... what did it do?”
“I don’t know. I’m only a technician, sir.”
Avery rubbed his chin, troubled.
“What’re you thinkin’, Doc?” Janx said.
“Nothing,” Avery said. “It can’t mean anything, surely.”
“What?”
“It’s just that ... around two weeks ago, before we left for Ezzez. That’s about when the ghost flower nectar began working. It didn’t do anything before then, but suddenly, as if some trigger had been thrown—” his gaze darted to the relic “—the nectar proved effective against the Starfish tissue, or at least allowed Layanna to be effective against it.”
“I don’t get it,” Janx said.
“Neither do I.” To the technician, Avery said, “Tell us more.”
“I don’t know any more. Honest!”
Avery moved to the urn. At first he had thought to destroy it, to rob Sheridan and the Collossum of whatever it was, but it seemed to be inert now, and ...
“Could it be?” he mused aloud. “Could the relic help to fight the Collossum?” He shook his head. It was all beyond him. To the technician, he said, “What did—ah, the god—say about it?”
“He said—he said unbelievers should die!”
The technician grabbed a scalpel off a nearby tray and slashed it at Janx, cutting him along the forearm. Enraged, Janx grabbed him again and dashed him against the wall, where he slumped and did not move again.
“I think you killed him,” Avery said, inspecting first the technician, then Janx’s arm. The cut was vicious but not as deep as it could have been. Avery tore at his own robe and wrapped a piece of it above the cut, slowing Janx’s blood flow. “That should help.”
Janx nudged the body. “Just what are they doin’ with the relic?”
“I don’t—”
Noise sprang from the direction they had come from—shouts and, in the distance, running feet.
“Gaescruhd’s been found,” Avery said.
“Yeah.” Janx showed no guilt.
Avery started to move toward the opposite door, but his attention fixed on two large vertical coffin-like containers against the far wall, each propped in its own corner.
“What’s this?”
Each brass container, connected to hoses and pipes and fronted in a curved glass panel, held a human body, naked and bobbing in some sort of bubbling orange fluid. Both bodies were fit males in their early twenties, skulls shaven—the mark of a military psychic across various cultures—and there was something wrong with their heads ... Avery peered closer, then drew away quickly.
“Gods!”
“What is it?”
“Their brains have been removed,” Avery said, feeling sick. “At least, I think so. See the stitching around their skulls? They’ve been opened and, I’m sure, emptied. Otherwise why store them like this? They’re being held for the owners’ return.”
Janx’s eyes flashed. “The squid.”
“Exactly.”
“Shit. There are two of them. One was blocking off the main route to this place, but the other ...”
The noises in the direction of the sauna increased. Avery strode to the door, closed it, and with Janx’s help shoved a heavy cabinet in front of it. They left through the other door and picked their way down a narrow hall reeking of mold. They passed an equally narrow stairwell, then opened a random door and made their way through several rooms, making for what Avery believed to be the outer wall, though he was no longer completely sure. The singing from the room of worship had stopped.
They were passing through neater rooms now, cleaner and more orderly, with hammocks swaying from bowed ceilings; this was where the priests lived, or some of them. Probably the junior priests. The higher ones would have rooms of their own, perhaps with sex slaves chained to walls provided by the late Gaescruhd.
