The floor exploded in the middle of the intersection, blocking off the far route, and more limbs surged toward them, curling and grasping. Avery swatted one away, and Denaris stomped on one that snaked against the floor, going for her ankle. Janx launched himself on the head and stabbed repeatedly. The squid screamed and submerged. Janx threw himself off just in time.
Sweating and bleeding anew from the cut on his arm, the big man said, “Don’t think ... I can ... kill it ... Doc. Not with ... this thing.” He indicated his weapon.
“Maybe that won’t be necessary,” Avery said. “This way.”
He led them down a hall, turned right at the next intersection—just as the boards buckled in its center—and plunged through a doorway, then another, making his way through a series of rooms in what he hoped was the right direction. At one point he passed a man asleep in a hammock, then heard screaming moments later and knew that the squid still pursued them.
At last they burst out into the laboratory chamber. Avery had feared that the people who had found Gaescruhd’s body would have pushed through by now, but they’d gone another way, or perhaps they were still making their way in this direction. Avery could still hear them, shouting and swearing in the distance—and getting nearer. They were combing the halls, then, room by room ... and, yes, he could hear it, coming nearer.
Avery turned to the doorway, thinking to close it, then thought better of it. Janx was tearing at the cross-piece of his weapon, using his great strength to attempt to bend the iron so that it broke the side-points off.
“Take his knife,” Avery told Denaris, and while the whaler was occupied she plucked it from his sheath; Janx didn’t blink.
“To the body chambers, Gwen,” Avery said, indicating. “You take that one, I’ll take this one. Follow my lead.”
They leapt to the task, and not a moment too soon. The squid broke through the floor and shot its limbs out with blinding speed, using some of them to haul itself up halfway into the chamber, filling it with the creature’s awful reek. It must have been swimming in the sewers for weeks, even months, and was encrusted with foul growths and oozing sores. Avery wondered if the pollution had driven it mad; its eyes were bloodshot and wild. He desperately hoped not. Everything depended on it still retaining some reason.
As he and Denaris jumped toward opposite containers, each coffin-like construct holding a body that had had its skull sawn open, Janx climbed atop a table and continued bending and bashing his trident.
In the distance, the sound of the mob drew nearer, moving more swiftly than before. They’d heard the noise.
A stinking, pinkish limb strained toward Avery, dripping vile fluid, and he poised his knife over a cluster of hoses leading to the body storage container.
“Do it and I kill this body!” Avery shouted, aware of the high pitch of his voice.
The squid paused, just slightly. Then the limb started toward Avery again.
“Gwen!” Avery shouted.
“Then I’ll cut this one!” she said, knife poised over the bunch of wires and hoses leading to the other container in its corner, and the squid turned a huge eye on her. These hoses evidently connected to the body its brain belonged to, as the creature actually drew back the two tentacles it had been sending toward her. Avery’s heart sang.
“Leave!” Avery shouted. “Leave or we make sure you can never return to your body, and you’ll have to stay a squid in the sewers for the rest of your days!”
Avery could almost feel the rage of the squid in its baleful eye and the agitated movements of its limbs. It truly hesitated, weighing its own life against its duty, and in the end it chose the latter. With almost palpable regret, it extended its limbs toward Avery and Denaris.
Its hesitation had given Janx the time he needed. He’d ripped the side prongs off, turning the trident into a harpoon. With a howl he drew the weapon back, coiling his arm, and hurled the harpoon into the creature’s head. It sank deep, transfixing the brain. The squid’s limbs stiffened, and blood or ichor leaked around the wound, then went limp. Taking the weapon with it, the squid sank through the hole it had ripped in the floor and out of sight, its many limbs, now flaccid, trailing behind it.
Avery, Janx and Denaris looked at each other, breathing heavily.
“We did it,” Denaris said. “We—”
The door slammed opened, banging against the dresser Janx and Avery had shoved against it earlier.
“Get away from there,” Avery said.
Denaris had gone to the corner of the room closest to the door, where the coffin had been. She moved away from it now, eyes wide, then teetered on the brink of the chasm the squid had made. She could not get to where Avery and Janx were without going wide around the hole.
“Hurry!” Janx said.
She edged around it, face pale.
With greater force, propelled by several shoulders, the dresser slid clear, and the mob burst through the door, Sheridan at their lead. Instantly she punched Denaris across the jaw, laying her out, and passed her off to two men in uniform to carry as the mob surged around them, fury in the faces of priests and pilgrims alike. They glared across the ruined room to Avery and Janx, who backed away toward the far door. Sheridan had pulled out a gun, but through the shifting forms of the mob she couldn’t get a bead on either of them.
The mob began to edge around the hole.
Hating to leave Denaris but knowing there was no choice, Avery let Janx lead the way from the room, then slammed the hatch behind him. Sheridan screamed something on the other side, and at first her voice was muffled by the metal, but then he made out her words:
“What do you thinking you’re doing, Doctor? If you kill the Collossum, the Starfish will destroy the city!”
* * *
“You know the way out?” Janx shouted over his shoulder as they ran. “I’m turned around.”
“No,” Avery panted, “but I remember a stairwell ...”
“Don’t get treed,” Janx said. “Up is a trap.”
Heeding Janx’s advice, Avery passed the stairs without comment, but when they heard noises coming from ahead, then again after they darted down a side-hall, Avery led the way back to the stairwell and up it, taking two stairs at a time, even as the sound of a hatch crashing open reached them from the direction of the laboratory. Janx didn’t protest.
Almost immediately Avery wondered if he’d made a mistake. It was darker upstairs, and the halls were even more labyrinthine than those below. Worse was the smell ...
“What is that?” Janx said, smacking his lips and spitting. He had no ability to smell, of course, but he seemed to be able to taste the reek.
“I don’t know,” Avery said. It stank like mold, rot, unwashed bodies and filth, mashed together and concentrated into a deadly miasma. Fewer alchemical lamps burned up here, letting the reek of the sewers in, too. And there was some other chemical smell.
