The din of their pursuers increased. Janx and Avery picked up speed, rounding a bend and coming into a room full of miserable figures all chained to the wall. These weren’t the sex slaves of below but something altogether different and more awful, or at least so Avery guessed. Each one was infected, and they ranged in age and sex and general raggedness, but every one turned hopeful eyes on the two intruders.
“Please,” one begged, an old man with livid bruises on his cheeks. In a rasping voice, he said, “Please help us.”
“What happened to you?” Avery said.
“Help us ...”
Janx moved to the wall and began tugging at the old man’s chain. This wall proved of sturdier stuff than the one on the first floor, and it gave him trouble. Sweating, he continued to strain at it.
“We’re food to the god,” a woman said from not far away, confirming what Avery had assumed. “When it’s ready, it will take us.” With tears in her eyes, she said, “It took my son yesterday. He ... he was fourteen ...”
“Fuck!” Janx growled. He quit pulling at the chain and moved to another, but this one proved just as stubborn. Whoever had bound these people had been more intent on their task than those who bound the sex slaves. Whoever had done this served a god.
The noise of the mob picked up, and Avery heard distinct clatters on the stairs.
“They’re coming,” he told Janx. “We have to go.”
“No!” said the old man, voice quavering. “Please ... don’t go ...”
“You can’t leave us,” said a young man from the opposite wall. “If you do, it will get us.”
“Don’t leave!” another said, and more picked up the chant: “Don’t leave us! Don’t leave us! DON’T LEAVE US!”
Avery’s heart twisted, and he saw frustration in Janx’s eyes, but there was nothing for it. With noise of their pursuers reaching the top of the stairs, the two turned and fled through a doorway, the chants of the doomed still echoing in their ears—and those of their pursuers. They would bring the mob right to them. Avery slammed every door he passed through, locking several, but he knew that would barely slow them.
“Which way?” Janx said. “Do you see light? A window—”
They stumbled into a figure traveling the other way, and both sides recoiled. It was, to Avery’s surprise, once again the pilgrim they had met earlier, Rigurd.
“Oh! Oh!” Rigurd said. “I didn’t expect to see you here. It seems our destiny to keep bumping into each other.”
“What’re you about?” Janx said.
“I do not have to explain myself to you,” Rigurd said, straightening. “Now, if you will, I meant to inquire as to the noise and fuss. Know you what it pertains?”
Janx grinned cruelly. “There’re fugitives about. Dangerous men.”
“Oh! Oh!”
“They’re lookin’ for the exit. Know you where it is?”
“I—I—” Rigurd swallowed and wiped his forehead. “Well, I believe, that way, yes, there is a terrace, and some stairs, but I don’t see why you—”
Janx clapped Rigurd on the shoulder, letting his hand linger there, fingers digging into the older man’s flesh. “You done us a service, old-timer. I might just let you live.”
“I would measure your next actions carefully, hooligan.” Rigurd’s voice had changed. Become colder. Harder.
“Janx ...” Avery started, but it was too late.
The air shimmered around Rigurd, and suddenly Janx was thrown aside with such force that he smashed against a moldy wall.
“I knew there was something off about you two,” Rigurd said. “Ah, well, live and learn. That’s why I go amongst my visitors anonymously, to learn their true—”
Avery lunged forward with his god-killing knife. Rigurd saw it and dodged, but the blade nicked his arm. Instantly the half-formed amoebic shape about him faded into nothingness. Rigurd’s eyes widened and he clapped a hand over his arm.
“Damn you!”
Avery lunged at him again, but Rigurd was too fast. He instantly vanished through a doorway, and Avery heard the click of the lock. He tried it, but the door was metal and it held fast.
Avery went to Janx and felt his pulse, but he needn’t have bothered; even as he knelt over the big man, Janx’s eyelids fluttered, and the whaler moaned some expletive under his breath.
“Get up,” Avery said.
“Little bastard was the god of the place, eh? Might’ve known. He was a little shit, that was for sure. Got him with the knife?”
“Yes, but I don’t think we can count on that holding him. I barely scratched him. He can’t have received much of the poison, or whatever the lethal agent is, and we don’t have time to hunt him now.”
As Avery helped Janx to his feet, the noise of the mob reached his ears, louder than ever; the priests and pilgrims were smashing through one of the locked doors, very near.
“They’ll be on us soon,” Avery said.
Janx shook his head and stood straighter, disengaging himself. “I’m all right, Doc. Let’s run. If that Collie was right …”
“I doubt he was lying. He was about to kill us.”
“Good. Then—”
Another door crashed open; Avery assumed it to be the penultimate one standing between them and the mob.
