Chapter Twenty-six
QUICKSILVER DID SOMETHING then that I'd never seen or heard him do so impressively before.
He sat on his flanks, aimed his nose at the distant cavern ceiling as if it was a midnight sky, and howled long and mournfully, the hair of his hackles lifting thick from his shoulders.
That primal wolfish cry gave me goose bumps all over.
Beneath his warning aria of soulful animal passion, like the low growl of a snare drum, came the onrushing clatter of another faraway wave of attackers, that rolling of a million marbles along every inch of stone in the forest of pillars between us and escape.
The way I figured it, we were just the antipasto, a tasty display of tidbits between the oncoming vampires and their habitual prey beyond the pit behind us.
Ric moved to my right side and Shez to my left with Bez beside him.
Quicksilver finished his spine-chilling howl by staring straight into my eyes. His expression had never seemed so human. I read anguish there as if it mirrored my own feelings. The wolf-dog looked as if his instincts were being torn in two, between his canine loyalty to me and the ancient demands of his lupine breed.
Spinning away, he ran flat out for the first line of massive stone pillars, directly into the oncoming clatter.
I couldn't imagine what form of mummified zombies would overrun us next. Then a thick, dark shadow filled the gaps between the pillars, an oozing wall of flooding sludge eight feet high with a glint of gold near the top, froth atop the water.
Quicksilver leaped up against the first charging wall, six feet high, catching a golden lasso in his jaws and pulling the darkness down.
I gasped to see a massive mummified bull body crash sideways, pulling its harness mate with it. The sound of their terrified and angry bawling rang off the pillars.
Quicksilver had vanished under the black, rising dust of their fall. As the wooden-wheeled light chariot the bulls had pulled crashed into its fallen coursers, the wooden chariot shaft attached to the yoke between the bulls' horns broke loose, splintering into a massive rough-pointed spear.
The Egyptian charioteer, a mere extra in the royal scheme of things, catapulted onto that ghastly weapon, transfixing his chest as his head and limbs thrashed.
I winced at this bug-on-a-pin sight. The driver had been no cannon-fodder mummy, but a true man, a living version of the ruddy-skinned, black-wigged men immortalized on tomb walls. His wrist- and armbands of turquoise and carnelian reflected the light as he wriggled.
I spied another flash of flying gray fur. Quicksilver was bringing down another ponderous pair of mummified bullocks. Zombies were driven beings, not always controllable. Time after time a lead chariot fell between the stone pillars as others piled up behind them, causing chaos if not death.
Rich male laughter drew my eyes to Shezmou. The Lord of the Slaughter must be enjoying the rout, and the carnage.
But when I turned, the laughing man was Ric.
"Zombie chariot draft teams," he was saying, his hands spread with triumph. "These bulls I can handle, O Great Royal Vampire Fools!"
And he strode forward as the mouth between every pair of pillars became clogged with falling bulls and tangling chariots.
Quicksilver was still acting as a one-wolf pack, hurling himself at every path between the pillars to distract the bulls like a rodeo clown, spinning his lean torso in midair, driving them off-balance.
In Quicksilver and Ric's wake came Shezmou, laughing like the Jolly Green Giant shilling for frozen peas, wresting off the head of any charioteer he could find and hurling them like soccer balls into the pit.
I was as confused as my familiar. My mind and emotions truly must control it, because I could feel my silver cuffs tightening and loosening on my wrists, generating heat and a new, molten-metal uncertainty at what form to take in this kind of battle.
Maybe we were just superfluous, like little Bez. The two guys and Quicksilver seemed to be handling all comers. Shez had moved on to wrenching off bull heads and hurling them two-armed into the pit.
I heard a new hard-driving metal clanging, remembering the sacred rattles called sistrums, which resembled chef's whisks with broken wires.
Over a fallen pair of headless bulls came leaping gilded hooves, six living gold-harnessed gazelles pulling a golden chariot bearing the twin pharaohs, Kephron and Kepherati, side by side.
I stared at the twins' petite, royally decked out forms and their delicate faces, each as exquisitely modeled as that signature Egyptian artifact, the bust of Nefertiti. One might almost concede their miraculous eternal survival was worth the cost of millennia of innocent blood.
Kephron was holding the bow while Kepherati pulled fresh arrows from the chariot's side quiver.
Kepherati handed her brother-spouse the feathered arrow and smiled, showing dainty vampire fangs. Kephron drew back the bowstring, his grimace showing larger fangs. He aimed. . . straight at. . . oh, me.
My conflicted wrist cuffs swelled into a solid silver spear shaft in my defensively lifting fists. Ah, not a great defense against a well-aimed arrow.
Quicksilver's racing form came snaking between the twelve pairs of oncoming gazelle hooves. Unlike the bulls, they were too many and too agile to overturn.
Those sharp, flying hooves could kick my dog to death!
Kepherati dropped her next arrow to jerk the left rein and pull the gazelles horizontal to the pit, coming abreast of me as Kephron let his arrow fly.
Somehow Quicksilver scrambled out from under the gazelle hooves, but he was limping. . . oh, God. And he still raced toward me as he so often did in Sunset Park.
I sensed Ric shouting, "No!" and saw him riding a dark wave, an animated headless bull he was driving straight for the gazelles and the royal chariot.
Quicksilver charged me, knocking me to the dusty stones. The royal arrow sped toward me just as fast.
I heard a violent huff of escaping air. Quicksilver and the arrow flew out over the pit together and down, down, down into a rising red tornado cloud of beetle and crocodile dust.
I knew there was sound all around, but I couldn't hear it.
All I could hear was Shezmou's nearby triumphant laughter as he tore off another foot-soldier head and threw it into the pit and final judgment.
After my dog.
Vampire Sunrise Page 26