“Nah, nah.” The gnole flicked his ears. “Bone-doctor should not worry. A gnole prefers human mating-yelping to days of humans standing around stinking of longing.”
Piper put his face in his hands. His ears felt hot. Galen had the temerity to start laughing. “You can smell that? Really?”
“Surprised humans can’t.”
“It must be easier for gnoles,” said Piper, “being able to tell so easily if someone you like likes you back.”
“Eh.” Earstripe made an equivocating gesture with one hand. “Awkward sometimes. Mating season, eh, everybody wants, nobody cares. But sometimes a gnole gets mate smell with a gnole who isn’t mate, very awkward.”
“Like an affair?” asked Piper, puzzled. I know so little about gnoles. I don’t even know if they mate exclusively like humans claim to.
Earstripe shook his head. “No, like mate. Like…uh…” He seemed to be trying to think of a human equivalent. “A human marries another human, yes?”
“Sometimes, yes.” He carefully didn’t look at Galen.
“Yes. Humans are mates. But could a human marry another human who didn’t marry them back?”
“Uh…” This time he did look at Galen, baffled.
Galen nodded to Earstripe. “Not legally, but yes, I think I understand. If someone thought that they were in a close relationship, but the other person didn’t, or didn’t want to be, or was trying to get away.”
“Yes.” Earstripe nodded. “That. Embarrassing. Everyone can smell then. Worse if different caste. A gnole leaves then, usually, goes to another warren far away.”
“Maybe it’s better we can’t smell that well,” said Piper, imagining being so deeply in love with someone who wasn’t interested. If I was in love with Galen, say…
His stomach clenched in a way that he didn’t like and he could feel his cheeks heating again. If I was. If. Not that I am. Not love-love.
Just because he’s funny and handsome and intelligent and as brave as a lion and he accepted your weird gift as if it was nothing strange and he acts like he admires you, when he isn’t yelling at you for running risks, and he dropped everything to come on this trip because Earstripe asked, just like you, and he understands that gnoles are people and we have to learn more about each other in order to live together and also when he slid his hand over your cock, you thought you’d died and gone to heaven…
He cleared his throat and very carefully pushed all those feelings away, because they weren’t going to help but Earstripe could probably smell them anyway. “So,” he said. “Are we ready to try the next door?”
“A gnole is getting very tired of doors.”
“Maybe it’ll be the last one. We’re almost back where we started, I think.”
Galen stood, then reached down and pulled Piper to his feet with easy strength. “We can only hope,” he said. His fingers lingered in Piper’s hand for a moment, warm even through the kidskin. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
They stood in front of the door and Galen reached out and tapped the mechanism.
The door opened onto a room full of clockwork bones.
* * *
“What happened here?” asked Piper softly.
“Dead machines,” said Galen, eyeing the pile of broken ivory that lay ankle deep across the floor.
“Did something kill them? Or did they just stop working?”
“Judging by the marks, they didn’t just stop.” Galen pointed to a piece of machine-stuff as long as his arm, the end splintered. “But why here, and nowhere else?”
Earstripe tossed an apple into the pile, where it lay forlornly.
“That’s an interesting question,” said Piper. “Someone must have cleaned the other rooms, except for the pits, which were presumably too hard to reach. Human staff? But why not this room?”
Earstripe lobbed a few more apples in.
“And if they had cleaners, how did they avoid getting smashed to bits?” asked Galen.
“Perhaps there’s a way to turn the entire mechanism off,” said Piper. He gave a short, humorless laugh. “Probably there is, and it’s clearly labeled in three languages that nobody reads any more, and it’s currently somewhere under the river. But either they didn’t clean out this room before whatever event caused them to abandon this place or…” He trailed off, uncertain what the alternative would be.
Earstripe tossed in another apple and said, “A gnole doesn’t want to alarm anyone, but a door isn’t closing.”
“No…” said Galen thoughtfully. “No, it isn’t, is it? And it’s been more than thirty seconds by now.”
“Nearly a minute by my guess.”
Earstripe tossed in another apple.
A blade shot out from the pile of bone, and speared the apple in midair. Piper recoiled in surprise. Galen slapped for a sword that no longer hung at his waist.
From out of the mound of debris, a machine began to rise. It was hard at first to tell what was part of the living machine and what were broken pieces of dead ones. Piper had an impression of a body like a slender scorpion, equipped with a blade instead of a stinger. Its legs rose above the level of its back like a spider, and instead of heavy claws, it had two long, thin appendages, like an insect’s feelers.
“It’s injured,” whispered Galen. “Look!”
It was indeed. It had five legs on one side, but only two on the other, and one of the thin feelers was dragging on the ground. It looked as if it had taken a serious pounding at some point.
It must be over a thousand years old. And it’s been injured all this time.
The scorpion used its good feeler to scrape the apple off the blade. It turned toward the doorway, and even though it was eyeless, Piper swore he could feel it looking at them.
“A gnole thinks the machines fought here,” said Earstripe quietly.
“Like a cock fight,” said Galen. “The ones that survive the obstacle course get here and fight the ones that got through before them.”
“Cock fighting is barbaric,” said Piper, recognizing as he did so that it was a profoundly unhelpful observation.
“You know, the Bishop says the same thing.”
The scorpion took a jerky step toward the door, then another one.
Piper’s first thought was that it wouldn’t be able to go through the door. The other rooms had all been safely enclosed. But if this is a machine made to run the obstacle course, not one of the traps, why wouldn’t it come out? And the door’s been open for much longer than a minute.
“Maybe it isn’t supposed to fight humans?” he said hopefully.
“Had no problem fighting apples.”
“So what do we do now?” asked Piper, taking several steps back.
“I’m going to fight it,” said Galen. “Obviously.”
“How is that obvious?!” he hissed, but any answer was lost when the scorpion machine charged.
Twenty-Three
“Get out of the way!” shouted Galen, dodging to one side of the doorway as the tail-blade smashed into the floor where he’d been standing. “Get back!”
“You don’t have a sword!” Piper yelled behind him.
This was true, but Galen was quite aware that a sword made of steel would be only emotional support. Whatever substance the machines were made from was only vulnerable to attacks from other machines.
Fortunately, there was an entire room full of broken machine parts that he could use.
Unfortunately, the scorpion-thing was standing between him and it.
He could feel the black tide beginning to rise, like water swirling around his waist and creeping higher. The taste of iron filled his mouth.
“Don’t come near me once it’s dead,” he grated, his voice sounding strange in his own ears. “Not until I talk to you first.”
The scorpion turned its blunt, eyeless head toward him. It seemed to be moving slowly, almost as if whatever powered it was running down.
It’s been a few thousand years. Nothing lasts forever.
; He had just formulated that thought when the blade sliced at him, missing him by half an inch.
The tide engulfed him, whispering instructions. Galen embraced it. He had done the best he could for his companions. Now it was time to do what he was made to do.
Everything slowed. The scorpion was still terribly fast but he was faster. It was so easy to step to one side as the blade struck at him, to dive forward, past the machine, into the room of bones.
He picked up a large piece of ivory, not quite the size of his lost sword, and swung around. The machine had turned and come after him. It struck at him again, and this time one of the feelers whipped out to slash at his ankles, forcing him to divide his attention. He put both feet together and jumped over it, like a child skipping rope, and blocked the bladed tail with his makeshift ivory club.
The force of the blow almost sent him to his knees. He stumbled but the tide caught him and carried him, even though he had to drop the club from fingers gone numb and smarting. The feeler whipped back the other way and caught his calf, a line of heat telling him that he was bleeding. No matter. Pain was the tide’s problem, not his.
Don’t block. It’s too strong to block. Dodge. Dodge and look for a weakness.
He dove to his right and kept going, snatching up another piece of ivory. The machine spun and then it, too, almost stumbled, as the missing legs on that side failed to keep up.
Take out the remaining legs and it won’t be able to move.
He smashed the club down on one of those legs. They looked delicate, but they were surprisingly strong. The club bounced off, but in the moment of the swing, when everything was so slow, Galen saw that the broken legs were dangling useless from the joints. The whip-feeler was coming up again and the blade was coming down so it seemed like a good idea not to be in the middle. He dodged right again and it stumbled again on the turn, so this time he cracked the club down directly onto the joint, just as it was taking the scorpion’s weight.
The whole machine staggered and it swung the blade wildly at Galen’s face in a sideways slash. The tide flung him down in a sprawl across the scorpion’s back, and that was not a good place to be, so he kept rolling and went off the far side, striking at the legs on that side as he went. The angle was wrong, but the machine had apparently learned that if it allowed the human with the club to strike at its legs, bad things happened. It snatched those legs tightly under its body and came crashing down on that side, practically on top of him. Galen’s bruised knee hit the ground and it hurt dreadfully but that didn’t matter because the tide only rose higher in response to the pain. The blade came at him, as did the whip, and he could only avoid one this time. Another hot line burned across his left arm, almost at the shoulder, although compared to his knee, it was insignificant.
He regained his footing at the same time it did, and tried to circle behind the scorpion. The range on the blade is all forward. If I can get behind it, maybe it won’t be able to strike as easily.
If it had been a real scorpion, this likely would have worked. Galen brought the club down on another leg joint, felt the machine shudder, and had a moment of triumph, before the entire tail simply swiveled around on a joint at the base and cut at him.
And now I’m dodging the blade and it has a lot more reach because it’s not going over the body. Lovely.
He tried to dodge to the side again, but the machine had learned this trick and the blade came down in another sideways slash, forcing him back. A clockwork bone turned under his feet and he fell backward and landed on his bruised ribs.
The battle-tide blunted pain but could do nothing about loss of breath. Galen suddenly couldn’t get air in his lungs and that was very bad, that was probably terminally bad, and the machine limped toward him, backward, lifting the blade high overhead and Galen tried to let out a yell of defiance that came out as a gasp and then an apple hit the scorpion in a bad leg joint and it collapsed reflexively again to try to protect its legs.
This time it couldn’t quite get up. The part of Galen that was still Galen doubted that the apple was the cause, so much as the pile of bone gears that it had dropped its bodyweight on. The part that had surrendered to the tide noted that there was another party armed with possibly lethal projectiles and he would have to deal with that once he’d finished off the scorpion.
The scorpion heaved itself up again, and then began to rise. It had one working leg on the right side. It flipped its body upright vertically, standing on the good leg and the matching leg from the left side, inelegantly bipedal.
It looked absurd, the thick body and lashing tail-blade balanced on two slender points. His first thought was that there was no way that it could possibly walk around like that.
His second thought was to remember the narrowness of the spaces in the room with interlocking blades. To get past that, it would have had to assume a posture like this.
He got to his feet. His lungs didn’t want to work, but they weren’t given a choice in the matter. He could hear his own breath wheezing in his ears.
The scorpion lumbered at him, rocking from side to side. Galen dodged, or tried, but the scorpion pivoted on one leg like a swivel, barely slowing at all. The feeler wrapped itself around a narrow piece of ivory and struck at him with it, missing his kneecap by inches and slamming heavily into his thigh.
Someone yelled his name. An enemy, probably, but Galen didn’t have time to worry about that. He stayed on his feet, even though he was going to have a bruise the size of a dinner plate. The legs, whispered the tide. It’s only got two left. Take out one more leg and it can’t walk. One more leg and it’s done.
Arguably Galen also only had two legs left, but the tide didn’t concern itself with such things. He grabbed the ivory club that the feeler was holding and yanked, hard.
The feeler was strong enough to hold onto it, but not to keep its balance. It lurched toward him and Galen kicked out hard at the near leg. His knee throbbed like a broken star as it connected.
The machine collapsed again, trying to protect its leg, but this time the trick worked against it. It lost its balance and went over. Galen leaped out of the way as it crashed down full length.
The underside looked exactly the same as the upper. Maybe it could reverse direction just as easily—or could have if it had more than two thin legs remaining. It began trying to right itself again, but this time Galen was not having it. As soon as it put its tail down to push itself upright, he snatched up another bone club and brought it down on the last leg, then flung himself free.
The scorpion began to flail wildly. Its tail struck at air, the feeler lashing back and forth, but it could not reach him and it could no longer stand on its own. Galen watched the machine’s ratcheting motions, waiting for an opening, then stepped in and slammed the club onto the thinnest part of the tail, just behind the blade. The shock of impact numbed his arm but he heard something crack that didn’t seem to be his bones so he hit it again and then again, forehand and backhand, over and over, no longer thinking, nothing but a hand on a weapon, again and again and again and again…
The tide slowly receded. The machine still moved, but only in aimless twitches, the motions of a snake with the head cut off. The blade lay half-severed, the tail joints broken.
“It’s dead,” someone said from the doorway. “It’s dead, Galen. You can stop.”
Someone. He knew them. Not the enemy, no matter what the tide might say. Not the enemy. Someone who had been in his arms, breathing against him. Piper. Yes. Not the enemy. The enemy was dead, if it had ever been alive in the first place.
He stepped back and shook himself. The tide never went away, but it receded. Ankle deep instead of over his head. Yes.
Galen turned and saw Piper and Earstripe in the doorway, watching him. The wariness in Piper’s eyes hurt more than he expected. “It’s fine,” he croaked. “I’m fine. It’s over.”
Piper crossed the distance between them in seconds. Galen wasn’t sure if the man was trying to embrace him
or trying to keep him from collapsing where he stood. Possibly a little of both. “You’re hurt,” said Piper, getting a shoulder under his arm. “Sit down, for god’s sake.”
“Not here,” mumbled Galen. “Is the door open?”
“No,” said Earstripe, “but a gnole sees a panel.” He went to the door, giving the dying machine a wide berth, and pressed it.
For a long, long moment, no one breathed, and then the door slid silently open. Through the doorway, Galen could see another door standing open, and the darkness of the cellar beyond.
“We’re out,” he said. “We did it. We got through.”
As one, they bolted. No one had to voice the thought that the door might close again and trap them. Earstripe was through first, and Piper and Galen hobbled out like partners in a three-legged race.
The wet air of the cellar tasted like fine wine. Galen hadn’t realized how dry the air inside the maze was, or how badly his lips and skin and sinuses had dried out. He drew in a lungful and almost didn’t care how badly his ribs hurt in response.
“You’re hurt,” said Piper. “Sit down—let me look at you—”
“Not yet,” he said hoarsely. The adrenaline of the fight would last him a little longer, and he knew that they weren’t out of the woods yet. “There’s still our gracious host to deal with.”
“Ah, yes,” said Thomas, from the top of the stairs. “I was wondering when you’d remember me.”
Twenty-Four
“I am very, very impressed,” said Thomas. “I mean that very sincerely.” The tip of the crossbow he held didn’t waver. It had a nasty man-killing head, pointing down at the trio. “I never expected that you’d make it through. At best, I thought you might manage another room or two, and I was hoping I could determine how you had died. But this! You got the door open, no less!” He smiled warmly at them, and Piper was struck by the thought that he was entirely sincere.
“He can only shoot one of us,” said Galen quietly. “Then he has to reload. We can rush the stairs.”
Paladin’s Hope: Book Three of the Saint of Steel Page 16