Unabated, the flow of glass struck another beam.
Luma ran for the lever. She felt a snap, and a loosening—her belt had untwisted itself from the strap she'd tucked it into. The end of the leather flew into the grinder's jaws, pulling her toward it. Even as she jerked back, she hooked her sickle around the lever, yanking it back into its original position.
Ontor stepped a wary circle around the now-still golems. Behind him, Iskola sorted through the jumble of components around the upended table.
The grinder teeth slowed, but did not completely cease their chatter. Luma's belt tightened, and she fumbled with the strap. Her hauberk twisted behind her, hauling the belt out of reach.
She gesticulated to Ontor. "The lever! It's not all the way off." She looked into the jaws: a sizable block of glass had lodged itself in the overtaxed grinding mechanism. It was stuck off to the side, but if she shifted it, she might jam the jaws entirely. Or it might chew through the block, and then her, too.
Instinct told her to chance it. As Ontor reached for the lever, she hooked the crescent of her sickle around the block of glass, pulling it into the center of the jaws. A sulfurous vapor belched from the device. Black ichor, sluggish as blood, pooled out from below the machine. The machine jerked, working to chew up the glass block. At any moment, it might buzz through the momentary obstacle, clearing the jam. "The lever!" Luma shouted.
Inexplicably, Ontor had stepped back from it. Luma pulled at her belt, finally freeing herself. She gasped in relief and fell to all fours, crawling across the chamber's rough surface as Ulisa and Eibadon approached.
An odd inflection crept into Ontor's voice. "You hurt?"
"A close call, but I'm fine," Luma answered. She was still dizzy from her brush with death. "Why the hell didn't you pull the lever?"
Ontor held himself in confused hesitation, as if torn between two possible actions. Gathered in a staggered rank behind Ontor, her other siblings looked to one another, as if each waited for one of the others to act, or to reveal to her some dire fact. For an instant, she wondered if she'd been dealt a mortal blow, and had yet to realize it. She looked down at her abdomen, half expecting to see a spreading wound or an impaling blade. As far as she could see, she was unharmed.
Shifting stone rumbled overhead. A section of catwalk dislodged itself from the wall and swung down behind them. Chunks of rock clattered onto the machine. Eibadon held up his shield to deflect a debris chunk bigger than his head.
"We've got to get out of here," Luma said. She dashed for the exit.
His words drowned out by the sounds of the dropping rubble, Arrus signaled to Ulisa and Eibadon. They blocked Luma's path.
"What are you doing?" she shouted, attempting to push through them.
Ulisa laid swift hands upon her, and before Luma could react she was caught in a hold, her sister's fingers jabbing a pressure point she didn't know she had. Eibadon seized her by the other hand. Together the monk and cleric marched her back toward the machine, avoiding her wild kicks.
Luma cried out in panic and confusion. Her brother and sister neither acknowledged her or showed a hint of emotion. She twisted around to see Iskola removing the dampening ring from the iron golem, as unperturbed as if she were pulling a book from a library shelf. Ulisa dug her fingers harder into the pressure point, forcing Luma to relax into her hold and abandon her resistance.
Arrus now stood by the lever. With a jabbing thumb, he signaled Ulisa and Eibadon. As he pulled the lever, they picked Luma up and hurled her back into the jaws of the machine.
Her legs went in first. A moment of white agony gave way to nothingness as her body closed off her sense of pain. By fits and starts, the dying machine drew her into its jaws. Though spared direct sensation, she could hear the wet tearing of her flesh and the crunching of bones. She thrust her arms out, pleading words she herself could not hear.
Eibadon bent down to inspect her condition, then spoke in Arrus's ear. Luma wondered what maxim he'd be using, to say that she was good as dead.
The machine coughed again, pulling her in further. It had her up to her pelvis now. She tried not to see her gushing blood as it coated the front of the machine, intermixing with the ichor.
The room shook as a chunk of ceiling came down, burying a quarter of the room and loosing an advancing cloud of dirt and dust.
Her siblings sprinted for the stairs, dodging showers of rubble. Only Ontor remained, his gaze shifting back and forth between the exit, the crumbling ceiling, and Luma.
Maybe he still meant to save her, and was waiting until the others were out of sight.
Another lurch of the machine pulled her in further. Its jammed blades had lost the capacity to slice her apart; now it simply crushed her.
A shaking Ontor crouched before her, head turned as far to the side as he could manage, clutching and unclutching his fingers. Dust caked his features. Behind him, another section of the catwalk crumpled to the floor.
She tried to speak, to beg him to stop the machine. Time remained to get out, to regroup, to understand whatever madness had gripped Arrus and the others. Her lungs refused to draw air.
Ontor spoke, sobs swallowing his words: he repeated the same phrase over and over. Dimly Luma realized what he was saying.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry ..."
He summoned a measure of composure and rose to his feet. He still couldn't look at her. "I'm sorry," he said, "that it had to come to this." His head swiveled as a tumble of stones landed on the steps, breaking several of them. If he waited any longer, he'd be trapped, too. "This wasn't supposed to have to be me." Still barely looking at her, he plucked a dagger from its scabbard. "None of us wanted to have to do it. We were hoping...I warned you, again and again. But you wouldn't understand." He took a step toward her. The blade rose.
Luma shut her eyes and slumped, playing dead. It was her only chance. Ontor didn't want to do it. Were he truly ready to pull the knife across her jugular, she had no way to stop him.
A heavy object crashed onto the machine.
Ontor bolted, reaching the stairs moments before another tumble of rocks dashed them into a heap of broken boards. Luma heard the trapdoor slam shut.
She was alone.
Inch by inch, movement by movement, Luma pulled herself toward the lever side of the device. Now the pain washed in, her body screaming its alarm as blood vessels ruptured and muscle separated from bone. Consciousness wavered; she willed herself to remain awake. She groaned as her fingertips brushed the corner of the machine. She felt for the button that would reverse the mechanism. It was still out of reach. Luma twisted; a terrible report of breaking bone sounded from her lower limbs. Her hand found a raised round shape about the size of a saucer. Which way had the salvager slid it? From left to right, or the other way? Luma called to mind the colorless, blur-edged visual memories of her spider form. She would have to slide it farther away from her. Even now she might not achieve the needed reach. Driblets of commingled blood and sweat dripped from her brow. Clamping top and bottom teeth together, swallowing a cry of torment, Luma shoved herself over just a little more.
The button yielded, jolting the machine to life. The teeth on either side of her whirred at top speed as the mechanism reversed. They caught the sleeve of her reaching arm and shredded it. She pulled it away before it could do the same to her forearm. Where the device's jaws pressed down on her, the teeth moved in halting stages, pushing her out piece by piece. More fluid spilled from the machine. It screamed and gnashed. Clouds of arcane vapor, black interspersed with flashes of green, belched from the jaws each time they found purchase.
Now Luma prayed for unconsciousness, even for a moment. Desperate for distraction, she tried to tap into the citysong. All she could reach was that part of Magnimar that suffered and despaired. Her death throes joined a chorus of others: a man expiring from his stab wounds in a Dockway tavern, a woman dying during childbirth down in Rag's End, a fever victim thrashing on a Naos sickbed.
Final
ly the machine expelled her. Luma lay panting in the black-red muck. She feared to look back at herself. From the waist and below, all sense of having a body, of being able to move or control her limbs, was gone. Had she lost them entirely? In the end she couldn't stop herself from checking. Her legs were shattered, crooked, pulverized, but still attached. They were one big wound, leaking gouts of blood. If she couldn't staunch the flow, she had but minutes to live.
As she slipped in and out of awareness, the rhythm of falling wreckage slowed and finally stopped.
The pain gave way to shock, the blessed severance of sensation that accompanies grave injury. Luma knew this both from books and from experience. It had happened to Ontor once, when he fell from a rooftop onto a spiked fence, impaling himself through the abdomen. She'd clutched his hand as they waited for Ulisa to summon Eibadon to perform the healing. Ontor had regarded her with serene bafflement: "I don't feel hurt."
Now the situation was reversed, except that Ontor and the others were responsible for what had happened to her. And if Eibadon should happen to return, it would be to bash her skull in.
She pushed away thoughts of betrayal and protest. They wouldn't help her survive, not in this moment, and so she could not afford them. Luma imagined her grievances, her countless questions, as a physical manifestation—a red and swirling cloud. She pictured her numbness as a chamber, much like this one, deep underground, sealed with a trapdoor. In her delirious inner vision, the swirl, representing her anger, her sorrow, her need for answers, flew into the cavern. The door clanged shut, and a lock clicked around its latch. If she made her way out of here, she would unlock the door, and ask herself what she had done to provoke this from her own brothers and sisters. She would find out what had turned them into murderers. How they aimed to profit by this.
But that was if she made it out, a task for which distraction was the enemy.
Luma reached into the city to pilfer a sliver of loose healing magic, as she had done for the burned man at No-Horn's. Though the working exerted no visible effect on her shattered body, she felt the closing dark of unconsciousness halt and recede. That was all she'd expected, and was better than dying.
Plunging her fingers into the yielding ground, wending around stock-still golems, she crawled to the table where the wounded salvager had fumbled for a vial. Several of the glass containers had been smashed by falling stone, but two remained in the toppled stand. They might contain nothing more useful to her than alchemical fluids. But since the salvager had been reaching for one of them in the middle of a fight, the odds were better than even that she'd find a healing draught here. If not, the contents might do something absurd, like grow her to giant size or cover her body with a granite carapace. A potion's color revealed nothing consistent of its purpose, but Luma could usually tell by smell. She popped the cork on the first vial; a whiff of ammonia rose from it. It fell from Luma's weakening fingers. This was it. She was going to die right here, right next to this bandit. Her vision narrowing once more, she managed to get the second vial open. It smelled of camphor, cloudberries, and lemon—like certain arcane medicines she'd had occasion to down in the past. Without it, she was grave dust. Making silent prayer to Abadar, god of streets, cities, and her former family, she opened her mouth and gulped it down.
A soft heat permeated her, bringing with it a second glimmer of strength. Steam rose from the wounds on her legs as they cauterized into a network of scars. Broken bones still protruded from her flesh, but the skin had sealed around them, stopping the bleeding.
The healing draught had been of some use. But it wasn't nearly enough. Under any pressure whatsoever, some or all of those wounds would tear back open.
With her legs crushed, that was a more than probable event. Nearly any strenuous movement might reinjure her.
She turned her attention to the extent of the cave-in. It had reduced the size of the chamber by more than half. A treacherous wall of rock, cement, marble, and cobblestone cut her off from the exit. She'd spotted no second way out during her reconnaissance. If it had existed, there was a good chance it was now buried, too.
She looked up; the collapse had opened fissures in the ceiling. Through them Luma saw filtering daylight. She dragged herself back to the mouth of the machine. Her bag of spell ingredients, lost when her belt snapped, lay nearby. With trembling fingers, she sorted through it, hoping the item she sought had not been damaged. Though its vial was cracked, the component, a living spider, appeared stunned but intact.
The spell, which she'd used more times than she could count, required a healthy pair of arms. The legs, however, could perhaps dangle loose. She would hurt them, again and again, but it was her only way out.
Again she dragged herself, this time to the portion of the rubble pile closest, by vertical distance, to the ceiling's widest fissure.
To attune to the citysong took all of her hazy concentration. This time she sought out not the great hound-sized spiders of the cliffs, but the humble spinning spiders that lived in the dark corners of hovels and manors alike. She did not want to become a spider—that magic was spent—but rather to borrow their means of locomotion.
Their jittery energy filled her arms. She placed hands on the rubble wall and felt them adhere to the surface, just as they had done while in spider form.
The effect wouldn't last forever. There was no time to rest and prepare herself. She had to find the strength to pull herself up the wall, reach the fissure, and crawl through—and she had to do it now. She placed her hands as far as they would go without having to bear the dead weight of her body below the waist. Then she breathed deep and heaved herself up.
A river of agony washed over her before subsiding back into shock. Each instant an eternity, she pulled herself up farther. Jolts of pain broke through with each heave, as her useless, malformed legs banged against the rocks.
She sucked in a startled breath as a stone dislodged itself under her spidery grip. By reflex alone she reached out and seized a firmer handhold. The rock tumbled down, striking her shattered knee on its way to the chamber floor.
She made the mistake of looking down and saw wounds reopening across her ruined legs. Nausea rippled through her. Now fresh reservoirs of pain opened up, in her shoulders and arms. Her arms straining in their sockets, she moved herself up to the ceiling.
As she did, her perspective shifted. Luma beheld herself from a higher vantage, as if floating above her own body, above the chamber itself. She regarded the poor climbing wretch with pity. Why couldn't she just give up and move on to whatever the next realm held for her?
That's you down there, Luma realized. Either her soul was detaching from her body, as it supposedly did at the moment of death, or she'd fallen into a delirium of pain and hallucinated this vision of her own wracked body. She felt tugged from above. Was this the pull of the celestial planes?
If so, it was too soon. Luma thought of her family, and what she had to do. Luma had to live. To understand. She had to. She would will herself to do it.
Luma fought the pull until it let up, releasing her back into her physical form. All other matters would have to wait. Only the effort of moving up the wall could save her.
She reached the ceiling as the climbing magic ebbed. A chunk of ancient beam, exposed by the collapse, jutted toward her. In a series of tiny, aching movements, she turned herself around. She launched herself at the beam.
It might easily detach, sending her dropping to the floor and landing on her to boot. But the beam was part of the city, her beloved Magnimar, and Luma had no choice but to trust that it would not betray her, as her siblings had. She held her breath.
The beam held. Eyes watering, Luma pulled herself along it until she reached the hole.
A woman's hand, pale and thin, thrust down, waiting for her to grab hold.
Chapter Twelve
Between
Awareness came in bursts. She was being lifted up, borne somewhere. Carried in a pair of strong, stick-thin arms.
There was a place she should have recognized but could not quite bring to mind.
At times she thought she had died and gone beyond, but this place between places was neither up nor down.
Luma could feel but not see. A blindfold, or perhaps a sleep mask, lay upon her face. She tried to pull it off but her arms were restrained at the wrist.
She was in a bed—a pillow under her head, blankets weighing down on her legs. Which didn't move and maybe weren't there anymore.
The pain grew worse, into a steady throb that would not leave her.
Someone came periodically to spoon salty broth into her mouth, or to pour water onto her tongue and lips. Occasionally the liquid was neither of these things, but tasted like the healing draught she'd taken down in the golem room.
She submitted wordlessly to these ministrations. The impulse to speak had left her. As had the ability to measure time. Eventually she heard herself talk: "Ontor?"
If it was Ontor, he didn't answer.
Her dreams took on a seeming reality, convoluted and menacing. A gray-bearded man with part of his upper lip missing told her that her father had been fatally poisoned. She woke up trapped on an island, alone in a trackless sea. She looked at herself in a mirror; reflected back at her was the strange golem figure of struts and tubes. The brain bubbling in its central globe was all that was left of her.
Most of the time she wandered through streets that resembled those of Magnimar just enough to confuse her. She had the entire place imprinted in her, yet now its avenues and byways went on forever without ever taking her anywhere familiar.
In one dream she wandered into a place that was and wasn't Grand Arch. She hopped a white stone gate to drift toward an alabaster palace. Looking down, she realized she had no legs, but this did not impede her progress. Through carpeted, perfumed rooms she swept, until she came to a courtyard. There, on a throne of marble, skulls, and gold ingots, lounged a lovely woman, her neck swanlike, her eyes green and cruel. The woman beckoned her, holding out a stone plate heaped with figs.
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