Without giving Katsumi time to follow, he pivoted around the corner.
The observation deck was empty. Marus would have slumped back against the wall with relief, if Katsumi hadn’t turned the corner, her rifle barrel gripped in both hands to turn the weapon into a club. She stepped up on the stone bench that circled the deck.
He saw at once what she was doing. She caught hold of one of the slender stone columns that ringed the perimeter of the deck to hold up the roof. Then she leaned well out of the tower, her neck craned to see if anything was perched on the roof.
A loose stone lay on the floor beside his bare feet. He nudged it with a toe and wondered whether to throw it. Safer than getting any closer to her, and at that short range, he could hardly miss. The fall was certain to finish her off, and he’d have one fewer enemy in the outpost.
No. Whatever he’d said earlier, he knew the truth: he couldn’t take on a linx by himself. He needed her. He just had to be very careful she never found out.
Besides, she’d brought him tribute, and the way to make sure more such gifts arrived was not to kill whoever delivered them.
Especially if she looked like that, the muscles in her arm flexed where she gripped the stone column, her body arched and leaning out at an angle. Moonlight shone through the worn linen of her shirt. He’d been with plenty of women who were well aware of a Prince’s attention and who reacted accordingly, but this one was so focused on her task that she didn’t seem to notice herself, let alone him. That was oddly intriguing.
She climbed down, with one quick shake of her head when she looked at him. No unnecessary talk, and he led the way back, struggling to think of some clever strategy that didn’t require any earth-related power. Naturally, by the time he reached the armory, he was no closer to destroying the linx than he had been when he’d talked to her before the fire.
The armory was as empty as he felt. That left only the barracks.
The door to that was closed. He went to it with no hesitation. Defeating a linx might be impossible, but he knew exactly how to keep a human in her place: act as if he still had his power, show that nothing in the world could intimidate him, and it would never occur to her to think otherwise.
Before he opened the door to the barracks, he gave her the candle, in case the linx was alerted by light despite having no eyes. He didn’t need to gesture to her to stand well back. She retreated fast as he turned the handle fractionally, trying not to give himself away by so much as a click. The door inched open.
From a gap in the roof, where tiles had fallen, a ray of moonlight fell on glass that gleamed in reflection.
Marus stayed still, letting his eyes adapt to the near-darkness. He felt nothing, maybe because what he’d dreaded was now reality, maybe because what occupied the barracks was more motionless than he was.
He couldn’t fully grasp its shape, but then again, it had none. It was a mass of clear cylinders, each as long as a man’s arm, joined at odd angles like sticks tossed together at random. The barracks accommodated a double row of bunks welded to one wall and more beds flanking the opposite side, but the sheer size of the linx made the room look small in comparison.
He pressed the door shut and backed away. Katsumi was already in the dining room, and he joined her there. Wonderful, there was a linx and he’d tossed off a nonchalant assurance he would destroy it, even though it was large enough to split into new entities that would crawl out of the outpost to drink any flesh in their way. Now what?
Find out what humans did under those circumstances, he decided. And make it sound like a casual conversation rather than a desperate search for help.
“Maybe I’ve been too hard on you,” he said as he made himself comfortable on the bench next to the fire. One of the advantages of eyes like his was that if he stared at the flames, a human standing off to the side couldn’t tell he was watching her in his peripheral vision. “I suppose your kind really wouldn’t have any idea what to do if that attacked you.”
As he’d expected, she glared at him before she caught herself and looked at her feet. “We’re not as helpless as that. If we sprayed acid at it from all sides, that would eat into it too fast for it to recover. And if we could be certain it was dormant, we’d try walling it in. It can’t get through solid stone, so if we built another roof overhead, made sure there wasn’t a single gap—”
“Forming a crypt around it.” He liked the idea; if something couldn’t be killed, the next best strategy was to seal it away, as the enemies of the Queen Beneath the Earth had done to her. And damn, that would have been so easy if he hadn’t been trapped himself.
Katsumi sat down as well, as if she was too tired to remain standing any longer. “But that takes time, even if we used stone from the rest of the outpost so we didn’t have to drag any up here. The linx could wake at any moment, and it would have a lot to feed on.”
“So you’ve never killed one before?”
“I heard of another coastal town getting rid of one, years ago. They lured it aboard a ship with goats and pigs, and while it was feeding on those, they used rowboats to tow the ship out to sea. The linx was swarming over the decks by then, but they’d reached a deep underwater sinkhole and they sank the ship.”
Not having goats, pigs, a ship or a sinkhole, Marus felt completely lost. What was he supposed to do now? Short of luring one of his brothers there to destroy the linx—which would be suicide—nothing came to mind. The silence pressed in around him, stifling.
Katsumi cleared her throat, drawing his attention back to her. “Forgive me for asking this,” she said hesitantly, “but—do you have a way to deal with it, in your flesh form?”
Marus brushed dust off the tabletop and rested his elbow on it. “Not yet. But there’s no cause for fear. I’ll think of a plan, and if that fails or the linx wakes, I can always revert to rock and smash it.” He paused. “Though if you have any thoughts, share them. Apparently humans can be more resourceful than I realized.”
She fidgeted, and he realized something else—she wasn’t nervous at the prospect of speaking to a Prince, but because she had something to hide. Before he could question her, she reached into her jacket and drew out a small cylindrical package trailing a length of cord.
“I have this,” she said.
“What is it?”
She relinquished it when he stretched a hand out. “We call it dynamite. Light the oiled cord, and when the flame reaches the dynamite, it produces an explosion that can shatter…anything.”
It took a conscious effort not to sit up with a jolt. “Why did you bring it here?”
“Because of the linx.”
“Nothing to do with me? Good to hear. Hand over the rest.”
It was a guess on his part, but the sudden fear that widened her eyes was most gratifying. Especially since he kept being reminded how close he was to being killed. “That’s all I have,” she said. “Truly.”
Marus stared at her, searching her face and the unblinking dark eyes. Her throat moved as she swallowed, but she didn’t flinch.
“So this can destroy the linx,” he said, trying not to show how relieved he was. “We only need to toss it inside the barracks.”
She shook her head. “That won’t work. The blast has to be contained to be effective, and it needs to target the linx’s entire body at once. Otherwise, the undamaged part will attack us.”
The worst part wasn’t the sense of defeat, it was the loss of hope. “All the more strange that you’d bring this to destroy the linx.”
“I didn’t say I was going to destroy the linx. If it woke and caught me, I’d rather die this way than be eaten alive.”
Marus gave up on the argument; he guessed she’d planned to use the dynamite against him, but he’d deal with that later. If there was a later. Think. He didn’t dare rely on her kind, and until he regained his power somehow, he’d stay far away from
any of his brothers. So what did that leave him?
A burning log settled in the fireplace. Marus sat up as an idea flickered through his mind. Maybe it was the memory of his brothers that had inspired him, but whatever its source, it was the only chance he had.
“Can you catch a rat?” he asked.
She stared at him. “What?”
“A live rat. There should be some in the kitchen, under the cupboards or in a grain bin. Go catch one or two, then find a ladder.”
From the skeptical look, she clearly thought that was a makework suggestion to get her out of the way, so he sharpened his voice to a snap. “That’s an order!”
That got her up as if the stick of dynamite had gone off under her bench. Marus watched her hurry out, grinned to himself and went to fetch a saw.
* * *
The ladder was broken in half, with one or two rungs so rotten Kat didn’t trust her weight to them. Marus had two saws hanging from a rope he’d tied around his waist, and now he took an empty barrel from the kitchen before he left the outpost. He headed out to the side of the barracks.
She followed with an unlit lantern in one hand and the ladder balanced on her shoulder, wondering again what he thought he was doing. None of this made sense. After she’d shown him the dynamite, she was surprised he hadn’t killed her instead.
Though maybe he felt no need to, if he was so powerful that nothing she could do to him made any impact. In the thirty years the Princes had ruled Avalon, no human had ever so much as scratched one of them. She wasn’t likely to be the first.
The stony ground outside was wet and slippery, but the rain had stopped. Marus set the barrel against the wall of the barracks and propped the half-a-ladder on top. Now they could climb to the tiled roof of the barracks, not that she had any idea what that would accomplish.
She wasn’t even sure what to do with the two rats she’d caught. Her baited box trap had broken one rat’s hind leg, but since Marus hadn’t wanted them unhurt, she’d taken both of them, tied into thick cloth pouches at her waist. She wasn’t afraid of rats, but the last thing she needed was them gnawing through the bags and biting her.
He went first and climbed off the ladder onto the tiled roof. The little sacks swung against her hips, the rats squirming inside, as she set the lantern down and scaled the ladder. She hoped he wasn’t so insane he would push her through the gap in the roof, so he could watch as the linx devoured her.
He was at the gap now, lifting tiles away to widen it. When he set the tiles down, he did that so carefully the sound was almost inaudible. She crouched on the other side of the gap and glanced down warily. It was like looking into an abyss where ice glinted here and there.
Marus leaned closer, and she gripped the rough clay edges of tiles, but he didn’t try to touch her. Only put his mouth so close to her ear she felt the stubble on his skin when he whispered, “Too dangerous to talk once we’re in. Do whatever I do.”
He passed her a saw, then climbed down into the gap, feeling with a bare foot for what she guessed was a rafter spanning the width of the roof. Then he disappeared into the darkness. She hooked the saw over her rifle barrel, then scrubbed her palms on the sides of her pants before she climbed in too.
The rafter creaked. Kat froze, clinging where she was, but nothing stirred beneath her. Not yet. Marus shifted to the left, and she did the same in the opposite direction—if their combined weight was on one end of the rafter, it might break, sending them both down into a mass of hungry glass.
Moonlight trickled through the gap in the roof. Marus was a dark shape crossing to another rafter, using the beams between as stepping-stones. Kat did the same, her heart filling her throat so she could hardly breathe—though with the dust-furred cobwebs that wreathed the rafters, she didn’t want to. A fine powder of rotten wood sifted down.
Beneath her, pale light rippled as if an imperceptible shiver had passed through the glass.
Kat glanced down and immediately wished she hadn’t. The branching veinwork of glass tubes spread out below her, multiple thick filaments jutting up and extending outwards in every direction. One misstep, one fall, and it would swallow her up.
Marus reached another rafter extending across the width of the room. He crouched, and a rough, steady rasp broke the silence. A tremor passed through the rafter’s length, and she realized he was sawing through the wood.
The linx quivered. The bite of the saw didn’t drown out a sound like multiple wineglass stems tapping together.
If he hadn’t ordered her to do whatever he did—and if he hadn’t been capable of enforcing that order—she would have scrambled back and out through the roof. Instead, she knelt on the same rafter and fumbled her saw loose with trembling fingers. Half-rusted teeth bit into the thick wood beneath her and sawdust rained down.
The linx rippled again, glass tubes swiveling like dogs’ noses scenting the air. Joined though those were to each other, they moved as if all connections were liquid, effortlessly turning to sense their surroundings. Kat sawed faster, her fingers numb where they gripped the handle. The rafter creaked again, shaking under her.
From different angles, the linx’s rods—its feelers and arms and feeding projections—oriented themselves upwards. The entire mass began to rise.
That time the sound beneath her was a low groaning split as the rafter gave way. Kat flung the saw down and scrambled to her feet. Wood cracked with the reaction. Marus had already reached a connecting beam when she leaped blindly.
She landed on another rafter that shuddered but didn’t break, and pinwheeled her arms frantically to stay on it. Behind her, the entire rafter crashed down.
The linx’s glass was harder than it appeared, but under the rafter’s weight and momentum, it crunched. The sound was like a boot coming down on the film of ice over a winter pool. Fragments flew skittering across the floor.
Kat had her footing, and she caught one of the wooden braces that slanted down overhead at an angle. Her nails dug in so hard splinters poked beneath them, though she was beyond pain at that point. The rafter lay across the floor, splitting the mass of the linx in two, but cracks in the glass were already sealing themselves. Bars swept softly over the floor, absorbing fragments into themselves as sponges would have sucked up water.
Numbly, she waited for the two halves to rejoin, fusing easily into each other to make all her effort wasted.
Like distorted mirror images, the crystalline masses milled on either side of the rafter as if it was a wall that separated them. They had no internal organs, but the constant, angular growth and twist and swivel of their rods was a pulse of its own, a bizarre kind of breathing. Cylinders long and clear as icicles retracted soundlessly in seconds, only to emerge on the other end of the mazeworks of glass. Each linx looked as untouched as if the rafter had never come down, but when their rods touched each other with a sharp ring, the limbs drew back rather than joining.
No. Her heart stuttered. The original linx had been dormant because it had been almost ready to divide, and that had just been done for it. No, no. Now there were two of them.
And then the fear vanished, because she saw Marus’s plan. Both linx were hungry, as all newborns were, so it was just a matter of putting some food between them.
She tore at one of the cloth pouches she carried, and the rat tumbled out. A moment too late, she realized her mistake, because the rat fell almost twenty feet and seemed to land on its already injured hind leg, judging from its squeal of pain. It had dropped between the two linx, and as it tried to crawl away, they both moved. Rods pivoted and plunged.
One slammed down with bonecrushing force, flattening the rat into a patch of fur. In moments, the rat’s body turned transparent. The linx sucked that up as easily as if the rat had turned to water and the rod was a hollow straw. The other linx’s bars turned and dipped as if searching for what they’d lost.
A rat wo
n’t be enough. She lowered herself to sit on the rafter. Marus shouted, but he was a moment too late, and she pushed off.
She’d bent her knees to absorb the impact, but she still landed with a jarring thump on the floor. As the linx turned in her direction, she scrabbled to her feet, holding on to the wall behind her with one hand—but her other ripped open the second cloth pouch at her belt. The rat was so frantic to escape that its claws raked her fingers, and she flung her arm out in a swift arc. Flying end-over-end, the rat hit the floor closer to the linx that had already fed, and raced to get away.
It might have succeeded if it hadn’t run straight into the body of the linx. Before it could weave its way through, two rods snapped together, crushing it between them. The rat was gone at once, and the other linx, deprived for the second time, surged at Kat.
She twisted aside, struck a rod out of the way with the butt of her rifle and threw herself into a roll that carried her beneath another extrusion that slid through the air. Both the linx moved now, and their feeding projections grew swiftly towards her. She was a fly, and three-dimensional spiderwebs wove themselves around her, glass singing as the two linx fought to get at their prize.
But Marus had taken advantage of the distraction to climb across the remaining rafters overhead. He threw down a makeshift rope—a length of torn blue silk—and she caught it, flinging the rifle back over her shoulder before she clambered up with desperate speed. A rod brushed her calf. Even through her trousers, the cold of it stabbed like a needle. She swung her legs up, and he hauled on the other end of the silk.
Her shoulder thudded against a rafter. The climb had turned the sinews in her limbs to hot wires, but she caught the rafter with the last of her strength and pulled herself up. Beneath her, the song of the rods striking each other turned to a chorus of high-pitched shrieks, like razors drawn against the edges of wet glass.
Sweat trickling down her throat, she leaned over the rafter. Any individual linx might have reached her, but not when they fought each other. Rods collided with sharp cracks, intricate meshworks of glass locking together so that what struggled up was a thick twisted spiral, a helix distorted out of any symmetry.
The Beast Prince Page 3
