The instability of the machine had not gone unnoticed, and two guards were presently forsaking their meal of prime steak and raising the alarm with panicked shouts. Their retreat allowed Nikaetomaas to wriggle free unnoticed, then turn to haul Gentle after her. The juggernaut was now close to toppling, and shots were being fired on the other side as the guards above the gate sought to dissuade the crowd from further burrowings. Gentle felt hands grasping at his legs, but he kicked back at them, as Nikaetomaas dragged him forward, and slid out into the open air as several cracks, like sudden thunder, announced that the saints were tired of teetering and ready to fall. Backs bent, Gentle and Nikaetomaas darted across the rind- and crust-littered ground to the safety of the shadows as, with a great din the saints fell backwards like comic drunkards, a mass of their adherents still clinging to arms and coats and skirts. The structure came apart as it hit the ground, pitching pieces of carved, cooked, and crippled flesh in all directions.
The guards were descending from the ramparts now, to stem with bullets the flow of the crowd. Gentle and Nikaetomaas didn’t linger to watch this fresh horror but took to their heels, up and away from the gates, the pleas and howls of those maimed by the fall following them through the darkness.
“What’s the din, Rosengarten?”
“There’s a minor problem at the Gate of Saints, sir.”
“Are we under siege?”
“No. It was merely an unfortunate accident.”
“Fatalities?”
“Nothing significant. The gate’s now been sealed.”
“And Quaisoir? How’s she?”
“I haven’t spoken with Seidux since early evening.”
“Then find out.”
“Of course.”
Rosengarten withdrew, and the Autarch returned his attention to the man transfixed in the chair close by.
“These Yzordderrexian nights,” he said to the fellow, “they’re so very long. In the Fifth, you know, they’re half this length, and I used to complain they were over too soon. But now”—he sighed—“now I wonder if I wouldn’t be better off going back there and founding a New Yzordderrex. What do you think?”
The man in the chair didn’t reply. His cries had long since ceased, though the reverberations, more precious than the sound itself, and more tantalizing, continued to shake the air, even to the ceiling of this chamber, where clouds sometimes formed and shed delicate, cleansing rains.
The Autarch drew his own chair up closer to the man. A sac of living fluid the size of his head was clamped to the victim’s chest, its limbs, fine as thread, puncturing him, and reaching into his body to touch his heart, lungs, liver, and lights. He’d summoned the entity, which was the shreds of a once much more fabulous beast, the renunciance, from the In Ovo, selecting it as a surgeon might choose some instrument from a tray, to perform a delicate and very particular task. Whatever the nature of such summoned beasts, he had no fear of them. Decades of such rituals had familiarized him with every species that haunted the In Ovo, and while there were certainly some he would never have dared bring into the living world, most had enough base instinct to know their master’s voice and would obey him within the confines of their wit. This creature he’d called Abelove, after a lawyer he’d known briefly in the Fifth, who’d been as leechlike as this scrap of malice, and almost as foul smelling.
“How does it feel?” the Autarch asked, straining to catch the merest murmur of a reply. “The pain’s passed, hasn’t it? Didn’t I say it would?”
The man’s eyes flickered open, and he licked his lips. They made something very close to a smile.
“You feel a kind of union with Abelove, am I right? It’s worked its way into every little part. Please speak, or I’ll take it from you. You’ll bleed from every hole it’s made, but that pain won’t be anything beside the loss you’ll feel.”
“Don’t. . .” the man said. “Then talk to me,” the Autarch replied, all reason. “Do you know how difficult it is to find a leech like this? They’re almost extinct. But I gave this one to you, didn’t I? And all I’m asking is that you tell me how it feels.”