Den of thieves

Chapter Twenty-Two

Bile rushed up Malden’s throat and his head swam. The breath exploded out of him and he nearly let go of his bodkin. The demon’s arm throbbed around his midsection and constricted his guts until he thought for sure he would be pinched in half.

Then it picked him up off the floor and slammed him against the ceiling of the tower room. His vision went black for a moment and when he came to his ears were ringing like bells.

It had grown still larger, until it nearly filled the room. Its myriad arms waved limply in the air and slapped against the stone walls. One of its arms still held the crown, gripped carefully in a thin twist of flesh. It held the thing well clear of Malden’s reach, even if he’d had the presence of mind to make a grab for it.

Malden stabbed wildly around him with the bodkin, but even when his knife struck true it merely sank into the pulpy flesh, then came out again without leaving so much as a mark on the creature’s arms. The thing was sickeningly fluid, barely solid enough to keep a form, it seemed. Yet where it held him, its muscles were like ropes of steel. The thing was… unnatural. Unworldly.

Now Malden understood why the room was guarded by a statue of the Bloodgod. This was no natural beast. It must be a very demon, loosed from out of Sadu’s pit of souls. It did not belong in the world of light and air. Whatever sorcerer had summoned it from its natural environment must have understood that. He or she must have known that it would grow, and continue to grow, when exposed to air. They had placed it in the crystal bowl of water to keep its size small. If he could submerge it again in water, perhaps it would shrink once more and It thrust him against the walls again and again, trying to batter him to death. For a while he could not think or even see clearly as he was lashed against the flags and banners that lined the walls of the tower room. Pennons and standards crashed to the floor as his body knocked them free of their pegs. His left shoulder struck the stone wall hard and went instantly numb, and he could barely feel his legs.

Water-there must be some water-somewhere He could hardly think straight. He could hardly think at all. There had been water in the bowl, but it soaked into the sand that covered the floor. That must be what the sand was there for. The river was nearby, if he could somehow trick the beast into climbing over the wall and falling into the canyon beyond-but how he would manage that when he could not free himself from its grip was past his imagining.

Water! He must have it! He He had no water. But he had wine. The flask at his belt was still half full. Would it have the same effect on the creature? He could not be sure.

The beast had grown still larger. It filled the tower room entire now, and was crushing him against the walls with its bulk. As it waved its arms around, it smashed the stones to powder-its arms were as thick around as tree trunks now. Would it keep growing, would it grow so large it burst the walls of the tower? Would that be enough to kill it, when the upper stories of the tower collapsed upon it?

Malden doubted it. But he was certain of one thing-he, himself, would never survive such a collapse.

There was no more time for thinking. He reached around the tentacle at his waist and grabbed the flask of wine. It was leather sewn together with gut, the seams worked with wax to make them waterproof. It sloshed as he lifted it up to see it. When he bought the thing, he’d chosen shrewdly, picking a vessel that wouldn’t leak, that would stand up to rough treatment. Now he cursed himself that he hadn’t just bought some cheap skin he could burst with one hand. The damned flask was too sturdy. He brought his bodkin around and stabbed it. Wine squirted out of the hole he’d made and red drops ran down the back of his hand.

One drop fell onto the beast’s skin. The arm that held him pulsed wildly and he was thrown hither and yon, but the grip around his waist eased a trifle. Yes! The wine had some effect on the thing. He held the flask toward the tentacle and squeezed it as hard as he could, spraying wine all over its pulpy flesh.

Suddenly, blood rushed down into his legs and they burned with new sensation. His guts relaxed inside his abdomen and he belched as his stomach nearly loosed its contents. He squeezed the flask again and he was free, flying through the air as if the demon had thrown him like a ball.

The wall of the tower came toward him very fast, and he nearly crashed into it head first. He threw his arms up in front of him and managed to catch the wall with his sore fingers and then cling there like a spider before he fell back into the demon’s arms.

Below him the beast thrashed like a mad thing, bashing against the walls convulsively. Stone crumbled and shattered and pulverized. A wide crack opened in the wall and then a whole section of the tower’s stonework fell away, letting in a rush of cold night air.

The tentacles snapped at Malden’s ankles and back, trying to get a grip, but they were slow and he was able to avoid being grabbed up once again. The main problem he faced was that the beast had grown so large there was precious little room in the tower it didn’t fill, little enough that Malden had to press himself against the wall to keep from being crushed by its sheer bulk.

More of the wall fell away. The tower above began to groan as its timbers shifted, no longer able to support the weight. The tower that stood for so many centuries, that seemed eternal, now lurched and swayed like a ship in a gale. In a moment the room would collapse and he would be crushed. He had escaped one gruesome fate only to befall another, it seemed. And yet-perhaps Malden looked down and saw that he was very close to the statue of Sadu that was the secret lock to this room. The creature had enough respect for its creator, it seemed, not to smash the idol or even brush it with its tentacles. Malden waited until the tentacles were as far from him as possible, then dropped to his feet next to the image. He wasted no time pushing down on the arm-lever that controlled the door.

The pivoting section of floor and wall began to turn, and Malden readied himself to dash through it as it revealed the moonlit hallway beyond. Yet when the wall had swiveled only a few degrees through its arc, with only a sliver of moonlight coming through from the other side, the motion stopped.

The cause was immediately apparent. The tentacled beast’s mass was pressing against the wall, keeping it from swinging open. Malden pushed at the wall, trying to force it to open, trying to squeeze his shoulders through the small gap, but to no avail. “No!” he screamed at it. “Get back, you infernal bastard! Let me go!”

The beast made no response but to redouble its thrashing motion. Malden laid into it with his bodkin, stabbing and thrusting wildly at its ever-moving arms. It was no use, though, because the thing was still growing, still expanding to fill more and ever more of the available space — and then the tower began to rumble, as if it were being shaken to pieces. Rock dust sifted down from the ceiling and the stone walls began to give way.