“We? Nothing. You’re going to shut up,” I said, “and I am going to run like hell.”
TEZZERET
Being about to die did not strike me as sufficient reason to abandon either of my treasures. So it was that I undertook to flee with my etherium trap in one hand and my hunk of sangrite in the other. Even without having replenished my mana reserve, I can do surprising things with etherium by using its innate energy to power its action. Reasoning that the least flammable thing in the entire neighborhood was the neck-deep trub in the midden where I stood, I decided to put as much of it as I possibly could between myself and the magma scorpion.
I took a deep breath and went in headfirst. As I clawed my way blindly downward, my fingers found the grating of the sewer drain-a grillwork of chrome steel, set in cement. Encouraged not only by Doc yammering in my ear-“What are you doing? Are you crazy? It’s right up there! Why aren’t you running?”-but also by the sudden impact of something large and heavy landing on the surface of the trub above me, I engaged the etherium device with my mind.
Chrome steel is hard, but even the hardest metal can be overcome by the proper application of force. Working by feel, I brought out from the etherium an assemblage of gears, ratchets, and levers. Jamming levers through the holes in the grating, I then turned the device’s innate mana wholly to working those gears and ratchets and levers to pry apart the bars of the grating as swiftly as possible… because the trub was becoming unpleasantly warm, and I could hear, through the slimy mass itself, a series of minor detonations, which I took to be the steam blasts generated as the scorpion struck blindly downward with its tail barb-a stinger made out of white-hot rock. Again and again and again.
I managed to avoid picturing what that stinger would do to my flesh.
With a squeal that came only dully to my ears, the bars gave way. Well-lubricated by the rotting, yeasty mass around me, I managed to slide through headfirst, and tumbled ten or twelve feet until I hit the sewage stream, which was only a few inches deep. It did nothing to improve the stench.
Entirely the opposite, in fact.
I pulled myself up from the muck and took a quick look around. Witchlight globes were strung every few dozen yards, enabling me to see a lot of straight tunnel to either side, and very little else.
“Hey, not bad,” Doc said brightly. “Now we run.”
“Not yet.”
“Yes yet,” he said, and punctuated his reply with a sensation that felt as I imagine it might if someone were to rip off my testicles. Slowly.
The pain dropped me to my knees. “If I pass out, we both die.”
The scorpion’s blazing stinger jabbed downward through the drain, unleashing a burst of steam and greasy smoke. “And dying is different from what’s about to happen exactly how?”
“You have to trust me.”
“Trust you? Never kid a kidder, chum.”
And somehow when he said it, chum sounded less like the word for pal than it did the word for the rotting fish guts one uses to attract sharks. “This is my hometown. I know every inch of it. That knowledge is the only chance we have.”
The pain vanished. “So what are we waiting for?”
The stinger struck again and again, and the sewer began to fill with smoke. I extended a hand-my right, from reflex, even though I couldn’t help flinching when it entered my field of view-and down through the drain and out of the smoke came my device, sprinting along on spider legs. I had it leap up and wrap itself around my arm, and then I passed the chunk of sangrite over to it. From there it was a simple matter of encasing the sangrite in etherium, and arranging the whole thing to make a sort of yoke, or a harness, holding the sangrite at my back and leaving my hands free.
This took barely a second, but in that time the cement around the drain burned away, and the top curve of the sewer collapsed, dropping a very large, very hot arthropod into the sewage, which did nothing at all to improve its temper; nor did the instant blast of superheated steam that very nearly blew it back up to street level. Catching itself at the rim, it started toward me along the ceiling, leaving a trail of burning footprints.
This was when two more of the creatures clambered down through the hole and clattered along after the first.
“Three?” I said. “Really?”
I could just imagine Jace whipping up this little trick with his pyromancer, whistling cheerfully as they worked, thinking You know, one indestructible monster just isn’t enough. Better double the order.
And one to grow on.
“Um, hey there, Native Son?” Doc chirped in my ear. “Are we running yet?”
“Yes,” I told him. “Yes, we are.”
And we did.
Pelting along the sewer tunnel as fast as my legs could carry me, I very soon discovered a piece of compelling evidence in favor of Bolas’s story that I had not, in fact, been raised from the dead: I found myself gasping and stumbling with fatigue in under a minute-very like how I might if I’d spent a span of time getting no exercise more strenuous than breathing. I was forced to funnel mana into my legs, which burned my limited reserve even faster.
And behind me clattered the magma scorpions. They were gaining.
“How much do you know about these things?” Doc hissed in my ear.
“Not… a lot.” I took a sharp turn into a side tunnel that sloped more sharply downward. Running downhill was vastly easier, and I picked up speed. “They’re not… local.”
“Really? There’s something you don’t know everything about? Stop a second-I gotta mark my calendar.” Doc, having no need to breathe, kept up a running commentary that made thinking even more difficult than being chased by indestructible monsters.
“Magma scorpions,” I said between gasps of breath. “Shells… unbreakable. And hot… set afire… anything they touch. The barb… venom… magma… temperature of a planetary core…”
“Oh, awesome. So if they don’t grab us and burn us to death, we get spiked with planetary core gunk in the back? That’ll leave a mark.”
“No,” I wheezed. “Steam burst… blow me to pieces. Nothing left… to mark.”
“That’s comforting. Um, hey, it sounds like they’re gaining. Are they gaining?”
The growing heat on my backside told me all I needed to know. “Want me to… stop and look?”
“Never mind.”
It seemed, however, that our impending mutual demise was not enough to make him be quiet. “They’re still coming. They’re still gaining. Don’t they get tired? I mean, they’re really just giant bugs, right?”
I did not have the breath to explain to Doc that while ordinary bugs-arthropods in general-are cold-blooded, and thus tire quickly when they overheat, magma scorpions are exactly the opposite; the heat generated by exertion makes them stronger. They tire only when they stop, which they weren’t going to do until I was on the well-done side of dead. Not to mention that they are an apex predator in their ecosystem, fearless, that their brains are larger than mine, and that they are, generally speaking, as intelligent as a medium-size dragon. And nearly as tough; there are only six ways to kill them, of which five would remain out of reach for too long to be useful.
“Um, hey,” Doc said. “They sound different.”
“What?” I was too busy running to waste time listening.
“Still gaining-but down a third.” Doc, it seemed, could use my nervous system more precisely than I could. File the data.
I stifled a curse that I didn’t have breath for anyway. “That means… there’re only two… there.”
“That’s good news, right?”
“They’re not… bugs,” I rasped. “The other… gone ahead to cut us off…”
