Dead Rosalind.
Annah yanked up hard again, driving her joined hands into Pelinor's belly. More curds bulged out of his mouth; but they slithered back inside as soon as Annah released her squeeze. Again and again she went through the prescribed motion, scoop in, relax, scoop in, relax… but her very first compression had forced out as much gunk as she was going to get, and subsequent squeezes ejected no more. Pelinor's throat remained clogged — the blockage was too big to dislodge.
When Annah realized that, she let go of Pelinor and gestured at me. 'You try.' We traded positions and I jammed my hands into Pelinor's gut with every gram of strength I possessed. More curds squirted out of Pelinor's mouth… but not a titanic volley, just a coughing dribble. Not nearly enough to clear his windpipe.
I could picture a glistening mass of white clotted all the way down to his bronchial tubes. Each time I squeezed, the mass was pushed and the top part spilled into his mouth; but I couldn't crush in hard enough to push the whole squirming bulk out of his esophagus, and as soon as I let go, everything slid back down again.
'This isn't working,' I said. 'We have to think of something else.'
'Get his mouth open,' the Caryatid commanded.
Annah reached in to pull down Pelinor's jaw. Pelinor resisted, probably just out of instinct: by now, he couldn't have been thinking clearly. Beneath the flame- ravaged skin, his face had gone purple with suffocation; when I looked at the whites of his eyes, they were dotted with the same red petechiae pinpricks I'd seen on Rosalind's corpse. Tiny blood vessels burst by the exertion of trying to draw breath. Pelinor was straining so fiercely, I didn't think Annah could possibly get his mouth open — but a few seconds after she started to try, the rigidity slumped out of his body as he fell unconscious. Immediately, she flopped his jaw wide…
…and the Caryatid plunged the flame into his mouth.
The tiny ball of fire disappeared inside. From where I was kneeling, I couldn't see anything but a yellow-orange light shining out between his lips, the flame so bright it lit his cheeks from within. Smoke wisped out of his mouth and nose; I prayed it was only the ash of charred curds, but I was afraid some of the smoke came from Pelinor himself — his tongue and inner cheeks turning to cinder, maybe even the soft tissues of his throat. The Caryatid would be as cautious as possible, focusing the flame's heat only on the alien chunks that were filling Pelinor's air passages… but she was, after all, playing with fire, and it was Pelinor getting burned.
As the Caryatid worked, she talked in a voice I'd heard from time to time as I passed the door of her classroom. A teacher who reflexively explained everything she was doing, the way she'd talk students through a sorcery exercise. 'I've started burning chunks of alien material in his mouth. The nuggets want to avoid the flame… they're crawling away from the heat… but after a few seconds' exposure, they stop moving and drop. Annah, could you sweep out the remains from the bottom of his mouth? Don't burn your glove on the flame. Good. Now' — she took a deep breath—'we'll start on the throat. Phil, I'll need you to squeeze his stomach. As tight as you can and don't let go. Do it.'
I dug my grip into Pelinor's diaphragm. In my mind's eye, I imagined wet white nuggets being pushed up his esophagus into the flame. Burn, you bastards… every last one. More smoke billowed from Pelinor's mouth — rank-smelling stuff, like swamp rot. Annah swept out the dead debris. We were making progress.
As long as we didn't let ourselves think about what the flame was doing to Pelinor's windpipe.
Eventually, the Caryatid had to propel the fire so deep into Pelinor's throat she lost sight of it. I don't know if she lost control of the flame at that point; I don't know if she ever lost control at all. But even if she could direct the cauterizing heat wherever she wanted, she was operating blindly — as she looked into his mouth, all she could possibly see was a dim gleam shining past the blistered epiglottis. Yet she didn't dare reduce the strength of the flame, for fear it would gutter out amidst the moistness of the alien curds.
The end came quickly: a sudden eruption of blood from Pelinor's mouth, extinguishing the flame, splashing in torrents onto my hands where they were still wrapped around his abdomen. In the light of the streetlamps, the blood was bright red — arterial blood from the carotid. Inside Pelinor's neck, the Caryatid's flame had burned through the esophagus and seared into the major artery carrying blood to the brain. There was nothing we could do to stop the gusher; the rupture was deep down, out of sight, out of reach. Even if we could staunch the bleeding, pinch the artery shut, Pelinor's blood-starved brain would die within minutes.
So we watched the blood spill. Watched it gradually slow down. Watched Pelinor die in a pool of crimson and white.
By the time it was over, Impervia was kneeling on the roadway with the rest of us. Her breathing was ragged; being thrown against the guard rail may have broken a few more ribs. But she still had plenty of breath to say prayers for our dying friend. Tears slid down her cheeks as she asked God to have mercy on Pelinor, sword-sworn knight, Christ's beloved son. A man fallen for a righteous cause, called to this mission by heaven itself.
Impervia wasn't the only one weeping. Annah and I had tears in our eyes… but the Caryatid's face was as hard as a gravestone. I longed to tell her it wasn't her fault; if she hadn't tried to burn away the curds, Pelinor would surely have choked to death. What she'd done was the only chance Pelinor had.
But my mouth refused to speak. None of us seemed able to do more than mumble prayers. The look on the Caryatid's face said she didn't want to hear anyone say, 'You did your best.'
She waited only until Impervia said, 'Amen.' Then the Caryatid stood up, wiping her hands (damp with Pelinor's blood) on her crimson gown.
'We're going in now,' she said. 'We're going to burn that demon in the fires of hell.'
For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Impervia said again, 'Amen.'
Together we headed up the steps of the generating station… and if any one of us looked back at Pelinor crumpled in the roadway, it wasn't the Steel Caryatid.
21: THE SHAFT
The station's front door stood open — left that way by Jode or Sebastian. No bombs went off as we climbed the steps, no spikes shot out as we entered; whatever defenses might have been here, they'd been swept away by nanotech brooms.
The inner lobby was resplendent with carved marble: a massive alabaster reception desk, a wide ascending stairway behind it, doors going off in several directions. I recalled that the station had been built in the 1890s… a time when OldTech culture admired stolid geological decor, before tastes mutated to glass and steel and chrome. This room, this whole building, smelled of stone — stone kept damp by the perennial mist blowing off the Falls.
Not so perennial now.
All but one of the doors off the lobby were closed. The exception was immediately to our right, a door left ajar with dirty wet footprints leading up to it. If Jode and Sebastian (or their muddy boots) continued to leave such an obvious trail, we could track them all the way to the generators.
How convenient. Considering how flagrantly Jode had taunted us, did the shapeshifter
In which case, our group might have clear sailing all the way to the generating room. Jode couldn't waste time tormenting us small fry. The Lucifer had more pressing priorities — perhaps, as the Caryatid suggested, freeing a group of its fellows from an electric cage — and Jode couldn't afford to dally before the mission was accomplished. After the jail break, then… then…
I had an unpleasant thought. What if Jode was deliberately making it easy for us to follow? What if Jode intended us to make it safely to the electric cage so some newly escaped Lucifers could use us as playthings? Or as lunch? I opened my mouth to suggest this to my companions… then changed my mind. The others knew we were walking into a trap — Dreamsinger's trap, Jode's trap, somebody's trap — and my friends weren't running away.
I wasn't running either. Not with Pelinor and Myoko dead. And when Impervia kicked open the door ahead of us, when the Caryatid sent a fist-size fireball flaming forward to light our way (and perhaps scorch the smile off anyone lurking on the other side)… I didn't wince at the commotion.
We were going in. All the way.
Down a short corridor to a pair of metal doors: two elevators, side by side. I'd read about elevators but I'd never seen one till the first time I visited Niagara. All the local hotels had them. Many visitors spent hours riding up and down; some people preferred the glassed-in variety that showed the world outside, while others liked the spooky chill of not being able to see, just moving blindly until the doors opened and you found yourself thirty stories higher than where you started.
The elevators before us were the closed-in type, traveling through pitch-dark shafts. I could tell this because one of the doors had been ripped from its frame, leaving nothing but a hole and a very long drop.
I peeped cautiously into the shaft, taking a good look up and down. No threats were immediately visible. Two bundles of cables dangled in front of me, one for each elevator car, side by side in the same shaft; but even with the Caryatid's fireball lighting our view, I couldn't see the cars themselves. I
When I thought about it, I decided the cars must be on the bottommost level; it made sense for the Keepers to lock the elevators down there so intruders would have a harder time reaching the generator room. Not that such tactics would slow down Sebastian — he'd ripped the one door open, and for all I knew, he'd summoned his nanite chums to carry him and 'Rosalind' down the shaft, like feathers floating on the wind. Too bad our group couldn't do the same; but since none of us could fly, we needed a practical alternative.
On the far side of the elevator shaft, a ladder was embedded in the concrete, running as far as I could see both up and down — no doubt used by workers when the elevators needed maintenance. I didn't relish a climb down umpteen stories, with the very real possibility of running into booby-traps set by the Keepers… but what other choice did we have?
Impervia answered that question by jumping into the shaft and catching the nearest bundle of cables. The bundle had four cables side by side, all in a line with a fist's distance between adjacent ones… like four strings on a harp, except that the cables were each as thick as my arm. Impervia had no trouble grabbing two of the four with her hands and jamming her feet between adjacent pairs for extra support. The cables were taut but not totally unyielding; they pinched her boots with what looked like a strong (but not painful) squeeze.
'How is it?' the Caryatid called to Impervia. 'Can you just slide down?'
Impervia freed her feet, loosened her grip, and tested to see how far she slid. After only a few centimeters, she stopped and shook her head. 'The wires aren't smooth — they're prickly with rust. If you tried to slide far, the friction would rip your gloves, then start on your fingers.'
