mind.
The chamber was huge. Great arches and porticoes extended it beyond Sam's line of sight. The floor on the east side dropped away abruptly in an embankment. An arm of the Thames had been diverted into this area. Sam noted distortion on the water surface and searched the shadows until he found Willie's spy drone, hovering near the vaulted ceiling. From the scattered piles of moldering crates, this place had once been a loading dock. In olden times it had held the hustle of honest workmen, or perhaps dishonest ones. Now it hosted workmen of an evil bent. Its stone walls range with the screams of their tortured victims, scattering the echoes into an infinity of agony.
The druids were gathered in a cleared area about five meters south of the west entrance. Magefire lit their work, providing enough light for Sam's goggles. Far too much light. He had no need to see them slicing flesh from the victims who remained alive. They were moving briskly; there already were three skeletons on the dank floor.
'This one is diseased,' Carstairs announced as if observing the color of a house.
'Dispose of the affected parts. Such flesh is unsuitable,' Hyde-White told him.
Carstairs nodded. The golden sickle in his hand rose and fell. The Lord Mayor's victim shuddered and went limp, her screams abruptly cutting off as she fainted. Or died.
Sam's mouth filled with bile as he watched Carstairs hold out a severed limb to one of the assistants. The man who took it was tall, well-dressed, and almost regal-looking. He seemed pleased to be of service. He carried the arm reverently across the chamber and stopped a foot from the stairs that led down to a river landing. Throwing underarm, he pitched the limb far out into the polluted waters where it splashed softly and disappeared. The man returned to his station, oblivious to the blood on his hands.
A flicker of motion caught Sam's attention. Two men were moving in from the north entrance. Estios and Chatterjee. Sam watched them crouch in the lee of a pillar and begin a mystical centering process. He turned his attention to the druids, drawing a bead on Glover. He was not happy to see the pectoral of the archdruid on the man's chest.
Estios and Chatterjee unleashed a brace of fireballs. Mystic energy exploded on either flank of the druids' gathering, flinging flaming men and women in all directions. Sam saw Carstairs go down.
At the sudden violence, Sam flinched involuntarily, but his target reacted better. Glover's body flared with a defensive spell as he ducked for cover. 'Hanson,' he shouted. 'Protect me.' Sam lost his clear shot as the big acolyte stepped between him and Glover. Just delaying the inevitable, Glover. He shot Hanson, but the man didn't go down. Another dose of the Lethe tranquillizer might overload his system and kill him, but given the man's involvement in the druids' affairs, Sam didn't care. He fired again. Hanson staggered, but still didn't go down. He showed no sign that the drug was having any effect at all. Sam emptied the rest of his clip into Hanson, rapidly reloading as the man stumbled forward.
By Sam's side O'Connor opened fire, raking the crowd with her H amp;K G12. Sam watched her hose down a group clustered around Hyde-White. His protective flunkies fell like mown wheat. The fat old druid sagged as O'Connor's slugs reached him. He joined his followers on the cold, damp stone.
Taking down half of the Circle's numbers wasn't enough to stop the fight. The enemy had split up, scattering around the chamber in search of protected firing positions. Fortunately, the enemy's actions remained uncoordinated. Better still, they were indecisive. That was good; the druids probably didn't realize that they had the runners outnumbered, outgunned, and outmagicked. The imbalance of magicians was what worried Sam the most. Flashes and bursts of sound and smell from the far side of the chamber raised his worry to fear as Estios and Chatterjee came under magical attack. Their defenses and luck were holding, though, and the sharp buzzsaw sound of their G12s made it clear that they were still functional.
A throbbing moan announced the arrival of the runners' equalizer, Willie's combat drone. Unlike the smaller spy drone, this machine was armed and armored. It was also far from quiet; only the sound of the combat had allowed it to approach undetected. But it was here now and odds shifted more in the runners' favor. The drone's high-tech nature made it largely immune to magic, and its firepower alone was probably more than the druids could deal with. Panels slid back along the cylinder's side and gun muzzles snouted forth.
Before the drone could open fire, the room was suddenly lit by an enormous flare of white light. Sam screamed as his amplification goggles overloaded, the compensators not quite quick enough to spare him from all of the burst. The shouts and howls from the druids' forces showed that the runners weren't the only ones caught unprepared for the tactic. Sam dropped to the floor and ripped the goggles free. He rubbed at his eyes as if he could scrub the whirling spots of color away. Blind, he was helpless. The drone wasn't firing. Had Willie's sensors been affected too? If so, they were hosed. Several people ran by his position, but he could do nothing. He heard O'Connor's G12 fire and send slugs into the wall. Her sight was affected as well. They would have been dead now if the druids hadn't been more interested in escaping. Sam's eyesight cleared with maddening slowness.
But when he began to focus on his surroundings, he almost wished he couldn't. Some kind of dark slimy sludge was puddled near the body of an acolyte who had fallen near the open sewer. Contrary to the slope of the floor, the puddle was moving. Sparkling with an oily iridescence, the polluted surface of the river was flowing up and over the cornice. The leading edge of the slick reached the fallen woman but instead of creeping along and under her outstretched arm, it crawled up and over. Black smoke rose hissing where sludge contacted flesh and cloth, Sam saw bone where spatters of the slime had leaped ahead of the puddle's leading edge.
As the body disappeared under the advancing foulness, the slime began to bubble. A mound humped where the woman had lain, welling up into a hideously humanoid column.
Sam flashed on a warehouse in Hong Kong, remembering the thing Glover had raised there. Then, the toxic spirit had saved Sam's life, even though the result had only been incidental to saving Glover. This time, it was Sam who threatened Glover. The noxious parody of a man lurched toward him. As the slime thing rose, the remaining druids and their acolytes burst from hiding. Under cover of magical and mundane firepower, they made a concerted break for the northern entrance. Estios and Chatterjee, unable to reply to the concentration of firepower, couldn't stop them. Leaving their dead and wounded behind, the druids fled.
As soon as he had a chance, Estios fired at their retreating backs. He rose from his hiding place and shouted for the runners to follow him in pursuit. He didn't wait to see if he was obeyed. Chatterjee was hard on his heels, and O'Connor hurried to join her fellow elves. Sam hesitated, unsure of the wisdom of pell-mell pursuit into the dark; he had lost his goggles. In that moment, the thing moved between him and the northern door. Like an angry wasp, Willie's drone buzzed the slime shape, 5.56mm machine guns blazing. The drone's high velocity slugs tore through one side of the thing and out the other with no apparent effect. The thing's half-formed head swiveled to track the drone as it circled.
Willie concentrated the fire of both guns on the shape's malformed shoulder. Bullets slammed into the viscous goo, perforating the limb. The guns raked up and down, dumping a volume of fire that eliminated in-pouring slime before it could reseal the breech. The right arm that had been reaching languidly toward the drone dropped to the floor and splashed on the hard stone.
A rapid series of beeps from the drone was Willie's cheer.
Sam didn't join in. He was watching the puddles of the arm coalesce and flow into the base of the shape. Willie wouldn't be seeing it; she would be concentrating on amputating the thing's other arm.
The second limb splashed down only to trickle back to the parent mass. Willie was keeping its attention but doing no significant damage. Sam thought it would be wisest to get out as soon as he could. A bulge was beginning to develop on the monster's right shoulder. It would be restored to itself soon, and Willie's ammo supply was limited.
Sam was looking for a way past the thing when he realized that it wasn't reforming an arm. Its shoulder just continued to bulge until it began to look hunchbacked. Willie's fire gnawed at its neck, but the thicker attachment was proving more resistant to the drone's fire.
With appalling speed, a tentacle burst from the growth on the thing's shoulder, whipping out and wrapping itself around the drone. The shock and mass almost brought the machine down, but Willie revved the rotors. The blades sliced gobs from the pseudopod and the drone rose again, but it was still trapped.
The monster pumped its substance into the tentacle, becoming thinner and thinner as the portion gripping the drone bloated. It was nearly a caricature stick figure by the time the mass overcame the drone's lift capability and the machine crashed to the floor. The drone's landing gear was still retracted and the rounded lower end offered no stability. The cylinder canted sideways immediately. Guns firing wildly, the drone toppled.
