everything in Umbriel was still frightfully strange, and none of it gave her any purchase on what was happening.
Luc hopped down from the shelves and crouched behind her. For her part, Annaig climbed up onto the table to get a better view, but the wavering air above the fire pits obscured the far end of the kitchens. Still, the scamps were all swarming in that direction, leaping through the wires, grills, and racks above the pits. Beyond, a black curtain of flame and smoke occluded what the shimmering air did not. Only in the central aisle could she see anyone, and there the cooks and their helpers were black silhouettes, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder.
“You,” Qijne snapped, from off to her left. “What are you standing about for?”
“What’s happening?”
Slyr was with her, and the rest of the staff from Ghol’s station, along with a motley collection of the largest and most dangerous-looking cooks in the kitchen, including Dest, a hulking ogrelike fellow with black and yellow fur. They were all armed to the teeth with butchering knives and cleavers.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Qijne snapped. “Come, now.”
The closed around her, moving at a trot, through the huge boilers, parsers, and stills, the pulsing soul-cable, and into territory Annaig had never seen—high-chambered rooms filled with long, watery trenches in which she caught glimpses of serpentine movement. As they went along, chefs darted out and made adjustments to the equipment, until at last they came to a stair leading up.
“All of it, now,” Qijne said.
“But they’re coming,” Slyr protested. “Look, you can see them.”
She pointed back the way they had come, and Annaig made out, darting in and amidst the strange machinery, a handful of chefs, cooks, and tenders.
“They let them live, in hopes we would delay,” Qijne said. “We won’t. Do it. Send your hob.”
“Yes, Chef.”
They continued up the stairs, but a moment later a vast rumble began.
Annaig found herself pushed up against Slyr.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Qijne’s purging the kitchens,” she said.
“Purging them?”
“We’re invaded, Annaig.”
“Invaded?” She had a surge of sudden wild hope.
“By another kitchen. It hasn’t happened in years.”
They had reached the top of the stairs now, and emerged through a massive iron valve into a cavernous room. Dest closed and sealed it. Then the chefs began laying various odd-looking packages about in front of it.
Slyr was still hustling her back, toward the far end of the cavern.
“What now?” Annaig asked.
“We wait. The kitchens are full of fire and thirty kinds of toxins. If anyone survives that, we’ll fight them here.”
“I don’t understand. Why would another kitchen invade?”
Slyr blinked and looked at her as if she were stupid. “To get you,” she said.
“How—How do you know that?”
“From what I saw, it has to be one of the upper kitchens, the ones that serve the greater lords. They could have attacked as we defended, with venomous gases. Instead they sent cooks. That tells me they want someone alive, and that must be you.”
“So everyone we left down there—”
“Not just dead, dissolved,” Slyr replied.
“Then—”
But a hollow boom filled the chamber, and another. Then a silence settled.
“Be ready,” Qijne said. “They were prepared.”
“Ah, sumpslurry,” Slyr moaned. “How could anything survive all that?”
“That’s a rhetorical question, I take it,” Annaig said, trying hard not to shake.
The door glowed white-hot for an instant, then turned into a drifting vapor.
“Ready!” Qijne repeated.
For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Then a monster leapt through the door. Annaig’s first impression was of a bull-sized lion with a thousand eyes set on squirming stalks. She had no second impression, for the packages Qijne’s people had scattered in front of the door suddenly revealed their natures and became variously fire, force, cold, and vitriol. The monster, whatever it was, was disintegrated.
But behind it, through the newly formed fog, poured hordes of cooks.
In appearance they were the same mixture of physical types that Annaig was becoming used to in the kitchens. They wore gold and black.
Qijne screamed like some sort of bird of prey and ran at the attackers, her staff behind her.
In only seconds they were enveloped, and although Slyr kept trying to push Annaig back, after a moment the fighting was all around her. Blood spurted up her chest and face as a cleaver chopped someone’s arm off; she slipped and fell, blinded by the blood in her eyes. When she managed to wipe it out, she saw Minn staggering by, clutching her bleeding gut, her face dissolving into yellow worms. She tried to scream, and might have, but if so, her voice was lost in the din.
All of a sudden Qijne was there, pulling her up from another fall. One of her ears was missing and much of her left arm had turned a strange gray color.
Qijne pulled her close.
“He won’t have you,” she shouted in Annaig’s ear.
Then she pulled back, and Annaig saw her arm come up, and as blood sprayed from nearby, she saw it outline a long, wickedly curved
But then Slyr buried her cleaver in Qijne’s neck, and the chef’s eyes fluttered. Annaig felt something tug at her neck and thought her throat had been cut before realizing the invisible blade had sliced through her locket chain. Slyr hacked again, and then Qijne staggered back, swiping her hand at Slyr, but the slate-skinned woman, trying to step back, slipped over a body. Then Qijne toppled, knocking Annaig over yet once again.
They landed face-to-face. Qijne still wasn’t dead. She was trying to get her hand back up. Annaig grabbed her wrist. The blade was invisible again, but Annaig felt something at her forehead, and a lock of hair fell past her nose.
She shrieked and pushed the hand back. For a long moment Qijne resisted, but then the spurting from her neck slowed to a trickle and her eyes went dull.
Annaig lay there, panting, oblivious to the chaos still reigning around her. She kept hold of the hand and saw— inside the sleeve—a sort of tightness on Qijne’s arm, as if it were constricted by an unseen band. She tugged at it, but couldn’t find any sort of catch, buckle, or tie. She was just in the process of carefully laying the arm aside when something brushed her wrist and then, to her horror, cinched around it. Reflexively she grabbed at it with her other hand, but all she could feel was a sort of gummy torus, encircling her wrist. There was no blade.
She realized that it was almost silent now. She began to turn, but someone grabbed her up by the back of her jacket, and a moment later she was standing unsteadily on her feet again. Corpses were sprawled all around her. Slyr was a few feet away, held by two unfamiliar men. Everyone else she knew from the kitchen was dead.
From the press of black and gold before her, a man emerged. He might have been a Breton, with his high, delicate cheekbones and sensuous lips. He put a finger to his chin, and she saw it was long, slim, manicured. He wore the clothing of a chef, but it was as black as his hair.
He turned sky blue eyes first on Slyr, then on Annaig.
“So,” he murmured in a silky voice. “You two are responsible for Lord Ghol’s last several meals?”
Slyr lifted her chin. “We are,” she said.
“Very well, then. You have nothing to fear. I am Chef Toel. You belong to me now.”
He touched his finger to her lips, and everything faded to black.
NINE
