All That Lives Must Die - Eric Nylund [255]
Robert struggled and grappled with a black tiger.
Eliot strummed Lady Dawn and the air rippled; the light from the nearby glowing mushrooms on the walls dazzled to magnesium brilliance.
The cat withered in the light—and Robert snapped its neck.
Fiona moved toward them to help.
But the cracks in the floor between her and them widened.
A reptile hand pushed aside massive stones . . . with claws as big as scythe blades.
A limb thrust through, and then a smooth lizard head emerged from the earth—hissing and snapping; it devoured five knights with one bite.
This dragon pulled its hindquarters free and its tail whipped about, crushing everything in its wake, impacting the tower wall, and blasting skulls and stones and metal supports—making a hole to the outside.
Through it Fiona glimpsed flashes and motion. The battle wasn’t just in here.
Queen Sealiah advanced on the great beast, and as she did, she grew talons and fangs, and flowers sprouted in her footsteps. She was as pale as the dragon was ebon. She drew her sword, its tip broken and jagged and dripping poison.
Fiona had seen that sword. Her father had skewered Beelzebub with it.
The dragon slashed at Sealiah; she stabbed its claw.
The beast cried out and the limb went lame. It hobbled and snapped at her.
Sealiah punched it in the snout.
The dragon had scraped her arm, however, and came away with her blood on its teeth. It reared back and roared. The veins in its neck bulged, turning a nacreous green with poison.
Sealiah laughed as the creature thrashed and fell . . . shivered, and became still.
But her laughter died as she saw three more dragons push forth from the fissures.
How many more of these things were there? Fiona had seen hundreds of these shadows in the alley near Paxington. If that many of these now more-solid shadows caught them in here . . . she and Eliot and Robert would get slaughtered.
Skulls and stones fell from the top of the tower and shattered on the floor.
Or they’d be buried alive.
“Outside!” Fiona shouted to Eliot, and pointed at the breach in the wall.
Eliot and Robert and Mr. Welmann moved toward the hole. Eliot hesitated, looking back at her, but Mr. Welmann hustled him through.
Sealiah and Jezebel lingered, though, fighting on.
And Louis? Her father was nowhere to be seen among the knights battling hand to hand, slashing with swords, or hacking with lances . . . and in turn, being bitten, crushed, and stung to death by the things boiling from the earth.
This was a losing battle.
They had to regroup and get some maneuvering room.
Fiona felt cold and her feet went numb. Should she stay and look for Louis? He wasn’t even armed. Could he survive this carnage?
Eliot, Robert, and Mr. Welmann, however, were already outside—and that decided it. She’d stick with her brother.
She pushed soldiers out of her way, swung her chain, cleared a path, and jumped through the hole in the tower wall.
It was worse out here.
Fissures radiated from the tower of bone across the mesa. From them it looked like every shadow creature in Mephistopheles’ army pushed through into the melee. The ten thousand knights and soldiers camped in the castles’ inner courtyard had expected an attack from the outside, not from within their own walls . . . and they’d been caught unawares.
Thousands of men lay torn to pieces on the flagstones. Officers shouted orders—but few soldiers had the wits to listen as giant centipedes, and oily protozoa, and legions of patchwork men slithered from the earth and swept through their ranks.
Sealiah and Jezebel emerged behind Fiona.
“We must hurry,” Sealiah said. “My knights in the Tower Grave pay for our escape. They will not last long.”
The Queen of Poppies sounded irritated, as if those men dying for her were letting her down by merely getting eaten alive while she made small talk.
Fiona was about to tell the queen that there was no