Marn dove to the ground, curling in on himself. Maya glanced at Tanax and Beq, making a fast tactical assessment. We need something to put our backs against.
“Beq, get to Marn,” she said, pointing. “Tanax, cut through to the left. I’ll take the right and meet you over there.”
“Got it,” Tanax said, and spun away, the twisted space of his blade humming. Beq’s eyes were wide behind her spectacles, but she gave a quick nod, put her head down, and started to run.
She’d be an easy target for the blasters when she stopped to help Marn. Which means it’s up to me to get their attention. Maya gave a shout and charged.
Cables slapped and bumped all around her. She aimed for the center of the oncoming line of men and plaguespawn, haken dancing to deflect more blaster fire. A bolt exploded against a cable, severing it in a massive shower of sparks. Maya’s off hand snapped out, sending blasts of flame whipping toward the opponents she could see only as darting shadows.
The plaguespawn closed around her, and from the pack-like way they moved she could tell they had the will of a dhakim behind them. The smallest, fastest monsters reached her first, dog-sized creatures of jutting bone and rippling black muscle, and they leapt at her with no thought for their own safety. Maya cut one clean in half, sidestepped another, then staggered as a third hit her and flared her panoply in a wash of cold. She made a half circle with her free hand, and a wall of flame sprang up to her left, catching three of the things and turning them into twitching pyres. She pressed forward, slashing to clear cables out of her path, letting fire drip onto the floor in tiny seedlike chunks.
Another plaguespawn rose in front of her and died, but the rest were closing from behind, a hissing, squelching mass. When they were over her fire-seeds, Maya released her grip, and the tiny things bloomed in concussive flowers of flame. The trap that had failed against Jaedia tore through the plaguespawn, sending bits of muscle and bone spraying wetly around her. Another volley of blaster bolts came at her, and she stopped them all, moving with unconscious grace. She could feel the Thing growing warm in her chest, standing out against the waves of cold from her panoply.
Maya took an instant to look over her shoulder. She’d come halfway around the pit, and as planned she and Tanax seemed to have attracted the attention of their assailants, letting Beq skirt the edge of the mass of rot and reach Marn. Maya turned, heading in their direction, and across the pit she could see the twists and ripples of space that said Tanax was doing likewise.
Two more plaguespawn came at her, a pair of larger monsters as big as loadbirds. One had no legs and writhed forward like a worm, with a dozen disturbingly human arms surrounding a maw jagged with splintered bones in place of teeth. The other was a crab-like thing whose oval body rolled and turned inside dozens of too-long limbs, waves of muscle rippling along their length. Eyes of every color looked down at her and blinked in unison.
Maya sent a wash of flame toward them, buying time as she backpedaled. They bulled through it, unfazed, and split up, the worm going right and the crab slipping to the left. Maya concentrated and sent a lance of more potent fire at the multilegged creature, but it adroitly moved its body out of the way, sacrificing only a few lengths of leg. At the same time, the worm closed with shocking speed, its arms reaching out for her. Maya spun away, slashing, and a woman’s delicate hand and forearm went flying. She sent another wave of fire at the worm, and it took light, burning from maw to tail. Even still, it kept coming, and Maya found herself rapidly backing toward the pit.
A blaster bolt slammed over her shoulder, white-hot, and blew apart the top of the worm’s head. It reared up, screaming like an angry cat, and another bolt hit it lower down, leaving a crater that wept black fluid. Maya left the thing thrashing in the dirt and charged the crab, letting its arms curve around her as she hacked toward its central body. She felt its claws scraping at her panoply, drawing flares of blue and draining her energy, but before it could close its arms around her she reached the oval mass of eyes and cut it in half. The plaguespawn’s limbs twitched and shuddered wildly, and Maya spun free, dancing past the dying worm and reaching the other side of the pit.
Beq was waiting there, on one knee with her blaster pistol in both hands, all her lenses extended and capped with smoked glass. Maya grinned at her, and she smiled back. Beyond her, Marn was on hands and knees, free of his chains. He’d been down here a long time, Maya realized—his hair was long and stringy, and through his ragged clothes she could see the shape of his ribs.
Another plaguespawn, this one nearly as big as a bear, loomed out of the forest of cables on the other side of the pit. It reared for a moment, roaring, then came apart in a half dozen chunks. Tanax turned away from its remains and retreated in their direction, blocking more blaster fire with his twisted-space haken. Maya’s own blade snapped up to intercept incoming shots, while Beq fired back from just behind her. The shadowy figures were advancing, and she saw at least one of them go down. She closed her off hand, and a pillar of flame engulfed another, but there were at least a dozen more, and she felt her power ebbing. The Thing was a hot coal in her chest.
Abruptly, the cacophony of blaster bolts and deiat halted, leaving only the crackle of Maya’s blade and the buzz of Tanax’s. Their attackers were spread in a rough semicircle on the other side of the pit, among the last of the cables, with a few more dog-sized plaguespawn at their sides. Directly across the pit from her, a big man stepped out of the shadows. He wore scavengers’ leathers, augmented with bits and pieces of broken arcana and fragments of unmetal plate, and a long, heavy coat that swirled about his ankles.
“Cyrtak,” Marn gasped out. His breathing was wet and raspy. “Careful. He’s—”
“—a dhakim,” Maya said. “I gathered.”
Cyrtak looked at them, head cocked. His eyes focused on Maya, and he seemed almost disappointed.
“Take the girl alive,” he said. “Kill the others, and the bait.”
“Come and try,” Tanax said. Twisted geometry whirled around him like a rippling hurricane.
The attackers hesitated. As Maya had intended, she and Tanax now had a wall behind them, and she was confident they could deflect their blaster fire while Beq picked them off. The big plaguespawn are all down, too. We can take them. She tried to inject arrogant confidence into her voice.
“Cyrtak,” she shouted. “I am detaining you in the name of the Twilight Order. Come quietly and you will have an opportunity to present a defense.”
He barked an astonished laugh.
“The rest of you,” Maya said, “are free to go, if you drop your weapons now.”
A murmur ran through the attackers. Cyrtak looked around, eyes narrowing.
“You pack of fucking cowards,” he said. “Fine. I’ll take them myself.”
He thrust out a hand, palm down. In the pit, the miasma of rotting flesh and bone quivered.
Beq lined up a shot and pulled the trigger, but a tendril of black goo flung itself upward, intercepting the blaster bolt in an explosion of slime. A moment later, the whole mass was heaving itself upward, a gelatinous blob of deliquescing meat, studded with chunks of bone and skeins of gut. It hurled itself up the side of the pit, splitting into a dozen tendrils as it reached for the two centarchs.
Maya and Tanax blasted it simultaneously, a wave of flame and a blade of twisted space slashing into the thing from opposite sides. The fire charred its surface for a moment, and the blade slashed it apart, but it kept coming, burns sloughing away and wounds closing with a gloop. Each tendril split and split again, until a mass of finger-thick ropes were coiling around Maya. She slashed desperately, but each tentacle she severed simply fell back into the central mass and spread outward anew.