Chapter 76
First, Song saw to it that they could hold.
Tactically speaking, this was not overly difficult. Though the Odyssean threw host-corpses down the lift shaft regularly, most of them broke their limbs in the fall and thus she only need leave Tupoc and Expendable to put them down. Spears made easy work of the dead things, enough damage severing the threads of blood-red divinity moving the corpses, but she knew better than to think this state of affairs anything other than temporary.
For now the Hated One threw only half-hearted assaults their way, one or two at a time, but the archives upstairs were a cacophonous orgy of destruction. The Hated One was ripping out the seal on his prison and would turn his full attention on them when he finished. She spared a moment of deep dismay at the thought of so many rare books being so callously destroyed, lore perhaps forever lost to the murderous thing’s tantrum. A petty evil compared to the rest of the night’s work, but an evil nonetheless.
A thought to deplore later, she chided herself.
“How long before it gets out?” Song asked.
Maryam Khaimov cocked her head and hummed, pondering her answer. Song’s friend had long straddled the line between pale and sickly, but now she had fallen firmly on the latter side: she looked feverish, her blue eyes rimmed in red by exhaustion and the ailment of Gloam-work. And though Song would yet describe both eyes as blue, the left one had gone cloudy and so light it was nearly gray. Between that and the traces of spew on Maryam’s collar and chest there was no hiding something in her ritual had gone terribly wrong.
And yet she seemed Maryam still, entirely herself, save for the… addition.
“It’s nearly there,” the spirit said, head rising out of the signifier’s shoulder to speak. “I can taste it in the aether – the veins of red became roots and now they are cracking the stone.”
The spirit was not much changed from when she had saved Song from her would-be killers. Still close as a sister in looks to Maryam, but now there was a… vitality to her that had once been absent. Even knowing her intangible, Song would think that flush true and the way she breathed necessary. Perhaps both were. She knew little of the rules regarding such existences. Song cleared her throat.