46

HIGH GROUND: IT’S NOT JUST USEFUL MORALLY

A brown-haired werewolf named Jay who looked like a high school wrestler came up and helped Stuart try to clear an access point on the landing behind us. Said landing was blocked by a couple tons of dragon carcass, but Stuart shot out the small viewing window in the door and peeked through. I could hear the urgent, quiet conversation that he had with another knight in Latin. It wasn’t smooth because the Romans had some kind of stick up their butts about prepositions, but their hurried conference translated something like this:

“What lobby danger troubles you?”

“Living statues. But that is the lesser vexation.”

“What mean you?”

“We occupy some strange dimension. Detroit is gone, brown glass mountains surround us, and the sun is red.”

“Incestuous mother lover! Do you require our immediate aid?”

“Only one living statue visually remains.”

Then Stuart yelped, and he didn’t even have being a werewolf as an excuse. What he did have was a heavy fragment of reception counter caving in the top of the stairwell door where he’d just been standing.

I sluffed up the steps. I wasn’t there to lead a slow careful expedition that cleared the tower floor by floor; I was there to move into enemy territory and play capture the flag, and now that I knew a dragon had been guarding the upper stairwell, I kind of doubted anything else was. I wanted to take advantage of the dragon’s absence before anyone or anything else stepped in to fill the void.

I didn’t run all out, though. Oxygen and I were just barely on speaking terms again, and I wanted to retain the option of shrieking hysterically. I was also finding and reloading a shotgun as I moved. Everybody’s life has given them certain skill sets, whether that be making omelets or shooting foul shots or texting one-handed without looking, and I could probably thumb shells into a shotgun while skateboarding down an escalator.

At the next floor landing, I took a shuffling peek through the viewing window built into the door. There wasn’t any electricity working, but it was day outside even if it had turned into a foggy day in a dead dimension, and most of the long hallway I saw was traveling between glass offices and conference rooms. I didn’t see anything moving, not even shadows. Especially not shadows.

The next two floor landings yielded similar experiences. It was the fifth-floor landing that sucked. I took my glance, and it’s a damn good thing my body was moving because some kind of javelin came straight through the small square viewing window faster than any major league baseball. I think the sharp point took a millimeter off my neck hair.

The door flew open and I discharged a shotgun barrel into it just as bad things came boiling out. They were men, sort of, but they had an extra pair of arms coming out of their torso, and most of their four hands were clutching short swords, daggers, shields, or spears. Red eyes had emerged from every side of their skulls, and insect mandibles had sprouted from their humanish cheekbones. Their skin wasn’t completely chitinous, but it was harder and more polished-looking than normal flesh, and their muscles were bulging and oddly segmented.

Ant men. As far as I know, the few remaining real ant men live in networks of underground tunnels beneath the surface of Greek islands, but there are still myths about how Zeus created them from ants to replace an island’s population after a plague wiped out all of the humans. Whatever the case, these versions were strong. The one I shot and killed was pushed forward violently, and I barely moved my arm aside before the next ant men used their brother’s corpse to pin me against the opposite landing wall. I did move my arm aside, though, and I angled the shotgun around the dead body and discharged a second barrel into the ant men who were using their dead brother as a battering ram.

The flesh under the ant men’s jaws was soft and vulnerable for some reason—I guess it had to do with neck mobility or swallowing—and two more of them had their throats torn out by the load. Hundreds of tiny ants went flying out of their bodies when they were wounded, splattered against the wall like dead flies on a fly strip. Some tiny ants that were still alive began crawling out of the exposed wounds, but I didn’t really register that at the time because Sig’s spear flew out over the railing from the stairs below me and struck another ant man through the side of its head. I shoved the corpses around me back and drew my katana.

The next ant man had short swords in each fist, which was actually good, because I kicked the body of the ant man Sig had killed and impaled the corpse on the blades in its left hands, making an impromptu kebab. God help me if something that strong with that many limbs started getting handsy. I ran around the left side while the ant man was still freeing its fouled blades and cut its head off with a katsugi-waza strike from my shoulder; then I was past it and smashing another set of left blades down. The uchi otoshi strike smacked my blade back up from the impact in a way that would have horrified a lot of kendo instructors and let me impale the katana under the jaw of another ant man in the doorway. I spun away and used a stiff forearm to push the dying body off my blade in the same motion, and then I was running up the next set of stairs and Sig was following me with her handgun roaring in my ears.

We made it past the choke point, and several ant men tried to follow us through the landing door and up the stairs, but they were stepping over bodies and slipping on gore, and a burly werewolf, Jay, was suddenly on the landing and swinging a fire axe.

Stuart was on the stairs right beneath the landing, and he braced the barrel of a riot gun on the stairway rail, ready to begin firing the moment Jay was out of the way. Jay’s hands were changing into claws around the haft of his fire axe, and his voice was a lot more ragged behind his helmet. “GO!” he roared, and I’m not using that verb figuratively. It’s not like Jay needed to be loud for my sake.

“Go for their throats!” I tossed over my shoulder. Something about those tiny ants I’d seen reminded me of the trolls that had still been assimilating out of vagrants when we’d killed them. It gave me a very strong feeling that we really had caught the School of Night off guard, that John Dee 2.0’s mind was frantically calling up things to protect him. If he was like most cunning folk, he probably didn’t like capitalism all that much, and he’d been confined in this office building for weeks. Maybe the rat men represented the corporate rat race on some level. Maybe the ant men were office drones. If the world of myth and magic envisioned by John Dee really was colliding violently with workplace reality, I’d better hurry the hell up before I found out what kind of monster an office manager would inspire.

The stairs of the next few floors were caked in dead bodies. They weren’t human or inhuman, but too much human. The corpses looked as if their skin had been turned into candle wax that was melting off their bodies. In some cases, agonized faces were trying to emerge from chests or shoulders that were sliding off their frames like a loose tarp, while above those chests and shoulders a head flopped like a loose hood.

“The hell?” I muttered to Sig as we rounded a stairwell toward floor seven.

“Skinwalkers.” I didn’t ask how Sig knew. Apparently, dragging psychically sensitive magic users who had killed their loved ones and turned cannibal to a place where vengeful ghosts were more active hadn’t been entirely in the School of Night’s favor.

Floor eight went great. Nine was fine. Then came ten and sucked again.

The door on ten opened while I was still moving up from the landing on floor nine. “Sig? John?” a voice called out from above. Molly’s voice.