The woman beside Jendara shrieked and fell over, pulling down the man in front of her and the little girl beside him. Jendara grabbed the woman’s arm.
“Calm down,” she ordered the woman, hacking at the rope that connected the prisoner to the row of captives in front of her. She caught a glimpse of Boruc helping another group of prisoners run toward the shadows on the far right-hand side of the room. The moon-beasts must have lost control of the humans, too distracted by the giant tentacle breaking through the floor.
The woman gasped and Jendara brought her attention back to her. “Hold still,” she snapped.
“Where am I? What’s happening?” The woman burst into tears. “Jona!” she screamed. The knife parted the last strands of rope and the woman stumbled sideways, out into the aisle. “Jona!”
“Wait!” Jendara shouted, but too late, as a terrified man slammed into the woman on his way toward the still-open chapel doors. She stumbled backward, her right foot going into the crack in the floor. The chapel shook and lurched, and the woman sank down to her waist, wedged into the crack.
“I’m coming!” Jendara called, but the crowd shoved her aside in its mad dash toward freedom. Jendara caught herself on the remains of a pew. She could just see the trapped woman, her screams overpowered by the roar of the crowd.
The woman’s right side suddenly jerked and sank deeper into the floor. Her torso went rigid. Her mouth opened and closed, and then blood fountained up out of her lips.
There was a crunching loud enough to be heard over the panicked shrieks of the mob. And then the woman vanished into the crevice. Jendara could only stare at the spot where the woman had been.
Someone yanked on Jendara’s arm, forcing her to turn. It was Kran, wide-eyed and pale. He tugged her toward the door.
“No.” She had to shout to be heard over all the terrified voices. “We’ll get trampled.”
Then the voices changed from shouts to screams. The crowd pushed back from the doors as armed deep ones, dozens of them, hacked and slashed their way inside.
“To the windows,” Jendara ordered Kran. She shoved him toward the front of the room. With the deep ones serving as a distraction, maybe she and the others could find a way to lower people down to the sea.
The floor shook again, harder. The walls and ceiling rattled. A huge slab of stone crashed down in the center aisle, sending people racing back into the pews. A woman shoved Kran aside, ripping his hand out of Jendara’s grip.
“Kran!”
But a trident caught her in the side of the arm. She twisted away. It was a glancing blow, but the tines stung where they cut into the flesh. The deep one lunged at her.
This time she wasn’t distracted. Jendara stepped aside and let the creature’s sloppy attack take it past her, driving her knife into its exposed spine, just above the fin. It dropped without making a sound.
Jendara spun around, but Kran was gone. And she’d been driven back into the center aisle, just inches from the crack in the floor. A stench wafted up from it like rotten fish and death. The stink of the sleeping god’s pit.
“Out of the way,” a voice shouted, and Korthax pushed past her. He scrambled over the huge slab of stone and then broke into a run. With a snarl, he slammed into Skortti and toppled the older ulat-kini. They grappled together on the floor. The acolytes kept chanting, but they looked ready to run.
Jendara looked around herself, desperate for a glimpse of her son. The ground rumbled and lurched beneath her. The sleeping god was about to rip its way into the Star Chapel.
“Dara! Where’s Kran?”
Vorrin had found her. He grabbed her by the shoulders, turning her to face him.
“I don’t know,” she shouted. Panic hit her. “I don’t know!”
He stared at her, as scared as she was. The chapel was chaos and their boy was lost in it.
The portal device’s humming, so constant that Jendara had stopped even noticing it, suddenly grew louder. Jendara felt her teeth buzzing in their sockets. A brilliant blue light filled the room.
Jendara squinted as she searched for the source and saw that the light poured out of the portal device. The denizens of Leng must be readying to open the doorway back to their own land, wherever that was. As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she realized Ahrzur was not among the massed denizens, and she pulled her gaze away from the device to search for him. He was the one who had set the moon-beasts on them in the first place, the one behind all of this.
She saw him moving behind the still-chanting ulat-kini acolytes, toward the brawl. Skortti suddenly cried out, and Korthax dragged himself to his feet, holding both the astrolabe and the scepter. With the grin of a madman, he brought them together, the end of the scepter sliding neatly into the tube on the back of the astrolabe. He pulled something like a shining bronze key from his belt pouch—the same metal object she had seen him take from Fithrax in the spiders’ cave. The symbols on the two ancient brass relics burst into white light.
Ahrzur lunged at Korthax and ripped the starry scepter from the ulat-kini’s hands. Korthax swiped at the denizen of Leng, but Ahrzur knocked him aside as if he were no more significant than a fly. The ulat-kini fell to the floor, stunned.
Ahrzur took position in front of the portal device. Blue light outlined his stocky figure, and the starry scepter glowed. Jendara could barely stand to look at him, but she had to see what he would do next. She glanced away for a second to ease her aching eyes, and noticed Skortti’s battered shape crawling across the floor. He had lost his proud miter and silver cloak; his eye had swollen shut, and blood trickled from his nose. But he kept dragging himself toward Ahrzur. He stretched out his hand for the scepter.
Then the portal device’s humming changed. A long peal ran out. The walls of the chapel began to vibrate. The stones behind the portal device began to glow and shimmer with their own blue light.
“What’s happening?” Vorrin shouted.
“They’re opening the portal!” Jendara bellowed. Tiny shards of stone rained down from the ceiling. It felt like the whole island could shake apart. “We have to find Kran!”
She spun around, searching for the boy. She saw Zuna with Glayn at her side, fighting a group of deep ones. On the far side of the room, Boruc carried Chana in his arms as he urged a group of anxious Sorinders toward the exit.
“He’s with another boy!” Vorrin shouted. “There, in the front row. They’re trying to get to the windows.”
She could see Kran now, with Oric in tow. Jendara drew her sword. “We’ll have to cut our way through the ulat-kini.”
The scepter’s light surged brighter. Ahrzur raised it over his head, and a beam of white light shot out onto the shimmering chapel wall. The ground flung itself sideways. Jendara and Vorrin grabbed at each other as they slid down the suddenly tilting floor.
Salt spray erupted from the crevice, which had more than doubled in width. The ancient beams beneath the floor groaned, and on the far side of the gash in the ground, an ulat-kini warrior screamed as one of the huge floor tiles broke loose and plummeted into open space. Within the crack, something with a faint luminescence struggled to writhe its way upward.
The deep ones rushed the front of the room. Humans and ulat-kini no longer mattered to them: they cared only for the scepter that controlled their god. They threw themselves at the denizens of Leng and the fleshy moon-beasts.
Jendara scrambled up the sloping floor. “We’ve got to get to Kran,” she warned Vorrin, reaching backward for his hand. She grabbed the edge of a crumbling pew and pulled them onto safer ground.
This part of the chapel, just moments ago packed with terrified people, was mostly clear now—but the spaces between the pews were filled with fallen rock and the dead and injured of several species. Jendara didn’t have time to pick her way carefully across the debris. She jumped on top of the pew. The stone back of the bench wobbled beneath her boots, and she jumped to the next one.
A huge deep one, nearly the size of the Elder, rushed past her.
“It is not time!” it bellowed. “The stars are wrong!”
Roaring as it ran, it flung itself at Ahrzur. They slammed into the portal device. The denizen of Leng was momentarily stunned. The huge deep one grabbed Ahrzur’s limp arm and began to tug. The denizen of Leng struggled in the beast’s grasp, but his arm stretched taut for a moment and then ripped free. There was no blood, no screaming, no nasty exposed bits of tendon and snapped arteries—his arm was simply no longer attached to his body. The hulking deep one gave a hoot of delight and flung the limb, star scepter and all, up into the air.
The scepter flew free of Ahrzur’s hand and hung for a moment, its glow fading. Then it spun end over end out the open window and was gone.
* * *
Ahrzur’s arm fell to the ground and lay there, a dead snake of a thing. The denizen of Leng lashed out with his free hand, slashing open the deep one’s chest with his black talons. The deep one stumbled backward, clutching at the shredded flesh. Ahrzur drove a kick into the creature’s torso and sent it flying backward. The beast hit the end of the crevasse in the floor and pedaled for traction, but it was too close to the edge. The deep one fell back into the opening.
A tentacle whipped up out of the crack, the massive deep one wrapped tightly in its coils. It squeezed the fish-faced creature, and blood ran out of the beast in rivulets. The tentacle gave one last squeeze and then tossed the creature down into the depths of the pit.
The tentacle hung motionless for a second, its tip pointed like a dog’s nose fixed on a scent. Then it slithered forward, groping along the ground until it reached the spattered blood left by the injured deep one. It rubbed itself in the gore, its surface seeming to drink it up.
Jendara turned away from the sight. She had to find her boy. “Kran!” she shouted. She was close, she knew it.
“Jendara!” a young voice screamed, and she saw Oric at the front of the room, waving, frantic to get her attention.
“No!” Vorrin roared, and Jendara realized what he saw: the denizen of Leng bearing down on the boys. The creature snatched up Oric and leaped over the debris that separated them from the end of the crevice in the floor.
Kran ran after his friend.
Time seemed to stand still for Jendara. She saw her son’s enraged face, the knife in his hand. She saw the denizen of Leng holding up Oric as it shrieked jubilantly and raced toward the blood-hungry tentacles. The boy was a lure, she realized. The damned denizen of Leng still thought it could lure the sleeping god through the portal, using Kran’s best friend as bait.
Kran threw his dagger and it flew true, slamming home in the denizen of Leng’s shoulder blade, the shoulder of the arm that gripped Oric. Oric tumbled to the ground and rolled to his feet.
The tentacle lashed out, sweeping the denizen of Leng down into the crevice. The entire chapel rumbled and shook. The floor beneath Kran and Oric tipped sideways, down the aisle and away from Jendara. The ground groaned, and the far end of the crevasse opened wider. It now threatened to swallow up the chapel’s back wall, and the boys were sliding right toward it.
“Kran!” Vorrin yelled, and then he was off. Jendara spun around to catch up with him. He was headed for the huge slab of roof that had fallen across the aisle and now spanned the crevasse like a bridge. He scrambled up onto the rock, hoping to grab the boys as they passed below.
Something rose up out of the pit, huge and leathery like the wing of some gigantic bat. A film of phosphorescent algae clung to it so it glowed a pustulant green. The wing twitched, sending out air currents that sent everything around it flying.
Including Vorrin.