I let my forward motion carry me over the director’s desk, knocking him into the wall. Ignoring him, I scrambled to my feet and spun. I couldn’t see anything in the office with us, but screams rang through the halls.
“Axton, watch Michael!” I snapped as Lorencz called herself a balesword. “And close the door behind us.” A split-second later, Lorencz threw open the office door and we both charged out.
The hospital hall had turned into an abattoir. I recognized some of the transients that lurched and clattered across the prone bodies: bloodscrapers and razorbites, gnawers and banebeaks. Doctors and orderlies shrieked as they fended off the monsters, knocking oil lamps off their hooks and spilling burning liquid on both the transients and the panicking crowd.
A familiar voice rose in prayer — the cardinal was fighting Perdition in his own way. I assumed he knew what he was doing; two months earlier, I’d seen him close a breach with nothing but a prayer and a holy symbol.
“Lorencz — get everyone out of my way.”
She glanced at me, confused.
“Why —?”
“Do it.” I grabbed Might’s hilt and drew it from its scabbard.
Even expecting it, I staggered under a surge of lust and hunger, and for one dizzying moment everything around me swam in a crimson haze. Saliva flooded my mouth, sweat broke out on my forehead, and blood pounded between my legs. Every hair on my body rose as Might sucked at the sweat on my palms, adhering to my flesh.
“Droit? What the hell —” Lorencz stared, horrified. I licked my lips and tasted salt.
“Stay back,” I grated as I took a step toward her. Visions danced before my eyes: Lorencz’s moist, red cavities quivering with a dying pulse. The taste and heat of her blood. My fingers digging into her tobacco-blackened lungs and tearing their warm, sooty interiors open to the clean air. Soft, ragged flesh yielding to my ruthless thrusts. Might twitched against my hand, throbbing and thirsty, and I changed my mind. “Come here.”
Lorencz scrambled backward, letting her cigar fall on the floor.
“Run! Run — get outta here!” she bellowed, her eyes wide. “It’s the Hound!”
Doctors and orderlies turned, startled. I bared my teeth and attacked, instantly slamming into a balewall that kept me from ripping open the sorry sacks of ambulatory fluids and painting the walls with their hot. bright blood. I jammed Might into the bale and twisted, trying to carve my way through. Lorencz was still shouting, but her words had degraded into meaningless noise.
A razorbite closed its serrated bone pincers against the ankle of my boot, grinding against the leather. I kicked it away and yanked Might free to meet this new enemy.
The hallway behind me was full of transients wading in the blood of their victims and scuttling toward me with ruthless intensity. The snarl vibrating in my throat grew louder. I swung around and strode toward them, crushing the smallest of the vermin beneath my boot heels and slashing joyfully at the rest. Every time I felt the physical jolt of Might slamming into a living creature, I shuddered. Drool dripped down my chin as I kicked and crushed and thrust and pierced, wanting more, wanting blood, wanting the pleasure of release but held trembling on its verge as crimson coated my blade.
It wasn’t transient blood. When transients die, they turn into raw bale and ooze back across the Line, vanishing. But if it makes any difference, the transients had probably killed most of the people in that hallway before I ever reached them.
At last I stood ankle-deep in the bloody remains of the fire victims and hospital staff who hadn’t fled quickly enough, panting with excitement and looking around for my next victim. When it became clear that nothing was left alive, not even a transient, the pounding bloodlust began to recede. Temptations still tumbled past my mind’s eye, necrophiliac atrocities displayed like wares in a marketplace, but none of those visions were as compelling as that first, urgent need to kill. My heartbeat slowed. My erection softened.
I thrust Might into one of the corpses and peeled my hands off its sticky hilt. My palms stung as it reluctantly released me. I wiped them on the blood-slicked leather of my firefighting coat, then scraped spittle and froth and soot off my mouth with my dirty firefighting face-rag and let it fall back down around my neck.
Few have been brave enough to ask me what it was like being Yzyrchye’s Hound. It’s like raping and being raped at the same time, I tell them. A teeth-grinding sensation of ruthless power and abject violation. It’s painful and humiliating and violent and addictive and I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it until now.
The tingling along my nerve endings grew stronger. Might wasn’t spent yet, and neither was I.
“Droit!”
I turned. The balewall had vanished. Lorencz and Croix were fighting side-by-side, trying to kill a large knifeback. While it kept them busy, more transients were swarming over the bodies beyond. The other physicians and orderlies were gone — killed by transients or fled upstairs.
“If you’re sane again,” Lorencz spat, “we could use your help.”
I licked my lips. A flicker of concern for my partner crossed my mind, but my eager fingers were already wrapping around the warm, firm length of Might’s hilt. The tingling flared into wildfire.
I plowed into the knifeback and chopped my way through it. Transients lifted their head-equivalents as if they sensed Might’s provenance. Claws flexed, pincers snapped, and barbed tails whipped. A feral howl rose in my throat as I stomped on their living bale, swinging my sword like a graceless madman.
At some point Lorencz closed me in balewalls again. I continued to rage for a while, but at last I managed to jam Might into a corpse and shake off its possession again.
Yzyrchye, that had felt good, I thought. Just like the old days.
Then, with a touch of concern: Just like the old days.
I took a few cleansing breaths, grabbed Might and hastily slammed it back into its scabbard, wrapping the chain around its hilt and hooking it shut. I didn’t need to clean the blade — the same infernal thirst that sucks the moisture from my palms absorbs any blood that touches its length. Sometimes — and I never knew what would trigger it — I would bury Might in an enemy and find the sword impossible to pry back out until it had completely exsanguinated the body. Most of time the effect was simply startling. Once or twice it had nearly cost me my life.
Now I was acutely conscious of the weapon resting against my leg, heavy, satiated, and making only a dull demand on my attention. I took a deep breath and laid a bloody hand on the balewall.
“Lorencz,” I said. “I’m back. Let me out.”
The walls fell. Lorencz and Croix stood down the hall, watching me. Michael was there as well, one hand resting on Axton’s sleeve. He was looking in my direction, but I knew it wasn’t me his blind eyes were focusing on; it was Might.
Blood dripped off the walls and puddled on the floor. Most of the lamps had been broken, leaving the hospital dark and shadowed. The floor was carpeted by the corpses of two-time victims.
“So, you’ve chosen to serve Yzrychye again,” Croix said at last, his voice low.
“No.”
The cardinal gestured around us. I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, knowing it would be filthy with dried spittle.
“I’m using Might. It isn’t using me.” I narrowed my eyes. “Yzyrchye has nothing to do with this.”
“I don’t think you control that sword as well as you think.”
“Got to admit, pal, that wasn’t the cool, collected killer I’ve come to know and love.” Lorencz’s cockiness didn’t quite hide the tremor in her voice. Her balesword was gone, and her firefighting coat, like mine, was shiny with fresh blood.
“I told you if you were nice, I’d show you my sword.” I gave her a tight grin, fighting to reassert my own brand of normality. “Want to hold it?”
Croix and Michael looked confused. Axton watched with an air of detached interest.
“Not unless you buy me flowers and dinner first,” Lorencz replied, after a beat.
“Might doesn’t do seduction.” I looked around, feeling a sense of déjà vu. The hospital hall could have been one of any of the hundreds of buildings I’d raided as the Red General. I took a deep breath and focused on the present, letting memories of the past slide back into oblivion.
Croix, Lorencz and Axton were looking around, too. I could see from their expressions that the gravity of what had just happened was sinking in — not just what I had done, but of the breach itself. The cardinal murmured under his breath. I wasn’t sure if he was praying or cursing.
“They can’t say you didn’t warn them,” I told Lorencz.
“I know.” Her face was pale and drawn. “Don’t help much.”
“Is the Line any better?”
“The pressure’s off and the breach has been closed, but I’m seeing a strange transparency,” Michael replied, his blind eyes focused elsewhere. “And I still see those balewards I noticed before. Carel’s, I assume. They’re very well-constructed.”
“Can you see anything other than the Line, my liege?” Axton inquired.
“No,” Michael said. “No — just bale. But there’s something odd….”
“If we’re no longer in immediate danger, I’ll tend to the dead.” Croix stepped past the sentinels and knelt by one of the newly slaughtered bodies. Axton made the sign of the disc and sword. The rest of us ignored them.
“Lorencz, do you see it, too?” Michael asked, still gazing into the distance.
“What?” Lorencz’s eyes unfocused. After a moment of silence, she frowned. “Huh. Can you call Carel?”
“There’s a barrier around the hospital. I can’t call anything.”
Now both sentinels were looking at things I couldn’t see. Bored, I glanced at Axton. The little man was watching the cardinal.
“Well, shit. We been interdicted,” Lorencz said at last. Her voice was flat. Croix paused in his prayer to look up.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
“It means we’re screwed, Your Holiness. We got no contact with the outside world until whoever put up the barriers drops ’em again.”