Chapter 40: Part 40

  My torchfork dropped into my waiting hand fully two seconds before whatever the blur around the other woman's hand was could manifest. With a surge of indignant anger, I hurled my chair back and began to clamber over the table. Boddy reacted almost instantly, training his gun on Carver and squeezing. The sound was deafening in the closed room, and I realized I hadn't ever considered needing ear protection. I wondered how Boddy did it; his long tapered ears were surely more sensitive than mine.

  There were two brief puffs of dust on Carver's jacket, and he staggered backwards, closer to the door. As I finally finished my inexpert maneuver across the table, I had a crystal flash of a moment. The woman's weapon was coming to bear, and I realized I recognized it. That was Rookie's shotgun. It had always looked...so normal. Hadn't it? I guess after a couple days of dedicated construction I had started to develop a sense for what was or wasn't a thought construct. Carver, though off-balance, was unharmed. The lining of his jacket was peeping through a pair of tiny holes, each centered approximately over his upper left chest. Bullet-proof suit. What else? He had come prepared. Her the Interpreter had stretched her hands wide, something like piano wire gllimmering between them. I mean...she made a magic healing potion that had refused my skull in under a day. Why couldn't she work actual spells in the Lane? They just had to fit within the bounds of human imagination.

  The moment shattered, spilling fragments into the corners of the room. It was a useful metaphor, for once. And temporary. Carver's Bodyguard had been slightly slower on the uptake, but leveled his gun at my face. He wasn't risking the suit. Damn. I had hoped to catch him in the frozen time so I knew how to react. I had experimented a little bit with it and discovered that my allies could perceive nothing of it. If I had only been able to move with it, I would have won the fight handily. As it is, I was forced to abort my charge, tucking my head under my free arm as I rolled to the side.

  Carver's House was on the alert, now. The woman, whatever her name, had fired two rounds blindly from behind an overturned end table. There hadn't been any end tables in the room before, so it must be a thought construct. As soon as I realized it, it suddenly looked a lot more like a barricade. Boddy shouted something that was drowned out by the intense ringing of five gun shots in an enclosed space, but apparently Mean Uncle and the cousins could hear it. The larger of the cousins closed the gap to me and hauled me by my collar to relative safety behind a large stone planter.

  When I peeked out, Carver's Boddy had joined the thought constructor behind her custom barricade; no part of him visible outside the table's edge. No further shots were launched. Glancing over, I realized why. Her had woven a...well, it looked like a tapestry. Except it was made of gleaming wire. It looked extremely sharp, too. Mean Uncle and Boddy were sheltering behind the wall-sheet of razor-wire, and it thrashed so erratically that any time either side tried to line up a shot, it got in the way. I suspected that Her was directly controlling the odd spell and doing that on purpose.

  Wait, that left two people unaccounted for. The open door on the opposite end of the room explained Carver's disappearance. I knew the layout of the House well enough to know that there was not a way out of this suite that direction; just a private sitting room and a private washroom. I also knew Carver well enough to know that he wouldn't let himself get cornered. He must have a secret exit hidden in one of those rooms. Well, chasing him off the property would work nearly as well as getting him to willingly lay down his position. Of course, there were several dozen hobs out there, any number of which would join him. Probably all of them would, if he lied to them about why I had come. Only Boddy 's presence would give them pause.

  The other person unaccounted for was the second Cousin, who I think was known as Foolish Cousin. It hadn't been the highest recommendation, but he had volunteered, and Mean Uncle vouched for him, and I quote, 'despite all his faults'. I scanned the room, quickly risking another peek from behind my planter. Nothing. Except...huh. Someone had smashed a rather expensively antique dining chair and used its legs and a couple of other straight pieces to bar the main entrance to this suite. I hadn't even noticed it happening, with all the noise and action. That was surprising, because that should have been a very obvious, very messy outcome. And...wait. Were the pieces assembled into a wooden clog?

  Oh. That's why they're called cobbles. The old shoemaker and the elves. Their whole thing was about making shoes while nobody was watching. I didn't realize it could be...weaponized quite like this. Warden grabbed that thought and tucked it away in my mindscape, turning my attention back to the fight scene I had knowingly instigated. Okay, we were at a stalemate. That was bad, because any time that Carver had away from us was bad. (BANG, went someone's gun. A spray of stone and dirt flew from the side of my planter). I didn't have a proper ranged weapon, because I hadn't had time to forge one. The crystal moment was spent, though I knew I could recharge it in a few minutes. Too long. Boddy, Mean Uncle, and the Cousin next to me were all peppering the constructed barricade on the other side of the room, but barely left a mar in the wood. Even if I did have a proper weapon, their cover was better than ours. Well, better than mine and Fast Cousin's. Her's razor-wire scarf seemed impervious. I made a mental note (well, Warden made a literal mental note) to ask her about it later.

  We needed reinforcements. And fortunately, we had planned on them. It was time to unleash my most vexing and dangerous construct. I reached inward and brushed against Loyal. She had already dissolved into a cloudlike concept, ready to be given physical form from the irrealis around me. I had hoped not to need her this soon. I had, in fact, hoped not to need her at all. She wasn't tested, in her current form. It had weaknesses. Anatomy, or something like it. But she was the best I had.

  There was a creak like old bedsprings and the whoosh of a movie-screen candle going out. Loyal began to form, a few inches from my outstretched hand, as if a sheet was covering her and she was walking out from beneath it. Her beak came first, the last feature I had given her when I reshaped her. Her face, such as it was, followed, the single piercing light that was her eye shooting out little starburst rays that mimicked the deputy's badge of an old western (or the sort that kids get on field trips). The gunfire, briefly, stopped. My ears were still ringing, but I felt a sense of everyone trying to interpret some piece of new information.

  Carver's Boddy broke the impromptu cease-fire first. Loyal was too large to hide behind the planter box with me and Fast Cousin. As her body emerged, long and held low to the ground despite the lack of any forelegs, like a serpent clinging to a branch, he opened fire. The other constructor soon followed suit.

  The bullets ripped into the night-sky surface of Loyal, raising nothing more than clouds of smoke that soon settled back into place, leaving an unbroken pattern of nearly-black marked by brilliant white and blue specks. Well, that was...that was a relief. At least she was still bulletproof. In a surge of energy, she pulled herself the rest of the way out from under the sheet. I let her, holding the door as wide as it would go. Her wings followed her body, stretching from just behind her head to near where her legs met the serpentine trunk. They were, without question, the most disturbing part of her new form. I had made them from the myriad grasping tendrils of her original form. They were tamed now, symmetrical or something like it. Each writhed in an erratic but somehow synchronized fashion, like a school of fish closing on a morsel of food. The base of each wing was formed from an even longer tendril, meaning the whole length of them wriggled freely, as boneless as the 'feathers'. She spread them and they were wide enough to cover the whole width of the half-moon table where our negotiations had broken down mere minutes ago. If it had even been that long.

  Loyal shrieked, now fully manifest. Her tail was long and as snakelike as her body, tipped with a truly massive set of grasping claws. The horrid wail of an out-of-tune tuba mixed with the perfect harmony of a masterfully played violin. I don't know that it would be possible to describe the sound. I don't think it is even possible, in the realis, to make something pure harmonize with something discordant. If it is, I hope never to see it live in concert. It made the hairs on my arms stand on end and my stomach clench. And I was nominally in control of Loyal. Its effect on everyone else was paralyzing.

  Her lost focus immediately, her murder-towel fading from existence as she gaped in...it was hard to read her expression, but I hazarded a guess that it was wonder. Both Boddys had lowered their pistols to a rest position, and seemed to have forgotten they were in a shootout, staring with a mix of overt fear and deep resolve to face it. They'd recover fastest. The constructor woman simply shoved herself away from Loyal and into a corner. The fact that she was leaving her carefully thought-constructed barricade apparently didn't occur to her in the face of the purely unholy being I had brought to bear. Foolish Cousin popped into existence, seeming to fall from out of the hastily-crafted wooden clog while simultaneously growing from a fraction of his normal size. Fast Cousin actually dropped his sidearm, collapsing back against the planter. Mean Uncle, however, was grinning. I met his gaze and realized that the same grin was plastered on my face. Oh, how the tables have turned.

  "Loyal," I commanded, my own voice still faint to my slowly recovering hearing. "Capture Carver."

  With an unsettling ripple, Loyal crossed the room in two strides, her snakelike body tucking into itself, thrashing in a wind that touched nobody else. As she departed, Carver's Boddy managed to empty his clip at her, raising more streamers of writhing smoke. These coalesced into tiny tendrils, complete with tiny claws. When the gun clicked empty, my Boddy dashed across the room to kick it from his hand. Stalemate broken. Advantage us.

  None of us noticed that the other thought constructor had recovered her shotgun. With a click, but no gunpowder boom, she fired at Boddy. He flew backwards across the room, then slumped to the ground. There were no marks on him. Foolish Cousin was closest, and managed to turn him over. Boddy was breathing heavily, but he didn't seem to recognize the room around him.

  The tall woman turned towards me, leveling her shotgun at me. "That," she said. "Was an unexpected turn. Where'd you find that thing?"

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