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Todd squeezed each chunk in his fist before handing it over, hoping to eliminate most of the acidity with the blood. His palm and fingers stung, and he saw blisters rising on his flesh.

“This is insane.” Markham took the mangled piece of sensory membrane in a shirt-covered hand with obvious horror. “It may even be sinful. Those things—they’re intelligent, aren’t they? Isn’t this cannibalism?”

“It’s no worse than eating an angel’s flesh,” Jack protested.

“The angel gave of itself freely! You coerced those things into obedience!”

“They’re the enemy.”

“Andrew!” Todd held the last two pieces, his and Amon’s, and fixed the laicized priest with a stern look. “You don’t have to eat if you don’t want to. But Jack is right. To understand, we need to partake. The magick of eating another’s flesh for power existed long before Christianity institutionalized transubstantiation.”

“You’re verging on blasphemy.”

“You know your anthropology as well as I do.”

“There’s a difference between that which is given by God and that which is taken by force.” The former priest’s face darkened with anger, and he threw the scrap of meat onto the ground. “I’ll have nothing to do with this.”

“The monsters have eaten human flesh already,” Jack said, nudging the hunks of meat on the floor with the toe of his boot. “Now it’s our turn. But you have to do whatever you think is right, Andy. Just keep praying for me.”

“What good are prayers for somebody who knowingly enters into sin?” Markham asked, bitterly. “Or are you going to tell me later that you’ve repented?”

“Depends on what happens to me after I eat this,” Jack said. “Repenting might be the very last thing I do.”

“Maybe you had better let me eat it first,” Todd suggested, growing tired of the arguments. “I’m less likely to be killed if it’s poisonous.”

“You’re the statistician—what are the odds this is going to work?” Jack asked. Todd glanced at the probabilityscape and shrugged.

“We’re in chaos. The equations are too complex for me to understand.”

The ground trembled again, and a crack began to creep up one of the walls.

“And what’s the probability we’ll all be crushed to death in this cellar?”

“Rather high, if we continue to waste time,” Todd retorted. “How long do you think you can keep those things bound to your will?”

“Guess we’re about to find out.” Jack looked down at the scrap of flesh in his hand. “Let’s do it.”

Todd flipped one of the scraps to Amon, who caught it between sharp teeth and gulped it down with two short jerks of its head. Then he looked up at Jack, and, eyes locked, together they both raised the monstrous flesh to their mouths.

XLII

Jack wasn’t happy about making Andy mad, but he’d done it before and, assuming he survived the night, he’d probably do it again. Andy’s objections were sound; he realized that. But he was certain that this ritual was the secret to communicating between the dimensions; that perhaps it had always been the secret and the ancients had always known it.

He folded the square of flesh and crammed it into his mouth, bracing himself for the pain.

It hit fast and hard: a searing, acidic sensation that made the pain of the previous hour pale in comparison. He bit down once, but that was all he could manage—he had to spit the meat out or swallow it whole, because another bite into the alien flesh would blister his mouth beyond any hope of healing.

A foot away from him, he saw Todd grimly gnawing, dark blood seeping out from between his blistering lips. The pain barely seemed to bother him.

Deciding that the nerve-numbed theologian wasn’t worth trying to impress, Jack grimaced and swallowed.

The dragon’s flesh seemed to fight being ingested—he coughed as its acids etched their way down his esophagus, then swallowed repeatedly as the oversized lump of flesh triggered his gag reflex. It moved slowly inside of him, like somebody ramming a fist down his throat. Imitating the devil at Todd’s feet, he threw his head back and kept swallowing, involuntary tears oozing from his eyes as his body tried to reject the meat.

Then the dragon’s flesh hit his stomach. Excruciating pain blossomed out from the small bolus and lit up every nerve constellation in his body.

With one small part of his mind he registered that he was falling, hitting concrete, feeling flesh squashing under his jacket and blood soaking through his jeans, but the larger part of his consciousness was grappling with the visions that unfolded like an endless array of doors opening down a long, dark hallway. Each doorway revealed a glowing, spiraling tunnel that twisted in Möbius directions, guarded by fire and feathers and symbols. Each tunnel ended in a ruthlessly hungry annihilation—the devouring void that Amon called dragons of
רוקניא
—the abyss—that which constantly sought entrance into the hall of doors but was eternally repelled by the mal'akhim that guarded heaven and hell.

But the mal'akhim were besieged on both sides: not only did the void hunger for the energy fields of his own universe (could that be the right word, in a space filled with universes?), but there were also beings inside his own—endoverse?—that hungered for the power promised by the void.

Beings like the Gudruns.

Something struck his chest, hard, and Jack drew in a startled breath. His eyes refocused on the world around him, although the dragon’s vision floated at the edges of his sight like tattered veils.

“For the love of God, Jack, get up!”

“What—” the word was slurred, the blisters in his mouth keeping him from speaking clearly. He pushed himself up and felt warm blood ooze between his fingers. The ground jolted beneath them, rising. “Shit!”

He rolled to his feet, half-dragged as Andy hurled them both to one side.

The ground burst open and he threw his arms over his head as chunks of concrete battered down over them.

Down among the dead men,

Down among the dead men,

Down, down, down, down....

None of the rocks crushed him, for which he gave credit to Andy’s fervent prayers and the shield of God. But when he looked up, he saw one of the blind, carapaced serpents tearing at the circle he’d drawn on the floor, obliterating the marks with its blunt head. Blood and dirt were caked between its heavy scales, and he saw dark scars that might have been wounds from the flames. And—

He squinted.

The cilia on the serpents’ scales seemed longer than he’d noticed before. They spun off into translucency but were—connected?—to the dragons within the circle.

He blinked, but the image held.

“What is it?” Andy’s hand dropped on his shoulder.

“They’re attached, somehow,” he said, wincing and spitting as blisters along the side and roof of his mouth burst. He bit down on a blister jutting off the side of his tongue. Tears streamed down his face.  He spat out a thin mixture of saliva and blood. Damn, that hurt!

He staggered to his feet, pressing his back against the wall as the floor cracked and shuddered beneath the serpent’s thrashing.

The ecstatic vision of the communion was still with him, a gauzy, torn filter over his gaze that bent corners and stripped away surfaces. Across the room he saw the man-shaped hole that was Edward Todd and the looming shadow of Amon. He saw Andy beside him, his hands blazing with light, and a field of blood beneath his feet.

The serpents were connected to the dragons of
רוקני
, preparing the way for the incursion of the void. Each part of the equation was integral to the other.

He pushed himself off the wall and walked unsteadily over the cracking, bucking ground, falling to his knee once, forcing himself back up and lurching toward the broken circle.

Behind him, Andy shouted and scrambled to stand next to him, calling him all sorts of names.

The serpent’s head whipped around as Jack drew close. Its jaws gaped open, its blood-covered teeth silently threatening.

“I adjure you, ancient serpent,” Jack said, blood leaking past his lips as each word sent pain tearing through his burned mouth and throat. He straightened his shoulders and composed himself. “Give place, abominable creature, give way, thou monster; give way to Christ, in whom thou found none of thine works—for He has already stripped thee of thy powers and laid waste thy kingdom, bound thee prisoner and plundered thy weapons. He has cast thee forth into the outer darkness, where everlasting ruin awaits thee and thine abettors.”

The serpent plunged toward him, and Andy spread his arms, shouting a wordless oath that sent light leaping before Jack’s half-transformed gaze. The serpent’s mouth crashed into the barrier and hung there a moment, hovering before them, its teeth soiled but sharp.

Jack bit down on his tongue once more, then stepped forward and spat blood into the serpent’s straining mouth.

“Begone, serpent; God casts thee out, to whose might all things are subject.”

The serpent’s jaws snapped shut and it threw itself backward, head smashing against the ceiling. Then it leaped forward, propelling itself across the room and back into the last flickering flames of the chamber beyond, where Jack saw several still, blackened hulks coiled in frozen postures.

He grabbed Andy’s arm, his head swimming, then looked at the place where the dragons’ circle had been broken.

The two entities were completely focused on him: eyes and feathery antennae, cilia and vein-laden membranes.

XLIII

Auctor watched, a hyperverse away, as Viator thrashed back and forth with impatient anger. But both of them had been given conservative natures: hers as a pathfinder, his as an analyzer, and so they each waited to see what would happen next.

The hypospatial entity that had trapped their companions was not one of the burning guardian sigils that so actively attempted to bar them from this endoverse, but it and two of its companions were imbued with similar powers. Moreover, Auctor could sense the true sigils hovering just to one side of the dimension, watchful and waiting, just as he watched and waited.

If we interfere, we will face war,
he informed Viator, checking the multitude of possible endoverses that fanned out from his indecision over whether to enter the fray or remain aloof. In virtually all of them, he saw Viator and himself moving in to aid Domitor and Carnifex, only to be promptly besieged by the endoverse guardians who lurked above and below, waiting to repel the void.
And in this place, at this time, we face a high likelihood of loss.

Would we destroy enough to allow others access?
Viator asked, as any good servant of Verminaarch should. But Auctor, who had seen enough and calculated enough to develop a heretical sense of self-preservation, mulled over the odds with more concern for his own survival than the successful incursion of the void.

It isn’t clear. I would not waste our resources on an uncertain battle.

She hissed, dissatisfied but trusting his analysis, as she had been genetically programmed to do.

His check of the hypospatial entities’ patterns of mass and energy had revealed a few anomalies that Auctor thought he might exploit, but he was limited by lack of data. Just as the other entity, the tiny sigil-being that crouched in the room they were observing now, had seemed anomalously unfit to survive, so did the three others. They differed, in greater or lesser ways, from the other native entities whose data he had harvested.