He threw me back. I was off-step, out-balanced by my slow, heavy mechanical legs.
Laser shots danced across Glaw's face and chest as Gustine tried vainly to help out. Glaw pirouetted – a move that seemed impossibly nimble for such a giant – and his cloak whirred out almost horizontally with the centrifugal force.
Hundreds of fast moving, razor-sharp blades whistled through Gustine, so fast, so completely, that he didn't realise what had happened to him.
A mist of blood puffed in the air. Ghustine collapsed. Literally.
Glaw turned on me again. I'd lost sight of Cherubael. I was on my own.
And only now did I admit to myself that I was out-matched.
Glaw was almost impervious to damage. Fast, armoured, deadly. Even on a good day, he would have been hard to defeat in single combat.
And this wasn't a good day.
He was going to kill me.
He knew it too. As he pressed his assault, he started to laugh.
That cut me deeper than any of his blades. I thought of Fischig, Aemos and Bequin. I thought of all the allies and friends who had perished because of him. I thought of what his spite had done to me and what it had cost me to get this far.
I thought of Cherubael. The laughter reminded me of Cherubael.
I came back at him so hard and so furiously that Barbarisater's blade became notched and chipped. I struck blows that snapped blade-scales off his clinking cape. I struck at him until he wasn't laughing any more.
His answer was a psychic blast that smashed me backwards ten paces. Blood spurted from my nose and filled my mouth. I didn't fall. I would not give him that pleasure. But Barbarisater flew, screaming, from my dislodged grip.
I was hunched over. My hands on my thighs, panting like a dog. My head was swimming. I could hear him crunching over the onyx towards me.
You'd have won by now if you'd had the book/ I said, coughing the blood from my mouth.
'What?'
The book. The damned book. The Malus Codicium. That's what you were really after when you sent your hired murderers against me. That's why you tore my operation apart and killed everyone you could reach. You wanted the book.'
'Of course I did/ he snarled.
I looked up at him. 'It would have unlocked the prize already. Done away with this endless, fruitless study. You'd simply have opened the tomb and taken the daemon's chariot. Long before we could ever get here/
'Savour that little triumph, Gregor/ he said. 'Your little pyrrhic victory. By keeping that book from me you have added extra months… years, to my work. Yssarile's weapon will be mine, but you've made its acquisition so much harder/