Ribs.
Coulton saw it too. The litch hurtled itself against the wall and with a quick clawed toe pushed itself upward and landed right where Ribs must have been standing. But she was too fast; the glass weapon had dropped to the floor; Coulton screeched and swung about.
Alice crawled back against the wall, feeling with her hands in the dark for more broken shards. And then she found one and brought her fist around just as Coulton was throwing himself on her again, and she felt it go in deep into his stomach, and she slashed and stabbed and slashed again, cutting the flesh to ribbons, a great hot wetness drenching her wrists and arms.
He’d bit her shoulder badly and come away with a piece of her in his mouth but that was all. He slumped back, gripped his belly, kicked his legs out in agony.
She rose gasping to her feet. She looked for her gun, saw it floating in the air. Ribs had it aimed at the litch. She pulled the trigger. In a deafening roar, Coulton—what had once been Coulton—spun sideways and stopped moving.
It didn’t seem possible. Alice swayed. She was holding her shoulder, and she looked over at where Ribs must have been standing and she nodded. And then they were both running again, slower now, but running nonetheless back up the hall toward the sounds of fighting and destruction.
They came around the corner. Alice nearly fell to her knees. Oskar was slumped unmoving against a ruined wall, his face bleeding. Lymenion was nowhere. There was a splatter of blood and pieces of flesh all over the ceiling down the hall and Alice felt herself stagger. An entire wall had given way and she saw in the ruined room beyond the huge dark whirlwind that was the keywrasse, eight-legged, double-toothed, battling Jacob Marber, Marber with the dust in ropes and tendrils snarling the keywrasse fast, dragging it by the throat backward, the keywrasse tearing at Marber’s arms and legs with its long claws. Quickly Alice looked back. She saw Komako, kneeling, peering at her from under her tangled black hair. She held up one fist. She was holding the other weir-bent.
She didn’t hesitate, didn’t even think about it, but felt instead for the twinge in her side where she had been wounded by Marber, where the dust had penetrated her, and she leaned into it, embraced it, and raised both her hands open before her and spread her arms wide, feeling as she did as if she were pushing her way through heavy water. And she saw Jacob Marber, staggering back from the keywrasse, all at once lift his hands out from his body exactly as she was doing, a look of puzzlement crossing his face.
And then the keywrasse dragged itself up out of a pile of broken bricks and snarled and hurled itself at Marber’s exposed chest.
Alice sank to her knees in the same instant. The force of holding Jacob Marber pinioned was too much; he turned his face, and spied her, even as the keywrasse leaped at his heart.
After that, everything happened at once. The keywrasse was struck sidelong by a wall of smoke. Alice felt a rope of dust enclose around her own throat with the tensile strength of iron, and then she was spinning, flying through the room and smashing through a door onto the little stone balcony. Everything was pain, fog, haze. She raised her face and saw the keywrasse, driving its jaws into Marber’s throat. She blinked. Marber, smashing the keywrasse against the floor. She blinked. The keywrasse, swatting at his head. Suddenly the balcony was shuddering and Marber and the keywrasse were crashing past, and she saw Marber take a terrible swipe from the keywrasse, and his head snapped weirdly back, and then the balcony gave out under their weight and she grabbed for the edge of the door and somehow held on as Jacob Marber plummeted in a pile of stone and brick far down onto the courtyard below.
She felt something then, a great powerful set of jaws seize on the overcoat at the nape of her neck and lift her up, dragging her back into the room. She lay gasping and sobbing and not moving in the drifting dust and rubble. She’d survived.
When she raised her face, she saw the keywrasse was limping, favoring its left front paw. It was still big, the size of a very big dog, though it otherwise resembled a cat again, with only the four paws and the ordinary teeth. But there was blood on its snout and matted in its fur, though whether its own or another’s Alice couldn’t say. She reached up and wrapped her arms around its neck, burrowed her face in deep. The heat it gave off was tremendous. Its fur smelled of burned things.
“Thank you,” she whispered, her eyes wet. “Thank you, thank you…”
Oskar and Komako emerged out of the smoke, bloodied, bruised. They didn’t get too close to the big keywrasse. She saw Komako go to the edge and look down at the rubble, at the crushed hand of Jacob Marber just visible. The girl closed her eyes. Wordlessly, she gave Alice the second weir-bent, the wooden weir-bent that Jacob had taken from her back in London. The keywrasse narrowed its shining eyes, all four of them.