He whispered them to the air, testing them, and a spider on the vertical face of a step fell and cracked apart.

For the first time he risked looking up. They were maybe halfway, and the steps above actually seemed to be lower than those below. He climbed, rolled, climbed again, and he was right, they were lower, now rising only to his chest. He snorted a laugh and hoped that Lulah heard.

From above, a creature hissed into his face.

Something whined past his head, slashing the air and flicking his hair. He blinked in shock, and when he looked again the thing's head tilted to the side on a fountain of blood.

“Go on!” Lulah said. She was beside him now, weighing another throwing disc. “They're coming. Go on!”

Ramus climbed, stepped over the dead creature and climbed again. His vision blurred from the exertion. When he found his way blocked by one of the great stone carvings, he scurried to the left until he could climb again, then had to move along the next step also.

He heard the hiss of another throwing disc, and then Lulah cried out in pain.

Ramus climbed two more steps before turning to look down. The Serian came after him, creatures flowing up the bloodied steps behind her, but something was wrong. At first he could not place what it was, then he saw a dark metallic shape lying in a splash of blood ten steps down, and he looked at Lulah. Her face was set into a pained grimace as she tried to climb. Her right arm was missing below the elbow, leaving shreds of flesh, skin and a strikingly white shattered bone. She grunted with exertion, her eye glittering with tears of agony and shock.

“Go on!” she screamed. “I'm coming! I won't wait for you anymore!”

Ramus turned and climbed, rolled, climbed, and when he was a handful of steps from the flattened top of the building, he realized what she had done.

He paused and looked back down. Lulah was ten steps below him now, holding her sword in her ruined left hand, the stump of her right arm raised high. A creature below her lifted itself toward her step and she swept the sword at it, but it had already ducked back down. Another came and she stabbed, catching its arm and eliciting a high-pitched shriek.

A third creature appeared from around the side of the building, climbed over a sculpture of a two-headed thing and ran at her. Ramus was about to shout when Lulah fell, rolled and launched a throwing knife into its face. She picked up her sword and swung again.

There were too many of them. He could see maybe ten of the monsters on the steps below her, and a few lay dead between the Serian and the ground, but there must have been others circling around the structure.