Silas Fennec felt a tremor from the lascivious tongue of his stone icon, and puissance roared through him. He stepped up-up onto spaces that he would not have seen or been capable of treading a moment before. Fennec twisted as the first Garwater man passed stupidly below him, then he opened his mouth and gasped as his gut spasmed. With a retching growl he spewed up a bolt of green-black glowing bile, a mouthful of thaumaturgically charged plasma that was not quite viscous liquid and not quite energy. It burst from him and landed foursquare in his attacker’s face.

Silas Fennec stepped quickly through ways of seeing, leaving the corridor, rising through the boat, the man on whom he had spat shrieking weakly and clawing himself, and dying.

The yeomanry were everywhere, emerging from doors and clutching at his clothes. They burst from closed spaces like rats or dogs or worms or gods knew what, reaching out for him and swinging their blades. They were quick, chosen for skill and courage: a plague, an infestation, an invasion, hemming him, penning him in, hunting him down.

Jabber and fuck they’re all around me,Fennec thought, and hungrily pressed his mouth again to the statuette. Planes and angles folded around him, reconfiguring in his path and wake, and he twisted and bolted up stairs feeling like a drowning man, reaching for air. He was angry.

The Garwater crew grabbed for him, gripped hold of what they could. You do not fuck with me, he thought, and felt a swell of power. I can do more than fucking run. He turned, snarling, spat and spewed and puked at his attackers, venting the baleful coagulum that collected in him with the statue’s kiss. He rolled his tongue and hawked snotty jets of the stuff at the faces around him.

Where the sputum hit, it corroded normal space like a dimensional acid, and the yeomen cried out in dreadful alien pain as their eyes and bones and flesh folded in on themselves and out of corporeality, dissolving, dissipating, torn away in impossible directions. They lay wounded and wetly screaming, and Silas looked at them without pity as he passed, seeing their faces flayed of reality, bleeding a viscous nothingness that spat and sizzled, their heads and chests punctured with holes into a void. They hemorrhaged into that unspace, a deadening vacuity spreading like gangrene from the edges of their wounds so that their flesh became hard to notice, vague and irrelevant, and then suddenly did not exist.

His attackers rolled and screamed as long as they still had mouths.

Fennec kept running, his heart hammering. He ran and kissed and bent space with his intricate steps, unfolding the planes around him.

Uther Doul followed him grimly, with such tenacity that even confined to conventional space, he stayed on Fennec’s tail.

Doul was relentless.