Serpents and Stairways

Chapter VI

Georg was having a destructorly hard time looking away from the phantasmagorical Beast that was pulling out of him through the optic nerves every other aspiration, and still he looked at Dinah in amazement.

"Are you sure about that decision, miss Gremin?" he asked just in case.

"Do you mean not negotiating with extortionists?"

"I mean the audacity."

Dinah furrowed her translucent eyebrows, thinking about an answer, and Georg took another peek at the creature—this time with just the corner of his peripheral vision, as by the othersiders' legends one was supposed to see elves. But the moment he could make out some detail (arrays of pore-like hole clusters with long featherial eyelashes), the Beast's voice overtook them once again, colourless and disowned—like the voice of thoughts, or the one that narrates the texts in your head as you're reading them.

"What else are you good for?" The monster asked, and it made their swelling skulls rattle with abruptly rising pressure, pulling on their stomachs.

Georg wasn't afraid—the young man knew that nothing in the world could ever threaten his life, not even if he put a revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger. The proximity of that wrong being didn't bestow fear in him—but revulsion. As when one sees a carriage wheel crushing a pigeon into a mess of pale and maroon guiltless entrails. He glanced at Dinah. Her face remained unperturbed.

"What does it look like?" she asked.

"Like an angel." Servantes answered.

The automaton was looking straight, unwavering—although Georg had no idea how Servantes's vision functioned and whether it had anything to do with the things that looked like eyes on the automaton's face; those could be just as decorative as his beard, added only for human likeness. Perhaps, he only turned his head to communicate to the audience what he was looking at. A small theatrical performance for a select few observers.

"The creature's corpus is composed of four golden rings, full of eyes all around, with some resemblance to the model of the solar system," at last spoke the mechanical knight, "at its core are six pairs of wings."

"Attached to anything?"

"Those disappear in blinding light, my lady."

"Are you afraid?"

Georg didn't need to know who she was asking—instead he took a step forward, marvelling at how Servantes's description had simplified the creature's being. The automaton spoke not of how the wings' gyre resembled a cruel winter storm. He mentioned neither that the eyes on the golden rims blinked all at once, like man's, nor that all of them were green, although of different shades, and some were split vertically which made them look like stigmata. Yet, most important of all that Servantes had omitted, was that sensation that filled one looking at the centre of the angelic creature, where the light condensed. That sensation... like wanting to sneeze, or the moment before your muscle cramps—but experienced not in the body, but in your entirety, in your very self.

The angel didn't react to his approach, and Georg stopped by the edge of the precipice, looking down. There swole the gold of the horde. Then Georg shot the first time—without aiming, led by a feeling, continuing to look down at the scattered coins of unbeknown forgotten lands and sharp-edged stars of reliquaries gathered in piles, with a saint's relic in each; golden chains, each link as thick as a hangman's noose; someone's death masks; someone's burial armour and many, many ram skulls inlaid with gold, each resting by a strange ancient banner, hanging pitifully—

Georg raised his eyes and emptied the cylinder into the focus of the wings—where the creature's voice could have emanated from, was it not being born in the listener's mind immediately. Recoil rolled through his arm, and with it came a wave of nausea. The young man thought that he was about to throw up—all over the innumerable riches. His temples throbbed, his vision darkened.