“I refuse.” Tyvian was wide-open and had no defense. “C’mon, boy—take your shot. Kill me already.”
Well, that slots it. Artus grabbed the hilt of a double-edged dagger hanging in a sheath from a tap and began to shoulder slowly through the crowd. Tyvian might be willing to get run through for some damn fool reason, but that didn’t mean he had to let it happen.
“You think I won’t do it?” the pink-haired guy was saying, “You think this . . . display will be enough to save you? What kind of fool do you take me for?”
Tyvian rolled his eyes. “I don’t see you killing me, do I? Do it, you limp-wristed pile of cosmetics!”
Artus slipped behind a bench of whores, all of whom were enthralled so deeply in the drama before them, you’d think it was tooka smoke. Two of the girls clutched each other’s hands, their knuckles turning white.
“This is a trick,” the boy-swordsman said. “Pick up your sword.”
Tyvian shook his head. “I’d just as soon never wield that misshapen lump of steel again, thank you. Now, hurry up and kill me, or I’ll call you a coward.”
Artus spotted Gethrey Andolon in the corner with a black-haired woman to his left who seemed to have had her face kicked a couple times. Andolon was watching Tyvian with a cool smile on his lips, sipping some kind of brandy.
“Fight me! I want satisfaction!” Pink-hair stamped his foot.
Behind him a group of young gentlemen with all the hallmarks of pink-hair’s goons began jeering at Tyvian. “Coward,” they catcalled. “Whore-lover!”
Artus was close now, his dagger drawn. He had only to work his way past a few more rows of witnesses.
Tyvian threw up his hands, exasperated. “Fight you? Why? So I can let you poke me a few more times? No thank you.”
Artus kept his attention on Pink-hair’s back, keeping his blade low so people wouldn’t notice it. He slipped past a Verisi sailor whose mouth was hanging open like his jaw was broken.
“Let me? Let me?” Pink-hair scoffed. “You can’t—”
“Do you seriously think you were beating me?” Tyvian laughed. “Typical DeVauntnesse self-delusion! Boy, I could have not only won that stupid duel, I could have killed you three times by now. You’re welcome.”
Artus was behind DeVauntnesse’s goons. Just another second and he’d have a knife between the fop’s shoulder blades.
Pink-hair snorted. “And yet you’re the one disarmed and injured, and I’m here, about to kill you.”
“And taking your bloody time about it, too.” Tyvian sighed. “Would taunting you help? Here: your uncle Faring was a puffy-cheeked lummox with hands like plucked turkeys, and the only people he had the courage and the strength to physically abuse were women half his size whom he had to pay to let him punch them. Cutting off his balls was a public service, as had he ever reproduced, the collective reputation of the Saldorian gentry would never have recovered from the shame.”
Artus saw DeVauntnesse’s shoulders tense, saw his body coil—he was about to strike. Artus raised the dagger—one bull-rush past the pack of dandies and he was there.
“No!” A voice called from the crowd. Maude’s? “Behind you!”
Artus looked behind him just in time to see the flash of a blade—a blade aimed directly at his heart.
CHAPTER 26
BRAWL IN THE CAULDRON
Strong arms dragged Myreon onto her back. She thrashed against her attackers—two of them, she guessed—and managed to get one off her by smashing the back of her skull into what felt like a nose. Four hands pushed her back down. A dagger—a wicked, crooked thing that caught the streetlight for an instant—was plunged into her chest, only to rebound away sharply as it struck her sorcerous guard. Myreon knew from experience that having your blade ripped away like that hurt like hell, but the attacker made not a sound—not even a grunt.
Another blade touched her throat and was dragged across with a kind of professional savagery that was chilling to experience. Her bladeward held nicely—what should have ended her life only made her gag a bit. She found she had a hand free, and used it.
Murder in the dark had enough ethereal energy laced through it that invoking a basic rot-curse was easier than breathing. Myreon flung it at one of the Quiet Men standing over her, but he ducked out of the way and her curse went upward into the tree branches. She found herself pinned again, and the Quiet Man still standing over her pulled a long thin wire out of his cloak—a garrote.
A tree branch fell on his head, having rotted off the bole by her curse. He fell over her and the branch—a huge bough, actually—covered all of them. Myreon found herself free from human hands but now ensconced in leafy ones. It was a contest to see who could wriggle their way out first.
She was thinner than her assailants, it turned out, and got all the way out while her foes were only halfway free. She looked down at them—weirdly nondescript faces, black empty eyes, and little tattoos of buttons over the corners of their mouths. They looked at her with the exact same expression: murderous hatred.
She looked around. The street was no longer empty. Five men, all as blank and dark as the other two, and hard to see, stood in a half circle around her, their black cloaks concealing their features as well as their weapons. They closed in as one entity, smoothly and without signal.
Myreon felt all the anger she had felt on the courtroom floor all those months ago flow through her—these were the men who had seen her trapped in stone, who had almost driven her mad. These inhuman bastards were the reason she had lost her staff and been made an outcast. Now it was their turn to feel her pain. She pointed to the tree bough and focused her rage into Fey energy flowing from her fingertips. “Burn.”
The branch burst into flame all at once. The Quiet Men still pinned beneath it contorted with agony but made no sound. They struggled madly against the inferno, their cloaks catching fire. Myreon turned back to the other five.
All of them were staggering with the pain of their fellows, clutching their bodies and writhing at the sensation of their partners’ deaths. This close together and this many of them dying in agony at once had overloaded their senses. Myreon smirked. “A bit of a design flaw, wouldn’t you say?”
The first sign that the Quiet Men had been compromised was Claudia smashing the crystal decanter of chleurie over Gethrey’s head and screaming, “MAUDIE!”
Marcom DeVauntness made his lunge and Tyvian sidestepped and advanced, putting him nose-to-nose with the overextended pink-haired fool. Tyvian landed a solid haymaker on his bruised head, knocking the boy to the floor. He stepped on his sword. “Missed your chance, Marcom.”
Maude moved through the crowd like a whale coming up for air, knocking patrons aside with barely a pause. She was making a direct line to Gethrey Andolon and cracking her knuckles as she went.
Tyvian would have dropped a knee into Marcom’s guts, but he had no real guarantee he could stand up again thanks to his injured leg. Instead, he kicked the boy just below the breastbone, hard, and forced him to roll away. Then he flipped Marcom’s bejeweled sword into his hand with a practiced kick of his good leg.
Behind him, Tyvian heard Gethrey squeal, “Now, Maude . . .” before there was the sound like a hammer hitting a sandbag and Gethrey’s air whistling through his teeth. In front of him, he saw Artus wrestling somebody disinteresting with a dagger—no, a Quiet Man!
Marcom was back on his feet, flanked by his armed sycophants. He had Gethrey’s sword. “En garde.”
“I’ve had about enough of this,” Tyvian snarled, and slipped into en garde with a blaze of pain from his leg.
Tyvian beat the boy’s first attack out of line, advanced once, and then ran Marcom through the guts with a lunge. Tyvian grimaced as he watched the color drain out of the boy’s face, memories of another duel, too much like this one
, popping into his head. “Sorry. You really were asking for it.”
Marcom toppled to the floor, clutching his stomach and groaning. The flunkies advanced, swords out, and Tyvian disarmed the closest one with a lighting fast move that put the fellow’s sword in his off hand. He now had two rapiers pointed at two different men. “I want you idiots to think very, very hard before you do anything rash. I didn’t kill young DeVauntnesse here, so long as he sees a doctor in the next hour. I do not extend the same offer to you lot.”
The flunkies froze. Behind Tyvian, Gethrey howled as Maude proceeded to give him the beating of a lifetime. This seemed to settle it—swords clattered to the floor. One man knuckled his forehead. “Terribly sorry, Mr. Reldamar, sir.”
Tyvian surveyed the bar—the outbreak of disorganized violence had escalated into a full-scale brawl. People seemed to have noticed the Quiet Men in their midst, as they were all writhing in some kind of pain so intense it broke their usual veil of inconspicuousness. The reactions followed two trends: all-out assault on the assassins or terrified flight. People clogged the only exit, beer mugs flew through the air, and whores beat a hasty retreat upstairs or dove behind the bar.
“Artus!” Tyvian yelled. “You all right?”
Artus had his Quiet Man in a headlock and was sitting on the assassin’s back. “This guy almost killed me, but then he, like, froze!”
Tyvian nodded. “Carry on pummeling.”
Maude screamed. Tyvian whirled to see the big bouncer back on her rear end, clutching her face as blood poured down. Gethrey leaned against the table, a crimson-stained stiletto in one hand. His face looked like five pounds of ground beef, his nose flattened sideways against his bruised cheek, both his eyes swollen, his blue hair horribly mussed. His breathing came unevenly.
Tyvian pointed both his rapiers at his former friend. “Nobody left to hide behind, Geth. Let’s see how well you’ve kept up your footwork, eh?”
Gethrey spat a tooth onto the floor. “You . . . you think this is the only trick I’ve got up my sleeve?” He laughed hoarsely, reached beneath his collar and drew out an amulet of some kind of dull, polished metal. He touched three fingers to it and spoke a word: “Avorra.”
Tyvian’s blood ran cold. “Kroth—how they hell did he get one of those?”
The ceiling above Gethrey buckled upward, as though pressed by a massive fist, until it broke apart entirely, raining down wood and plaster and dust. Through the wreckage, Gethrey rose ten feet into the air; interlocking plates of mageglass solidified, formed a cage around his body and then formed a body of their own—arms, legs, shoulders. An instant later Gethrey Andolon was standing within the chest of a headless, fifteen-foot-tall mageglass giant that glowed like ice and starlight and was planted in one corner of the Cauldron’s common room. Tyvian had heard of these devices but never seen one in action—they were war-machines, used by the armies of the West against Kalsaari manticores and war elephants. It was called a “colossus,” and he honestly didn’t know any way one could be destroyed.
When Gethrey spoke, it was amplified to the volume of ten men. “Just one of the little perks of being a good friend to the Prophets, Tyvian. Not so confident behind your little swords now, are you?”
The sight of the colossus only intensified the panic inside the bar. Those struggling to leave struggled harder, trampling one another while making for the exits. Those who had been in the midst of fighting suddenly realized they had somewhere else to be, and joined in the retreat.
Gethrey laughed at them all. “Scurry, scurry, scurry my little rats!” He stepped forward and the colossus stepped forward also, ripping beams, supports, and debris aside with easy sweeps of its mageglass arms. He stomped on a pair of drunken sailors too slow to retreat; blood spurted across the floor.
Artus was beside Tyvian. “What do we do?”
Tyvian pointed at Maude’s unconscious body. “Help me with Maude; head for the kitchen!”
Screams and the sound of the collapsing first floor echoed through Tyvian’s ears as he crouched before Gethrey’s colossus to help Artus drag a stunned Maude to safety just before a support beam came crashing down. Dust was everywhere, as was smoke. Something was on fire. Gethrey shuffled awkwardly through the rubble, chuckling. “You know, Tyv, I always hoped it would come down to this. Well, not this, specifically—who would have guessed I’d get a colossus as a personal security measure?—but I mean this situation: you, protecting some girl, being ground beneath my boot heel.”
Hidden from Gethrey for the moment behind a pile of rubble, Maude got her wits about her. Her face was red with blood. “Gonna lose the eye,” she said. Artus grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her toward the kitchen, darting behind the bar while Gethrey was distracted by more screaming bar patrons.
Tyvian moved to follow but found the ring inexplicably clamping down on him. “What now?” He looked around: there was Marcom DeVauntnesse, lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood, left completely alone.
He reached a bloody hand out to Tyvian, his face a rictus mask of pain. “Help . . .”
Tyvian took a step toward the kitchen, just as a test, but the ring gave him a sting that made him finch. “Bloody hell! You have got to be goddamned kidding me!”
“Tyvian!” Artus yelled. “Let’s move!”
“Coming! Right behind you!” Tyvian dumped his stolen swords, crouched down next to the wounded young man, grabbed an arm and a leg and threw him across his shoulders. His leg screamed with pain. “If you bleed to death on me, Marcom, I’m going to kill you, understand?”
Gethrey spotted him and kicked a pile of half-crushed tables and chairs his direction, but they made the door to the kitchen in time. Crouching beneath the remainder of the ceiling, Gethrey crawled on his construct’s hands and knees, trying to reach Tyvian before he darted out of sight, but only managed to collapse the stone arch of the kitchen doorway.
The kitchen in the Cauldron took up a full quarter of the footprint of the building, with a massive hearth big enough to have six pots boiling at the same time—and an equally massive chimney, one with a whole network of brick and tin ductwork that linked all the little fireplaces and cookstoves in the house to the central chimney. Maude was leaning against a butcher-block table, panting. “He’ll kill us all, the bastard!”
Tyvian threw DeVauntnesse on the table. “Artus, put out those cookfires! Now!”
Artus grabbed a basin of water and threw. “We’re going up the chimney?”
Tyvian gestured around the underground kitchen, whose only windows ran along the edge of the ceiling and were only about five inches high. “Got any other ideas?”
The wall behind them buckled inward from a swipe of the colossus’s claws.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Gethrey boomed, chuckling. “I’ll take the whole place down if I have to, Tyv!”
Artus looked up the chimney, which stretched up four stories to the night beyond. “We’ll never make the climb! Your leg is too hurt, that pink-haired jerk his half dead, and Maude’s eye is . . .”
Maude looked like she was ready to pass out again, but she rolled her head back and fixed Tyvian with her good eye. “Spice . . . locker . . .”
BOOOM!
Half the kitchen imploded with a full-body charge by Gethrey. Had the chimney not been between him and them, he would have killed them all. Instead, his shoulder rammed into the bricks and the whole structure shook with the impact.
Tyvian, the ring fueling his strength, threw Marcom back over his shoulders and ran, Artus close behind, Maude behind him, all of them stumbling through the dusty darkness of the collapsing building. The spice locker was a small door in the back corner of the kitchen that connected to a dry, dusty hall, which then connected to a small room full of shelves and dried spices hanging from rafters. Here, though, between the supports, a trapdoor led to
the alley behind the Cauldron. Artus unlatched it and crawled through. He reached down for Tyvian, who passed DeVauntnesse through, then he turned to Maude. “C’mon!”
Behind them, Gethrey continued to rummage around the kitchen, crushing any possible hiding spot. Maude was looking back that way. “Where’s Claudia?”
“Dammit, Maude—come on!”
Maude looked panicked. “Did you see her get out? Did you see what happened to her?”
“Tyvian!” Artus yelled from above. “We’ve got a problem!”
“Add it to the bloody list!” he shouted back. “Maude, I’m sure she’s fine—let’s go!”
Maude headed back toward the kitchen. “I’ve gotta go back. She could be hurt. She could . . . could . . .”
Tyvian grabbed her by the shoulder. “Maude! Leave her be! If she’s back there, you can’t help her, understand? There’s nothing you can do!”
“Real problems here, Tyvian!” Artus yelled.
“Shut up, Artus!”
Maude looked down at Tyvian and favored him with a bloody, snaggle-toothed grin. “Don’t you worry for me, boy. Rolled too many shits like Gethrey Andolon in my time to step back now.”
Tyvian could scarcely believe he was hearing this. The ring fairly screamed on his finger, Don’t you let her go! “Why, Maude? It’s bloody suicide!”
Maude took a deep breath. “You come back to certain death for your lady love, let me do the same for mine, eh?”
Tyvian felt as though he’d just been gut-punched. It took him a minute to find his voice, but then he didn’t know what to say. Then Maude actually gut-punched him. Her fist was like a cantaloupe propelled through his intestines; all the air rushed out of his lungs and he fell to his knees, trying to wheeze his objections.
Maude patted his cheek. “Sorry ’bout that, but this is so’s you don’t follow me. Don’t feel bad.” She gave him a kiss on the forehead. “Always were a good lad, no matter what they said. Go on and be a hero to someone else now.”
All That Glitters Page 27
