by P. D. Kalnay
“Master? What will you do now?”
“I have to stop the others,” I said, not entirely present in the conversation. I couldn’t have cared less about the knights, but ordinary people were probably dying at that very moment. “Then, I’m getting Ivy back.”
I didn’t know how to overcome the vine’s grip, so I focused on the things I could do.
Chapter 26 – It Takes a Village
I should have gone back inside and fetched my shield and hammer. I should have shut the door behind me. I probably shouldn’t have let the sheath and the message moth fall to the ground. What I did was tear recklessly down the stairs, half-blinded by rage. Part of that rage was directed inward; I’d been so many kinds of fool that there wasn’t time to count them. I glided most of the way down without thinking about it. My feet barely touched the steps, and I reached the boulevard in record time.
A scream came from the city. It sounded close, and I sprinted left down the first side street I came to. Helping regular people was more important than helping a bunch of guys who should be able to help themselves.
I never saw the woman who screamed, but I saw her attacker, mostly. A tall, lean, generally man-shaped figure with too many fingers stepped from a nearby doorway. He was wrapped from head to clawed-toes in flowing robes and strips of fluttering cloth that resembled bandages. For half a second I thought I faced a mummy. The colour of the cloth shifted continuously, matching its surroundings and rendering him nearly invisible. Only a narrow slit, revealing three solid black eyes, remained uncovered. My eyes found it difficult to focus on the clansman, and without the motion that had given him away, I’d have remained oblivious to his presence.
If I’d startled him, the assassin showed no sign of it. He carried a long, narrow dagger in one hand and throwing spikes in the other. Those spikes flew across the street with incredible speed and flawless precision. Even if my shield had been on my arm, I might not have raised it in time. Magic is as fast as thought. Unconscious magic can be even faster. I’d never stopped a single pebble during my lessons with Lyrian, but five sharp spikes froze in midair, one, only an inch from my left eye—close enough for me to see the purplish poison coating the tip. I released my hold on the air, and the spikes fell in a clatter at my feet.
In that single second, the clansman had followed up his attack by bounding across the street at me. Man-shaped or not, his joints hinged in ways that made him appear freakishly alien and slightly arachnid. He moved with remarkable speed, but it couldn’t compete with the speed of my knife. The knife cut through the air to meet my enemy. It actually cut through the air. The first times I’d unsheathed the blade, I hadn’t noticed or had lacked the sensitivity to notice, but it didn’t part the air like a normal knife. It vanished the air, creating a microscopically thin vacuum surrounding the blade. Now, I could sense other air trying—and failing—to fill that void; a distant corner of my mind wondered what the consequences of leaving the knife unsheathed for too long would be.
Swinging the blade was as effortless as swinging the beam of a flashlight… or a lightsabre. My knife was all darkness, so maybe a darksabre. Not bad. I’d never bothered to give it a name. It didn’t seem the right time. The knife sliced the clansman in half on a diagonal from shoulder to hip. A trio of ebony eyes widened in surprise, or terror. Lyrian had taken a few seconds to disappear from a tiny cut. The larger slice resulted in a larger, and faster moving, darkness. The overwhelming wrongness of it felt sickening, and bile rose in the back of my throat. Both halves of the assassin vanished, not even having enough time to fall to the street.
Something passed from the knife and into my body, simultaneously making me feel revolted and stronger. I didn’t have time to worry about it and moved deeper into the city. The knife was formidable, but it wouldn’t do me any good if somebody stabbed me from behind. As I walked, I tried to open my senses and feel the world around me, especially the shifting currents of the air. Another task I’d not proven adept at.
The something from the knife, combined with the likelihood of imminent death, kicked my senses into a higher gear, and my vigilance provided an early warning as a dark green sphere dropped from a rooftop above and fell before me onto the narrow street. I’d stopped short of where it landed. The sphere was no bigger than a chicken’s egg, but the thick green fog it released when it broke open looked toxic, spreading to fill the street from one side to the other. A second sphere fell behind me, boxing me in. The point of ambush had been well-chosen. No doorways led off on either side, and the high, smooth walls of the buildings were unusually intact.
I glimpsed movement on a rooftop above, but nobody came down to the street, confirming my suspicion that the fog was dangerous. I considered using my wind magic to try to push the green fog back or cut a tunnel through. Then I laughed out loud. I don’t know what my enemies made of that. Green foggy death approached on either side, eating away at my little square of clean air. One of the crappier Star Wars movies provided me with a solution. It was time to go.
The knife cut a narrow doorway in the nearest wall, and I shouldered into the stone and mortar. The tall rectangle fell inward, braking apart with a dull thud and cloud of dust. I followed it inside. The large room stood mostly empty, with the remnants of a counter running across the middle. It looked like it had been a shop or a tavern.
Most of the back wall had fallen, and I made for the light. Then I froze. Instinct stopped me from stepping outside. An arrow shattered on the stone at my feet. I thickened the air behind me and leaped through the jagged opening. Another projectile zipped by my ear, narrowly missing me, but I didn’t stop to see what it was. I dodged side to side, jumping over the tumbled remains of the shop’s rear neighbour, before turning to stop in the middle of the next, wider street.
The surrounding buildings were piles of rubble and foundations, so anybody who wanted to fight would have to do it on the ground. I didn’t have to wait long before three clansmen moved from the shadows. The first stood as tall as the one I’d killed earlier, and he carried a knife in each hand. That guy came from behind me while the others approached from the ruins I’d just crossed. None of them made the faintest sound when they moved. The two who’d followed me were slighter, and were armed with slung short bows and slender spears, tipped on both ends. With the robes and wrappings, I couldn’t ascertain much else.
They moved to surround me, but this time I attacked. Mr. Ryan had taught me that waiting in the middle of a crowd of enemies was one of the stupidest ways to fight, so I drove at the nearest assassin, intending to break past and put a wall at my back.
It was one of the smaller ones, and an unquestionably female scream came from the assassin’s mouth. She’d jumped to avoid my strike, but the knife nicked her thigh just above the knee. The wound wasn’t more than a scratch, but with my weapon a scratch was enough. The others allowed me time to take up a better defensive position across the road while more dark power flowed from the knife into me. They were unable to look away from their dissolving companion. When she was gone, they shared a glance and ran away, rabbiting in opposite directions.
***
It soon became obvious that my enemies could sense something of my presence, or, more likely, they felt the knife. Ivy had said people far less talented and less sensitive than she might be able to feel the blade at a distance, and that most would go far out of their way to avoid it. The clansmen set traps instead.
The first trap came as a complete surprise and nearly ended my story, along with my life. My senses were flung far and wide upon the winds; any motion within a hundred feet would have alerted me to danger. That sensitivity did nothing to warn me of the tripwires. I only discovered them when I walked through them.
A dozen strands, thinner than a spider’s web spanned the narrow street. In the middle of day, they were barely visible up close, and the only one I felt was the one that pressed into my cheek, briefly, before snapping with an almost inaudible ping and unleashing hell around me. Th
ere was nothing magical about the wires themselves, or at least nothing that could be felt with my sixth sense. The enchantments they triggered...
I felt heat gather in an unnatural pattern across the stone walls on either side of me. There had never been anything wrong with my petrathen abilities, and I sensed that the rocks making up those walls would soon burst apart from the unbalanced stresses building inside them.
I stood in the middle of a perfectly laid trap—the jaws were snapping shut.
My petrathen side may have alerted me to the danger, but it was my wings that saved me. With partially solidified air and a desperate flap, I drove upwards and down the street as the walls exploded inward, filling the space with thousands of sharp, stony projectiles. There was no proper boom like explosions in movies have, just a crapload of simultaneous loud cracking noises followed by the dull tinkling of countless of rocks meeting in midair collisions. I managed not to be in the middle of most of those collisions, but I didn’t escape unscathed.
I caught nine or ten of the smaller shards at the furthest edge of the blast. The stone shards cut deep, and I fell to the ground a second after a few tonnes of rock did the same, blanketing the street behind me. The pile of rubble was new, but not otherwise out of place in Havensport. My legs bled around the jagged stone slivers, and I began pulling them out. It was pointless to wait. The upside was that no arteries or major veins had been hit. The downside was that my injuries distracted me, so I didn’t notice the assassin on the far side of the pile of fresh fallen stone until her arrow drove through my left hand. That arrow would’ve pierced my chest, but by sheer luck I reached to brush dust from my eye at the same time she released. For reference, an arrow through your hand hurts. A lot.
I left the last and smallest of the stone slivers, rolled to one side, and sprang to my feet. Without considering it, I brushed the arrow’s shaft with the knife’s blade, vanishing it from my hand. I saw the shooter turn and run back up the road. It looked as though she wasn’t interested in a stand-up fight. Then I tore off the hem of my makeshift toga and bound my wounded hand, but I left my legs to seep. My petrathen skin was rougher and tougher than human skin, and the blood was already clotting. I retrieved the knife from where I’d set it on the cobbles and continued on my way. Chasing, catching, or even finding the archer was beyond my abilities. There were bound to be more around, anyway.
***
I saw no residents of the city out or about, and there was far less uproar than when the wyvern had roamed the streets, but occasional shouts and terrified screams could be heard. The people I saw, taking cautious peeks from doorways or windows, went right back in again when they saw me. I’d like to think it was because of the knife. Havensport had no warning systems, and no gong sounded in the distance to inform of imminent danger. Still, the empty streets implied that people knew something was going on and that it wasn’t good. The city had grown eerily silent in between the times punctuated by death wails.
A scream rang out northeast of me. Judging from the volume it couldn’t have come from more than a block or two away… right around where Alak and Aleen lived.
***
I saw Aleen on the street near their house. She was still a long way off and appeared to be heading home. Alak exited through their ramshackle door before she got there. I wanted to yell, and tell him to get back inside, but the city had grown silent again, and I feared drawing attention. Neither had seen me, but Aleen hurried her pace. Even from up the street, I could tell she wanted Alak to turn back. He ran to her instead. Aleen caught him in an embrace and then hurried him toward their home.
A horrible wail broke the silence, sounding from far across the city. It went on and on before cutting short. Aleen glanced in the direction the scream came from, wrapping her arms protectively around her son again. They hadn’t noticed me yet, and I was going to shout out, to warn them of the danger, when the wall behind Aleen moved. I was looking right at them, but I saw nothing until the knife drove through Aleen’s back and the bloody point burst from the middle of Alak’s chest. The killing blow had been silent, flawlessly executed, and instantly lethal. Mother and son wore matching expressions of surprise, as they slumped to the ground.
My shout died on my lips.
Part of me had trouble believing it was real.
I’d seen Alak only days earlier; his mother had finally lifted his house arrest. He was a goofy kid, and a nice one. Aleen had sacrificed everything to give him a brighter future. That future had been stolen and thrown away in a single heartbeat.
First Three, then Ivy, and now Alak.
Each time I’d used the knife I’d become stronger, although I’d been too distracted by other concerns to notice when I killed Lyrian. Deep down, I knew using the knife was wrong, even for the right reasons. I knew at the core of my very being that the knife was the antithesis of everything I was meant to stand for, but pragmatism outweighed philosophical or moral dilemmas. I needed the knife to survive.
Every cut of the blade made the world substantially less and made me slightly more…
My roiling, barely controlled rage fused with the dark power the knife had gifted me to create something unprecedented. I hated that place. I hated people who inhabited it. I hated the whole world. An overwhelming urge to destroy everything rippled through my body with a painful spasm. What came next is blurry, and I only remembered a few pieces of the hours that followed. Some of it came much later as nightmares. I’ll do my best to put those broken pieces in the proper order.
The other Jack emerged from inside me again, and, for that afternoon, I watched through his eyes, like a passenger, or a prisoner—dragged along for the ride.
Chapter 27 – Fire and Lightning
My last clear memories from the hours that followed are of the clansman who killed Alak and Aleen. He stepped over their bodies without giving them a second glance. Possibly, he’d have run from the knife, given the chance, as others had done.
I didn’t give him that chance.
The enchantment that had driven shards of stone into me was a simple one, and my subconscious mind had studied it in the fraction of a second before I jumped. The tripwires were tied to iron spikes, driven into the mortar and cracks between the stones. Somebody had enchanted those spikes to steal all the heat from sections of the rock, moving and concentrating it nearby, and thereby creating massive temperature differentials in a small space. The result… the surface of the stone tearing itself apart. Primitive peoples on Earth mined stone with fire and water to create cracks; the enchantment did the same sort of thing, but infinitely faster and with more dramatic result. I was certain a petrathen had forged those spikes. He or she had also inadvertently gifted me with the knowledge of how they worked. The original enchantment had included bindings so that the spikes could be used by others at a later date. I had no need of that.
Making the stone walls behind the clansman explode proved remarkably easy. I’d spent my time trying to figure out how to create things. Destroying them required less effort. One block of stone at a time, I drove him towards me. I’ll say one thing for the guy: he was fast, and his reflexes—spectacular. None of the shards of stone hit him, but then hitting him wasn’t my goal.
In the middle of dodging exploding rocks, he managed to throw a projectile at me. I caught the short, black cylinder in a shield of thickened air before it reached me, and I had a half-second to examine it. The black tube was covered in flowing silver script I couldn’t read, and, strangely, it reminded me of a firecracker.
It exploded with substantially more force.
My air shield saved me, deflecting most of the blast away from my face and toward the clansman. It still knocked me over, and I tumbled and slid backwards. The assassin attacked well before I found my feet again and without the advantage of my knife’s speed he’d surely have finished me.
He produced a second knife from his robes and sprang at me, closing an impressive distance with the leap. I had no time to roll out of the way
, but it was unnecessary. A quick flick of my knife cut him from the air above me. Only his knives survived, falling to the street beside me. He must have let them go at the last instant.
Alak and Aleen were avenged, but I felt nothing except the power the knife fed me. The changes wrought by the knife reached a tipping point inside me. My senses became fantastically sharpened, but everything else that made me me became blurrier and muted. After checking for new injuries, I continued toward the middle of the city. I picked up my pace to give my enemies less time to set traps. The clansmen were shadow fighters who were capable of making their own shadows. I’d do better flushing them out into the open.
***
I passed through an alleyway so narrow that I was able to touch the walls on either side of me. And I was jogging, although the reason for that never returned with any of the disjointed memories. Two clansmen dropped from a low rooftop, landing behind me, and filling the alley. Neither made a sound, and without my windsense I’d have had no warning. As it was, I only just turned in time to take the brunt of their weapon.
They held a fat, arm-length, conical tube between them and pointed the business end at me. It wasn’t exactly a gun, cannon, or a rocket launcher, and there was no blast or smoke from gunpowder involved. I thought I sensed a wind enchantment, but there wasn’t time to investigate it. I pulled up a shield of air between us as both assassins rocked back from the tube’s recoil. The bundle of darts that flew from the tube spread like a shotgun blast, and, while my shield may have slowed them and knocked a few away, the vast majority drove into me.
Time slowed to a spectacularly painful crawl. Hundreds of scarlet-fletched darts covered the front of me like a pincushion. Both eyes had survived, although I now saw the world through two short tunnels of shaft and fletching. Along with the pain came stiffness that was the result of poison or drug. My knife arm had already stiffened up, and I’d yet to take a breath.
