The Element of Fire, Martha Wells [books for new readers .txt] 📗

pistol and drew the other just as the second man reached him. He deflected the thrust of the soldier’s rapier by hitting the narrow blade with his forearm and batting it away, almost managing to grab the blade and pull it out of his opponent’s grasp. As the man closed with him, Thomas’s pistol was knocked upward. It went off, the blast deafening him and scattering burning grains of powder down onto his attacker. The soldier faltered at the pain, giving Thomas time to shove him away and draw his main gauche. As the man rushed him again, Thomas stabbed him under the ribs.

He stepped back as the soldier collapsed, and in the sudden quiet he could hear others breaking through the locked door into the room behind him. He grabbed up his other wheellock from the floor and tucked it into his sash with the second pistol. Drawing his own rapier, he took the dying man’s discarded sword and went out onto the landing above the stables. There he shut the door and wedged the extra blade through the catch to keep it closed. It would not hold them for long.

He turned as the carriage doors below were flung open and a large group of Alsene troops burst in. Thomas judged the odds and knew this was it. He stayed where he was, to let the narrow landing guard his back for him.

The first one to the top of the stairs came at him like a madman with something to prove. Thomas parried the first flurry of blows, then took the offensive, driving the man back a step. The lack of room worked to his advantage; with his bad leg he would not have been able to fight as effective a running battle. There were more of them waiting on the stairs below, and he knew he wouldn’t have a chance to run.

His opponent tried an unsuccessful feint and Thomas drove his blade deeply into the man’s side. The soldier stumbled backward and the man on the step below lunged past him, only to be speared through the neck. He collapsed on the top step, choking and bleeding copiously, and temporarily blocking the landing.

There was a brief moment of respite as the others below tried to wrestle their fallen comrades out of the way and Thomas hung onto the railing, panting. He could hear them battering away at the other side of the door, and it looked as if the thick wood around the wedged blade was beginning to give. The man with the neck wound made a loud strangled cry and stopped moving.

Then Thomas saw a trooper on the stable floor below aiming a musket up at him. He flung himself back from the rail in pure reflex; this left room for another attacker to leap over the body blocking the stairs and come at him. Thomas parried the blows, letting himself be put on the defensive, trying to maneuver the man between himself and the musket. But moments passed and there was no impact or even the blast of a missed shot. They were trying to take him alive.

This realization energized him and he closed with his attacker, bringing their swords hilt to hilt and trapping the other blade in the quillions to hold it away from him. Pushed back, the man stumbled on the corpse behind him and Thomas shoved him down the stairs. He leapt after him into the momentary clear space, slashing at the men below who were struggling to disentangle themselves. He caught one in the face, the point tearing through the man’s eye and cheek before glancing off bone. The soldier fell against the wall, screaming.

Another struck upward at him, and he felt a tug and sudden pain as the point punctured his leather sleeve and stabbed into his arm. He cursed and tore himself free, falling backward on the steps now slippery with blood. The idiots were still trying to incapacitate rather than kill him. No matter what their orders, I’ve given them enough provocation, he thought in disgust.

Another man fought past his two fallen comrades in time to be stabbed in the chest, but Thomas’s grip on the hilt was weak now and the point slid away instead of going deeply into the trooper’s flesh. But it was enough to send his opponent reeling backward into the railing and Thomas struggled to his feet again.

Then he was struck from behind, between the shoulder blades, knocking him into the wall with stunning impact. He slid down it, unable to catch himself, blackness flowing in at the edges of his vision.

*

Waiting beside the door in the darkened hall, Kade kept her freezing hands in her pockets and tried to calm her thoughts. Anything to keep her mind off the man who had driven her half-mad standing there on the green plain of Knockma being too much a gentleman to take any notice of what Boliver had said.

With effort she managed to drag her attention back to the immediate problem. She didn’t think Grandier could really be helping Bisra. Why not lure us into invading them? She could shrug and say it didn’t matter; she would kill him anyway for what he had done to Galen Dubell. He was so like…

The soldiers burst out of a door five short paces in front of her. Their backs were to her, and she instinctively searched for glamour to hide. There was hardly any in the dark hall, but the candlelight provided just enough for her to slip out the door unnoticed.

Outside she dropped the barely adequate illusion and ran down the alley to the front of the house. She would have to get in another way, use glamour from the snow outside…

The wall just in front of her exploded.

She hit the icy ground, more from surprise than any impulse to duck. When the building did not collapse on top of her she looked up. Several men crossed the square toward her, one of them carrying a musket, the glow from its slow match just visible in the dusk.

Shooting a poor little girl like me with something that large is hardly fair, she thought, dazed by the suddenness of it. At a distance and in bad light her red smock probably looked bloody. It wouldn’t fool them at close range.

She dug in her pocket, hiding the movement in the snow, and managed to draw out a piece of guncotton stained with powder she had prepared earlier. She brought it up to where she could see it without having to turn her head and stared at it, trying to conjure a spark. Sympathetic magic, or unsympathetic magic as Galen had preferred to call it, was faulty and difficult to use. She might only burn her fingers. If she could call flame at all. Damn it, Kade thought, a spark, just a little spark. But she did her best work under pressure, and as the men came nearer, her mind stopped chattering and she reached the right level of concentration. The edge of the cotton began to glow.

Now. Just as the man with the musket suddenly shouted and raised his weapon, Kade sealed the concurrence spell. Every grain of powder within a ten-foot radius ignited.

The musket exploded almost over her head, there were screams and blasts as pistols went off, then a storm of little popping sounds as the scattered grains of powder from the musket’s blast ignited.

Kade scrambled to her feet, her clothes dotted with someone else’s blood. Three men lay dead or dying on the snow, two more running away around the corner of the house. She bolted after them, down the alley between Aviler’s house and the next, into the street where they had fought the battle with the fay the day before.

Kade slid to an abrupt halt as she reached the street. She felt her heart hit the pit of her stomach. The carriage doors stood open and there were armed troops milling in front of them. She could tell by their dress only that they were not city or crown troops. It looked as though there were a hundred of them.

Someone saw her and shouted, she saw the slow match of a musket glow in the twilight; she darted back around the corner and ran.

*

“Where’s the girl?” Dontane stood in the carriage doorway.

“Gone,” Grandier said. He stood in the middle of the street, wrapped in his scholar’s cope, thoughtfully studying the sky.

Dontane strode out and started around the corner of the house. “I sent five men after her. Damn it, she was running.”

“Perhaps she wanted someone to chase her,” Grandier said, and followed him.

On the other side of the house, they found the remains of the first group in the bloodstained snow. Dontane stared down at them a moment, then looked at the older sorcerer. Grandier was humming to himself and contemplating the sky again. Then Dontane saw what appeared to be a pile of rags on the snow further into the square. He went toward it.

It must be the men he had sent after the sorceress, though all were dead and none was recognizable. They looked like corpses that had been left to mummify in some desert, dry desiccated husks.

Dontane started forward but then stopped, his attention caught by Grandier, who was watching him with a speculative half-smile. Dontane took a step back and said, “There’s a ring here?”

Grandier nodded to a faint circular trough in the snow. He said, “It doesn’t do to walk uninvited into Fayre. Or run, for that matter.”

Dontane looked down at the pitiful remains of the Alsene troopers and wondered if Grandier would have let him walk unknowing into the ring. But he only said, “Good, we’re rid of her then.”

“Oh, I think not.” Grandier smiled and turned back toward the house. “We have something she wants, you see.”