by Carol A Park
Watchmen ran up to the monster and hacked at its legs with swords, which drew its attention away from the civilians.
That didn’t last long. It shook his head, like a horse flicking at flies with its tail, and with one arc of its arm, swatted a group of the Watch, sending them flying through the air and into the wall of the tailor’s shop on the other side of the square. Only one moved after they landed, but that one didn’t get up.
It stepped on others, and the last two, the monster picked up in one hand, opened its mouth to reveal a neat row of knife-like teeth and…
Even Ivana had to look away. The sound of the screams cut off abruptly, but echoed in her ears long after they had stopped.
So much for the Watch.
She pressed herself back against the doorpost to her inn, hiding in the shadows.
Burning skies, Ivana thought. Aleena was right. There’s nothing I can do against this thing.
A terrific crash filled the air, and then another reverberating roar. She dared to peer around the doorpost. The monster had turned its back to her and was snatching at the fleeing mob. Most escaped its lumbering grasp, and it wasn’t happy about that.
It smashed its arm into the wall of the nearest building—the tailor’s shop and home. The side of the shop caved in, glass windows shattering and timbers splitting like twigs.
Illusion of safety, indeed. She could only hope that someone brought down the monster before it smashed this entire quarter of the city into splinters.
The square was starting to clear. The monster was vicious and strong, but slow. It swung its head and body around like a galley trying to turn on a coin, seeking another target, and its eyes lit on a small crying figure.
Burning skies, it was a child. Why a youngster had been in the mob in the first place, Ivana didn’t know—curse the parents who thought that was a good idea—but now she had been separated from whoever brought her and was one of the few left in the square.
Ivana was closer to the girl than the monster. She was sure she could get there before it could.
Ivana pressed her hand to the side of the doorpost, eyes focused on the child. The girl either didn’t know enough to run or was too afraid to move.
The monster took one lumbering step toward the child, the neatly placed flagstones of the square cracking beneath its weight.
Ivana darted out into the square, waving her hands and yelling to draw the attention of the monster and hopefully the child.
She succeeded with both. The child blinked teary eyes, and as the monster took another step and reached for Ivana instead, Ivana threw herself into a side roll, coming so close to the claws on its hand she could feel the wind of their passing.
She rolled to a standing position at the side of the girl, hefted her onto her hip, and then ran the opposite direction.
The stones of the square vibrated under her feet as the monster turned to chase her, but she didn’t look back. Instead, she ran as though the abyss itself were at her back—then again, perhaps it was—and when she reached the inn, nearly tossed the girl through the doorway. She pointed and shouted, “Run out the back! Do you understand? Run out the back!”
The girl froze, staring at her with wide eyes, and at first Ivana was afraid she didn’t understand. But, finally, she turned and fled in the direction Ivana had been pointing.
Ivana glanced up at her inn once more and was dismayed to see a shadowy figure standing at one of the upper windows that looked suspiciously like one of her girls. She didn’t have any female guests that night.
She gnashed her teeth. What were they still doing there?
Ivana turned around to find the blank white eyes pinned on her. The monster raised a clawed hand toward the side of her inn, angry at being foiled.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” she screamed. She rolled again, into its reach, and hopped up onto one of its feet. She felt for the hidden slit in her skirt, slid her dagger out of the sheath on her thigh and through the slit with a practiced hand, and then jammed it as hard as she could into the monster’s foot.
Silver-red blood seeped up from the wound, but she hadn’t really hurt it. She did, however, accomplish her goal of distracting it from smashing her inn—and whoever was left inside.
Instead, it lifted its foot, trying to step on her. She flung herself forward and grasped at its ankle like the neck of a bucking horse, while it continued to flick its foot in an attempt to fling her off.
She had always imagined her end would come at the end of a noose or at the point of a soldier’s sword, rather than squished like a bug. This was a disappointing way to go, after all she had been through. Her aching arms started to lose their tenuous hold, and she closed her eyes, waiting for the inevitable.
Vaughn woke to a pair of almond eyes set in a furry orange head staring down at him, and he was certain he had gone crazy.
He blinked and groaned, and the eyes disappeared. Had he finally managed to drink enough to become senseless—and give himself such a headache?
But when he tried to move and found himself hampered by bonds on his wrists and ankles, he remembered what had happened.
The assassin had deceived and manipulated him, and he had followed her straight into her trap.
But where was she?
He craned his neck as much as he could, but the study appeared to be empty, aside from the owner of the almond eyes. The cat now sat on top of Sweetblade’s desk, staring down at him with flattened ears as though ready to pounce.
Great.
He heard the faint sound of shouting from outside, guessed that’s why she wasn’t there, and blessed whatever god had sent the distraction. He doubted Sweetblade realized that whatever she had used to knock him out wouldn’t last as long on him as on a normal person.
Now, he couldn’t waste his good luck. He blinked hard several times, trying to concentrate past the pounding in his skull.
What could he use to get out of this? Invisibility was useless to him until he was free of his bonds, so that left water.
Once again, he cursed himself for not practicing it more. He surveyed his surroundings again. Water. Water.
His eyes lit on the liquor cabinet. Water…content? And glass bottles which might break and provide sharp objects with which to cut his bonds.
He chewed on his lip, visually selected one of the smaller liquor bottles, burned the aether in his blood, and pulled…
It trembled.
He pulled again, and it toppled over onto its side without breaking.
Damn.
He took a few deep breaths, rolled to the side, and hefted himself to a sitting position. The room swam crazily, and he groaned again.
The cat hissed.
He glared at the beast. “Don’t blame me,” he told it. “You want me out of your space, help me find a way out of here.”
The cat started washing its face, casting Vaughn dirty looks every time he moved.
“Great,” he muttered. “Now I’m talking to a cat.”
He inched his way over to the cabinet and then slammed his body into it.
A few more bottles tipped, but still none broke.
Frustrated, he spread out his concentration widely and pulled as hard as he could on all of the bottles…
That only accomplished knocking them all over and making his head swim all the more with the rapid expenditure of blood.
He slumped back, defeated.
Sweetblade’s cat stood up, stretched, and sprang to the shelf that contained the bottles. It pawed at one, causing it to roll around a bit. It paused, as though considering, and then pushed it off the edge. It watched the bottle fall to the hard wood—not hard enough, apparently, since it still didn’t break—and apparently pleased with its efforts, began systematically knocking the bottles off the shelves.
“Is this something you frequently do in your spare time?” Vaughn asked the cat. “I can’t imagine your mistress would be too fond of that hobby.”
The cat flattened its ears again and
renewed its activities with even more vigor, occasionally looking over at Vaughn with a wild look in its eyes.
Then, it happened. One of the bottles hit the growing pile of glass just right, and it shattered. The cat jumped, hissed at Vaughn—as though it were his fault—and then stalked out of the study.
“Crazy beast,” Vaughn muttered.
Still.
He edged over to the glass shards, turned his back to the mess, and used his bound hands to gingerly feel for the neck of the bottle, which had broken off whole from the top. He managed to find it without slicing open his fingers, and then held the unbroken part in one hand and started sawing at the rope with the sharp edges.
It wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. He couldn’t see what he was doing; the bottle kept slipping, and he was certain he was going to end up slitting his own wrists instead.
Fortunately, while his attempt at cutting through the rope itself wasn’t working as well as he had hoped, his efforts were loosening it. He could feel the rope start to slip and burn on his wrists as tiny threads stretched and snapped.
A few more seconds…
There.
He wriggled his wrists—and a little bit of skin—free.
Whatever was going on outside the inn was escalating. He could hear screaming as he worked the bonds off his ankles, stood, and stretched.
He had to get out of here before she came back. He had a feeling next time she wouldn’t be so foolish as to leave him alone with her cat. But it still felt like his brain was trying to bounce around his skull.
Liquor was good for something, at least. He picked up one of the smallest bottles and read the date. He whistled. Expensive stuff. He grinned, popped the cork, and downed it. “Why thank you,” he said, setting the empty bottle on her desk. “Don’t mind if I do.”
But Vaughn’s momentary merriment disappeared once he found a window. He looked outside in disbelief.
An enormous bloodbane was stepping through a rift in the courtyard right outside the inn. He had never seen one so large; if the theory about the size and ferocity of the monster being correlated to how much the dead Banebringer had used their powers was correct, this Banebringer must have been quite active.
And this bloodbane was not only big, but savage. It had hardly stepped through the rift before it started looking for prey. This one wouldn’t flee, not like a bloodwolf—this one was out for carnage, and in the middle of a city…
Vaughn felt sick.
Assassin or no assassin, he had to act. The bloodbane would crush half the city before the Watch would be able to bring it down with their mundane weapons.
He opened the window, slipped out, and ran for the alley where he had hidden his bow.
The inevitable didn’t come. Instead, the monster roared again. It stumbled backward, stones crunching and cracking under its feet, and Ivana was finally knocked loose from her precarious hold on its foot.
She rolled again to the side, expecting to be squashed at any moment, and when she wasn’t, she whirled around to see what had distracted the monster this time.
She followed its gaze up until she spied a figure standing on top of her inn, backlit by the nearly full moon behind it, drawn bow against its arm.
The figure let loose an arrow, and it struck the monster in one of its eyes, evoking another deafening roar. It was then Ivana saw the feathered shaft of a second arrow sticking out of the monster’s other eye. The distraction from moments ago.
Ivana forgotten as nothing but a nuisance, the monster stomped its feet, and threw one arm out wildly in the direction of the archer. Ivana guessed it had been blinded, and alarm pulsed through her as the arm narrowly missed shaving the top floor of her inn off.
She screamed, leapt onto the monster’s foot, and jammed her dagger into it again, and again, until her already sore arms trembled from the effort.
The monster’s hand had been on a direct trajectory toward the archer, but her move caused it to falter, and it began its slow dance again, furious that the mouse had come back to nip at its feet.
The archer let another arrow fly, and it struck the monster to the side of the knee cap. Incredibly, the arrow slid through the heavy hide at the knee, and the monster’s leg buckled. It fell with a crash onto the good knee, and nearly on top of Ivana.
She flung herself out of the way, and the ground met her right shoulder and arm with an inelegant skid. She stumbled to her feet, ignoring the sudden fire that ignited down her arm. Another arrow was already flying toward the monster’s other knee, and then it fell forward. The entire square shook as its full weight hit the ground, and more timbers fell out of the crushed side of the tailor’s shop, along with the crenellations on top of the building next to it.
But the monster was far from defeated. It thrashed on the ground, trying to get up, and only succeeded in kicking through the wall of another building.
When she looked next, the archer had disappeared.
Ivana didn’t know if he had gone to find a better vantage point, or if he had decided that was all he could do, but she wasn’t going to lose the opportunity while the monster was disabled. Summoning every ounce of strength left in her, she pulled herself up its heaving side, plunging her dagger in again and again for a sturdy handhold for one hand, and grasping at divots in its hide for the other, and scrambled onto its back.
She had no idea what to do next, but she figured going for the head was always a good idea. She scrambled along its hide, half-crawling, half slithering on her stomach to avoid being thrown off, until she reached the center of its shoulders. She pulled out her dagger again, and jammed it into the side of its neck, hoping she would hit a vital area.
It thrashed even harder as more blood welled up, but not enough to matter. Frustrated, she jammed it in again, at a different spot.
The monster’s arm tried to reach backward to grab her, but it simply didn’t bend that way. So instead, it rolled over.
She used the momentum of its roll to fling herself through the air to avoid being crushed underneath and landed in a much more graceful crouch next to it. Blinded as it was, its arm flailed wildly at her, and she darted this way and that, trying to anticipate where it would fall next.
And then, all of a sudden, the monster let out one ear-shattering roar—so loud that for a moment the sounds around her faded. It tried to roar again, but it came out as an eerie, rumbling gurgle. It thrashed, shuddered, twitched, and then fell still.
Gasping for air, trembling from the energy pulsing through her overwrought body, she stared up at the monster’s stomach.
The mysterious archer stood on top of the monster, bow in his hand.
Ivana shook herself and scrambled up the side of the monster again.
The shafts of three arrows barely poked up out of the hide of the monster in the center of its throat.
She turned to the archer and immediately recognized him. “You!”
Heilyn bowed deeply, like some noble bowing to the king. “At your service, Da.”
“How did you—you should be—” She caught herself before she said more. Irrational rage pulsed through her, that he had escaped, that he had caught her unaware, that he didn’t even seem to care. She settled for an unfair accusation. “You almost got my inn smashed!”
“Your cat helped me,” he responded in answer to her unfinished question, a charming, crooked smile on his face.
A charming, crooked smile she had long since stopped dreaming about, stopped caring about, stopped thinking about—yet it hit her like one of his arrows, bounced off her walls…and left a crack.
She sucked air in through her teeth, finally seeing it. He didn’t merely have similar features. This was no coincidence. Ri Gildas and a man who looked like Airell, his oldest son, showing up in context to each other?
She would bet her entire safe this man was closely related to him. A cousin? A brother, even?
His eyes slid down the length of her body and lingered below her waist; the skirt of her dre
ss had torn at some point in her frantic movements and was revealing a long stretch of thigh. She glared at him and pulled the pieces of her skirt together.
Yes, definitely related.
The look did nothing to soothe her anger. She paced closer to him, dagger clenched in one hand, still dripping with the monster’s blood. To her intense satisfaction, he backed away from her, finally looking nervous like he ought. “Whoa,” he said, holding his hands out to the side, revealing the raw skin around his wrists where the rope had been tied. “I saved your life.”
“I don’t keep tally of debts,” she said through clenched teeth.
He glanced back at the inn. “Is this really where you want to do this?”
As if to emphasize his words, the sound of jingling armor floated down the street. More Watch come, too late, to help.
He cast her another one of those grins. “And sounds like we have company. I’m sure they’ll be fascinated to find that a humble innkeeper helped to take down this behemoth.”
His eyes flicked pointedly to her dagger.
She was trapped, and she hated him for it. She couldn’t kill him here, and not only because it would spawn another bloodbane. The Watch would see her, and potentially anyone who was still left in the square, watching. She had already revealed far too much about her other set of skills as it was.
Yet she couldn’t let him go. He knew who she was, about her inn, about her girls. There were people who would pay to know those things—and do something nefarious with the information.
But of the two choices, only one had immediate consequences.
“This changes nothing,” she spat at him, sheathing her dagger. “Don’t think I won’t find you.”
And yet, how would she ever find an invisible man? She slid down the monster’s side, anger almost to the point of boiling over, marched into her inn, and slammed the door behind her.
She was greeted by Caira, who was standing near the door holding a lantern. Her eyes roved to Ivana’s arm, and Ivana followed her gaze. Her blouse sleeve was in tatters, the shreds sticking to one long, oozing scrape down her arm, from shoulder to elbow.