by Ari Marmell
This was hardly Shins's first time in this specific alley, let alone the many just like it, so she knew she could deal with it. Nevertheless, she gave some very serious thought to asking Olgun to turn off her nose for a bit. She decided, however reluctantly, that he was probably busy enough enhancing her sight and hearing, and didn't need the extra distraction.
Besides, she wouldn't be here long.
She found the sentry more or less where she expected. He appeared to be a beggar, sheltering in a shallow doorway in a futile attempt to escape the elements. Most passersby, if they noticed him at all, would dismiss him just as readily.
Which, Shins knew, was the entire point.
Come to think of it, she wondered, as she studied the man far more intently than the ambient light and visibility should have permitted, don't I know him?
“Say,” she said over the rain, stepping out of the shadows, “didn't I once drug you and force you to guide me through the Guild?”
The rather comical, tangled-marionette thrashing as the thief tried to leap to his feet, draw his weapon, and reach for his signal whistle all at once granted Shins more than enough time to act. With an almost casual openhanded shove, she bounced the man's head off the brick wall behind him. Not too hard—she wasn't looking to kill the guy—but definitely more than enough to daze him, at which point she spun him around by the shoulders, wrapped an arm around his neck in a brutal choke hold, and made sure he was down for a good long while.
“You'd probably have preferred the drugs again,” she observed as she carefully lowered him back to the stoop on which he'd sat, watching as the rain swiftly diluted the blood dribbling from his scalp. “Maybe if we ever have to do this a third time, yes?”
From neighboring streets, her god-enhanced hearing detecting the muffled thumps and stifled grunts of other sentries receiving more or less the same treatment from Paschal's men.
The sounds of fellow Finders being silenced, beaten, maybe worse by the City Guard.
I should feel weird about this. I should be at least a little conflicted. Shouldn't I?
And yet, nothing. The thought of battling against her former brethren with her former foes, even the possibility of remaining an enemy of the Guild after Lisette was gone, scarcely registered. This was what she had to do. For herself, for the people she loved.
This was what Lisette had made her do.
She was still lost in thought when the five-hundred count Paschal had allowed for silencing the sentries came to an end. Still lost in thought when something enormously heavy clanked and clattered over the haphazard cobblestones, moving into position directly across the main entrance to the Finders’ Guild.
The canon roared. The fortified door disintegrated in a cloud of fire and splinters and smoke. From every visible alley, every street corner, every doorway, soldiers—heavily armed and clad in the black and silver of the Guard—charged their longtime enemy.
Shins charged with them, and there was no more time for thought at all.
Major Sorelle's cannon was not the only one fired within Davillon's borders that night.
Across town, in a district where not only cannon fire but violence of any sort was nigh mythical, one of the walls of the Ducarte estate had come tumbling down at the first shot. Louis Rittier—son of the late and lamented Clarence Rittier, newly risen to the office of the Marquis de Ducarte, had shot from his bed, screaming, at the sudden blast. Sheets and carpet grew thick with rainwater; shreds of silk, all that remained of the bed's canopy, flopped and writhed like dying worms. He huddled now behind a heavy table, frantically scrambling to don his trousers and sword-belt, while the captain of his House soldiers struggled to report over the twin percussions of rain and gunfire.
“…not just any soldiers, either!” the captain was shouting as he, too, crouched behind the makeshift shelter. “My people are reporting the ensigns of multiple families, including Luchene's!”
“Gods damn it!” She knew. The duchess somehow knew about Suvagne's planned coup and just as clearly knew that he was to have been a part of it. What he could not imagine is what could possibly have possessed her to move against them with open violence rather than politically. “Get a messenger to the Guard! Tell Archibeque to get his people over here and restore some semblance of bloody order!”
“My lord, I…. There are guardsmen among the attacking force as well.”
Rittier felt the blood run from his cheeks. “How did this…. How have we heard nothing of this?!”
“It's only possible if they put this together fast, my lord. And if we're the first of the Houses they moved against…. If we're to be the example…”
The young aristocrat was nodding, slowly pulling himself together. All right, so…his own House soldiers were gathered in their full numbers on the estate. They'd been intended to initiate open action, not defend against it, but they were well armed, well rested, well equipped. Whatever maneuvering Luchene had done to unite the larger houses and the guard, to engage in something of this sort, had to be borderline legal at best. His allies would almost certainly mount a magisterial challenge, and even if they did not, most of the soldiers outside had to be harboring doubts about opening fire on an aristocrat's property.
This wasn't a battle House Rittier could win, but they didn't have to win, just endure.
“Captain,” he ordered, finally snapping shut the buckle on his belt, “send a messenger under a flag of parlay. Tell whatever bastard's leading this farce that I do not recognize his legal authority to attack me or mine. Tell him I challenge him to a duel of honor for staining my own, and point out that he'll be saving lives on both sides if he accepts. That should buy us enough time for you to slip other messengers out into the street to inform our allies what's happening.”
“Sir!” The soldier snapped off a salute and scurried out the door at an awkward, crouching shuffle.
Some few minutes later, the firing stopped.
Slowly, suspiciously, the marquis stood, abandoning the safety of cover, and moved to the window to see what he might see. His captain joined him once more just as he twitched the curtain aside.
“Louis Rittier!” The voice echoed from beyond the wall, more solid than the rain, doubtless audible to every man, woman, and child on the street. “Come forth and address me!” A pause, then, “My word that you will not be harmed or touched.”
“Do we trust him?” the soldier whispered.
Rittier grunted. “He gave his word openly, publicly. He'll have issues in his own ranks if he breaks it.” He wiped the last of the crust from his eyes, wished he had the opportunity for a shave, and stood upon the window pane.
“I am Louis Rittier, Marquis de Ducarte!” he shouted back. “By what possible right have you attacked my home? Ordered your soldiers to fire on their fellow citizens?”
“By right of legal writ, authored by Her Grace, declaring House Rittier—among others—traitors to the city and duchy of Davillon!”
“Even if this were true, which I wholeheartedly deny, this is hardly due process! The duchess hasn't the legal standing to make such a declaration without trial!”
“Oh, but she does! In the presence of, and ratified by, a tribunal of House patriarchs, Beatrice Luchene, the Duchess Davillon, has claimed emergency powers and temporarily reinstated her right to absolute rule by virtue of lands and titles!”
The young aristocrat only realized his mouth hung open when the wind tossed a gulp of rain between his lips. “That authority hasn't existed in generations!”
“That authority hasn't been exercised in generations!” the voice shouted back. “It was never legally abrogated! And Her Grace has decided that the conspirators in her domain need to be sent a message.
“That's you, in case there was any confusion.”
Rittier felt himself held aloft on equal parts rage and mounting terror.
The distant noble continued, making Rittier wonder how he kept from shouting himself hoarse. “If you wish to challenge the legality
of all this before a magistrate, I'm sure you'll have that opportunity. If you surrender. If you insist on making this personal, on dueling me gentleman to gentleman, I accept—but I have no choice but to demand our duel be to the death! As part of Her Grace's…message.”
“My lord…” the captain began. Rittier brushed him off. He was hardly the world's greatest duelist, but he was better than most casual swordsmen. And the fellow shouting at him definitely had the superior tone of the aristocracy, not the gruffer mien of a military man. Killing him wouldn't get House Rittier out of this mess, but it would give their allies time to act. Legally or…otherwise.
“And what,” he called back, drawing his rapier and taking a few muscle-loosening swings, “is the name of the miscreant I'll be punishing for this assault upon my property and person?”
“Evrard d'Arras!”
Rittier's rapier halted in mid swoosh, and if his face had paled before, the blood must surely now be pooling in his toes.
“Captain?” Rittier was fairly proud of how steady his voice was.
“Yes, my lord?”
“Please send our messenger back out and inform Monsieur d'Arras that, while we intend to protest this atrocity most strenuously in a court of law, for the time being House Rittier surrenders to city custody.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Thick with smoke, with dust, with powdered stone, the air in the Finders’ Guild's upper hallways seemed more solid than the walls crumbling around them. Coughing, choking, hacking, and spitting were as prevalent as shouting and screaming—questions, orders, demands, and cries of far less coherent meaning. Guns fired, crossbows twanged, and projectiles of every sort gouged furrows into flesh and brick alike.
The cannonballs, along with the first fusillade of flintlocks and blunderbusses, had opened the building like a jar of preserves, cleared those halls of any initial lines of defense, thrown the thieves into absolute, panicked chaos. Now the guards moved in, creeping through the haze, firing at any sign of movement, any sound of resistance. Still, they knew that beyond those clouds, the Finders were also regrouping; that both sides were now equally blind, until the battle moved farther into the complex. That once the element of surprise wore off, no matter how well orchestrated the assault, the guards were going to start taking casualties. It was just the cost of this sort of raid.
“This sort of raid,” however, didn't normally include Widdershins—and Olgun had no eyes for the smoke and particulate to blind.
“Hold your fire!” She hoped the shout, coming from the ranks behind, would carry enough weight for the front-line soldiers; guess she'd soon find out.
Olgun's power wrapped around her as she broke into a sprint, flowing through her like a waterfall washing over her soul. She ran, leapt, kicked off the wall to one side, braced both hands on a startled guardsman's shoulders as she arced overhead. Her feet struck the floor between the massed soldiers at one end of the hallway, the clumped thieves at the other, and went airborne again just as rapidly. Tucked into a tight ball, one flip over—then a trio of rolls below—either side's line of fire. She shot upright from the final tumble, one last dive over the heads of the first of the Finders, landing on her hands in the midst of the group until she finally sprung into a standing crouch once more, rapier in hand.
Pity nobody actually saw any of that.
“Here, boys,” she taunted—and then spun.
Twisting, lunging, sidestepping, ducking, never because she saw the danger coming, but because Olgun guided her every move, a faint but unmistakable pressure on her limbs to which she reacted faster than thought. She leaned back at the waist and knees, almost horizontal, as a pair of blades flashed through the space she'd just occupied, and then struck out with two lightning-quick ripostes of her own. Cries of pain, the clatter of metal on the floor, followed by the thump of bodies. Moaning bodies; Olgun knew that she'd prefer to avoid killing if she could help it.
Just as he knew she'd not hesitate if she couldn't help it.
The shouts from all around were wild, panicked. The Finders had no idea who, even what, had plummeted into their midst; they knew only that it wasn't hindered as they were. Through the haze, dancing this way and that with the currents in the hall, they must have caught a flash of steel here, a blur of gray there, always gone before stinging, tearing eyes could make sense of it.
The click of hammers punctuated Olgun's warning, and Shins only smiled. Sparks snapped and sizzled before those hammers fell, a trio of flintlocks spat balls of lead, and three of the Finders fell screaming in pain, shot by their own confused and horrified allies.
Step, pivot, parry across, parry high. The clash of steel was swift as the patter of rain, as though the storm outside had elected to join the assault. Shins lunged, felt her rapier punch through something soft and whimpering; dropped into a low crouch beneath another thief's thrust and spun, kicking the ankles out from beneath the woman who'd just tried to stab her. The heavy thunk against the floor suggested this particular enemy wouldn't be getting up again anytime soon, but Shins stabbed her through one leg, just to be sure.
Finally, dispersed as much by the wind of Shins's own movements as anything else, the haze began to clear. Small patches of stone wall grew visible to either side. The blood oozing across the floor glistened in the lanternlight, and only then did Shins become aware of the faint and rather disturbing squelch of every step.
Still, she thought with a shudder, at least I'm not lying in it.
The seven Finders scattered around her, sprawled across the floor and all sporting various holes that neither nature nor the gods had granted them, weren't so lucky.
Well, maybe one of the gods granted them, sort of…
The eighth thief, still standing only by virtue of the fact that he'd been farthest to the back when all hell broke loose, hung limp as an under-stuffed scarecrow. His lip quivered, tears actually ran down his face, and the trembling that was only faint in his arms had, by the time it traversed the length of his sword, become violent enough to make the tip little more than a metallic blur.
Shins smiled. He squeaked, dropped his rapier, and sank to his knees, hands clasped on his head.
“Good call,” she told him. “You're going to grow to be a wise old man.” And just like that she was sprinting down the corridor, heading ever deeper into the complex and leaving the cleanup to the guards who followed.
Face drenched in sweat, Renard plunged into a chamber in the lower passages of the Guild, sliding to a halt behind a small cadre of Finders. Most were clad in casual clothes, even sleepwear, but the guns and blades they carried were well kept and ready to go.
They'd been, the lot of them, watching the room's other entrance, having piled up tables and chairs to form makeshift cover. All of which made sense, since the direction they faced led out into the halls, from where any invader would surely approach, while Renard had appeared from below.
“Coming up…from behind!” he gasped at them, doubling over with hands on knees. “Don't know how, but…they found one of the secret entrances! They're just minutes behind me!”
Immediately, swearing up a storm, the gathered Finders shoved furniture a few paces over, slipping around to the other side. They'd show the damn Guard, though! Bloody lawmen expected to take them by surprise; well, they were going to walk right into a wall of lead instead.
Renard made his way to the opposite side of the room, taking up position beside the door they had been watching.
The door from which, of course, the Guard would actually be coming. Yes, Renard had led them in through one of the hidden passages; just not the one he'd implied.
Rapier loose in its scabbard, a flintlock in each hand, Renard stared at the backs of men and women who really should not have thrown their lot in with Lisette, and waited for the firing to start.
“We're going to have to go room by room,” Paschal ordered, however reluctantly. He bitterly begrudged the time it would take, but this had to be done right.
H
e just hadn't expected the hallway to have this bloody many doors! They mocked him in the flickering lanternlight, teeth in an insufferably smug grin.
“Teams of four. Two in, clearing the room, two in the hall as backup. Nobody does anything alone, and no enemy contact is too minor; you run into someone or find something important, you call out. Immediately.”
All standard procedure for an operation of this sort, but the major wasn't about to let his people get sloppy. Not with this.
“Colliers! D'Ilse! Reno! You're with me!” He didn't bother to check as he began his march down the long corridor. He knew they'd fall in.
The entire passage echoed with the clatter of heavy boots kicking open doors, of orders shouted, of desks turned out and papers examined. Only on occasion did those sounds include any hint of violence, and when they did, it appeared little more than a few quick shots. The bulk of these rooms, clearly, were empty, and the inhabitants of those that weren't had, more often than not, wisely chosen surrender over resistance.
For all that it was going well, Paschal frowned. The problem with being this methodical was that it would take forever just to reach the far end of the hall. If anyone waited farther on, they'd have plenty of time to set up a proper ambush or escape in the chaos.
“We're starting at the other end,” he announced to the trio on his heels. “We'll move back this way and meet up with everyone in the middle.”
From there, for a brief while, it become routine. Kick in the door; dash inside, eyes and bash-bangs tracking quickly across every corner, digging through every shadow; a minute of more intense searching, to ensure nobody hid behind the furniture and no blatant dangers or evidence lay scattered openly; and on to the next room. Paschal and d'Ilse inside now; Colliers and Reno inside the next, while they waited in the hall; then Paschal and d'Ilse again. Familiar, efficient as clockwork.
And with the familiarity of repetition, even the most professional of guards could grow, however slightly, inattentive.