City in the Sky (23 page)

“What does one of your kind want to know anyway?” he demanded, realizing he was speaking to an Aeraid. “Be off with you, you'll do no business with the dead!”

“No, I fear I won't,” Demond replied, his voice growing cold. “Pass the regrets of the
sept
Rakeus on to his surviving family,” he added before turning away.

“I will,” Erik heard the Draconan warden admit, grudgingly, before Demond led him back to the platoon.

The captain looked nervous, and gestured Erik to come closer as the marines closed around them again.

“This is bad,” he told Erik quietly. “If someone on their side is killing
Draconan
merchants for trading with us…” the captain shook his head. “This is far worse than I've ever seen.”

“Then I suggest we get back to the ship,” Erik replied. “Before we drown in deeper waters than we thought we faced.”

The Aeradi now wanted only to return to their ship as quickly as possible, but the twisting avenues of the lowest district of the Draconan citadel made that difficult. Even though Demond knew the route, the way it twisted and turned made it difficult to move quickly.

Finally, just a handful of turns away from finally reaching the docks, the platoon turned a corner, and found the road blocked. A line of Draconan heavy infantry, the fancifully titled Claws of the Dragon, blocked the road.

At the sight of the Aeradi, the Draconan unit, about twenty men, stepped forward, rapidly approaching Erik's men. Erik gestured his marines to halt, allowing the soldiers to approach them.

The Claws reached the platoon and reformed into a double line, concentrating their numbers. Erik's marines, without him doing anything, seemed to drift around to bulk up the front of their formation, the part facing the Draconans.

For a long moment, the two groups of armed men faced each other in the street, then three men stepped out of the formation. Erik wondered how he hadn't noticed them before, as they were dressed completely differently from the soldiers. Where the soldiers were heavily armored, bore their shoulder-high cylindrical shields and had their deadly dragonclaw short swords out, these men were in red cloaks and appeared unarmed.

The leader of the three men was unusually short for a Draconan, short enough to blend into the crowd in any human city. The distinctive features of the Draconans were recognizable, but muted. The man seemed oddly familiar to Erik, but he couldn't place why.

“Who leads here?” the Draconan demanded.

Demond gestured silently for Erik to remain hidden among his men and stepped out. He was silent for a moment, and Erik saw the Draconan eye him up and down coldly.

“I am Captain Demond
sept
Rakeus of the Aeradi sky ship
Cloudrunner
,” Demond told the man. “Who seeks to know and why?”

“My name is Brane,” the Draconan replied. “I am looking for a man known as Erik Tarverro, and I am informed he is in your service.”

Demond looked about to deny this, but before he could say a word, Brane's gaze met Erik's. For a moment, the two men held each other's eyes and Erik suddenly knew where he recognized the man from.

The assassin Rade had shared the same features, height and dress. This wasn't just one of the assassin's brothers in the Red Dragon cult – this was quite possibly the man's
real
brother.

Erik knew, now, who had been pursuing him across northern Cevran, with even greater zeal than the Red Dragons normally pursued those who killed their own. Other men may have actually attacked him, but
this
was the architect of his pursuit.

“And I see my information is correct,” Brane said softly, his gaze still on Erik's face. “You may as well come out here.”

Erik moved slowly, his eyes holding the Draconan's as his hand fell to the hilt of his father's sword. Finally, he stood beside Demond, just in front of his men, still close enough for them to protect him if something went wrong.

“Erik Tarverro,” the Draconan said formally, “it is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for the unprovoked murder of the Red Dragon Rade, while he was working in the service of Dracona. You will come with me.”

“And if I refuse?” Erik said quietly.

“You, your men, and your ship will be interred,” Brane replied. His eyes flicked to Demond. “Surely, Captain, you will not risk such a fate for the sake of a man who killed another in cold blood?”

“I have heard two stories of the fate of the
assassin
Rade,” Demond told Brane softly. As he spoke, he placed a hand on Erik's arm and took a step backwards. The men behind them parted, allowing them into the line of Aeradi marines.

“I know which I believe,” the captain continued. He drew his own sword, and the skittering sound of steel on leather was repeated as every one of the Aeradi marines drew their blades.

“You will take a man of my crew –
any
man of my crew,” Demond said flatly, “over the dead bodies of
all
of my crew.”

The three red-cloaked Draconans had barely seemed to move, but long and lethal looking blades now glittered in their hands, and the Claws behind them had taken a step forward.

“Very well then,” Brane told Demond calmly. “I see no reason to object to your condition.”

At Brane's words, the twenty Claws immediately hefted their shields and advanced in step, splitting to allow the Red Dragons to drop behind their formation. The Aeradi marines did much the same, and two shield walls clashed together in the center of the citadel street.

The Draconans used a much heavier shield than the Aeradi, a cylindrical structure that covered a man from ankle to neck. Pressing against the lighter Aeradi shields, and the simply smaller and weaker Aeradi, it pushed the Aeradi back. Normally, the Aeradi would try to break Claw formations with archers, but this fight had started from too close.

Erik was still in the front line, but he knew that his men couldn't fight this kind of battle. He carefully judged the gap between the lower curve of his shield and the curve of the shield to his right, then thrust forward with his sword.

The sky steel of the blade punched cleaned through the shield of the Claw in front of him, and into the man's thigh. Erik ripped the blade out, and the man crumpled, a spurting flow of arterial blood marking his probable demise.

Erik used his weight and strength, greater than most of the Draconans due to his years as a smith, to push into the gap. The marines next to him followed, their flickering tachis dropping the men to either side of the Claw he'd killed.

The Draconan line broke. Not completely, not the breaking and running that would have made the battle easy, just the disintegration of the battle into pure melee – a type of fight in which the Aeradi's lighter shields and longer blades gave them at least a chance.

For the first moments after pushing into their line, Erik simply used his shield and weight to drive the gap further open. Pushing men back with his shield, he didn't bother to use his blade.

Once the Draconans accepted the change to melee, however, he couldn't pull that off anymore. While the Claws trained mostly for the heavy shield wall tactics they'd just tried to use, they also knew how to fight in messier environments. Despite the numerical equality, they did their best to focus two of their men on each of his, and the Aeradi were smaller and weaker to begin with.

Recognizing that his size made him the greatest threat and that he was the man they'd been sent after, three of the Claws came at Erik. They stayed back, somewhat, wary of the reach his longer blade gave him, but they pressed in, using their shields to cover themselves.

Uninclined to stretch things out, Erik slammed his shield into that of the Claw who came close enough first, hard. The Claw stumbled, slightly, and for a moment he was distracted.

A moment was enough, and Erik's sky steel sword ran neatly through the plywood of his shield, the iron of his armor and the flesh of the Claw's chest in short succession. The man choked and crumpled, allowing Erik to yank his sword back out, just in time to parry a thrust attempted by another Claw.

The thrust parried, Erik followed through with his shield. The tall oval of the Aeradi shield also carried a heavy metal boss at its center. This chunk of metal slammed into the top of the Draconan's shield, splintering it and sending shards of wood back into the man's face.

He stumbled back, leaving Erik free to pivot and thrust towards the third Claw. The Draconan had been launching an attack of his own, but found that, unlike most Aeradi, Erik's arms weren't short enough to cost any of the reach advantage of the longer sword.

The Draconan's dragonclaw sword skittered off Erik's sky steel mail, slicing his cloak, but Erik's sword embedded itself into the man's stomach. Erik yanked it out, and turned to the other Claw, only to find that one of his marines had run the man through while he was falling back from Erik.

Before Erik could move to aid any of his men, he caught a flash of motion out of the corner of his eye. He spun in place, barely managing to interpose his shield against the strike.

One of the Red Dragons snarled at him as he knocked the strike aside with his shield. It wasn't Brane, but that made things no better, as the Dragon launched another devastatingly quick strike.

Erik blocked with his shield again, but this time, the blow sheared off a good chunk of his shield. Before he could even think of reacting, another blow came drifting in. Again, Erik blocked with his shield, and again part of the wood scattered off onto the ground.

The Dragon managed to strike a fourth time, but this time Erik reacted faster. The metal boss of his shield, like the rest of his armor and weaponry, was sky steel. He interposed it against the strike.

The impact vibrated clear along his arm, but it clearly did much the same to the Draconan. It was quite possible the Draconan's sword was sky steel, as few weapons forged of lesser materials could have withstood that impact, but the vibration had nearly knocked it out of the Red Dragon's hand regardless.

In the moment of distraction as the Dragon tried to recover, Erik ran his sword through the Draconan's throat. With a choking gurgle, the Draconan slipped to the dirt, his red cloak pooling around him like blood.

Somehow, Erik was not surprised to find Brane stepping over the corpse of his compatriot.

“
Septon
Tarverro,” he hissed, “time for justice.”

Erik didn't bother to respond, except to lunge forward with his sword. Brane parried the strike and unleashed one of his own, slashing at Erik's head.

Dropping under the blow, Erik released his much-battered shield. There wasn't enough left of it to really help, and he was going to need the freedom of maneuver.

Using the impetus of the shields release, Erik bounced back up to his feet, causing another blow to go awry. He grinned tauntingly as Brane missed, and unleashed a stroke of his own.

Brane parried it aside, forcing Erik to take a step sideways as well. He didn't look as he did, and his foot came down on a blood slicked dragonclaw sword. With a screech of metal on stone, the sword slid out from under him, and his foot slid with it. Suddenly off-balance, Erik found himself dropping to one knee.

The Draconan snarled at him and launched a devastating slash. Down on one knee, Erik had no way of evading the blow, and threw his own sword up with all his strength. The two swords met with a horrible keening sound, and Erik's sword, reforged by his own hand less than six months before, sliced clean through the Draconan's weapon.

For a long moment, Brane stared down at Erik, and at the stump of his sword. Then he glanced around at the ruin of the Claws he'd brought with him and snarled wordlessly.

“This isn't over, Tarverro,” he told Erik. He threw the useless hilt of his sword at Erik, the still-sharp broken piece of the blade gashing Erik's cheek open as the impact drove Erik back on his heels, and fled.

For a long moment, Erik did nothing, merely staring at the shattered pieces of Brane's sword. Finally, he heard footsteps near him, and looked up to find Demond looking at him.

“He's gone to get others, lad,” the
Cloudrunner
's captain told him. “Bind that up; we need to get back to the ship.”

Demond's words finally brought Erik back to reality. He gazed around the street as he opened the bandage-roll pouch he, like the rest of the soldiers. Breaking the Draconans’ line and leaving them to face the Aeradi marines, already veterans of a similar street brawl, had doomed the Claws, but they hadn't gone down lightly.

Most of the Aeradi were binding wounds, and five Aeradi bodies lay unmoving in the streets, among the dozen or so Draconan corpses. His men had performed magnificently, but it hadn't been enough to prevent more deaths in the already battered platoon.

The wound in his face bound, the bandage covering the entire left half of his face up to his eye, Erik surveyed his men. It broke his heart to make them move, but he didn't have a choice.