Echo City (39 page)

“The ones I saw looked like warriors,” he said. “Some flew, others crawled. They’ve been chopping in there for centuries. They were all heavily armed.” One Blade fidgeted slightly, another glanced at her companions. That was exactly
what he wanted. To unnerve them. He closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them again he knew that his life was changing, here and now. This was when he paid for his beliefs, his passion, and his shunning of the god that had ruled his family and directed their actions for generations.

Doubt came, and he let it flow away once again. It was good to see it go. Its departure made him strong.

“You’re a monster,” Jan Ray said, voice filled with bitterness and distaste. “A traitorous, stinking, fat, disgusting monster. I’ve sensed your unbelief for years, Dane, but I never wanted to admit it, even to myself. Never wished to acknowledge that my second cousin could shun the god Hanharan, who made him.”

“My parents made me,” he whispered.

“And who made them?”

“Who?” Dane said, drawing strength into his voice. “Hanharan? Don’t make me laugh.” The Blades gasped, and he saw more ways to unsettle them.

He brushed his hand against his jacket pocket, uttered a subtle, deep hum, and something in there began to move.

“You’ll be arrested. I sent men after your bastard, and I told them to bring back his ugly head for the wall. They’ll follow until he reaches his destination and will kill whoever they find. So who is it, Dane? Watchers? There are many left, we know that for sure.”

Dane scoffed. “Watchers? They’re harmless ass-gazers. Why should I mix with the likes of them?”

“Because they’re enemies of Hanharan. And when someone like you, Dane Marcellan, betrays his blood, any enemy will do. You can’t do things on your own, because you’re weak, and Hanharan has shunned your treacherous flesh. You need friends. You need accomplices.”

“Jan Ray, there’s no truth to any of this,” he said, feeling the movement in his pocket, glancing at the Blades, and smiling inwardly when they averted their eyes. “Nophel is missing and will be punished.”

“You think I don’t know you’ve been feeding him that juice from the dead Baker witch?” she whispered.

Dane shook his head and slipped his hand into his pocket.
The contents were wet and warm, and he had maybe a dozen heartbeats before they would kill him. He closed his eyes and summoned his hate and rage, and he was pleased to find it close.

“You’ll suffer, Dane,” Jan Ray said, “and it will all be in the dark. Your name will be wiped from the family, and no one will ever—”

“You can suck Hanharan’s cock while your bitches pig-fuck you,” he said, closing his hand around the eggs, “and I’ll happily hold my cock and watch.”

The priestess opened her eyes in surprise, but it was the Blades’ reactions he was watching. They stepped back, averting their eyes from such blasphemy and muttering prayers, and Dane pulled his hand from his pocket. Whatever the outcome of this moment, his time as a Marcellan was over.

He flung the scarepion eggs, flicking his wrist in four motions, letting one egg slip away each time. The first two found their targets, breaking across a Blade’s chest and throat and spewing their screeching contents. The third bounced away and broke on the floor at a female Blade’s feet, and the fourth missed altogether, disappearing into the darkness.

Jan Ray stumbled back from Dane, leaning against the viewing-mirror controls. The angle on the screen flickered and tilted crazily, and, high above, one of the Scopes would be screaming in pain.

The scarepion young—dozens to an egg—sought blood with their staggering sense of smell. They used their birthing horns to penetrate skin and inject venom, then clawed their way inside. In heartbeats the first two Blades were on their knees, screaming as they scratched and tore at their own flesh. The third Blade made the fatal error of leaning forward to look at the ruptured egg rather than stepping back. Scarepions could jump.

The fourth Blade came at him. His sword was drawn—a deadly weapon that had been handed down through his generations, scored with a record of kills, each scoring filled with dried oxomanlia extract that would turn toxic on contact with blood—and the man’s eyes were wide with fear and disbelief that he was going against a Marcellan.

Dane had to turn that disbelief quickly to his advantage. If the fight began, the Blade’s training would take over, and Dane would be cut down.

“How dare you!” he thundered. The Scarlet Blade faltered and blinked in confusion, his blade dipping toward the floor.

Dane stepped lithely into the soldier’s killing field—his weight and build, as ever, belying his grace—and slid his knife between the man’s ribs. The soldier’s mouth fell open and Dane twisted, pulling left and right, wanting to kill quickly. The soldier groaned, and, as he fell away, warmth gushed across Dane’s hand.

Dane kept hold of the knife and turned, looking for Jan Ray. She was going for the door. If she got away, the Scope tower would be crawling with Blades in moments, and Dane’s only escape would be up and off the tower—an ignominious end, but at least one that would be in his control. He thought of Nophel, the poor bastard he had misled for so long, and hoped that his death would be quick and clean. And he thought of the old dead Baker—his friend, his lover, and the mother of his only child, whom Dane had taken under his wing and protected, bitter though the child had remained against the mother who had abandoned him to the workhouse.

“I’m so sorry, Nophel,” he said, and he felt wretched now that they would never know each other as father and son. He should have told him the truth, but doing so would have doomed them both.

He could not take a blade to a Marcellan, though, not even this Hanharan priestess who had tried to kill him. He could not punish her for her foolish beliefs.

Jan Ray screamed. Dane looked toward the shadowed corner where she had fled, expecting to see the opened door but instead seeing nothing. And when her scream came again, he knew that fate had steered her to the fourth scarepion egg. And though he had spent his life consciously not believing in such things as gods, he closed his eyes and gave thanks to something,
anything
, for his fortune.

   Dane Marcellan closed the door to the viewing room and descended the staircase. He had sprayed the room with barch
oil first, hoping that it would kill most of the scarepion young before anyone else entered. That was the best he could do. He felt wretched at the deaths and sick to his heart at the betrayal.

But, in truth, the betrayal had been a part of him for decades. The Baker, his love, had opened his eyes to the folly of Hanharan beliefs. And when she’d had her own eyes closed at the hands of the Dragarians, he had vowed to see his way forward in the way she would have desired—as a disciple of science and truth. That vow had only now come to action, and it was Jan Ray’s fanaticism that had led to those deaths. If only she could have let him walk away.

Now it was Nadielle, his old love’s chopped replacement, whom he had to find. The Hanharan priestess said she had sent Scarlet Blades after Nophel. If what the old woman claimed was true, Dane doubted Nophel had a chance of reaching Nadielle at all. But his options were suddenly more limited than he had ever planned for. And Nophel was the only family he had left.

Traitor though he was, for a while he would still be a Marcellan in a city that feared his name. He would use that fear for as long as he could.

Beyond that, fate would decide.

“You led them here!” the woman said, and Nophel shook his head.

They must have followed me all the way from Hanharan Heights, all day, keeping out of view and watching and waiting until …

“Malia, he’s terrified!” the other woman, Peer, said.

Nophel could not look at either of them. He was staring at the window where the face had been, and he knew what would come next.

“Stop bickering if you want to live,” he said. “They’ve come to kill us all.”

Malia took control. Nophel had seen women like her in the Blades—harsh and cruel but with a discipline that meant they could focus under pressure and fight when the time came. And as she whispered orders to Peer, he started to work at his bonds.

“Back there, in the bedroom, under the bed. Weapons. Bring them all, and give one to Brunley.”

“I’m not mixed up in—” the old man began, but Malia cut him off with a short, harsh laugh.

“You’ve been seen with us, old man. Tough shit.”

Peer pushed past Nophel, glancing at him as she went by. Soon he heard the clink of metal as she rummaged under a bed in the barge’s next room.

“How many are there?” Malia asked, and Nophel realized she was asking him.

“I don’t know.”

“How many?”

“Usually they work in fours,” he said, and she glanced back at him. Was that grudging belief he saw in her? Right now it didn’t matter. “They must have followed me, and whoever sent them wouldn’t have risked them being seen. So, four. Any more and I’d have seen them for sure.”

“What sort of a spy are you if you can’t—”

“I’m not a spy, woman!” Nophel spat. With the immediate threat from Malia abating, their true position was only just dawning on him. Whoever had sent these Blades must want the people—or the person—Dane had sent Nophel to meet. The Baker. Who were they to know she was not here? Maybe they thought she was Malia, or Peer, or …

“Are
you
the Baker?” he asked Malia, and his heart skipped a beat.
I could watch her die, and then I’d die with a smile
.

Malia actually laughed. “I’m fun to be with, compared to her.”

“They’ll try to kill us all,” he said softly.

“Yes, that’s what I’m assuming.”

Peer appeared with her arms full of weapons—several swords, knives, throwing stars, a crossbow, and a rack of bolts.

“They won’t be heavily armed,” Nophel said.

“Don’t need to be with those blades of theirs,” Brunley said.

“And I doubt they’re wearing armor. Not if they were sent to track me. They’d have been running. Tired.” He was thinking, trying to recollect anything about the Blades he saw every single day that might help them all survive this.

“Anything else?” Peer asked. She was hefting the crossbow, but it was obvious she had never fired one in her life. Her face was pale and slack, a fine film of sweat across her upper lip.

“Pull back, click, lock in a bolt,” Malia said. Then she snapped up a short knife and squatted down three steps from the door, sword in her other hand, listening. “Here they come,” she whispered.

“They’re all right-handed,” Nophel said.

As the door crashed inward, Malia dropped the knife and lobbed her sword into her other hand.

   “Window!” Malia shouted, darting at the shape shouldering through the remains of the wooden door.

Peer ducked and turned, bringing the crossbow up, hoping she’d primed it and fitted the bolt correctly. Suddenly she was certain she had not, that it would misfire, and the woman shattering her way through the window—face flushed, teeth gritted, eyes glittering with a fury Peer could not fathom—would roll and bury her sword in Peer’s stomach. She’d feel the warm rush of blood and see her guts spill, and before the poison on the sword killed her, she’d die of shock. So she pulled the trigger, fully expecting that breath to be her last, and someone other than her screamed.

The woman in the window slumped down and dropped her sword. Her face had changed. The fury had gone, and so had one of her eyes; in its place protruded the last third of a crossbow bolt. One of her arms flapped, thudding against the bulkhead. Her head lowered slowly and thick fluid dribbled from her face, pattering onto the wooden floor, and Peer knew it was the Blade’s brains.

Peer had never killed anyone in her life. She heard the chaos around her but none of it registered. Her focus was narrowed and aimed entirely at the woman—the woman she had killed.

Malia shouted. Metal clashed on metal, and Peer was shoved aside as the Watcher backed into her. The Scarlet Blade who had come through the door pushed his way forward. Malia stabbed at him again, holding her sword left-handed so that it sliced in under his defenses. In the confines of the barge’s small room, already filled with people, there was no finesse to the swordplay, only brutality. As Peer scrabbled backward and pulled herself upright against the table, Malia kicked out at the man’s crotch. He turned sideways and took the kick in his thigh, punched her in the face, forced forward as he brought his sword around toward her unprotected neck.

“Malia!” Peer shouted, and then the soldier cried out as he tripped. Nophel jerked in his chair, kicking up and out with the foot he’d worked free of his bindings, shoving against the man’s hip and tipping him over.

Malia drew back her sword arm, but Brunley had already buried a knife in the nape of the man’s neck. The Blade hammered his feet against the floor, dropping his sword and reaching behind with both hands.

“Back,” Malia said. Brunley did as told, and she thrust her own knife through the Blade’s heart. “Two more.” She went for the door.