Furies of Calderon (77 page)

Aldrick flicked his weapon to one side, and droplets of blood, of his
uncle’s
blood, splattered against the stones of the battlements.

Amara’s face set into a sudden mask of cold disdain. “Crows take you, Fidelias,” she said in a cool, quiet voice. “Crows take you all.”

Tavi didn’t see her strike, so much as he saw a blur of color the same shade as the cloak the Cursor wore. She moved toward the swordsman with her guardsman’s blade, and the sword made the air whistle as it darted at Aldrick.

The swordsman took a pair of quick steps back, no surprise on his face, no emotion. He lifted his blade, and caught Amara’s blow on it. Three more blows followed, so fast that they chimed in what almost seemed a single tone, but the swordsman stopped them all, despite Amara’s sheer speed, his blade close to his body, his movements very short, quick.

Tavi crawled forward, tears blurring his eyes, lugging the huge shield and the sobbing Fade with him. He recovered the dropped dagger and shoved it through his belt again, watching the battle, helpless and terrified.

Amara whirled and crouched and whirled again, her blade whipping at Aldrick’s throat, knees, and throat again. The swordsman blocked each strike and then with a sudden, hard smile, his blade lashed out. Amara hissed, and the sword tumbled from her hands, falling to the stones near Tavi.

Aldrick whipped his blade in a horizontal line, and Amara let out a harsh cry, staggering against the battlements, her hair fallen around her face. Tavi could see blood on the mail around her belly. Amara turned toward Aldrick, unsteady on her feet and swung her arm at him in a strike. The swordsman slapped her hand aside, and his foot lashed out at her knee. Amara gasped and fell to the stone. She struggled to rise again.

Aldrick shook his head, as though disgusted, and slammed one heavy boot down onto Amara’s splinted arm. She let out a cry and jerked. She looked up at Tavi, her eyes not focused, her face bedsheet-white.

Aldrick did not pause. He drew back his blade, crouching, and with two hands swung it toward the paralyzed Cursor.

Tavi didn’t stop to think. He seized the fallen sword in his left hand and lunged forward from his knees, toward the swordsman. The guardsman’s blade flicked out and found the gap between the swordsman’s mail and the tops of his boots, drawing an insignificant cut across the skin. But it was enough to make Aldrick divert the blow aimed for Amara’s neck, to parry Tavi’s clumsy thrust aside.

Aldrick snarled, his face suddenly suffused with scarlet anger, making an old scar stand out white against his cheek. He slammed his weapon against Tavi’s. Tavi felt the jolt of it in his shoulders and chest, and his arm went numb in a tingling wash of sensation, from fingertip to elbow. The sword flew off somewhere behind him.

He rolled back and tried to lift the shield to cover himself, but the swordsman kicked it aside, and it tumbled out of Tavi’s grasp and into the courtyard below.

“Stupid boy,” Aldrick said, eyes cold. “Give me the dagger.”

Tavi clutched his hand on the dagger’s hilt and started worming his way back along the wall. “You killed him,” Tavi shouted, his voice hoarse. “You killed my uncle!”

“And what happened to my Odiana is your fault. I should kill you right here,” Aldrick growled. “Give up. You can’t win.”

“Go to the crows! If I don’t beat you, someone else will!”

“Have it your way,” the swordsman said. He whirled the sword in his fingers and closed toward Tavi, lifting the blade, eyes cold. “If Araris Valerian himself was here, he couldn’t beat me. And you aren’t Araris.”

The swordsman brought both hands to the hilt of the sword and struck. Tavi saw the cold, bloodied metal of the blade falling toward him and knew that he was about to die. He screamed and lifted a hand, knowing full well that it would do him no good, but he was unable to do anything else.

The sword came down in the death stroke.

And met steel in a cold, clear chime, like a bell. A cloud of silver sparks rained down where Aldrick’s blade had met the steel of the guardsman’s sword.

Fade stood over Tavi, both hands on the hilt of the short blade, his legs spread out wide, knees bent, his body relaxed. The swordsman bore down on his weapon, but Fade seemed able to hold it away from Tavi with little effort, and after a scant pair of heartbeats, Fade twisted his body. Aldrick’s blade slid to one side, and he skipped back from a counterstroke—but not fast enough. Fade’s sword whipped toward Aldrick’s face, and split the white scar there open anew, blood flowing.

Aldrick dropped back into a guard position, watching Fade, his eyes wide, his reddened face going pale. “No,” he said. “No.”

Fade took a step forward and stood between Tavi and the other two men on the wall. His voice came out quiet, low, steady. “Stay behind me, Tavi.”

Then he spun forward, deftly stepping over Amara’s unmoving form, his sword gliding toward the swordsman. Aldrick parried in a shower of scarlet sparks, slid a thrust to his belly aside, and cut at the slave’s head. Fade dropped to a crouch, and the blow struck cleanly through two feet of fury-crafted battlement stone. A chunk of stone the size of a big washtub slid down the wall and fell into the battle outside the fortress.

Fade rose, blade dancing, and pressed the swordsman back, down the battlements, his ragged and unkempt hair flying about his head, his scarred face set in an expression of cool detachment. When his sword struck Aldrick’s, scarlet fire rained down, and when he caught one of the swordsman’s strikes, clouds of silver-white motes flew forth in a flash.

Tavi saw Aldrick begin to panic, his movements becoming jerkier, faster, less elegant. He retreated step by step, and Fade pressed him relentlessly. The slave swept one blow at Aldrick that missed altogether, throwing up another shower of sparks as the blade cut through the stone near Aldrick’s feet, but the slave seemed to recover rapidly, and he began to push Aldrick down the wall once again.

Tavi had never seen anything so graceful, so terrifying, as the two men clashing together. Though Aldrick was the larger of the pair, Fade seemed more nimble, his movements more fluid, again and again blocking blows that might have killed him to miss by the barest margin. He leapt over one strike, ducked under another, and thrust at Aldrick’s belly once more. The swordsman parried him aside, spinning on his feet to reverse positions with Fade on the narrow battlements, so that he now stood with his back to Tavi.

Aldrick rained a pair of heavy blows down on Fade, who danced aside from one and slid the other off the guardsman’s blade. Fade countered with a volley of cuts and thrusts too swift for Tavi to follow, and Aldrick once again backed down the wall, defending himself.

Fade’s blade whipped at Aldrick’s foot and missed, slashing stone. Aldrick kicked the slave in the face with one heavy boot, and Fade’s face snapped to one side. He turned the motion into an upward slash, but that blow too missed Aldrick altogether, instead slashing through the massive merlon beside him.

Aldrick’s sword darted down to Fade’s wrist, a swift cut that drew blood and threw the sword from the slave’s hands and down into the courtyard below. Fade cried out and fell to his knees, clutching the hand to his chest.

Aldrick stood over Fade, panting, white around the eyes, and drew his sword slowly up behind him. “Over,” he said. “Finally over. You lose.”

The merlon beside him slid to one side along the upward-sweeping line Fade had cut in it, the stone falling with a ponderous grace to the weakened floor of the battlement. It struck, and the two slashes Fade had made in the stone became a sudden myriad of crumbling cracks. Aldrick tried to step back, but the stone beneath his feet gave way like a rotten board, and with a howl Aldrick ex Gladius and a thousand pounds of stone went crashing down to the courtyard below.

The slave whirled, but not before Fidelias, holding the rope they had used to climb to the wall, had tossed a loop of it over Fade’s head. Fidelias jerked on the rope, and it tightened. Then the man planted his feet and hauled.

Fade struggled, but he had no leverage. The rope hauled him off the battlement. Fidelias let go of the rope, and Fade fell out of sight. The end of the rope had been tied off to one of the crenellations, and the rope tightened with a sudden, snapping jerk.

“No,” Tavi breathed.

Fidelias turned toward Tavi.

“No!” The boy rose to his feet and threw himself at the man on the wall, brandishing the dagger. He leapt at Fidelias, knife extended.

Fidelias caught Tavi by his shirt, and without any effort spun him around and threw him to the stones of the battlement. Tavi felt the rock hit his back with an impact that stole his breath and turned the steady, hot sting of his wounded arm into a raging fire.

He let out a weak sound of pain and tried to struggle away from Fidelias, but within a few inches he felt the crumbling edge of the shattered battlement behind him. He looked back and down on a drop into the hard, jagged rubble of the fallen section of wall, where Marat and beasts fought in savage efficiency, killing.

Tavi swallowed. He squirmed out as far as he could on the broken battlements and heard the stones begin to crackle and groan beneath him. “Stay away from me.”

Fidelias’s face twisted in anger, and he jerked his hand in a sudden gesture. The stone
rippled
, as if it had been a sheet snapped by a holdwife, and threw Tavi a few feet toward Fidelias, stunning the boy.

Fidelias reached for the knife. Tavi swept it at him in a desperate cut. Fidelias clutched the boy’s throat, and Tavi felt his breath cut off with a sudden jerk.

Tavi struggled uselessly, until his arms and legs seemed to forget how to move. He stared up into Fidelias’s hard eyes and felt his body going limp.

And so it was that he saw Amara weakly stir and lift her head. He saw her writhe, lifting one knee beneath her, and reaching back to draw a short, small knife from her boot. She clenched her jaw and shoved her broken arm beneath her, her forearm across the floor, lifting her body.

Then, in one motion, she drew back the knife and flicked it at Fidelias’s back. A sudden jet of wind propelled the knife toward him.

Tavi saw the man jerk suddenly, startled surprise on his features. He stiffened, fingers loosening from Tavi’s throat, and reached a hand up toward his back, his expression twisting with sudden agony.

“You wanted a knife, Fidelias,” Amara hissed. “There’s the one I took from you.”

Fidelias, his face blank, frightened, turned back to Tavi and clutched at his hand, at the dagger.

There was a frantic moment of scrambling, and Fidelias let out a gasping cry of pain. Tavi felt a hand around his wrist, a sudden pressure, heard the crack of breaking bones. Agony roared over him, and he saw his hand dangle uselessly.

Fidelias reached for the dagger and grabbed its hilt.

Tavi seized Fidelias’s belt and hauled with all of his strength and weight.

Fidelias overbalanced, let out a harsh croak and fell from the battlements, to the sharp-edged rubble of the gap in the wall. Tavi turned and looked down, saw the man land on the stones, with his feet under him. Tavi thought he heard bones break.

Fidelias fell to the ground, and a tide of Marat washed over him.

Tavi stared, panting, exhausted, in more pain than he thought could exist in the entire world. Uncle Bernard. Fade. The tears welled up, and he couldn’t stop them, couldn’t stop himself from sobbing, letting out ugly, harsh little sounds. He laid his cheek down on the stone and cried.

He felt Amara crawl to him a few moments later. The Cursor dragged a shield with her. She lay down beside Tavi and used the shield to cover them both.

He couldn’t stop sobbing. He felt her hand pat clumsily at his back. “It’s all right, Tavi. It’s all right.” She leaned her cheek against his hair. “Shhhh. You’re going to be all right. It’s over.”

Over.

Tavi cried quietly, until the darkness swallowed him.

Chapter 44