At least, that’s the way I thought it happened, looking backward at the results. In the moment, I heard a huge noise like thunder experienced from the inside and found myself thrown toward the captain and his companions. Somehow I managed to avoid a skewering as we all tumbled together into the large dining room that had backed the audience chamber.
I’d balled up by then, dropping my swords and rolling with the force of the blast as I’d been taught. It took me halfway across the room, throwing me into and through the legs of the nearer rows of chairs with bone-jarring force. As I bounced to a halt under the table, I thought sure my luck had run out. I was badly tangled up with the remains of two or three shattered chairs, disarmed, and easy meat for anyone still standing. That’s when the ceiling came down, bringing with it various bits of junk from the attic and a goodly piece of the roof above that, reversing the direction of my fortunes.
Instead of a trap, the huge oak table had suddenly become a refuge. Oh, I still had to free myself from the wreckage of the chairs, but I did that quickly enough. I had a new collection of cuts and bruises layered over the old, of course, but none too severe, and nothing like what I’d have had if the ceiling had landed on me. As soon as I could manage it, I slithered stiffly out from under the table and surveyed the damage.
Various cries and faint stirrings in the rubble marked other survivors of the battle and collapse, by implication if not immediately by position or persuasion, though nobody else seemed to have mastered the trick of digging themselves out yet. It seemed a perfect time to make a quick exit, so I started toward where I’d last seen Maylien in hopes of finding her alive and ready to travel.
That’s when Devin called out, “Aral, help! The dog’s got me!” His voice was gasping, laced with pain and panic.
With his cry to orient me, I spotted the stone dog, a massive presence near what had once been an outside wall, its paw pressing down into a low-lying pool of shadow. The huge beast was covered in dust and debris, which is why I hadn’t seen it earlier, but it seemed otherwise unharmed. I started to turn back toward Maylien, but I couldn’t help picturing Devin—my onetime friend—lying there under the great weight of that stone paw, his ribs creaking as it slowly pressed down.
I couldn’t leave him to die like that. Damn me, but I couldn’t do it. Even knowing that he’d betrayed the memory of our goddess, I couldn’t leave a fellow Blade in the hands of the Elite.
The funny thing is that the old Aral would have done it in a heartbeat. Aral Kingslayer would have looked at what Devin had done and seen only the black and white, and he’d have condemned Devin to death without a qualm. But the new Aral had lost that clarity of purpose. He understood too much about bending to circumstance.
I didn’t know what pressures had been brought to bear on Devin. I didn’t know what I might have done in the same situation. Oh, I wanted to believe that I’d have chosen to die by torture rather than betray my goddess, and I really think that I would have. But I didn’t
know
I’d have done it, especially if they’d threatened Triss. Because of that and because of Zass, I couldn’t just let an old enemy kill the new one who had once been my friend. With a snarl of frustration, I released my hold on Triss.
“Find the Elite,” I said, “quickly!” Triss dove into the wreckage near where I’d come out.
“Here!” he called a moment later, raising a shadowy tail above a heap of broken lath and shattered plaster. Then he started digging.
Within moments, Triss had exposed the Elite captain’s head and right arm. I flicked a wrist, releasing the dagger there into my hand, then knelt to press it against the captain’s chin. There was a time when I’d simply have cut his throat, but I wanted to give him a chance.
“Call off your dog,” I said.
“Fuck you.” He had dark blood on his lips, and he spat some of it into my face.
“Aral!” Devin’s voice was weaker now. More desperate.
“Do it now, or die,” I said.
“I’m already dead,” said the captain. “We both know you’re going to kill me.”
“Only if I have to.”
He spat at me a second time, and I drove the dagger up, through the soft place behind his chin and the roof of his mouth, into his brain. Behind me the stone dog gave one great howl, then fell over with a crash that shook the floor.
“Devin?” I called. “Are you dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you owe me. Get the fuck out of my city.”
I’d taken a life to save a life. And somehow the fact that the life I’d ended belonged to someone who’d cheerfully have killed me if our circumstances were reversed didn’t make me feel any better about the whole thing. But sometimes that’s just how it is. So I wiped the blood off my face and went to see if I could find Maylien.
We still needed to get out of there, and I didn’t think we had a whole lot of time to manage it. A big and more or less intact chunk of the roof had fallen atop the place where I thought she ought to be, so I sent Triss into the wreckage.
He emerged a few moments later and gave me a shadowy grin. “She’s fine, trapped in a little pocket between the wall and a big piece of ceiling, but essentially unharmed. I didn’t want her to attempt anything drastic with magic from where she is, for fear she’d make it worse, so I told her we’d get her out soon.”
“Great, any idea how do we do that?”
“You don’t,” said Devin from somewhere behind me. “At least not right away. We weren’t done talking. You know I can’t let you leave until we come to an arrangement.”
“You’re not serious.” I turned around to find Devin aiming an arrow at me from somewhere near the place the door used to be. He’d apparently salvaged one of the fallen guard’s bows. “For fuck’s sake, man, I just saved your life.”
“That’s why I didn’t shoot you in the back. I wanted to give you one last chance to change your mind. We need your expertise, Aral. You could do so much for us. Don’t make me throw a treasure like you away.”
“Zass,” said Triss. “My master just saved your master’s life. You will
not
let him do this.”
Zass said nothing, but the string of the bow suddenly broke with a sharp twanging noise, momentarily disarming Devin. Somehow, it felt like a loss.
“I won’t say it again, Devin. Get out of my city and don’t come back. Don’t force me to kill you.” There was a time where I might have been able to make that threat stick. Now . . . I just had to hope he wouldn’t make me try.
I turned my back on Devin. “Triss, what if we went out what’s left of this window and you cut a hole through the wall behind Maylien. Can you make that work?”
“Yes, I think I can. I’m tired but not impossibly so.”
“Then, let’s do it.” I put one foot up on the twisted frame.
Behind me, I heard Devin’s swords slide out of their sheaths, a deliberate threat on his part, since we both knew he could have drawn them silently. I kept going, climbing out through the window. Either he would kill me or he wouldn’t. At this point, there was very little I could do to stop him except run away, and I wasn’t leaving Maylien behind. I’d lost my own swords in the blast and cave-in, and there was no possible way for me to defeat another ex-Blade knives against swords. Not on this ground at any rate.
As I slid around to hang on the wall just outside where Maylien lay trapped, I heard Devin swearing behind me. Then he put his swords away just as noisily as he’d drawn them.
“This isn’t over, Aral. If it wouldn’t have upset Zass, I’d have killed you just now.”
“Fuck you, Devin. I—oh, shit.” Out of the corner of my eye I’d seen movement on the road in front of the great house. More Crown Guards on the way, along with at least a half dozen Elite judging by the stone dogs. “We need to speed things up, Triss, the next wave’s going to be here in a couple of minutes.”
He spread himself out on the old masonry of the wall for a time, focusing his strength, then flapped his wings and sent the stones to the everdark. It was still as creepy as all hell to watch him do that, but I was beginning to believe that I might someday get used to it. Bontrang exploded outward through the hole, with Maylien sticking her head out a moment later.
“Thank you,” she said. “I knew you wouldn’t let me down, Kingslayer.” I looked away from the admiration in her eyes.
“Look, we don’t have a lot of time here, and I don’t have a rope. Can you climb onto my back?”
“Of course.”
Maylien slid farther out of the hole, putting her arms around my neck and shoulder, then pivoting to hang free for a moment before she wrapped her legs around my waist. As I took the strain of her full weight, I had to suppress a groan. She was a tall woman and sword-trained, and I was a bruised and battered wreck. Without Triss’s help, we’d have fallen off the wall.
“Ready?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Ready.”
I started down, moving as fast as I could. When I got about eight feet from the bottom, Maylien let go and dropped, touching down only lightly with her feet before dropping into a backward roll to soak up the force of her fall. Apparently, she’d taken me at my word about needing to get out of there fast. A moment after she dropped, I kicked off and followed her. By the time I’d rolled to my feet, she was beside me. That was good because the deep baying of one of the stone dogs started then—we’d been spotted.
“Take my hand,” I said, “and run.”
She did, and Triss widened himself out into a broad curtain of shadow between us and our pursuers while I aimed us straight toward the edge of the bluff. In this light, Triss’s intervention wouldn’t allow us to slip away, but it would make it much harder for any archers to hit us, especially since they’d have to shoot on the run. If any of them tried, they shot wide enough of the mark that I didn’t know about it.
We had to slow a bit when we crossed from the ruined gardens into the wall of overgrown shrubs that had colonized the broken ground along the top of the bluff. Branches slapped at my face and chest, and weeds clutched at my boots, while Bontrang flitted in and out above us.
Maylien went up several points in my estimation over the next minute or two. Both because she kept her mouth shut to save her breath for running and because she would have soon pulled ahead of me if she’d let go of my hand. When it came to running, she was in decidedly better shape than I was. Not having to worry about Maylien gave me more leisure to worry whether Triss would be able to manage the task ahead.
If not, we were all going to die. As fast as we ran, the stone dogs were faster still. The three following us had started out less than a quarter mile behind and they’d gained ground fast as we sprinted toward the edge of the bluff. The brush and trees that so hampered us barely registered for the dogs, who left a swath of crushed and shattered greenery in their wake. The only good thing about the dogs’ speed was that they’d left their masters behind, temporarily saving us the necessity of dodging magefire and -lightning and other nastier sorts of magic. They’d closed to within twenty feet when we abruptly ran out of running room.
“Trust me,” I said to Maylien, as we broke through the last of the brush before the cliff’s edge.
Then I scooped her into my arms and leaped into space. As I did so, Triss caught hold of my shoulders and spread himself out above us like a great black wing. I frantically fed Triss nima as we moved lurchingly out and away from the bluff, filling that wing from the well of my soul. Somehow, we stayed aloft.
It was more of a slow and loosely guided fall with a lot of wild swings and random turns in one direction or another than a true sail-jump, but we didn’t just fall. That felt like a miracle, really, since we normally used my arms as supports for Triss’s shadow wings and they carried half the weight. Even the massive quantities of magic I was pouring into the effort were barely enough to keep us aloft under the circumstances. I desperately hoped we could hold it together long enough for something roughly resembling a successful landing, and wished I still had a goddess to pray to on the subject.
Behind us the stone dogs bayed wildly and briefly, then dove down through the ground into the rocky bones of the Channary Hill, heading for the base of the bluff. We hadn’t gotten away yet, not by anyone’s count.
“I love this,” Maylien said suddenly, reminding me that she was more than just deadweight.
“You what?” With all the nima it was taking to fight the twisting and bobbing, I didn’t really have the spare energy or breath for conversation, but I was simply too shocked not to ask.
“I’ve always wanted to fly,” she said. “Bontrang makes it seem like such fun. Look at all the people down below.” She pointed toward the Downunders, where the morning crowd had filled the streets. “Don’t they look surprised?” Quite a few had noticed us, and they started pointing and calling out to their fellows. “Oh, this is glorious!”
Crazy woman.
We lurched abruptly left at that moment, nearly flipping over. I was still trying to think of some way to respond to Maylien that didn’t involve a lot of swearing when a bright whip of magic like a giant chain forged from links of green fire slashed past a few feet to my right.