Shadow Of The Winter King (Book 1) (15 page)

As Serris fell back, her hand ringing with pain, the liftmaster raised his weapon for another strike. It was a short and heavy thing, more like a butcher’s cleaver than a sword. A poor man’s blade.

“Little bitch,” he said. “Rut you with this blade, I will. Make you scream for more.”

Serris held her dagger pressed against her arm in an overhanded grip. She did not know what had driven the Ravalis and their loyal servants to hate women so much, but at least it meant the man might underestimate her, which would prove his undoing. Not that she could afford to underestimate
him
: he was heavier, stronger, and better armed. She backed up cautiously, and her feet edged over empty air. The lift railing had broken off in this spot long ago. The liftmaster could shove her over the edge without much difficulty—not that he would have to, with his superior reach. She had to lure him in close.

“Want to rut me?” she said. “Come claim me.”

He reached forward with his empty hand, and Serris waited until he had almost closed it on her arm. Then she brought the razor-sharp dagger around and cut his hand open with a quick slash.

The liftmaster withdrew, surprised, and looked at the bright blood oozing through his cut glove. “You’re a prickly one. I like that,” he said, as though it were a compliment.

He reached forward more forcefully, as though that would make a difference, and Serris stepped past and opened him three times: hand, wrist, and arm. He scrambled for her, and she cut him in the armpit. He lacked the Dusters’ steel armor, and his leathers parted easily beneath her sharp wintersteel.

She expected the liftmaster would retreat, having suffered five wounds in quick succession, but instead he bulled foward. The man ignored her cuts like the stings of angry but merely annoying bees. The look on his face was one she’d seen before: a big man who simply does not understand how a much smaller woman could be thwarting him.

Serris slashed the liftmaster and dodged his clumsy strikes again and again, bleeding him cut by cut. When he switched to the sword to hack at her, he lacked the strength to lift it. He struck lazily, and when she slashed the inside of his elbow, the liftmaster dropped the sword with something like relief. When he finally staggered back, he bled from over a dozen slashes. Only three ragged breaths had passed between them.

The liftmaster looked at her confusedly, and Serris shrugged. She did not need to explain his stupidity, only exploit it. He lurched toward her with one final grab, but she side-stepped and let him stumble over the edge. He flailed weakly for balance, fingers scrabbling at her, but Serris only wrenched her weathercloak away. The man fell silently into the snowy night.

Snow swirled to reveal the shadows of Tears and Dusters struggling to find one another in the flurry. Serris thanked the Old Gods for the snow that had saved their lives thus far: the stinging, clinging muck distracted the Dusters and threw off their aim. Several of them flailed blindly in the blizzard, hacking at every flicker of movement. A clatter of steel drew attention, and one of the Dust Knights sent a blast of flame in that direction, causing a second knight to curse as the dust magic shattered on his shield.

One of the Dusters looked more confident in the snow—perhaps this one was native to Tar Vangr and thus accustomed to fighting in the weather, like Serris herself. She had pinned down Nacacia and was hammering at her sword like a woodsman splitting a stump.

Serris kept low as she scuttled toward one of the confused Dusters and leaped onto his back. She took advantage of his surprise to seize hold of his swordarm and wrap her other arm around his neck. Against his strength, she pointed his sword, which burned with imbued thaumaturgy, at the Duster who had almost broken Nacacia’s defense. When she had the aim right, Serris tore her dagger across under her captive’s helmet. Blood gushed, and the dying man loosed his sword’s fire. The intense heat scalded Serris through her cut sleeve, but she held on. The struck Duster shrieked as her armor melted onto her body, and Nacacia ducked aside to let her leap off the lift.

Serris swore inwardly. She hated killing women, and the Ravalis—with their hereditary contempt for anything female—usually obliged her by setting men in her path. The Duster she’d just killed must have fought hard for a position in the king’s elite guard. She’d been winterborn, too, which made her death an insult to the Circle of Tears and Tar Vangr. Shame.

Serris wiped lifeblood from her face and surveyed the situation. Four Dusters were down, along with the captain, and the liftmaster was long gone. Erim and Nacacia were dispatching a fifth Duster, who fended off their blades desperately. A sixth, increasingly weary Duster traded blows with Daren. Against all odds, the Tears were winning. And yet, the ground trembled under Serris’s feet.

Then a horn rumbled like resonant thunder, so loud it forced Serris and the other Tears to their knees. A fire lit in the darkness behind the swirling snow, like the burning eye of a great beast.

“Ironclad!” Nacacia cried.

The two women threw themselves aside as a bolt of flame burned the air between them, searing the mage-glass black and crackling where they had stood. A Lancer charged onto the lift station, its mighty axe screeching against the glass at its side. Daren shot at it with his caster, but the bolt skipped off its armored shoulder. The Lancer turned and dispelled the snowy mist with its cannon, catching one of the staggering Dusters with the blast. The man burned away in a white hot beam wherein his body became a blackened skeleton. Dazzled by the thamurgical explosion, Serris could not see if Daren had survived.

Across the way, Meron hurled a grenade at the Lancer, but the alchemical blast hardly bruised its thick armor. It turned its cannon on him, and he ducked behind the wall crenellation just in time—Serris hoped. The mechanical beast headed that direction, ponderous and wary. Its axe hacked at Meron’s cover while its cannon recharged, ready to blast him to dust if he reappeared.

Serris leveled the stolen Duster’s sword at the Lancer’s back, but its dust magic managed only a sputtering flame that did little more than draw its attention. The burning eye settled on her, and she could see the smirking face of a Ravalis soldier inside. The Lancer’s scoping axe haft extended and the blade shot at Serris like a hurled spear. She rolled aside, even as the blade cracked the glass where she had stood, and rolled to her feet. As she ran, she hurled the useless Duster sword into the blizzard.

She had to get to Daren and the mortars. Nothing else they carried could take out a Ravalis ironclad: their blades would bend and their casterbolts skip off its armor to no effect. They could keep drawing its attention, but sooner or later the soldier inside the Lancer would start ignoring their attacks and simply kill them one by one. Serris wasn’t sure she could fire a mortar accurately enough to hit the Lancer, and the thing stood directly between her and where she’d last seen Daren and his pack anyway. She risked a glance, and across the way she saw Darren struggling to push himself up—the blast must have winged him. A wonder it hadn’t cut him in half.

“Keep moving!” Serris shouted to the Tears.

She ran, trying to circle around the ironclad, but a massive axe crashed down into the glass right in front of her, and she fell back, startled. Cracks spread in all directions. The cannon took aim at her, but she kicked off the axe and scrambled the other way, and the fiery beam did little more than make her ears ring. If she couldn’t get to Daren, she had to keep the Lancer occupied so it did not turn on him. She had to give him a chance to fire at its back.

“Hey, small-blade!” Serris cried at the Lancer. “Can’t hit your target? Small wonder women laugh at you.” She made an obscene gesture.

The pilot of the Lancer probably couldn’t hear her, but the hand signal seemed to have worked. The cannon adjusted its aim, though it could not keep up with her. Its axe, on the other hand, kept smashing into the glass not a pace from her, or slashed over her head as she ducked and rolled.

A shadow appeared out of the gloom, bent over and waiting for her. She realized it was Meron, retching out his guts onto the mage-glass at their feet. Blood soaked his chest, and Serris realized his wound had come open again. He must have lost his mask because when he looked up at her, his face was white as death. “Syr,” he panted. “I—”

The butt of the Lancer’s axe caught her on the backswing with enough force to rattle her bones and send her sprawling toward the sheer drop-off. She rolled to a stop, half on, half off, and lay flat on her back, staring at the roaring blizzard, ears ringing and her senses scattered in all directions.

How beautiful the snowflakes were, swirling above her head, swept cautiously around one another in what could be a duel or a dance of passion. Her leather mask had come loose, and a flake of snow landed on her skin. It burned.

The searing pain woke her with a start, and she rubbed at her scarred cheek. She bolted up, remembering only afterward that the Lancer was still there. By chance, the backswing of the axe had knocked her behind a solid stone wall half the height of a man, erected to keep anyone from wandering off the edge of high-city. She knelt only a pace away from snowy oblivion—indeed, one of her legs had been hanging off the edge. With a shiver, Serris got her bearings and peered over the low wall.

She could only have been stunned for a few breaths, but in that time the Lancer had pinned the Tears down. Nacacia crouched behind the wall on the opposite side, winding one after the other of her heavy casters, charging each for a shot. Even as she did, the Lancer methodically advanced on her, the mage-glass groaning under its heavy tread, its axe hacking away at the wall over her head. Erim and Meron were nowhere to be seen, if they even still lived. Serris could just make out Daren lying where she had left him, but she couldn’t tell if he was dead or simply feigning death to keep from being a target. Either way, he could not ready a mortar without the Lancer shifting focus and blasting him to ash.

A wild thought occurred to her. It was tantamount to self-slaughter, but so was doing nothing.

“Cass!” Serris signaled to Nacacia, who nodded and tossed a heavy caster in Serris’s direction. Serris rolled into the open, plucked the weapon from the air, and leveled it at the Lancer. The casterbolt flew straight and true and blasted into the Lancer’s central hatch. The metal groaned and a crack ran through its bright orange eye.

That got the Lancer’s attention. It turned and leveled its cannon at her. Serris could see fire roiling inside the weapon, like screaming, burning death.

Behind the Lancer, Daren rolled over, two mortars in his hands. They fired off, trailing smoke, and flew right past the Lancer, then up into the night. And like that, all was lost.

“Get back!” Nacacia shouted.

At first, Serris could hardly think, let alone understand. Even the Lancer looked up, registering the attack but seeming to laugh at its ineffectiveness. The burning eye fixed upon Serris once more and the cannon took aim.

Then she heard a loud whine, turned, and ran.

The mortars shot back down and detonated on either side of the Lancer, throwing off its aim. The ironclad staggered as the glass around it cracked, splintered, and finally gave way. The mage-glass collapsed beneath its feet, and the Lancer tumbled down into the blizzard amidst a cascade of glass, stone, and flame. The war machine scrambled at the edges like a drowning man, then was gone.

Cracks shot through the glass beneath Serris’s feet. She leaped, and Nacacia reached down to catch her. Her weight almost pulled Nacacia into the abyss after her, but the woman’s tightly-corded muscles strained and she kept Serris aloft with a groan. Serris slapped at the broken edges of the glass, cutting open her gloves and fingers, but she couldn’t get a grip. She was going to fall.

Then Erim leaned over the edge and grabbed her wrist in both hands. Meron appeared, choking against the blizzard, and put his hands over Nacacia’s to help the already strained woman Together, they pulled Serris up, then lay together heaving in the swirling blizzard. Nacacia panted and heaved air into her already burned lungs while Meron sat against the half-wall, panting and smiling. Erim helped Serris rise shakily. He looked terrified and weary and beautiful. She had never been more grateful to see him, and she wanted nothing more than to throw her arms around him. Then his eyes went wide as he saw something over her shoulder.

“Serris!” Erim cried in warning, his blond hair tangled in his masked face.

Too late, she saw the final two Dusters lurking by the edge of the lift: Rieten and one of his last knights. The commander had survived her casterbolt, but he bled profusely from a vicious gash in his forehead. Like the coward he was, Rieten had secreted himself behind the controls, along with his last Duster, who pointed a sword dripping venomous green magic straight at her.

“Kill her, Squire!” he shouted. “Kill the scarred whore!”

The last Duster—he must be a mere boy if Rieten called him squire—held the sword pointing at her, his hands trembling only a little. “Whore.” He hid behind the word like a shield. “Whore.”

Serris saw indignation in Rieten’s brown eyes, and knew its source. It enraged him to see a
woman
who was the equal of not one of his companions, but three or more, and an ironclad besides. Rieten was defeated and he knew it, but his squire could strike one final blow.

Serris locked the young Duster’s eyes with her own. She raised her master’s dagger to throw just as the magic blazed forth in a sizzling torrent. There was no way she could dodge.

“Serris!” A shadow interposed itself in front of her. It turned its back, raised its cloak, and intercepted the eruption. Magic exploded over her protector’s back, spattering around the edges of his cloak. Serris saw his bone-white face—it was Meron—and watched his expression go from shock to agony to acceptance. Finally, it was over, and he collapsed forward, smoke rising from his back. She caught him in her arms and staggered under his weight.

Serris stared past Meron in shock at the Duster squire, who looked right back at her. His gaze dropped to the wound he had inflicted, and Serris saw him stand up straight in shock.