The Trials of Trass Kathra (12 page)

Filth
, Slowhand thought. Then, feeling the slightest disturbance in the air, he instinctively span as a projectile identical to the one that had killed Shay – a crossbow bolt, not an arrow – sheared by him to thud into the fake rock on which Shay slumped. His archer’s expertise immediately calculated the arrow had not been fired to take him out, too, but only to incapacitate by hitting him in his drawing arm.

Slowhand’s eyes narrowed as he stared at a figure clad in black standing on the opposite side of the circus ring to him. Unlike the others – males – the black she wore hugged a lithe and supple figure with flowing red hair, and her crossbow was raised and primed once more, and she smiled as she fired.

The smile faded as Slowhand instantly brought up Suresight, re-notching his arrow as he did, and released it without a moment’s hesitation or calculation. It split its opposite number in two as it came.

As the broken halves of the bolt and Slowhand’s arrow dropped to the sawdust of the ring, Suresight was already primed to fire again. But across the ring his attacker had jettisoned her crossbow in favour of twin swords that she drew from sheathes on her back, and even as Slowhand’s arrow sped through the air towards her, the swords moved, reducing the arrow to slivers.

A trick reciprocated, the smile returned.

“Who are you?” Slowhand hissed.

“Someone employed to do a job. A
real
job, that is, not this posturing and preening that passes for your excuse of a life.”

That sounded
personal
, Slowhand thought, but now was not the time to explore why. “What kind of job?”

“Shepherding. If you weren’t so out of the loop, you’d know that most of your heretic friends are now guests of the Final Faith. You took a while to track down. I volunteered for the job.”

“Is that so? So what happens now?”

“I deliver you. I get paid.”

“Confident. But you just killed my girlfriend, so I think I’ll have to spoil your plans.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You really don’t have a lot of choice.”

The girl nodded and, out of the corners of his eyes, Slowhand was aware of Faith moving down the aisles between the now empty seats, closing on the circus ring. A second later, he was surrounded by a solid wall of crossbow wielding robes. The message to him was clear – you’re outnumbered, archer. You might take down some of us but you’ll never stop us all.

No? Slowhand thought. And in that instant heard Shay’s voice in his head.

It comes naturally to you. Like breathing
.

Maybe Slowhand didn’t need telling, but he might have needed reminding, and he moved in a blur, plucking arrow after arrow from his quiver and unleashing them before his newly found circle of friends had chance to react. Six of them went down with arrows embedded in their throats or through their hearts, three more with tips positioned as exactly as had been the bolt that had killed Shay. Slowhand moved as he fired, allowing none of the figures to draw a bead on him while at the same time circling the ring so that the girl and her swords could not draw close. Despite this, his accuracy was undiminished, and the eyes of those who were not felled by arrows widened as much in shock as those who were.

But Slowhand was not quite as invincible as he appeared. Though his archery prowess was indeed undiminished, the physical effort it took to maintain was already starting to take its toll, and Slowhand found himself uncharacteristically breathless. There wasn’t really the problem, though, because while he could nevertheless maintain the pace needed to eventually finish off every single one of his attackers, he carried a quiver stocked not for battle but entertainment.

In short, he didn’t have enough arrows to go around.

Slowhand felt the contents of the quiver as he plucked the next arrow from it, confirming, as he’d calculated, there were only four arrows left. Three of these he used to drop twice as many Filth, each arrow shot with such force that it passed through two men at a time. The last arrow he withheld. The smile returned to the girl’s lips and was echoed on the faces of the survivors as they saw the archer’s predicament, and as one they began to move in.

Slowhand turned in a slow circle, bowstring creaking, the arrow pointing at each Faith in turn but not released, until it was aiming directly at the girl’s heart. Still, he did not release it, holding her gaze as she sensed victory and her smile grew. Then, as she raised her swords, he swung Suresight directly upward and released the tension that had kept the arrow from play.

The arrow shot high above the ring, tearing through canvas and anchoring itself, and Slowhand rose on the whizzline attached to it. He leapt from it into the web of rope rigging that filled the hemisphere, that part of the Big Top where the aerialists performed, and sat like a spider in its nest. His attackers now far beneath him, Slowhand saw there were nine of them left, ten with the girl. She was already angrily despatching her men towards various ladders and poles that accessed the upper tent, but Slowhand was ready for them, clambering swiftly along the ropes to the centre of the hemisphere, where lay the riser ring through which most of the Big Top’s rigging was tied off. The band that encircled the king pole – the central support of the whole tent – was a confusing snake’s nest of thick and intertwining guy lines but, as everyone mucked in together on the road, he was no stranger to them and knew precisely which to loosen or untie to create the utmost havoc beneath him.

His new friends were about to discover just how dangerous a place a Big Top could be.

Two ropes brought down the gantry from which handlers controlled the trapeze lunge ropes, and another one of the wheels from which hung the cloud swings, the ropes on which support performers swung out over the audience to hold their attention while the next aerialist ‘trick’ was readied. Both structures first collapsed sideways, dropping to forty five degree angles as their guy lines whizzed through their pullies, then, as they whipped free, both fell to the big top’s floor, those Filth who were using them as a means to reach him falling with them, screaming. Slowhand’s satisfaction on hearing the crunching impacts of his attackers’ bodies was, however, short-lived, as three crossbow bolts thudded into the king pole next to his head, and he immediately dropped down through the rope spiderweb, grabbing onto one of its strands and swinging rapidly, hand-to-hand, down it towards its connecting quarter pole.

The quarter pole – and the seven others that ringed the arena – were the medium supports of the Big Top, positioned where they were to prevent sagging, and each rose to a point where the Big Top’s triangular roof flaps were lashed together, separable in case of an emergency. This, Slowhand reckoned, qualified as an emergency and, dangling by one hand, he quickly undid the lashings on one side, then rapidly shimmied, crossbow bolts thudding about him, along the skirt of the tent to the other. He undid the lashings there, too, and the entire section of canvas roofing flopped inwards, dropping down like an exhausted dog’s tongue. From the expressions on the faces of the Filth it headed towards, climbing the tower to the high-wire, it was clear they thought it an inconsequential threat, but they had seriously underestimated the weight of such a section of canvassing – wet or not – and were slapped from their positions with another bone-crunching thud and appropriate screams as the flap hit them, almost overbalancing the tower itself.

Slowhand needed to gain height once more, and he flipped himself from the guy rope into the air, grabbing onto the lip of the flap adjacent to the one he had dropped, then heaving himself onto the roof of the Big Top. Dressed as he was, he hissed against the cold and hammering rain, and his bare soles slithered frustratingly on the buoyant canvas as he pounded determinedly up, but eventually he reached the Big Top’s cupola, and, through the gap in the roofing, out of which projected the king pole, flipped himself back inside once more.

The last of the Filth – the girl aside – had now managed to reach the spiderweb of guy lines some twenty feet below him and, spotting his return, were aiming crossbows, but Slowhand had already worked out what he needed to do. He dropped from the cupola onto one of the guy ropes that made up the spiderweb, the impact of his landing sending a tremor throughout the lines, and the Filth staggered, one of them involuntarily loosing a bolt he’d primed into the chest of a comrade-in-arms on the line next to him. The skewered Filth fell, clutching the line desperately for a moment before dropping away, and the resultant second tremor gave Slowhand all the time he needed to work his way across the web and boot his unsteady opponents from their perch.

Far below, the girl side-stepped the falling bodies as they exploded beside her, and raised her gaze slowly upwards. Eyes locking with Slowhand’s, she smiled and then made her way to the ladders that would eventually bring her to him. Slowhand’s jaw tensed, knowing his final opponent was in a different class entirely to the rest, and his eyes darted around the hemisphere, working out the moves he would need to counter those she would doubtless bring. Unarmed, dressed in nothing but his thong, the possibilities seemed limited, but then, almost unwillingly, he remembered a phrase that had many times been used by Kali Hooper.

Make it up as you go along
.

Slowhand calculated the girl’s route and made his way to one of the surviving lunge gantries, drawing in a trapeze on a guide rope. As he’d guessed, she was already doing the same, stepping onto the horizontal swing, intending to use it to reach him. She didn’t get the chance, Slowhand bringing the fight to her by kicking off at the same time she did.

The two of them clashed in the heart of the hemisphere but, neither practiced on the acrobatics tool, did so clumsily, and the wind knocked from the pair of them, they were sent spinning wildly in opposite directions. Slowhand struggled to bring the trapeze under control, the Big Top and, more threateningly, the girl looming in his vision in a series of skewed, disorientating and vertiginous flashes, and then the two of them impacted again with a thud and an explosion of air and spittle. The collision was slower this time, accidental, but that didn’t stop the girl taking a swing at him with one of her swords, and Slowhand only just escaped decapitation by dropping from his standing position to grab the trapeze bar with his hands.

He swung away from the girl, knifing his legs to gain momentum to cross the hemisphere, and gained a moment of precarious rest on the edge of the trapeze platform from which his opponent had kicked off. Twisting, he saw that she was doing the same on his, using the time to position herself with her lower legs wrapped about the trapeze ropes, freeing both hands for her swords, and then he was swinging once more, as she was swinging towards him.

Heading inexorably towards her, Slowhand had nothing with which to block the coming blades but the trapeze itself, and with a grunt he flipped himself back into a standing position. As the girl rushed towards him, he violently jerked his body sideways and downwards so that the hand rail of the trapeze rose up to parry the blows. Swords met wood, one deflected harmlessly but the other cleaving the trapeze in two, and the archer immediately grabbed the guy line of its left half, swinging out with it as it broke from the right.

The manoeuvre caught the girl by surprise, and Slowhand already had another one coming as, with a further twist of his body, he swung his now singular support around in a sweeping circle, heading directly back towards her. The girl gasped as Slowhand’s feet smashed into her side and her trapeze was again sent spinning, this time so violently that its guy lines wrapped themselves about each other like plaiting hair. As she struggled to bring it under control, Slowhand swung in again, wrapping his legs about her entangled form and twisting an arm so that she released one of her swords into his grip. The girl roared in fury and swung at him with her other weapon, but Slowhand had already released his legs and was swinging away. It was only after a second that he realised she had nevertheless cut cleanly through his thong, and he was now completely naked. Once upon a time he might have reflected that the combination of nakedness, girl in black leather and lots of ropes would have held much promise but what had happened since – who was he kidding? What had happened
today
– quashed any such thoughts. Make no mistake, this girl might have been hired to capture him but this was rapidly turning into a battle of life and death.

But here was not the place to fight it. If he was going to take the girl on on even terms, now that he had one of her swords, he needed space, and needed it quickly. The girl already freeing herself from her entrapment, Slowhand swung away, flinging himself from the trapeze rope onto one of the surviving cloud swings, and from there shimmying up the rope to the wheel that suspended it. From there, another couple of leaps took him back to the section of roofing he had released, and then back onto the exposed upper surface of the Big Top.

The girl was right behind him, and Slowhand backed up as she pulled herself up onto the outer canvas. For a second the two of them stood there bent and gasping in the hammering rain, weapons poised, and then the girl came at him, yelling like something possessed. Slowhand did his best to defend himself under her furious barrage of blows, blocking and feinting, but he was being constantly forced back and barely managed one thrust himself, and it didn’t take him long to realise that, despite the weapon, they were not on even terms at all. The girl was good. Very good.

She swung again, and Slowhand jack-knifed at the waist, avoiding her blade. The move threw his balance and he fell onto his back, slithering into one of the valleys of the undulating canvas, and cold water rushed to pool about him in the depression he had made. The girl launched herself at him, blade destined for his throat, but a moment before she struck Slowhand raised his legs, caught her, and sent her tumbling over him. He scrabbled around as she scrambled up, and the two of them circled each other, struggling to regain their footing.