They split the party, p.31
They Split the Party, page 31
47
CURTAINS
On the other side of the city of Nikos, in a mansion being rented by the delegation from Her Lady’s City, Diane Recpina was about to die. Most of her bodyguards were lying dead, their throats slit by flying swords being puppeteered by a shadowy silhouette of a woman, and the few who were still standing weren’t faring particularly well. Running had done little good as the shadow woman moved like liquid, and her swords were barely slowed by the opposition mounted against her.
Now, cornered in her bedroom, she watched the last person charged with keeping her alive fall to a flying sword to the stomach. By now, the princess was out of screams, falling back on terrified whimpers as she backed away, desperate for an avenue of escape.
As a trio of floating blades slowly glided into the room, Diane ran for the bedroom’s balcony. It wasn’t much of a plan, but she wasn’t planning. She was just trying to get away as she desperately prayed to Lady Luck to once again show her favor. Instead, as she threw open the balcony doors, she was shown the shadowy silhouette of her murderer.
She yelped, backing away, only to stop when she realized she was backing straight into the waiting points of the animated swords. Her head turned back and forth, finding herself cut off on either side.
She was trapped.
“Princess.” The shadowy figure bowed, speaking fluent Iandran. “Hearsay spoke often of your ambitions and beauty. I do hope this great and tragic end will see both suitably immortalized in the imaginations of your fellows. I promise you, it will most definitely be in mine.”
“Who are you?”
“Me? I am the great equalizer. The reminder to those at the very top of society that they are as mortal as those at the bottom. I am the untimely tragedy that rings through nations’ histories for generations. And from this day forward, I am no longer merely the Prince Killer. I am the—”
The shadow’s words were silenced as Brass leapt into the room through the open balcony window, and he scattered the shadow with a slice of his sword. Immediately, all three blades at Diane’s back surged forward, and she let out another scream just before Brass tackled her out of the way.
They rolled to a stop on the floor with Brass hovering over Diane, offering her a reassuring smile.
“Princess,” Brass greeted. “We’ve really got to stop seeing each other like this.”
Elsewhere in the city, the Chancellor of Parthica was running for his life, hounded by a set of flying polearms. He fled through his home’s grand halls, desperate to reach more of the guards somewhere on the premises before the weapons or their shadowy puppet master could catch up to him.
Unfortunately, he was not the athlete of his youth anymore, and his leg seized in a cramp so severe it dropped him to the ground. As he lay on the ground, cursing and writhing in pain, he rolled over to find himself staring down the length of a possessed spear. And then, just before it could stab down, a golden, spectral image of a sword manifested above him, batting the spear aside before cleaving it in two.
Church entered the hall from the opposite end as Kurien’s shadowy doppelgänger, holding Zealot at the ready.
The Sultan of Gypten had been annoyed by the needlessly ostentatious pyrotechnics display so late in the evening, but that annoyance quickly vanished from his mind when a cloud of daggers burst into his penthouse suite. No guards came when he shouted, but the weapons quickly fanned out in a ring that encircled him.
Before he could even make sense of that much, a metallic disc flew into his suite, letting out a low thrum. Suddenly, the sultan found himself falling—toward the ceiling. The daggers closed in on the space he’d been in a moment ago, and a crash rang out as a barely visible blast of force sundered one of the daggers, followed by several more in rapid succession.
The metallic disc’s thrum died, and the sultan fell back to the ground, now surrounded by the shattered remains of a dozen broken blades.
Outside the sultan’s window on an adjacent rooftop, Phoenix cycled his wand and shot a line of spider silk out that he could use to swing over to the sultan’s inn. As long as Kurien’s shadow was still in the area, his job wasn’t done. But he was off to a good start.
Back in Roland’s own room, Wings couldn’t see Kurien’s face, but she could see the way the Prince Killer froze up like she’d just been startled, and Wings could hear the shift in her voice. All dismissal was gone.
“So, you figured it out after all,” Kurien said.
“It’s over, Kurien,” Wings said. “You lost.”
In four locations scattered across the city, Kurien and her shadows recentered their stances. Wings, Brass, Church, and Phoenix each squared off against an array of flying weapons, the only thing standing between the summit’s participants and death. For Kurien’s part, she found herself nearly bouncing in anticipation, even through the growing pain in her wrist. She was about to have a duel for the fate of four nations beneath a blanket of fireworks.
She couldn’t have asked for a better stage.
“Please,” Kurien said. “All you’ve done is make this interesting.”
Annoyed as she was over losing his helpers and as many questions as she had about who could have teleported them and their cargo out like that, Snow took solace in the fact that she had been right. One on one, even with his fancy quicksilver weapon, Silas was no match for her.
But he did put up a fight.
With René and Rosa gone, Silas was free to swing around his weapon like a whip, cutting wide, sweeping arcs through the air to try and keep Snow back. After only a few swings, though, Snow had his pattern down, and after one last dodge, she vanished in another shadow blink, reappearing inside the arc of his swing. He reacted, trying to alter the attack’s course to hit her, only for her to sidestep the attack and grab the sword out of the air.
Ice spread across the quicksilver cord linking Silas’s swords, locking the weapon up and racing along it to capture him as well. He countered by retracting it, shattering the ice and converting his weapon back into a sword staff.
He stayed on the offensive, alternating between short lunges and spinning slashes with the sword staff. Snow dodged every one of them, sidestepping, ducking, and weaving around each one. With every miss, he grew more frustrated, attacking faster and sloppier. He was so tunnel visioned on her, he forgot to pay attention to his footing and didn’t see the ice until it crawled up his boot.
Silas moved quickly, jabbing one end of his staff into the ice, gripping the shaft tight, and extending its length so that it propelled him into the air, breaking the ice on his foot in the process. By the time he landed, he was back to paying attention to everything Snow was making contact with. He even avoided parrying her weapons with his, knowing the contact would only let her cover his weapon in more ice.
The problem, Snow eventually realized, was that Silas only ever fell for a trick once. But she still had a few more tricks up her sleeve.
She blinked to get behind him and to get enough distance to throw both of her daggers. He, of course, spun around in time to see the attack coming and dodged—anyone who’d been in a fight with her longer than a few seconds knew to expect an attack from behind when she blinked. But hitting him wasn’t the point of the throw.
The next time she blinked out of sight, Silas reacted exactly like he did before, whirling around in anticipation of an attack from behind. Only this time, he found nothing, as Snow reappeared in the exact same spot she’d disappeared from. With his back exposed, she grabbed him by the shoulder, immediately spreading ice across his body.
Still, he fought back, elbowing her off of him with his unfrozen arm and turning to face her. The ice made his movements awkward and easy to dodge and left him wide open for her last trick. She willed Companion Piece back into her hand, calling it to come back to her—and straight into Silas’s back. With a thunk, the dagger sank into him, and he seized up. His staff fell to the ground.
Just for good measure, Snow sprinted forward, leaping into the air at the last second to deliver a flying mule kick straight into Silas’s chest and sending him crashing through the window of the closest building. She sprang back to her feet in one fluid motion and shook her hair out of her face.
Silas didn’t get back up.
Glass crunched under Snow’s boots as she stepped through the broken window to collect Silas, who she found prone in the remains of a broken shelf, shattered pottery, and loose soil. Going off that, and the flowers that were absolutely everywhere, she must have kicked him through the window of a florist. Or a homesick druid.
Most of the ice on Silas’s body had broken up, letting him slowly roll onto his stomach and try to drag himself to his feet. Before he could even get on all fours, Snow’s boot was on the back of his neck, pinning him down. Already, some of the frost began to fade from her face, and her eyes slowly began to shift back to a pale blue.
“One chance,” Snow warned. “Stay down.”
“Why?” Silas grunted. “Why are you doing this?”
“You put a hit out on me,” Snow stated, as if that alone was justification for hunting a man across two kingdoms. A bit more blue came back into her eyes as she recalled last spring. “And you hurt my friend.”
“You killed mine,” Silas spat.
Silas squirmed and struggled beneath Snow’s foot, but he got nowhere. After a moment of holding him down, Snow spread ice out from her boot and froze him to the ground.
“Kill me if you’re going to,” Silas said. “It won’t change anything.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Snow said. “I already promised to deliver you alive.”
“You’ll do no such thing.”
Snow hadn’t heard any clink of any weapons or armor. No tremble of fear or hesitance, which any normal person would have had in this situation. The fact that they were unarmed and unafraid to confront her should have tipped Snow off even before she turned around, but the Cult of Stars was something she still hadn’t gotten back into the habit of expecting.
Two hooded figures stood behind her, hands folded neatly in front of them. With a flick of Snow’s wrist, Companion Piece sank into one of their forehead carvings like it was a bullseye.
The other didn’t so much as bat an eye. Crackling silver smoke began to leak out from beneath the folds of his robes, quickly filling the florist shop. Snow summoned Companion Piece back to her hand, searching for any sign of the cultists in the crackling smoke surrounding her.
“How many of you do I have to kill before you figure out this always ends the same?” Snow asked.
“Kill as much as you like. Nothing will change.” Snow ignored everything but the cultist’s voice, trying to locate him amid the constant echo and shift in the sound’s origin. “I told you, I will not allow your hunt for Silas Lamark to succeed.”
“You think you can stop me?”
“I defeated you when you were five strong. Alone, you are nothing.”
“About that,” Snow said. “I’m not alone.”
Gamma couldn’t have timed his shot better if they’d rehearsed it. A blue-white beam of light cut through the fog surrounding Snow, and a surprised grunt echoed from the smoke as the cultist took a direct hit. Snow dove out of the way as more blasts followed, each one finding another target in the smoke. On the rare occasion Gamma didn’t land a kill shot, she finished his work for him with Companion Piece.
Silas may have had a bunch of starborn-worshiping lunatics watching his back, but she had an autostruct with arcane eyesight. The crackling smoke that normally provided them cover and made them so difficult to fight did nothing to impede Gamma’s vision, and in seconds, the autostruct’s shots fell off in pace as he started running out of targets. The fight was over. Even the Cult knew it.
“Another time, Starbreaker,” a voice snarled at her, rapidly withdrawing deeper into the smoke.
The blasts from Gamma ceased, and the smoke thinned out as quickly as it had arrived. When it vanished, she found herself in the florist shop with Gamma as the only standing figure in sight. Too late, Snow realized she couldn’t hear Silas struggling anymore. The ice that had encased him was still unbroken on the floor, but he was nowhere, as if he’d slipped out without disturbing it. There was no sign of where he or any of the cultists had gone.
“Where did they go?” she demanded.
“Teleportation,” Gamma reported. “The effect was consistent with their movements within the atmospheric disturbance they created. I could not determine their destination.”
Frustration simmered inside her, slowly growing into full blown anger. Weeks tracking Silas. Nearly getting killed by the Cult. Spending all day and all last night finding where Silas would be tonight, and she had nothing to show for it. Not Silas, not his accomplices or the weapons they’d bought, not even a lead on where to find them.
For once, she didn’t let the cold take over. She only did that when she wanted to focus or to block out feelings she didn’t want to deal with. She wanted to be pissed. She wanted to stab something, ideally several somethings. But before she could properly start swearing or throw Companion Piece into a wall, the ceiling of the florist shop broke apart.
Across all her bouts, Kurien was a flurry of energetic, almost erratic movement. In one part of the city, she crossed blades with Brass as the glintchaser desperately juggled defending himself and keeping Princess Recpina out of harm’s way. At the same time, she overwhelmed Church with a halberd assault and forced Phoenix on the defensive with a storm of daggers. And she did it all while dancing around the attacks of Wings right in front of her, alternating attacks with Phoenix’s blaster and the sword stolen from Wings.
“I want to thank all of you,” Kurien said, her voice projected across her shadows. “I had my doubts, but you’ve played your parts to perfection. This was a better show than even I could have envisioned.”
“Not sure I like the use of past tense there,” Brass said.
In four places at once, Kurien made her move. All three of her swords fanned out around Brass and Diane, preparing to stab from all sides at once. Exploiting a poorly judged block, she knocked Zealot out of Church’s hands, sending it cartwheeling across the hall out of reach. With the cleric disarmed, the halberd turned its attention to the chancellor himself. A comparative slouch in close combat, it was trivial to send blades around Phoenix’s guard and rake him across the back before immediately boomeranging toward the sultan. And after finally maneuvering Wings out of the way, Kurien used a shadow blink to change angles, and took aim at a now exposed Roland.
Wings’s eyes widened. Phoenix dropped to his knees in pain. Church clutched at his amulet, speaking as fast as he could. Brass grabbed Diane’s hand.
Each of Kurien’s scattered weapons lunged as she fired a blast at Roland.
And, in that moment, the battles were over.
Brass yanked Diane straight down, letting the arranged swords pass over them. As he dropped to the ground, he stabbed with his own sword, threading it through the handguards of all three weapons, catching them in one move, and pinning Kurien’s blades into the floor.
Church’s skin became hard as stone. It wasn’t enough to stop an enchanted weapon. But it was enough to survive jumping directly into the halberd’s path, taking a stab meant for the chancellor right in the chest. The halberd lodged in Church’s own chest, not deep enough to kill him, but deep enough to get slightly stuck trying to pull back. Church seized the opportunity, grabbing the halberd with both hands and holding it in place. Every twist and jerk of the weapon sent lightning bolts of pain through his body, but as long as he held it, it couldn’t hurt anyone else.
Even as he fell, Phoenix cycled his wand, took aim, and shot out a line of spider silk, catching a blade inches from opening the sultan’s throat. With his free hand, Phoenix dug into his belt and tossed another dispel disc at the briefly trapped sword. When he set it off, the spider-silk line he’d created disintegrated, and the possessed weapon dropped to the ground.
Meanwhile, the blast Kurien fired tore through the air as Wings dove forward to try and block it with her remaining sword. By inches, she was too slow, and the blast struck Roland in the chest. The king was knocked back, crashing into a wall.
“No!” Lupolt screamed.
Wings rolled, recovering from her dive and coming up with her sword at the ready, only to freeze as she saw Roland lying slumped against a wall. Phoenix’s blaster clattered to the ground as Kurien released her control over it and took a bow.
“Goodnight, Your Majesty,” Kurien said.
“Renalt preserve me.”
Kurien’s head shot back up at the sound of Roland’s voice. He sounded as if he were in pain, out of breath. And yet, the King of Corsar lifted his head with a smile on his face.
“That’s two apologies I owe Phoenix,” Roland said.
“Roland.” Lupolt breathed a sigh of relief. Nearby, Wings beamed with pride.
Kurien shook her head in disbelief. “How?”
Roland reached into his shirt, producing a large, silver and onyx medallion engraved with arcane sigils. White energy arced back and forth across its face, absorbed from the blast that had struck Roland.
“A last-minute gift from an old friend. He made it so fast, I didn’t think it would actually work,” Roland said. His smile briefly took on a sad quality. “You’d think I’d know better than to doubt him by now.”
Wings took the opportunity to slam the hilt of her sword into the floating one Kurien had taken control of. In a flash, her weapons transformed back into a bow in her hands. Wings reacted immediately, drawing an arrow.
“Roland!” she shouted.
The king threw the absorbing medallion at Kurien.
The Prince Killer saw the medallion tumble through the air toward her. She should have reacted. She could have. But she was mesmerized by the thing.
