P. Power - Knight Esquire

Burks yelled loudly.

“Nanos! Death dust, don’t let it touch you, be careful, it’s a trap of some kind, the Larvals always have a plan within a plan…” He fought as he spoke, his voice loud but not hurried sounding, both men fought hard, but it was clear that Burks was the superior fighter. Vastly so in fact. Better than anyone Tor had ever seen at least.

Well, if you had thousands of years to get good at something it would hardly be surprising that you might be a bit better than average. Tor focused on the smoke, the “death dust”. So… this was made of those tiny machines he’d heard about? Tor hadn’t built shields to withstand that kind of thing. Dust could be stopped, but this stuff was tiny to his mind when he reached out to it. Like air itself. Even if he had, most of the people around him didn’t have a shield on. Could he do anything about it? It was, oddly enough, slowly moving towards the people, even though the breeze should have carried it away at about a thirty-five degree angle.

Crap.

So, could he stop it? If he had an air choke, he could, Tor thought. But all he’d brought was his shield, which uselessly enough, Connie had right now and his temperature equalizer. Well, he also had his poison detector in his pocket and one that looked like it around his neck, but both were sort of not needed at the moment. People started to run away, but for some reason Burks called for them not too. It was a trap. It turned out that the ancient was right. More of the little death dust bombs started going off, six in all. Surrounding them.

The people nearest them started to go down. They just… died.

Other people started fighting, a man with black eyes for each bomb somehow. Not different men with strange eyes, the same man. Exactly. Like twins, only more of them and even closer to each other in looks somehow. With the exception of Burks, each of the others on their side that fought was being beaten easily. One of those, he saw, was familiar. Short hair in a white blond bob, fuzzy now, rather than curly locks. She wore a very light pink dress that was almost white and had a knife in her hand, being hit over and over again as she tried to hold her ground. Blood already pouring from her nose and face.

Trice.

Rolph and the gate guard were barely holding against their man even though they made him looked like a dwarf between them. A woman in a Royal Guard outfit fought too. Right, Wensa. She went where the Prince did. For a half second it made Tor wonder if she’d worked the whorehouse too, in order to stay close to Rolph. It wouldn’t have shocked him if she had. She’d do anything to get her job done after all.

The death dust moved away from the blast and sought the people of the crowd, closing on them. What could he do? Other than die of course. He couldn’t even run away…

Still the air?

He knew the field needed, but this was a huge space… It probably wasn’t possible to do anything strong enough, fast enough. Not without time. Or… enough focus. Could he do it?

No.

It couldn’t be done, not in time. Not without risking death due to pattern failure. Just trying could rip his own body apart on the basic level.

Would he do it anyway?

That, he knew, was the real question. Dead was dead, but he had to try. He sat cross legged on the ground suddenly and built the field, climbing as deep as possible as he could into his mind, then going deeper. So deep that reality stopped being for him.

For each moment he failed, people died. Tor couldn’t think about that, he could only think of the air not moving. The dust in it not shifting or floating.

Still.

Be still.

He knew it worked finally, after what felt like forever, but had to be less than a minute. The sounds of fighting lingered, but he held his focus tight and didn’t waiver. People needed to run now. He couldn’t tell them too. Tor couldn’t even open his eyes. Doing that meant letting go of his desperate grasp on the clouds of death.

He felt himself hit, but didn’t move, couldn’t let himself even try to. Then, for a while, he was hit over and over again. He thought. Tor couldn’t feel it really, the blows that struck at him he just kept going and sought to move deeper, past the black and images in his mind, past the bottom and the emptiness on the other side. Holding only the field he needed to keep people alive. Everything stopped then. It was, he thought, a place between. No, it wasn’t a thought.

It just was.

He didn’t move out of it for a long time.

Tor didn’t know if he could really. This death dust, if he let it go, would anything else be able to stop it? It seemed a deadly thing. Better to hold as long as he could and let everyone else run away, if they could stop the attackers. That was all he could do.

Not that he thought that either really. It was just what was. Tor knew it, but didn’t consider it at all.

Finally he began to hear something strange, bizarre really, it called to him, got his attention and pried him away from what he was doing just enough for him to wonder what it might be. Singing. At first he wondered if it was his imagination, his mind having grown so bored that it was making up songs to entertain itself. Fair enough, except for the need to hold the nanos in place. Finally he opened his eyes to see Burks standing in front of him humming along with the singers.

“Ah! I thought that might work! Novel stimulation can sometimes attract attention, even in the deepest states. Tor, the death dust has been dealt with; we managed to wash it out of the air then removed the earth to a safe location out of the city… A lot of people have died, but not nearly as many as might have. That was… not too bad, holding it all in place like that.”

People were dead?

Yeah, he knew that. Selfishly he just hoped it wasn’t his friends. Tor knew that some of them had been in danger though, so he tried to hold his own mind still, until he could find out what all had happened. People sang still. Two people actually. It was Mercy and Connie singing softly to him, their voices lovely, both looking over at him, so he nodded.

“Who?”

Tor couldn’t ask which of his friends he’d lost. Which people he’d loved that he’d never see again. It was important he knew, because both women cried openly as they sang. God…

The Queen stopped singing, followed by Mercy a few seconds later, and sniffed loudly.

“Oh Tor! Thank god you came back to us, we were all so worried, it’s been three days. Burks didn’t know if you’d ever let go of the field, until you died from it. When dumping snow on you didn’t work, everyone kind of thought you’d never come back.”

“Who?” He asked again, his voice flat and without expression. From the looks on all their faces, Tor knew they got it. Finally The Queen spoke, her voice just above a whisper.

“Laura. The cook. She heard the commotion and saw the fighting, so she led eight of the men and women from the kitchen in an assault on one of those…things. Most of them were injured, but it… destroyed her Tor. She didn’t even live long enough to…” There was a sob, but no description of what happened. Tor was kind of thankful for that. He’d liked Laura.

“Duke Winchester fought with the one that attacked you, and held long enough for Burks and Varley to kill it. He died of his wounds yesterday. The Duke fought most bravely and didn’t yield, even when he was wounded unto death.” Connie stood straighter when she said it, her voice sounding proud.

Tor nodded.

“Varley?” His voice sounded soft and weak, but Burks spoke strongly enough.

“She’s fine. She used her shield as a battering ram and her Tor-shoes to hit the Larval attacking you. It worked well. She’d seen the war minister, Smythe, do the same thing a few moments before and picked it up almost instantly. Smythe took out three of the assassins by himself that way. Said he learned the trick from you? A godsend really. I’ve seen three of the clones go through nearly fifty people on their own with nothing more than knives before, and those were all hardened warriors. Without Smythe and the Princesses we would have lost a lot more people.”