Amanda Downum - The Drowning City

Jodiya’s lips twisted and she whistled once, high and sharp. Zhirin tensed and Jabbor’s arm stiffened under her hand, but Fei Minh only laughed.

“I’m sorry, but the rest of your men won’t be coming.”

Jodiya’s jaw clenched; a raindrop trickled down her cheek and dripped from her chin. “What next, then? Shall we stand here until all our guns are too damp to fire?”

“Or perhaps you should put yours down. You’re outnumbered.”

“Yes, but you or your daughter might die with us if you shoot. Will you risk that?”

Zhirin’s fingers tightened on Jabbor’s sleeve, and she felt leather beneath the cloth. She loosened her grip, holding her breath as a knife dropped silently into his hand. Beside her, Isyllt shifted her weight. One of Jodiya’s companions began to tremble faintly.

Fei Minh drew a breath, perhaps to answer. Zhirin felt a prickle of gathering magic and tensed just as a shrill, icy shriek cut the air.

Guns thundered and Jabbor pushed her down as he launched himself at the closer assassin. Zhirin slipped and hit the ground with a splatter of mud. Someone shouted; someone else fell. She scrabbled out of the road, hands skidding across wet grass-water everywhere, but too scattered to answer her. She looked back to see smoke fade into the rain and the last assassin fall as Jabbor broke his knee with a kick. The knife flashed as the man went down, and he didn’t rise again.

Stories spoke of heroes fighting from dawn to dusk, but in truth it happened so fast she could scarcely follow. Four bodies sprawled in the mud-Jodiya, her men, and one of the Tigers whose name she’d never learned.

“Idiot girl,” Fei Minh muttered. Zhirin wasn’t sure if she meant her daughter or Jodiya. She tucked her pistol inside her coat and picked her way around puddles till she reached Zhirin.

“What are you going to tell Faraj?” she asked, taking her mother’s hand.

“I’ll think of something. Or perhaps nothing at all-murder is an ugly business, after all, and one can hardly be surprised when an assassin finally makes a wrong move.”

“Mira-”

Someone shouted, and past her mother’s shoulder she saw Jodiya stir.

“Watch out!” But her shout was swallowed by a pistol’s crack. Fei Minh’s lips parted in shock and she stumbled into Zhirin’s arms. She threw a clumsy arm around her mother and flinched; the moisture soaking her back wasn’t rain.

“Mother!”

They both fell to their knees. Fei Minh gasped, mouth moving, but Zhirin couldn’t hear the words over the roar of her heart. Blood slicked her hands as she tried to stanch the wound, but already her mother was crumpling in her arms, her grip on Zhirin’s hand falling away.

She might have screamed, but she couldn’t hear that either.

People were shouting. Jabbor knelt beside her, trying to tug her away. Isyllt rose shakily from beside Jodiya’s still form. Mau fell to her knees beside her mistress, mouth working. Water rolled down Fei Minh’s face, soaking her hair and tangling in her lashes as her eyes sagged closed. Zhirin could hardly see through the blurring rain.

Jabbor’s words finally began to make sense. “We have to go, Zhir, now. We have to go.” She couldn’t fight as he lifted her up, could barely keep her knees from buckling. Rain ran down her face, hot and cold, washing the blood on her hands rusty pink.

“Go,” Mau said, her voice harsh and cracking. “Get out of here. We’ll deal with this.” Mau tugged a ring off Fei Minh’s limp hand and pressed it into Zhirin’s. Her fingers curled around it reflexively, blood smearing the gold. She couldn’t draw breath around the pain in her chest, as if the ghost of the bullet had passed through her mother and struck her.

“Come on,” Jabbor said, tugging her away. “I’m sorry.”

They only made it a few yards before Isyllt collapsed onto the rain-soaked road.

Even unconscious, a trained necromancer was never truly helpless. It certainly felt that way, though, as Isyllt watched Jabbor carry her limp body into the forest. She was lucky he didn’t leave her in the mud, especially since Zhirin was in no condition to argue for her safety.

On the other side of the mirror, Sivahra’s forest rose thick and dark. The sky was a low ceiling of gray and violet clouds, twilit gloom. Spirits chattered in the trees and the breeze twisted through the leaves in silver and indigo ribbons, beautiful and disorienting.

Vertigo struck quickly, the familiar dizziness that came of casting her spirit free. On its heels came the wild rush of freedom, the longing to run and fly unfettered by meat. It was the most dangerous part of ghostwalking, more dangerous than any lurking spirit-if she abandoned her flesh too long, she might never return to it. She held on to the echo of her heartbeat until the urge passed. At least, she thought bitterly, as a ghost she had two good hands.

At the Tigers’ safe house, Jabbor carried her inside and laid her body on a bedroll, less gently than she would have liked. The living glowed blue-white with heat and life, distorted as if she watched them through water. Her own flesh was clearer and dimmer, the light drawn in. She hadn’t realized how awful she looked, blue as milk and hollow-eyed. She could return to her body, perhaps even wake, but she needed rest and this might be the safest place to find any.

Zhirin sank onto a pallet in the far corner. Jabbor tried to speak to her, but she wouldn’t answer and after a moment he left her alone, closing the bamboo door behind him. When he was gone, she began to cry.

Isyllt turned away from the girl’s grief. She’d known Jodiya wasn’t dead but hadn’t acted in time. And while it was true that she’d been so exhausted she could barely walk, that wasn’t a particularly good excuse. Not one Zhirin would want to hear, at any rate. Even the memory of the assassin’s heart stilling beneath her hand was a hollow one.

She made sure her pulse was steady and wrapped her body in webs of wards. She needed to rest her spirit as well as her flesh, but not just yet. And she didn’t want to fall asleep listening to Zhirin’s tears. The diamond flared as she touched it with spectral fingers, but the girl didn’t notice.

Deilin Xian appeared, lips curling. On this side, the ghost was clearer and more solid than the living. A frown replaced her snarl when she saw Zhirin. “What’s happened?”

“Khas assassins killed her mother.”

Pity looked quite ghastly on the dead woman’s face.

“Leave her to her grief,” Isyllt said. “Walk with me.”

They stepped through the wall, a queer scraping sensation that Isyllt always hated, and emerged on a narrow walkway. The building was set on stilts and wrapped around a broad and towering tree. Lights flickered among the branches, green and gold firefly flickers.

“What are you doing?” Deilin asked as she followed Isyllt over the rail, landing silently on the leaf-strewn slope below.

“Looking around. I thought I’d take a native guide.” It was all she could do not to spin around like a child; the absence of weariness and pain made her light-headed.

“You’re in my world now, necromancer. Do you think you could best me so easily here?” More curiosity than threat in the question and Isyllt turned to face her, taking in the honor-blade at Deilin’s hip, the easy warrior’s grace of her stance. She was younger than Isyllt had first thought, perhaps thirty-five when she died. A bullet beneath her right breast had killed her; the wound bubbled and slurped when she spoke and her face and hands were tinged blue. Not a quick or easy death.

“I think I’d win,” Isyllt said at last. “But it wouldn’t be easy. And if that happened, I’d never let you out again. Do you want to risk it?”