Jim Butcher - First Lord's Fury

Tavi recovered his balance and immediately drew strength from the earth—specifically, from the earth trying to smother him, weakening the furies responding to Renzo’s command. He waded forward, through the failing power of those furies, and, with an instant of razor-sharp focus, cut cleanly through Renzo’s hastily raised blade, the steel collar about the huge man’s neck—and the neck beneath it. Renzo’s body dropped like a slaughtered hog’s, still quivering.

Time slowed.

There was little blood. The blazing sword in Tavi’s hand had cauterized the cuts even as he made them. The courtyard bully’s broad hands twitched and spasmed. His head had fallen facedown, and Tavi could see his mouth moving for a few seconds, as if to spit out the dirt upon his tongue. That didn’t last long. A heartbeat, two, then there was stillness.

Renzo had been an appallingly petty evil from the last days of Tavi’s childhood.

Tavi felt sick at how easy it had been to murder him.

His thoughts and focus were, for a few seconds, entirely shattered, and so, when the vord Queen exploded from the earth behind Renzo’s corpse, she nearly killed him in the first instant of their meeting.

Tavi seized upon a windcrafting, weak though it was down in the sinkhole, to speed his perceptions. Even with the crafting, there was time for no more than a bizarre, flash impression of a beautiful face, glittering black eyes, a tattered old dress—and then there was a flicker of motion as a shadowy blade darted toward his heart.

Tavi had enough time to think, I didn’t feel it coming, it’s not made of metal. Fortunately, his reflexes hadn’t had any metalcrafting to rely upon when he first trained with a weapon, and they hadn’t needed the advance warning. His own burning blade caught the dark weapon in the vord Queen’s hand, defeated the Queen’s disengage, then suddenly slipped and wobbled as the resistance of the other weapon vanished. The dark blade curled in her hand like a striking serpent and drove into his belly. It pierced his armor as though it were made of soft cloth instead of battle steel, and he felt himself thrown back hard against the layers of a stone shelf lining the pit wall behind him.

The vord Queen came at him, her eyes shining with a terrible intensity, but he responded with the instant, deadly reflexes of a man who had been wise enough to embrace the cold, insensible strength of his armor and weaponry, who felt no pain though his body was trapped against the rough wall, impaled upon a deadly blade. The vord Queen was swift enough to avoid having her head taken from her shoulders, but only just. Tavi’s burning sword left a wound in her scalp and seared away a mass of thin white hairs. She blurred away from him, letting out a metallic shriek, and simply bounded up out of the pit.

An explosion of light and furious sound bright enough to hurt his eyes—odd, that metalcrafting didn’t seem to offer any protection from that source of pain—made the shape of the disappearing Queen a silhouette and left her profile burned onto his eyes in bright color as the rest of the world went dark.

Every instinct in him screamed to get out of the hole, get into action, move, move, move . But he didn’t. When the Queen had leapt from the pit, she hadn’t been holding a sword. Whether he could feel the pain or not, given the rock at his back it was almost certain that there was a preternaturally sharp weapon still thrust into his belly, sunk into the stone behind him like a nail into wood. If he simply tore his way free, he could all but cut himself in half.

He held the blazing sword uncomfortably close to his own body, squinting down with his light-dazzled eyes, and confirmed it. There was a bar of gleaming, green-black material still thrust through the plates of his lorica. He touched a hand to it, lightly, and found that it was double-edged and as sharp as a scalpel. The lightest touch had opened flesh with a horrible, delicate ease. It looked like vord chitin and, for all that he knew, it was. When the blood from his fingers touched it, the weapon quivered , sending silver shocks of sensation through his body, though his metalcrafting kept him from experiencing it as pain.

Bloody crows. The thing was alive .

Outside the pit, the vord Queen shrieked again, the sound a brassy challenge. Explosions of fire thundered outside. People screamed. Steel rang on steel.

Tavi was having a hard time getting enough breath. It couldn’t be the lungs themselves. The chitin blade’s thrust had been far too low. He glanced at his fingers and saw them smeared with something tarry and green. It smelled vile. Lovely—poison, which must have been shutting down his breathing.

Tavi grimaced. The chitin blade didn’t have a guard or a tang. It simply… segued, from a long, lightly curved blade to an oblong, rounded handle. He couldn’t walk forward and off the impaling blade. The handle would never fit through the relatively small hole the blade had made, and widening the wound himself seemed… counterproductive.

Stars thickened in his vision. His body was running out of air.

Tavi debated simply striking the sword, snapping it with his own burning blade, but there were excellent reasons not to. The blow might not break the vordblade, in which case it would just cut through him with all the power of his own strike. If he tried to burn through, it would heat the blade and cauterize the wound, rendering it all but untreatable by watercraft. Simply seizing it and breaking it with earthcrafted strength was a fool’s game as well—the blade would nip off his fingers all the more neatly because of the supernatural power backing the attempt.

More screams, human and vord, came from above. Incoming windstreams howled, and a Cane let out a furious roar. He began to feel dizzy.

The soil around him, all over his clothes, his boots, his armor, was loose, fairly sandy.

That would do.

Moving carefully, he gestured with one hand, and a long pseudopod of sandy earth rose up from beneath him. He scooped up a handful, and mused that his own blood had made it sticky and clumpy. He caked it around the vordblade. He did that twice more, until a thick clump of bloody, sandy mud clung to it.

Then he ground his teeth, held out his sword, and poured fire from the glowing blade down onto the mud, shaping it with his thoughts and will. It enveloped the mud in a swift, sudden, short-lived flash of fire that brought up blisters on his hands and face—and when the light had faded, the sand glowed dull red with heat, clinging gelatinously.

A second pass of the sword allowed him to draw the heat back out of the sand again, before it could spread up the blade and into his vitals, and the vordblade was suddenly encased in an irregular lump of glass.

Tavi seized it, took a steadying breath, and drew on the weapon. It didn’t move at first, but he didn’t dare turn this into an exercise of brute strength. He increased the pressure slowly, gently, until the weapon abruptly slid free of the stone behind him. It raised sparks from his armor as Tavi pulled it carefully from his flesh.

He gave the vordblade a little toss so that it landed on the far side of the pit. Then he focused on his own body, finding the wound, a narrow and reasonably minor injury in its own right. But the tissues around the wound, all the way through his body, were swelling as though they meant to burst.

Tavi ground his teeth, focused his will, and stopped them from growing any worse. To some degree, the swelling was an advantage—it kept him from bleeding too hideously, for the moment. But he could feel his body’s own unwitting rebellion in progress, a toxin-induced physical frenzy in his blood that would kill him in minutes if allowed to run its course.