Jim Butcher - Captain's Fury

Kitai's head whipped around as the alarm bells in the Grey Tower began to ring. She paced over to the edge of the rooftop, peered at the tower, and snorted. "I told him so. You were there."

Isana hurried to Kitai's side. The younger woman stared intently at the Grey Tower and shook her head. "We must hurry."

"What's happening?" Isana asked.

Kitai seized her pack, shrugged into it, and jogged toward the other side of the building. "Someone is ringing bells."

Isana bit down on a sharp retort and instead hurried after Kitai. "More specific, please."

"They went inside only moments ago, and the alarm has been raised. The Tower's defenses and guards have been alerted. They can only get out from the roof, and they must escape quickly if they are to escape at all-which means we must hurry." She lifted a hand and pressed it gently against Isana's chest. "Wait here," the Marat woman said. Then she took a pair of steps, her legs blurring with sudden haste, and flung herself off the top of the building. She bounded gracefully through the air, a full twenty feet or more, and landed on the top of the aqueduct that coursed through this part of the city and passed near the Grey Tower.

Kitai turned as if she did such things every day and promptly produced one of the coiled ropes from the case at her belt. She flung one end, lariat style, across the gap between the rooftop and the aqueduct, and Isana caught it. She blinked up at Kitai. "What do I do with it?"

"Slip one foot through the loop, like a horse's stirrup," Kitai said. "Hold tight with both hands. Then step off the building."

Isana blinked. She glanced over the rooftop's edge. It was a seven-story building, and the fall to the street below would be quite sufficient to crush the life from a woman of far more youth and agility than she. "Um," she said. "And then what?"

Kitai put an impatient hand on her hip. "And then I pull you up and we go help my chala ."

Isana felt her mouth open. Kitai was not a large person. Certainly, she looked athletic and strong, but it was a slender strength one expected in a dancer or runner. The Marat were a physically formidable people, she knew, but all the same Isana was several inches taller than Kitai and outweighed her. Could the girl support such a weight?

The alarm bells continued to ring.

" Isana ," Kitai hissed.

"All right," Isana said, flustered. Then she stepped up to the edge of the roof and slipped her foot through the loop. She pulled the rope tight against her foot, clutching hard with both hands at the level of her stomach.

It was a very, very long way to the ground.

She closed her eyes and stepped off the roof.

She felt Kitai pulling the rope tight even as Isana stepped into empty air, so that she did not fall, so much as swing down in a great, broad arch. The speed of it was dizzying, and she felt a small scream pulled from her lungs in pure reaction. She reached the top of the forward arch and fell backward, clinging desperately to the rope, then forward again. She spun wildly a few times, and then Isana realized that the rope was moving upward in short, solid jerks.

She opened her eyes and looked up to see Kitai, a dark shape against the pale stone of the aqueduct, hauling Isana upward, hand over hand, her feet planted firmly on the stone of the aqueduct. She pulled Isana up over the lip of the stone structure, and Isana managed to sprawl onto it, trembling, her foot tightly pinched by the lariat.

"Come," Kitai said quietly. "Hurry."

Isana freed her foot while Kitai recoiled her rope, then set off at a lope down the length of the aqueduct, which proved to be nothing more than an elevated stone trough carrying a steady volume of water as great as the mill stream back on her steadholt. There was a stone lip a foot wide on either side of the trough in the center, and Isana stepped up onto it and followed Kitai as quickly as she could manage. She kept her eyes focused ahead, on the Marat woman's back. If she looked over the edge of the aqueduct and saw how easy it would be to plunge to her death, she might not be able to make her feet keep moving.

Great furies grant that the wind didn't come up.

Or that her feet didn't strike a patch of slippery moss.

Or that her hammering heart didn't make her head go light for a moment, her balance wavery.

Or-

Isana ground her teeth and focused on Kitai's back and on keeping her own feet in motion.

Kitai came to a halt several dozen steps later, spreading her hands as a warning to Isana. Isana stopped as well, and Kitai said, "It's ahead of us."

"Very well," Isana said. She slipped off her shoes, closed her eyes in brief concentration, and reached out for her connection to Rill. Then she rucked up the skirts of her dress to her knees and stepped down into the stream of water in the aqueduct's trough.

The current was a strong, steady pressure along her calves, though not nearly enough to take Isana from her feet, provided she kept them braced strongly. The water had flowed down to the capital from the mountains many miles to the north, and it was bitingly cold. As Rill manifested around her, Isana gained the insight of her fury's senses, and she was surprised at how clean and fresh the water remained, despite its long trip through the aqueduct's channel.

The guardian fury in the water ahead appeared to her as a sudden, ugly sensation of pressure. An invisible presence in the water, she could sense its malice and its desire to do violence to any intruders. The water ahead suddenly thrashed, then a bow spray of freezing droplets rushed toward her in a line, as if she was being rushed by an unseen shark.

"You'd best get behind me just to be safe," Isana murmured, and Kitai hurried to comply.

Isana had no idea where the designers of the Tower's defenses had found such a vicious fury-or worse, what kind of mind it would take to reshape a natural fury into a dangerous beast-but she had dealt with stronger furies in the wilds of the Calderon Valley. She stood calmly before the oncoming monster, and waited until the last possible moment to flick her wrist and send Rill against it.

Isana felt her senses join with her fury's, as Rill, her presence somehow warmer and denser than the cold animosity of the guardian, slammed against her foe. The water five feet in front of Isana erupted in a cascade of spray as the two furies wound around and through one another, currents of living water twining and intertwining like two impossibly elastic serpents.

Behind Isana, Kitai took in a sharp breath, but Isana was too involved in her connection to Rill to look back at the younger woman. Instead, she focused her senses and her will upon Rill, lending her own determination and confidence to the fury, fusing her thoughts and will with Rill's ever-mutable essence. One did not overcome a water fury by simple force of will, the way other furies might be mastered. Water furies could not be beaten down-only changed, redirected, absorbed. Together, Isana and Rill entangled the guardian fury, blended with it, and separated its cohesive essence, bleeding it away into the steady stream of the aqueduct, diluting it, while Rill's presence remained anchored to Isana's mind and will, holding its shape.

The waters thrashed for several seconds more, then they slowly began to subside as the guardian fury was dispersed into the current. Depending on how strong the guardian fury was, it could take anywhere from days to weeks for it to draw itself back into a cohesive being again-if it did so at all-but Isana felt no compunction about disabling such a dangerous being.

For goodness' sake, what if some foolish youths had gone running along the aqueduct purely out of the exuberance of their years, and not for any sinister purpose focused upon the Grey Tower? A fury like that could drown someone without enough power to fight it off, or strike out at an unsuspecting victim and send him tumbling from the aqueduct to the ground far below.