Барб Хенди - Dog in the Dark

The hair-thin black line down the blade’s spine lit up with orange-red heat. Humid air sizzled in its passing. The blade missed her opponent’s right thigh ... and grazed the left.

Forest gray wool split, smoke rose from the gap, and Magiere heard a sharp suck of breath. She quickly pulled the falchion’s blade up and across. Two more screeches rose on the steel under the flash of white stiletto blades.

Magiere slashed again with the dagger. Her opponent twisted out of the way this time, and she straightened up, looking into the woman’s amber eyes. They were somehow familiar, though she couldn’t place them above the wrap across the woman’s face.

A trace of smoke from the woman’s wound blew away in the breeze, and her eyes betrayed no pain. She came again so fast that Magiere barely blocked.

Fear, not anger, let hunger begin to escape.

Magiere’s jaws ached under the change in her teeth. Everything in the world but her own body suddenly slowed. She dodged and chopped down with the falchion at the anmaglâhk’s shoulder.

The woman leaned under the sword’s path and pulled her left wrist out of the way last.

A glint of white passed before Magiere’s face.

She barely saw her opponent’s right hand finish its swing as a burning sting rose along a line from her left temple to the center of her forehead.

Blood ran down into Magiere’s left eye and half blinded her.

Leesil knew exactly whom he fought. Above the wrap that hid the rest of her face, her slanted eyes were sick with fury. He knew the depth of her pained hatred for him and knew the reason for it, but he felt no pity for her anymore.

Én’nish and her kind had come at him and Magiere too many times. It would end right here.

He held on to control and grew coldly calm, as in his youth. He could taste those nights that had haunted him for so many years after. Carrying a thin blade between his teeth or a garrote wire coiled between his gloved fingers, he would crouch in the dark or scale a wall to slip into a bedchamber.

Én’nish tried to get inside his guard, to strike for his throat, his heart, his abdomen, and finally the inside of his thigh to pierce an artery. He kept her going with feints of his own but had no chance to pull his second blade.

When her speed waned, when the fury used her up ... he feinted straight at her this time, as if to aim a kick and expose his left side.

She took the bait and lunged.

Leesil spun in his false kick and turned his back to her. The winged blade he held in his right hand swept around, and he heard his blade clink against one of her stilettos.

She had tried for his heart again, as he knew she would: it was the only kill point of which she could be certain in a fast attack from behind.

He dropped to one knee as he came around with Én’nish’s blade still grating on his own, and he punched his free hand under as he swept her blade upward on his. His fist cracked against her small knee, and she began to buckle as he slashed down.

The point of his winged blade tore open her tunic, down her abdomen, and off her right hip.

She staggered back. Shock rather than pain washed the malice from her eyes.

Leesil felt nothing as he pushed off, rising to finish her.

An arrow hit the deck right in front of his foot, and he jumped back, looking up.

Never looking at the man, Brot’ân’duivé rammed two straightened fingers into the right eye of a crewman. As his target fell, dropping both cudgel and sword amid a scream, he unfocused his sight and took in the whole deck at once.

He had expected Dänvârfij to send two, perhaps three, to take either Léshil or Magiere. Only one need be seized to subdue the other. He had taken out one anmaglâhk, but two were left: Dänvârfij was obviously one and Én’nish the other.

Brot’ân’duivé had planned to take those two and then kill the others one by one when they came to investigate. Now the crew had been alerted, and two more men rushed out of one aftcastle door.

He saw Dänvârfij’s blade slash Magiere’s forehead.

Léshil split the front of Én’nish’s tunic and stepped after her as she retreated ... and an arrow sprouted from the deck at his feet.

Brot’ân’duivé ducked under one crewman’s cutlass as he kicked out the knee of another. He rammed an elbow into the back of the first one’s neck and peered upward into the rigging.

Four, not three, anmaglâhk had boarded this ship. There was an archer above.

Everything had come apart for both sides. In these circumstances, if he were the one coming after Léshil and Magiere, at this point he would try for a kill instead of a capture—at least of one of them.

Brot’ân’duivé crushed the throat of the second crewman wavering on an injured knee, rushed for the base of the main mast, and climbed fast up into the dark.

Dänvârfij saw blood run down Magiere’s forehead and into her eye. She had faced the monster before in the Everfen, but the sight of Magiere still unnerved her. She was fighting something unnatural.

Magiere’s one clear eye suddenly flooded black, as if the iris had swallowed all of the white. Her face twisted up and her mouth gaped, exposing teeth like a beast’s.

Dänvârfij fought for calm, for focus. She needed another crippling blow to put this thing down. Her left thigh burned from the dagger of white metal no human should possess. And she now wondered about the wisdom of having ordered Rhysís not to fire.

He might have ended this already, but from his distance above, he might kill Léshil or Magiere. That could not be risked; then again, both Léshil and the monster were within reach. Only one need be left alive, and this creature before her was insane.

Madness spawned mistakes.

Dänvârfij tensed as Magiere roared from pain. Dänvârfij feinted with her right blade toward Magiere’s blinded side. Trying to see with her clear eye, Magiere twisted her head and raised the dagger to defend.

Dänvârfij spun and kicked Magiere’s cut temple.

Magiere’s head barely snapped aside. Though she lost her grip on the dagger, that same hand came slashing back with hooked fingers. In the same instant, Dänvârfij glimpsed a shadow racing up the main mast. Then she felt the impact on her neck.

Fingers—nails as hard as claws—raked her skin but failed to dig into her throat.

A shout sounded from high above in Elvish.

“Abandon!” Rhysís cried out.

Brot’ân’duivé closed on the crow’s nest as he heard the shout. The one up here must have spotted him somehow. He gripped the lookout’s edge and pulled himself up, but all he saw was an anmaglâhk sliding away along a rope by a short bow’s haft gripped in both hands. Brot’ân’duivé grabbed for the rope’s anchored end to wrench it and throw his quarry off balance.

The rope went limp in his grip.

He watched half its length fall, severed somewhere out there in midair. A splash came between the ships and piers, and his own half of the rope fell to dangle.

Brot’ân’duivé looked where that rope had led a moment before. Across the water at the next pier was the Cloud Queen . Wrapping the corner of his cloak around the rope, he vaulted the crow’s nest wall as he slid quickly toward the deck of the Bell Tower along the rope’s length.

Leesil heard one word shouted in Elvish.

He barely took a quick glance to see where the arrow had come from, and then he fixed on Én’nish again. He couldn’t risk looking for Magiere or Chap. If he did, Én’nish might not come after him but instead go after whomever he couldn’t save.