Роберт Беннет - Foundryside

And hopefully, he thought, glancing up, the girl will be getting into position sometime soon…

He saw an iron baluster on a balcony across the street, which gave him an idea. He took Whip out, aimed carefully, and flicked it at the baluster…

With a loud clang , Whip’s head caught on the iron railing. Gregor pulled the cable taut, hid in a doorway, and waited.

He couldn’t see them coming through the clothes above. He could only hear the soft scrape of their boots on the building fronts, echoing all around him. He imagined them dancing from rooftop to rooftop, weaving through the hanging clothes, drifting like dust motes on a gentle breeze. But then, as if he were fishing, his line suddenly gave a great leap…

There was a gagging sound, and a cough. Gregor peeked around the corner and saw one of their attackers spinning wildly through the air, having apparently been caught on Whip’s cable. The man sailed through the clotheslines, flying end-over-end, the lines and clothes wrapping around his form as he coughed. Finally he crashed into the street below, trailing tangles of clothing like some kind of bizarre kite, and was still.

Gregor nodded, pleased. That worked nicely. He hit the switch to retract Whip’s head from the baluster. It took a jerk or two from him, but soon the truncheon’s head came zipping down — and accidentally pulled a string of clothes with it.

Which, he realized, told his attackers exactly where he was.

He looked up as a black-clad man did a flip over the clotheslines, tumbling like an acrobat. Then the man adjusted something on his stomach, which caused him to fall rapidly back toward the building face opposite Gregor. Once the man’s feet were steady, he looked up at Gregor, and raised his espringal.

Gregor started to flick Whip forward, but he knew it was too late. He could see it happening, see the bolt whipping down at him, see its black tip glinting in the moonlight. He tried to withdraw farther into the doorway, but then his arm lit up with pain.

He cried out and looked at his left arm. He immediately saw that he’d been lucky: the bolt had caught him on the inside bottom of his forearm, slashing it open. The unnatural momentum of the bolt meant it’d shredded his flesh as it passed directly through, but it had not speared his arm, or hit the bone. Scrived bolts did tremendous damage to the human body.

Cursing, Gregor looked up just in time to see a second assassin join the one who’d just fired — and this one, he suspected, would not miss.

Gregor fumbled to get Whip ready.

The attacker raised his espringal…

But then a silvery, strange rope came hurtling from above to wrap itself around the second man’s legs.

The second attacker staggered as the ropes struck him — at least, he staggered as much as anyone could while defying gravity and standing on a wall.

Praise God , thought Gregor. The girl came through. He looked up, but the windows above were lost in the fluttering storm of laundry. Presumably she was somewhere up there, firing away.

The bound man tried to leap off the building front — but this quickly proved to have been a bad idea: the density cords wrapped around the man’s shins believed that, as long as the target they were bound to was not at rest, they would keep increasing their density until it was.

However, the man’s gravity rig — whatever it was — allowed him to circumnavigate gravity itself: the one force that allowed objects to come to a resting state.

So, because of his rig, he could not be at rest. And because he could not be at rest, the bonds got denser, and denser…

The man started shrieking in surprise and pain, and he slapped at something on his chest, some kind of control mechanism for his gravity rig, probably. This caused him to just float in the middle of the air over the street — but that did not amend his situation, it seemed.

His shrieking got higher-pitched, and louder…

There was a sound like a tree root cracking in half, or fabric being torn. Then came a horrific spray of blood — and then the man’s legs separated from the rest of his body at the knees.

Sancia stared over the sights of her espringal as the man screamed in agony, floating above the street, pouring blood from his knees. She was crouched on the remnants of a wooden walkway that ran the perimeter of the Zorzi’s upstairs, peering through the old windows. She’d assumed that shooting the flying men with the espringal would just weigh them down until they couldn’t fly anymore — she certainly hadn’t thought it would do that .

said Clef, disgusted.

She swallowed her nausea. she said. She started reloading.

Gregor watched in dull surprise as the man’s feet and calves crashed into the earth, still wearing the density bonds. Then the man just hung there in the air, screaming as blood poured out of him onto the ground like a horrific water feature of the neighborhood…

And that , thought Gregor, is why scrivers so rarely fool with gravity.

Understandably, such a phenomenon got one’s attention. It certainly seemed to have distracted the man who’d injured Gregor — he was still standing on the building face across the fairway, staring at the sight, having seemingly forgotten all about Gregor.

Narrowing his eyes, Gregor took aim with Whip and flung the truncheon’s head forward at the man. There was a dull plonk! sound, and the thick weight cleanly connected with the man’s left temple.

The man’s body went slack and he dropped the espringal. Then, slowly, his legs slipped off the wall and his unconscious body started drifting over the street. It seemed his rig was set to keep him at a specific level — he neither rose nor fell. It looked like he was slowly skating over an invisible ice pond.

Gregor peered at the espringal lying in the mud. Then he got an idea. It was one of his favorite tactics: when outnumbered and outmatched, clutter up the battlefield as much as you can. Only this battlefield , he thought, is the very air above our heads.

He took aim at the unconscious, floating man, and hurled Whip forward. The truncheon’s head caught the man’s body in the chest and — just as Gregor had hoped — the momentum sent the man ricocheting off the building fronts, hurtling through hanging clothes, bouncing off his dying colleague, and generally wreaking havoc.

Gregor watched, satisfied, as the chaos unfolded. One of the men tried to get out of the way and leap across the alley, but the growing tangle of clotheslines caught him like a fish in a net.

Gregor scrambled forward, grabbed the espringal, raised it, and shot the tangled man, all in one smooth motion. The man cried out and went still.

Five down , said Gregor. Four left .

He looked up, reloaded, and saw two attackers flit across the street and twirl in midair. Gregor tried to draw a bead on one of them — but then both of them gracefully tumbled through the upstairs windows of the Zorzi Building.

Gregor lowered the espringal. “Oh hell,” he sighed.