Ilona Andrews: Steel's Edge

THREE YEARS LATER

RICHARD Mar ran through the woods. The wound in his side wept dark blood, almost black. A bad sign. His liver was likely lacerated. Congratulations, he told himself. You’ve finally managed to get yourself killed and by an amateur, no less. Your family would be so proud if they knew.

In his defense, it hadn’t occurred to him that a man would conceive, conspire, and execute a plan that involved having his own sister raped by a scumbag just to lay a trap for him. Despite everything Richard had seen, that depth of human depravity had eluded him thus far. He’d thanked Jackal Tuline for correcting that oversight by separating his head from his body. Unfortunately Tuline had six accomplices, and while overall they demonstrated a remarkable lack of proper training, one of them had managed to run him through.

Tree trunks flashed by him, the huge Adrianglian pines straight like masts. His breath came in ragged, painful gasps. Hot pain chewed on his side, biting at the wound with every step.

A distant howl rolled through the forest. The slavers had hounds, and he was leaving a bloody trail. He was in quite a jam, and he saw no way out of it.

The trees swayed around him, turning fuzzy, then coming back into focus. His vision was failing. Richard shook himself and pushed forward. He had to get to the boundary. Beyond the boundary lay the Edge. With the Weird’s woods stretching for many miles in every direction, the Edge was his only chance. Not that the Edgers would help him out of the goodness of their hearts. He had been born in the Edge and knew better than most that in the space between the worlds, it was every man for himself. But the Edgers, a paranoid and suspicious lot, owned guns and had itchy trigger fingers. They would see a group of armed slavers ride through their land and shoot at them as a matter of principle.

Dizziness seized him, tossing him against a tree trunk. Richard grabbed the fragrant bark to steady himself, his fingers sticking to the sap, and willed the trees to stop spinning. Come on, get a grip. This is no way to die. At least he could go out in a flash of glory instead of bleeding out under some pine.

The forest melted into a gray, rain-drenched swamp. Richard smelled the pungent aroma of the Mire’s herbs mixing with the stench of stagnant water. He’d know this scent anywhere—he’d grown up cloaked in it. He ran across the sluice of muddy soil to the clearing buttressed by the cypresses. Wide holes gaped in the ground like dark mouths. He checked the first one and saw the body of a child, a pale, thin form, floating facedown in two feet of brown water . . .

Richard shook his head, flinging the memory away. The woods reappeared. He was hallucinating. Splendid. He pushed from the trunk and kept moving.

In the distance, another dog howl rolled, more to the west. They must’ve broken into two groups. They were a cowardly lot, but they had a lot of practice chasing runaway slaves and were distressingly good at it.

The brush ended abruptly. He saw the ravine, but too late. The carpet of needles shifted under his feet, the edge of the hill collapsed, and Richard rolled down the slope and crashed into a tree. His ribs crunched, and the pain clawed at his side.

The swamp mud squelched under his feet. A man rushed him, weaving between the holes, sword in hand, mouth gaping wide in a scream, his wet hair plastered to his skull by the rain. Richard slashed. The body fell apart before him. Another slaver charged from the left. A second sweep of Richard’s sword, and the slaver’s head rolled off his shoulders and tumbled into the nearest hole. Red blood gushed from the stump of the neck and splashed onto the sludge . . .

Reality slammed into Richard in a rush of agony. He gritted his teeth, rolled to all fours, clumsy like a baby learning how to walk, and forced himself upright. A familiar dull pressure pushed at his skin and insides. He took a step forward, and the wall of magic ground against his senses. The boundary. He couldn’t see it or smell it, but it pushed on him, as if an invisible hand pressed against his insides. He’d reached the Edge. Finally.

A big furry body sailed over the edge of the ravine. Richard spun about, unsheathing his sword. The sun caught the long, slender blade. The wolfripper dog landed on the slope and sprinted forward, 170 pounds of muscle sheathed in short, dense black fur. Richard leaned forward, closing his left hand on the small ultrasonic emitter in the sword’s pommel. A gift from his brother. Kaldar had bought or probably stolen the gadget on one of his excursions to the Broken, and it worked in the Weird. The slavers’ dogs hated it, and Richard used it often. He’d never been much for killing dogs. They only did what their masters told them to do.

Three people cleared the top of the ravine. Two men, one thin to the point of being scrawny, the other wearing leathers and holding a dog leash, and a woman, tall, muscular, and with hard eyes. The slaver scouts. Hello there.

The dog was almost to him, running fast on massive paws, rugged, big-boned, bred to kill a pack of wolves and get home in one piece. Fifty feet. Thirty.

Richard squeezed the emitter. The sound, too high for human ears, lanced at the dog’s sensitive eardrums.

The beast halted.

“Get ’im!” the slaver with the leash yelled. “Get! Get!”

The wolfripper bared big teeth.

Richard squeezed the emitter again, holding the switch for a few painful seconds.

The dog whined and trotted over to the side, circling behind him.

The scrawny slaver on the right of the dog handler swore and pulled a gun from his waistband. Slavers were opportunistic thugs—most of them had barely enough magic to be born in the Weird or the Edge but not enough to succeed at life. They evened the odds with cruelty and Broken contraband weapons, counting on the element of surprise.

The slaver pointed the gun at Richard. He was young, blond, and the way he held the weapon, sideways, made Richard’s head hurt.

“We need him alive, you moron,” the dog handler said.

“Dude, fuck that.” The black barrel stared in Richard’s face. “I’ll take him out right now.”

“Is he an apprentice?” Richard asked, bracing himself.

“What?” The woman stared at him.

“Is he a scumbag in training?” Richard glanced at the gunman. “At least have the decency to hold the gun properly, you fool. If you don’t know how, pass it to someone who does. I’m not going to suffer being shot at by anything less than a full-fledged lowlife.”

The shooter sputtered. “Screw you.”

The gun barked, the sound booming through the woods.

Richard flashed, panning his magic in a defensive screen. Translucent white magic pulsed, forming a half sphere in front of him for a second, just long enough to knock the bullet aside. Even at full health, he couldn’t maintain the shield for longer than a moment, but with the right timing, it was enough. He used to flash blue, but being in the Weird had improved his magical strength.

The slaver spat another curse and fired, squeezing the trigger in a rapid rhythm. Boom, boom, boom.

Richard flashed, matching the cadence of shots a moment before they rang out. The white screen pulsed, deflecting the projectiles.

Boom, boom, boom.

A sharp yelp cut through the shots. The gun clicked. The man was out of ammunition.

Richard turned. The dog had fallen. The idiot had shot their own dog. That’s what happened when the destructive potential of a man’s weapons exceeded his intelligence.

“What the hell did you do that for?” The dog handler stared at the dog panting in pain on the grass. “You’re taking the heat for this one. There’s no way the fine’s coming out of my pocket.”