S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

Sir Evroyn reeled backward, and she recovered with the smooth precision of water running downhill, like an exercise in the salle rather than the desperate scramble that real fighting usually was. Red blossomed where his right eye had been, and on the last few inches of her longsword. He fell with a clatter of armor as if all the strings that held his body together had been severed at once. . which was more or less what happened. The point had punched through the thin layer of bone at the back of the eye socket and into his brain, just far enough and no more lest the steel be trapped by the edges cutting into his skull.

What part of last warning didn’t he understand? Lioncel thought, a little dazed. Did he think Tiphaine d’Ath was just bluffing?

“Throw down!” she barked, as the menie of Ath locked shields behind her and knocked down their visors. “Now!”

A few did, dropping their swords with a clatter and dropping to their knees with their hands on their heads. The rest started to close ranks, their big kite-shaped shields coming up to make a wall, but the kneeling men hindered the precision of the movement.

“Shoot!” the Grand Constable snapped.

Six crossbows fired, a dull multiple tung of vibrating steel and cord and right on top of it the hard ringing tank sound of the pile-shaped heads hitting steel, like a ripple of blows from a hydraulic punch in a mill. At point-blank range even the best armor didn’t always stop a bolt from a military crossbow. Lioncel felt as if something in front of him was pulling his hands up, snuggling the butt into his shoulder, squeezing the trigger-

A man stumbled backward with the bolt sunk deep in his bevoir, the jointed piece that shielded throat and chin. Blood leaked around the short thick arrow, and sprayed from under the visor and even through the vision-slit. Steel gauntlets scrabbled at it for an instant and then the armored figure fell and lay twitching and gurgling. Tiphaine d’Ath went through the gap like a falcon stooping, with Rodard and his brother Armand behind to either side. A man in the black harness of the Guard tried to overrun the Grand Constable-tucking his shield into his left shoulder and charging, to ram her off her feet by sheer weight and impetus. The shields banged together with a lightning crack , but she was already pivoting as if they were dancing a volta. She ignored him as he staggered where she’d put him, into the stroke of Sir Armand’s serrated mace. It smashed his visor with a sound like a boot heel stamping on a metal cup.

The sword flicked out again, its narrow point punching through the mail grommet covering an armpit and the edges breaking the links. .

Using the sword against opponents in armor requires absolute precision because of the limited number of targets. The armpit is a weak spot. Don’t throw your arm back so it’s exposed.

The voice in his mind was Tiphaine’s in some salle d’armes sometime in his life, running like an inhumanly detached commentary.

I will now demonstrate why. .

A minuscule sway, and a sword went past her. She reversed her own and thrust backward into the spot behind another man’s knee without looking behind her, blocking a thrust with her shield while she did, moving with the leisurely certainty of someone who had all the time in the world to line things up. .

The knee is another vulnerable area, but rarely easy to reach. .

He’d been reloading the crossbow as he followed, dodging through the shouting clanging mass of armored forms, with the two household knights to either side. The initial lines of combatants had broken up into knots of steel-clad forms who shoved and hit and shouted and screamed. And increasingly threw themselves flat and called for quarter.

“Follow me who can!” his liege called, in a voice like a contralto war-trumpet.

Four of the Guard men-at-arms who weren’t giving up retreated through the door into the Queen Mother’s chambers, a boom and clatter and crash of metal utterly incongruous in the pale splendors. For a moment they stood in the door, and then one of the Ath spearmen-he was actually carrying a glaive-thrust his polearm past the edge of a shield and used the hook just below the blade to drag the shield forward with a double-handed heave. The man attached to the shield by the arm he had through its loop staggered, then screamed as the war hammer came down on his shoulder, denting the metal in and breaking the collarbone beneath. The Grand Constable and her two knights burst through into the great chamber, and there was a blurring flurry of motion and the surviving man in black armor was running away. .

. . not running away. That’s out towards the balcony. He’s running towards Mom and the girls and Her Majesty.

His liege and Rodard and Armand were after the man, but he dodged behind an old tattered-looking statue on a plinth. Lioncel brought the crossbow up with a steady concentration, as if he were watching someone else aim-someone perfectly calm, as if this were a shooting range.

Tung.

The bolt punched through the ancient bronze without slowing and hammered into the man’s shoulder, twisting him around. Tiphaine d’Ath passed him with a sway of her torso, running with the liquid fluency of a leopard and ignoring the scrap-metal succession of blows from mace and war hammer that rang out behind as Armand and Rodard followed and finished the man in passing. Lioncel fumbled at the cocking lever of his crossbow as he dashed behind her; there was something dreamlike about it, his frantic speed not keeping up with her strides.

The dappled light of the balcony flashed into his vision like a tableau. A figure with a face dripping blood and boiling water and broken bones jutting through a servant’s livery stood before the hearth, leaning forward as if straining at an invisible barrier with a curved knife in his hand. Juniper Mackenzie and his own mother were between the man and the Queen Mother and the child, their hands upraised in an odd hieratic gesture; they and their opponent were in total silence, utter immobility, but he could feel immense forces straining against each other, as if the air between them rippled somehow without anything really visible at all.

The Grand Constable threw her shield aside and took the sword in the two-handed grip and spun like a wheel, the blade a silver blur. There was a heavy chunk-crack sound, and the assassin’s head leapt free. Juniper and his mother staggered and collapsed together clutching at each other, as if they had been pushing on a door that suddenly opened. The headless man fell. . which was a relief, because some corner of Lioncel’s mind hadn’t been sure he would .

Signe Havel was fighting another broken man, one who slapped the strokes of her backsword aside with the flats of his hands. She screamed-as much frustration in the sound as rage-and lunged.

And the blade went through the man’s ribs and grated home in bone, a killing stroke in any sane fight. He lunged for her , grinning, his left hand reaching for her neck even as he laughed and coughed out bits of lung. She dove backward in a tuck-and-roll, just barely avoiding the slash of the curved knife in his right by sensibly not wasting time trying to pull the sword free. Huon Liu darted in, his own blade in the two-hand grip and flashing down.

“Huon!” Lioncel shouted at his friend.

The older boy’s face was set. His light sword thudded down at the junction of neck and shoulder; then he spun away, clutching at his stomach with an oooff as the dead man’s knife cut. Light mesh-mail showed through the rent cloth of his jacket, and then blood welled over his hands. Lioncel breathed out and forced calm on himself, and fired. The bolt transfixed the assassin at the pelvis, and he could hear the point crunch into bone, but the man-if he was one-just pivoted for a moment under the horse-kick impact, then lurched forward again.