Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

Three Lightless stood around the doorway behind the fallen man, black silhouettes against the faint candlelight in the hall. Darkness bloomed around them like ink in water and Nona stood blind in her cell. She dived aside.

You have to let me see, or we’re done for.

Trying! Keot’s voice rose to a roar, echoing in her skull. Where he spread from her collarbone towards her neck it felt like the fresh brand of a hot iron. The devil knifed deep into the flesh of her neck to gain distance from the sigil-cut metal and forced a path beneath the collar. Once past it he poured upwards into her eyes.

Nona saw a club swinging down and jerked her head back with no time to spare. The weapon’s end scraped her cheek. Two other Lightless were coming forward, drifting to either side. More in the doorway, dragging the dead man aside. Keot’s vision painted all the walls in fire-tones and the Lightless themselves as black-skinned, wearing robes of pale, shifting silver.

Nona, having evaded the club, punched the man in the eye. She swung her leg, wrapping the chain around his ankles, then stepped away, yanking his feet from under him. He fell heavily on his back.

Great, now you have an anchor.

Nona ignored Keot. She swayed out of the path of another descending club and elbowed the woman wielding it in the throat. The man attacking simultaneously from the other side swung horizontally. Nona kicked his wrist, sending his club flying. None of the Lightless so far had much more than a touch of hunska blood and they proved easy work.

The man on the floor in front of Nona kicked loose of the chain and started to rise. As he did so a Noi-Guin flitted across the doorway, releasing, with a crack of the wrist, a spreading cloud of needles. Keot’s sight painted them as a score or more of glowing red dashes in the enchanted dark.

Nona turned side-on to minimize the target she presented and dove to the left. Hunska can’t fall faster than anyone else. A hunska can rise faster, driven by swift muscles, but with the needles centred on her torso Nona couldn’t jump clear without first crouching.

Think. It’s a puzzle.

Nona saw the needles, envisioned their lines of flight, saw the voids between them. If she was fast enough she could adopt a shape that would evade many of them, but no contortion would permit all the needles to pass her by.

She fell, twisting, flexing her knees to allow one of the widest-spread needles passage beneath them. Still five needles would hit her square on, with perhaps three more that might catch her. The tatters of her smock wouldn’t slow them.

The needles closed half the distance as Nona swept her arms up. She deflected the first on the wristband of her right hand. Her enemy had provided her armour. She knocked aside another with the back of that hand and stopped two more against the metal of her left wristband. The fifth she let hit her in the throat. It bounced off her collar.

Was the Noi-Guin Tellasah? Nona hoped so. The assassin had stalked her for years and finally captured her for Thuran Tacsis’s demented pleasures. If Nona had to fight a Noi-Guin she would rather it be the one she hated.

Nona hit the ground awkwardly, a bruising impact, her hands instantly hunting to see if she had been stuck by any of the other needles. Nothing. She rolled, kicking the Lightless she had tripped. The blow landed between his legs while still rising, and he lost all interest in continuing to get up.

The Lightless that Nona had disarmed now drew his knife rather than chase his club. Nona hauled herself around and up him, using his body to shield her from any further attacks from the doorway. The man hardly moved to stop her, mired in the moment as he was. She brought her elbow down in an overhead blow, hammering into the base of his neck. He started to fall.

The Noi-Guin came in fast, knives in hand, amid billowing darkness that even registered on Keot’s sight like swirls of mist. Nona stepped around the falling man to meet the assassin, tugging the knife from the Lightless’s hand as he dropped, and circled her ankle, swinging the chain towards the assassin’s legs. The Noi-Guin, whose shape hinted at female, leapt over the chain’s arc. Nona slowed the world to the limit her body allowed, exhausted as it was from constant efforts to free the wall-pin. The Noi-Guin came straight on without hesitation, stabbing both her blades towards Nona’s chest. Nona turned the first on her stolen dagger and the other on her wristband, struggling not to let it slide off and gash her arm. They slipped past each other and separated.

No cross-knives.

Keot was right: Tellasah had been wearing a bandolier of cross-knives. This Noi-Guin had none.

Nona threw herself forward, still furious. Zole would have been coldly clinical. Kettle fought in the serenity trance. But Tarkax Ice-Spear had been the one to see Nona’s true nature, reflecting his own. Rage drove them both at such times and only by embracing that rising fury could they approach perfection.

The clash of metal on metal punctuated the brief exchange that followed, as rapid a tempo as any drummer could beat. The Noi-Guin’s attack left no time for thought. Nona sank into instinct, letting her muscles lead by memory. Once she slashed across the woman’s torso, finding her blade unable to cut what lay beneath. Once the Noi-Guin’s thrust came too close as Nona twisted, and scored a burning line across her upper arm.

Nona found herself pitted against a better knife-fighter; but she was a beat faster. She broke from their sharp engagement, pivoting on one heel, throwing her torso towards the floor and bringing her other leg up in a kick towards the woman’s face, trailing chain. The Noi-Guin snapped back away from the kick, but the chain slammed across her mouth and cheek.

Nona went into a roll and came up onto her feet. The Noi-Guin staggered back towards the doorway. The black-skin across her face took the chain’s force but the shock of the impact still rattled her brain. Behind her two Lightless took off running down the corridor.

Nona followed the assassin, knocking aside the dagger thrown at her. They met in the doorway, one knife each now. Nona kicked at the Noi-Guin’s off hand, stopping her attempt to pull some new weapon or poison from her belt. They feinted, jabbed, slashed, Keot raging behind Nona’s eyes, howling for blood.

The Noi-Guin seemed to have gone on the defensive, maybe still recovering from the blow to her head. Nona reminded herself that the Noi-Guin was the better knife-fighter and had only to wait for her to tire and slow. Also, the cut on her arm had started to burn, more than a cut in the heat of combat should. The Noi-Guin’s knife had blade-venom on it, not useful in the scant seconds of a hunska fight, but if she slowed things down and drew them out, the venom would do her work for her.

Nona launched herself, releasing every piece of the rage and frustration that had built inside her since her capture and before, since her flight from Sweet Mercy. She slid through the air, knife angled for the Noi-Guin’s heart, her other hand coming forward too. The Noi-Guin, knowing her centre was protected by the armour that had stopped Nona’s earlier slash, focused on driving her blade at Nona’s chest. At the last fragment of a second, as her knife point drove under the Noi-Guin’s blade Nona angled it upward and tore a furrow from the base of the woman’s palm, down through veins, arteries, and tendons towards the crook of her elbow. Her other hand caught the Noi-Guin’s wrist before the blood had even begun to squirt, and pushed it up so that her thrust cleared Nona’s shoulder by a hair. Nona’s own knife-thrust carried on and hammered uselessly against the black-skin beneath the assassin’s jacket.