A Triple Thriller Fest (120 page)

Dmitri reached for his knife. Lars grabbed for his wrist, but Dmitri pushed him off with his other hand. He took a step back and had the knife out before Lars could recover his balance.

Lars held up his hands. “Don’t do this, Dmitri.”

“I’m sorry. I have no choice.” Everything felt like it was going in slow motion. There was a roaring in his ears. He was about to kill his friend.

Lars looked at the trap door, no doubt wondering if he’d get to the ladder before Dmitri could stab him. He wouldn’t. And Dmitri was good enough with a knife that if the bigger man tried to grapple with him, he’d get the knife shoved right under his rib cage.

“Please, whatever it is, just tell me about it.”

Dmitri stepped forward with the knife. And lost his balance. He felt like only half his body had moved. The other half dragged behind like water sloshing across a bathtub.

The pill. The green pill.
The drug had caught up with him even before he could remember he’d taken the thing.

He staggered, tried to regain his footing. Lars stepped to one side and then he was moving impossibly fast. He grabbed Dmitri by the jerkin and swung him forward. Dmitri crashed into the wall, then collapsed to the ground. He rolled over and lifted the knife as Lars pounced on him.

Only the knife wasn’t in his hand. It had skittered to the side where it winked in the light, mocking him.

Lars shoved his knee onto Dmitri’s chest and reared back his fist. “You bastard. We trusted you.”

Dmitri stared up at him, his vision swimming. It felt like he was watching himself struggle with Lars from a distance. Like theater. It wasn’t real.

Lars’s fist came down like a hammer. Dmitri barely felt the blow.

Chapter Twenty-nine:

Tess took cuts to her left thigh, her other shoulder, and her ribs. The last blow knocked her down. She gasped for air and tried to regain her feet but she couldn’t catch her breath.

And if Kirkov had pressed his attack, he would have finished her. But he hesitated just a moment—no doubt thinking she was feigning—and took his own ragged breaths. And Tess regained her feet. She brought her sword up just in time.

Peter and his guards fought in front of the tent.

No signal had been necessary to the men on the walls. As soon as the fighting spread beyond Tess and Kirkov, the gates and the portcullis opened and Lars’s men charged out. She couldn’t see Lars, but they kept a tight formation as they advanced on the tournament pitch. Niels’s men raced from their encampment, double the number of her own side, but less organized. The two armies would meet before they reached the roped area. She didn’t think Lars had enough men to fight his way through.

Kirkov and Tess traded blows again. He stepped back, then blocked her path to keep her from fighting her way to join Peter and his swords outside the ropes.

Men on the castle walls rained down crossbow bolts. Several found their mark. They shattered on impact and splattered their targets with red paint. But Tess could see men marked with paint still fighting. Any doubts about the deadly nature of the battle disappeared.

“You’re almost finished,” Kirkov told her. “One more blow and you’re dead. Surrender and I’ll let you live.”

“Liar.”

The bargaining gave her hope. He’d been jeering, boasting just moments earlier. She hadn’t landed a single stroke, yet Kirkov offered terms. Tess studied his labored breathing, then threw herself forward with a flurry of blows.

It was her first offensive since the opening moments and she forced him back a step before his equal technique and superior strength overwhelmed her again. She turned her head just in time to avoid the brunt of a blow to the head. It clanged off her helmet. Instead of staying out of his reach, she pushed forward again and again fell back just in time.

But this time she was sure. He was tiring. Tess was breathing hard, and bleeding from superficial wounds, but she had more stamina to draw on. She hung her head and took great gulps of air and Kirkov mistook her actions for equal fatigue. He came at her, hard, but he was slower this time. She fell back, fell back, always acting as if one more stroke would drop her guard.

He pulled his sword behind his ears and delivered a crushing blow that would have severed her head from her shoulders, if she’d been there when it landed. Kirkov flailed at the air, only just managed to keep his balance.

“And now it’s my turn,” she said. She came at him, thrusting, slicing, stabbing.

Her sword crushed into his shoulder. It would have bit through armor, flesh, and bone, but her blade was dull. He fell to one knee. She drove down with another blow. Kirkov lifted his sword and she was not strong enough to bash through his defenses. She swung again and this time drove him into the mud.

There was a movement at the corner of her eye. She turned to see two men cut the ropes and rush her. Her enemy was down, laid low by her attack, just waiting for her to bludgeon his skull in, dull sword or no. But instincts took over and she turned to face her new enemies.

The first came too hard and she sidestepped as he swung. Her sword caught him under the jaw. Bones cracked. He collapsed.

The second man forced her to retreat with a series of well-aimed swings. She let him drive her all the way back to the ropes on the far side, then knocked his sword aside and swung for his knees to get under his shield. When he dropped his defenses, she came around the top and bashed him across the clavicle. He pulled back with a cry. His shield arm hung limp.

Tess ignored him. She went for Kirkov, who’d regained his feet. He was done; she knew it. His only thought was to escape. She meant to finish the bastard before he could do it. Two more men joined his side and she’d have to cut through them, first.

Enemy soldiers had broken Lars’s tight formation. The battle degenerated into a dozen knots. She still couldn’t see Lars. He should be calling people to rally around his position.

Tess gave one final glance at Kirkov. So close. She could take those two men who shielded him.

But she turned and ran from the tournament pitch. She fell into one of the small battles, helped her men drive off their attackers, then shouted for them to follow her. They picked up two more a moment later. More than one man bled from wounds.

Tess led them into the knot of fighting that spilled out from the gate. There, she found Peter. She pulled him behind a protective wall of shields and swords.

“They’re trying to kill us,” Peter said.

“You think?” She looked around her. “Where’s Lars?”

“I don’t know. He didn’t come out with the others. What are we going to do? We’re not armed.”

“Like hell we aren’t,” she said. The men parted in front of her and she beat back a ferocious attack by three men who tried to get at her. Not all of them had sharpened swords, she thought.

The shield wall closed around her again. Tess shouted to the men on her left flank, which was stronger, and they sent a sortie to recover some men who had yet to fight their way back to the main group.

The action weakened her left side. For the next five minutes they fought a terrific battle to keep them from splitting her force in two. The handful of men who remained on the walls fired a stream of crossbow bolts. Weakened as they were, they couldn’t kill, but a blow could still knock a man from his feet.

“Into the castle,” she shouted. “Orderly retreat. Nobody turns his back.” They were only twenty, thirty yards from the protection of the hoardings that extended over the gatehouse.

“No,” Peter said from behind her. “We have to get to that tent, first.”

Tess stood two paces in front of him. She reached past the shield of the man at her front to bash at an attacker. “What? Why?”

“You saw Niels. He didn’t order this attack. They’ve got him hostage. And Sasha, too.”

She eyed the tent where she’d spoken to Niels. No question, now. That was no food poisoning. They’d worked Niels over during the night. But why? Just to take over his army? But the tent was on the other side of a small army trying to kill them.

“It’s too far away. They’ll have to take their chances.”

“No,” Peter said. He was at her ear, now. “They’ll make Niels tell them how to break into the castle.”

“And if we stay out here, they won’t need to, because we’ll all be dead.” She turned. “We’ve got to get back inside. Your son is in there.”

“I know. Don’t you think I know that?” He sounded anguished. “Do it, Tess. Rescue those guys. You have to do it.”

“Impossible.”

“You either get my friends out, or I’ll start shouting my own commands.”

“Try it and I’ll knock you senseless.”

“Look,” he cried. “Up on the hill.”

A second, smaller battle raged in the enemy’s camp. There were three or four men against as many as a dozen. A tent was on fire and a second had started to burn as well.

There were others, then, who resisted Kirkov’s coup. She watched their desperate struggle against a much larger force and knew she couldn’t leave them to die.

“I need the best men you can find,” she said to Peter. “Nine, ten of them.”

“I’ll go, too.”

“No. Fall back to the castle. Get anyone you can. Lars, Dmitri, everyone on the walls. Just leave the gates open. Get those spears. Come out to meet us.”

He nodded. His face was grim, but there was no panic in his eyes.

She’d meant the spears to form a bristling porcupine should the enemy breach the gates. Slow him down and force him to take punishment from the walls above. They were not sharp enough, but could be lethal if thrust hard.

She pushed men aside and studied every battle. Peter grabbed the first man, Tess the second and the third. In a moment she had seven. She looked for an eighth, but did not see one who was good enough. Not at hand.

“Let’s go. Keep it tight.”

The tip of the spear. Maximum force. Weak spot of the enemy.

The right flank of the enemy, opposite their left, was still a jumble of men, and it was here that she thrust forward. The enemies parted. One dropped his sword as he fell and the man who’d knocked him over snatched it up. He tossed his own, blunt weapon aside. A moment later and Tess took her own sharpened sword from an enemy.

After the first few seconds, the enemy closed around them on all sides. Peter’s retreat picked up speed. They’d have only moments before every man in Kirkov’s army had turned to eliminate this small group of outliers.

“Go. Faster.”

Tess lost herself in a blur of heaving, sweating, cursing men, thrusting swords and shields. But she was armed now with a killing edge. And her muscles knew what to do.

The last contact with Peter’s force ended. They were surrounded. Eight men against sixty.

Chapter Thirty:

The battle began just as Niels reached the encampment. Kirkov’s men—most of them had once been his own—flooded from the tents. They raced down the hillside with shields and drawn swords, shouting.

Running was a mistake. Whatever they gained in speed they would lose through exhaustion. A man could only sustain a sprint in full armor for a few seconds.

And with the running, clanking, and shouting, nobody seemed to pay any attention to the hooded man who hurried in the opposite direction. He tucked away Henri’s dagger and grabbed a blunt sword from the blacksmith’s tent. A moment later and he found the only tent that still had guards.

“Move out of the way,” he said. “I need to see the prisoner.”

One of them started to move, but the other leaned forward and squinted. “It’s Grunberg.”

Niels had his sword in hand and was at the attack before they could draw their weapons. He went after the more alert of the two first, then turned his attention to the other after the first fell. The second man fell back, fell back, and then fled. Niels let him go. He pushed his way into the tent, sword-first.

Three bound men lay on the floor, and a fourth slumped in the corner, unbound, semi-conscious. He used Henri Fournier’s dagger to cut their bonds.

“Get up. Hurry.”

They stood and rubbed wrists and ankles.

The fourth man was Borisenko. Niels helped him into a sitting position. His eyes were streaked with red from broken blood vessels. The bastards had pulped his lips and knocked out several teeth. One hand hung limp and every movement brought a groan.

“Can you stand up?”

“I don’t know.”

Niels turned to Miko Talo, Borisenko’s Finnish bodyguard, now unbound. “Take my sword. You three go to the armorer. With any luck it won’t be guarded. Bring back swords.”

“There will only be dull stuff. They’ve got all the sharp blades in the battle.”

“Better than hands and teeth. Go.”

Borisenko couldn’t get to his feet. One of his ankles was a mess. Niels tried again, but settled back in frustration by the time Talo and the others returned.

“We set a couple of tents on fire,” Talo said.

“Good.”

The Finn looked at his boss and winced. “I shouldn’t have been asleep. If I’d been awake they never would have taken me, I could have come back here and—”

“It was his own wife,” Niels said. “If you can’t trust her, you can’t trust anyone. Anyway, I
was
awake, and they still took me.”

“You have to go,” Borisenko said. “You know it.”

Niels clenched his teeth. “Goddamn it.” His mind struggled for a way out. They needed to move and move now. And they couldn’t waste their strength carrying Borisenko.

Niels pulled out Henri’s knife and pressed it into the man’s hand. “You get the chance, you kill Kirkov.”

“I’d rather kill my wife.”

“I’m hoping Tess has her.”

“No way. Katenka would never go in there unless she knew how to get out.”

“Then kill her,” Niels said. “Or your cousin. One of those two, either one, we need it.”

Borisenko gave a grim nod. The man had no chance. Niels should have kept the knife. Or better yet, used it to put the man out of his misery. Save him the hell of more torture.