The Price of Valor (65 page)

“Get clear of the doors!” Winter said, stepping to the edge of the corridor. The others obeyed, and a moment later there was an explosion of musketry from inside. Big chunks of wooden paneling exploded outward as musket balls punched through the flimsy wood, spraying the corridor with splinters.

“Bobby, open it!” Winter shouted. “Maura, hold here as long as you can, then fall back toward us. Sothe—”

Sothe was already running toward them. Bobby stepped in front of the still-smoking doors and applied her shoulder where they met. Winter had no idea if they were locked or not, but it didn't make any difference; the latch practically exploded out of the wood, and Bobby stumbled through, Joanna and Barley following her with pistols drawn.

The room beyond was a broad foyer, with a big table in the center and a cluster of armchairs at one end. Two doors led off on one side, and three on the other. Of more immediate interest than the sumptuous decor were the six Patriot Guards who'd just fired the wild volley through the door. The two rankers fired their pistols, reflexively, but the shots went wide; Winter, leaning around the doorframe, aimed more carefully and put a ball into the forehead of one of the Patriots just as the others worked up the courage for a bayonet charge.

Joanna and Barley, on the left, worked as a well-practiced team as three of the guards closed in. The big woman took the front, waiting until the last moment to dodge the bayonets. She managed to get out of the way of two of them, while the third ripped a narrow cut along her ribs. As this last attack went past, though, she grabbed his weapon and pulled him forward and off-balance. Barley surged out from behind her, opened the Patriot's stomach with one slash of her long knife, and then ducked under the next man's attempt to brain her with a musket butt. She sliced the back of his leg to the bone, jumped under him as he stumbled, and rammed her blade to the hilt in the chest of the third man as he recovered from his lunge.

Winter's opponent, a scared-looking young man, seemed less than fully committed to his attack, and danced backward from his thrust as soon as she feinted at his eyes. She ignored him for a moment, turning to cut down a more energetic guard who was trying to skewer Bobby while she drew her sword. He fell with a cry, and Winter spun back to face the timid boy, only to find a knife sprouting from his throat as if by magic. The musket fell from his nerveless fingers, and he slumped against the wall and slid slowly to the floor. Sothe, coming up behind Winter, had another small knife in her hand.

“More of them coming up the stairs,” she said. “I jammed the door to the back steps, and Maura's trying to hold them. But we have to work fast.” As she spoke, the roar of muskets and the lighter bark of pistols came from behind them, along with frantic shouting from below.

Winter pointed. One door, on the far right, had a crudely installed bar and padlock on the outside. “If she's here, she's in there—”

The door opposite opened, and Winter felt Infernivore stirring in the pit of
her mind as a figure almost twice her height squeezed through the doorway. He was dressed, as he had been dressed the last time she saw him, all in black, with a glittering obsidian facemask. As he stepped forward, two more men, similarly attired, came out behind him, sheltering behind his protective bulk. One was the young man Winter had fought in Desland, and the other was the older man with the long white fingernails. It was the latter who spoke, his Vordanai flavored with a strong Murnskai accent.

“You're bolder than I gave you credit for, Ihernglass,” he said. “We sensed you the moment you arrived, of course, and your objective was not hard to guess. I expected to have to hunt you down, but you've kindly delivered yourself exactly where you're wanted.

“You're awfully bold, for someone who was running for his life the last time we met,” Winter said, working hard to keep her breathing steady. Her demon thrashed and roared, a caged animal scenting food.
Three Penitent Damned.
She swallowed hard.
If I can just manage to touch them . . . “
We're here for the queen. Stand aside.”

“You had the advantage last time of being an unknown factor,” the man said. “This time I believe we
quite
understand each other. I will make you a counterproposal. Surrender, and your companions will be permitted to leave.”

“I—” Winter began.

“He's stalling,” Sothe spit. At the same time, she whipped the blade in her hand in a perfect end-over-end throw that would have ended right between the old man's eyes. Even as the knife left her hand, though, the younger Penitent was pulling his companion to one side, so the blade bit into the wallpaper and stuck there, quivering.

Sothe, who'd apparently expected this, was already drawing two longer knives from her belt. The huge Penitent Damned took a step forward, floor shaking under his tread, and grabbed the big table in both hands. He lifted it high, swinging it down like an oversized club to batter Winter, Sothe, and Bobby into the wall. Bobby, though, caught the other edge of the table in her hands and stopped it cold, the
smack
of wood on flesh audible through the growing firefight in the hallway. She and the Penitent strained, and the wood groaned and popped for a moment before shattering with a noise like a musket shot in a spectacular shower of splinters.

As if this had been the starting gun, the other two Penitent Damned came forward, one on each side of their giant colleague. Joanna stepped forward to meet the old man, jabbing at his face with a quick punch, but the Penitent was
deceptively fast. He let the blow whistle past his head and brought his fingers up and around Joanna's arm, curved nails slipping through flesh as easily as if it were cream. The big woman opened her mouth in a soundless scream as the old man ducked closer for a killing blow, then danced back hurriedly as Barley slid between them, knife slashing at his head.

The giant tore off a piece of the table to use as a club and swung it at Bobby, who ducked the blow and grabbed for the huge man's arm. This time, though, the Penitent seemed determined not to be drawn into a clinch. He gave ground, swinging again, and when Bobby tried to step around the club landed a backhand to the ribs that connected with a
crunch
of breaking bone. Bobby staggered backward, but didn't fall, and the giant came at her. Andy, who'd retrieved one of the dropped muskets, drove it into the Penitent Damned's side as he went past, but he ignored the wound as though it were a flea bite.

Sothe met the third Penitent Damned head-on, a blade in each hand to match his. The two of them seemed to erupt into a flurry of steel, nearly too fast for the eye to follow. But that wasn't quite right, Winter thought. Sothe was fast, faster than Winter would have believed possible, until she seemed to have four arms and four blades instead of two. But the young man was always a half step ahead of her, twisting so that every strike missed him by fractions of an inch, his own blows intercepting Sothe's and leaving long draw-cuts on the meat of her arms. He ducked under an overhand slash and brought his blade up into a gutting move that Sothe avoided only by a frantic parry and step backward.

Winter, sword out, stepped up beside the woman in black, and they exchanged the briefest of glances. That was enough—Winter went right, and Sothe went left. While Winter couldn't match Sothe's speed, the greater reach of her weapon gave her an advantage, and her empty hand could be just as dangerous. This Penitent Damned had barely escaped Infernivore before, in Desland, and he was not eager to repeat the experience. He went on the defensive, even with his uncanny agility, ducking and dodging and only occasionally finding space for his own blades to lick out. But however they tried to press their advantage, he remained out of reach. Small cuts blossomed on Winter's sword arm and a slash across Sothe's shoulder dripped blood, while their opponent remained unscathed.

Bobby, still looking woozy, stepped away from the heavy blows of her opponent, giving ground. Her foot came down on the outflung hand of one of the dead Patriots, and she stumbled forward, as though throwing herself into the Penitent's embrace. He swung a roundhouse at her head, which she avoided by dropping to her knees. The Penitent Damned raised his fists, then roared as Andy
darted forward again, sinking her bayonet into the small of his back. He grabbed the weapon from her in one hand, snapped it in half between his fingers, and hurled it aside, then turned his attention back to Bobby.

Bobby, making use of that moment of distraction, had grabbed the giant's ankle. Her hands barely closed around it, but she squeezed hard, with all the supernatural power of Feor's magic in her grip. Something broke with a
snap
, and the giant wobbled. He brought his great fist down between Bobby's shoulder blades with another bone-breaking sound, but Bobby hung on grimly, grinding broken chunks of his ankle between her fingers.

Barley, though skilled with her knives, was no Sothe. Her furious assault had driven the Penitent Damned back, but the old man had more agility than he'd let on. He blocked a cut aimed at his head and let his nails trace paths along her forearm, scoring bloody trails through her skin. Barley screamed, dropping one of her knives, and the Penitent closed his hand around her wrist and swung her into the wall, her head cracking hard enough to leave a dent in the plaster. He raised his fingers to her face, then spun, warned by some movement in the air behind him.

Joanna was back on her feet, one arm sheathed in red, breathing heavily. The old priest feinted at her wounded side, other hand ready to slash when she dodged, but the big woman simply bulled through the attack. His nails cut deep into her slide, slicing through skin and muscle and grating against bone, but she kept coming, swinging a balled fist hard into his face. Blood sprayed from his nose as it broke, and he staggered back in time to get a roundhouse punch to the side of the head that sent him sprawling to the floor on top of one of the Patriot corpses.

Winter's opponent, backward against the wall, spun away from Sothe and left himself open to her sword. She lunged, almost instinctively, and realized too late that the move was a feint. He was already sliding away, and her saber slid through the wallpaper and the plaster underneath to strike a wooden beam and stick hard. One of his knives was already coming up toward her wrist, and only by hurriedly releasing her sword did she manage to avoid losing a hand. She backed up, pawing for another weapon, as Sothe stepped in front of her.

A change had come over the black-clad assassin. Her fighting, which earlier had approached ragged desperation, had regained the icy calm with which she'd dispatched the Patriot Guard. Her moves were careful and precise, none of them close to striking home, but keeping the Penitent on the defensive and backing away. As the pair of them passed her, Winter was astonished to see the Sothe had her
eyes
closed, hands moving as if by pure instinct in the complex dance of blades.

The Penitent took one more step back, setting himself up for an attack, and his foot came down on the barrel of a fallen musket. Sothe's eyes snapped open, and she bulled forward, accepting a long cut across her back to drive both her knives toward the young man's face. He stepped backward, and the musket shifted underneath him—not much, but enough to put him off-balance, and he stumbled backward into Winter, who wrapped her arms around his midsection.

Not getting away
this
time.
She held him tight, as though in an embrace, and slipped Infernivore's leash. The demon surged out of her and into the Penitent, furious with frustrated appetite. There was a moment of conflict as the two creatures warred, but only a moment. Then Infernivore was rushing back into her, fattened by its kill. Winter felt the young man sag against her. His face was a mask of blood, streams of it running from his eyes like tears. When she let him go, he fell limply to the floor.

That left the giant. He'd pried Bobby's hands free of his ankle, and one of her arms dangled obscenely, bent backward at the elbow. He raised her into the air, gripping her by the shoulders, and though she landed blows from her good arm with all her supernatural strength behind it, his grip didn't falter. Winter thought for a moment that Bobby would be torn in half, like a sheet of paper, and she didn't think even Feor's
naath
would let her recover from
that
—

Then the giant dropped her, spinning as best he could with one leg crippled. The brown satchel Andy had been carrying hung from his back, pinned there by a saber that Andy had driven into his flesh for half its length. The young ranker was backing away, a pistol already in her hand, as the giant spun in place, trying to reach the weapon that impaled him.

“Everybody
down
!” Andy screamed.

Bobby, one arm dangling, threw herself away from the giant. Winter and Sothe dove for the floor, and Joanna covered Barely with her body. Andy fired, and Winter heard the
ting
of metal on metal as the ball struck the sack she'd attached to the huge priest. Then there was a
thump
, a sound so loud it reverberated in her breastbone and behind her eyes, and a wash of heat that frizzled her eyebrows.

Slowly, Winter unfolded herself and looked around. The giant was still standing, but his right arm and shoulder were simply gone, and ribs emerged from the bloody, smoking mass of his flesh like dead plants from winter soil. His black face mask had been shredded, as had the skin underneath, and both hung from his skull in torn rags.

And yet he wouldn't die.
Couldn't
die, maybe. As Winter watched, he turned,
torn muscles moving visibly in one leg where they'd been laid bare. One of his eyes was gone, the socket leaking vile, gory fluid, but the other stared down at her with a bright, mad glare. His remaining hand scrabbled weakly on the floor for something he could swing.

Winter's ears were still ringing, and the world tilted wildly around her, but she stepped forward and put her hand against the giant's chest. She felt the demon inside her surge at the proximity to one of its fellows, felt its boundless hunger, and she willed it down through her arm and into the Penitent Damned.
One more time.
The two demons met, and tangled about each other, but again the contest was a brief one. Infernivore, the demon that consumed its own kind, spread through the other demon like a drop of blood spreading into clear water, rapidly converting the other's substance into more of itself. When there was nothing left of the giant's demon, Infernivore surged back through the huge man's body and into Winter's hand, diving once more into the darkest recesses of her soul. The huge priest blinked once, and then his eye rolled back into his head and his massive form sprawled in the wreckage of the table and lay still.