Weapon of Vengeance (Weapon of Flesh Trilogy) (37 page)

Nothing but death.

Everyone dies
.  Strangely, the thought brought
Mya solace.  It didn’t matter if you were good, bad, pious, or irreverent.  In
the end, death took everyone. 

At least it won’t hurt
.  Her tattoos made sure of
that.  Mya looked down at her hands, the hands from which she had washed the
blood of her mother, and wondered about the afterlife.  Would their souls
meet?  Would she murder her mother again in hell?

Mya stared, helpless as the Grandmaster drew back
the dagger, Lad’s death glinting in the torchlight.

Yanking loose the laces of her dress, Mya prepared
herself to die.

T
he
gleaming kris thrust toward Lad’s throat, a killing strike that he could not
block.

He could, however, move.

To Lad’s hyper-accelerated senses, the knife moved
like syrup on a cold morning.  He twisted just enough to let the serpentine
blade pass harmlessly by.

The blademasters surrounding him tensed, but didn’t
intervene, awaiting their master’s commands.  Frustration contorted the
Grandmaster’s face, and he slashed again.

Again, Lad moved.

Without adjusting his stance, he bent away from the
stroke.  The wavy blade sliced through the air an inch from his eyes, so close
that Lad saw his reflection in the fine, layered steel.  He straightened and
regarded the Grandmaster’s flushed face.  Tynean Tsing wasn’t accustomed to
being so easily thwarted.  Lad couldn’t attack, but perhaps he could provoke a
reckless action or even a heart-attack; the emperor was not a young man.

 “I was made to kill, Grandmaster.”  Lad unfastened
the buttons of his jacket with provocatively slow ease.  “Not to stand like a
steer in a slaughterhouse.”

“You impudent…”  Spittle flecked the Grandmaster’s
lips and his hand quivered with rage.  Five swords hissed quietly from their
scabbards as the emperor’s blademasters prepared to kill at his word.

“Wait!”  Mya lurched forward, hands out and open,
her eyes wide with horror.  Shouldering her way through the cordon of
blademasters, she interposed herself between Lad and the Grandmaster.  “Please,
Grandmaster.  You needn’t kill him!  I can control him!”

What’s she doing
?  Lad’s mind spun.  He hadn’t
expected help from that quarter.  Ruled by fear, Mya always put her safety and
self-interest first. 
What is she plotting
?  Lad’s eyes narrowed in
suspicion.  She’d tricked him before.  He focused on the vulnerable spot at the
base of her skull. 
Never again
.

The Grandmaster waved her away.  “Not without a
contract, Mya.  He’s too dangerous.  Stand aside!”

Motion caught Lad’s eye.  Glancing down, he saw the
laces of Mya’s dress hanging loose.  She’d untied them. 
Why
? 
Mobility
? 
Was she preparing to fight with him? 
She has to know I can’t win, and Mya
never plays a game she can’t win
.

 “No!”  Mya’s tone shifted from pleading to
demanding.  “Don’t be
stupid
!”

Lad gaped. 
She’s provoking him
!  Could she
be planning some trick, some bluff? 
Can I trust her
?

The Grandmaster’s face flushed with rage.  “Do you
wish to die
with
him, Mya?” 

“If you’re foolish enough to waste such a perfect
weapon, then yes.  I’d rather die than be the slave of a sadistic
moron
!”

The dagger thrust came without warning, but still slow
to Lad’s perceptions.  Mya could have dodged the clumsy attack easily...but she
didn’t.

The kris slammed between the stays of Mya’s corset. 
Her agonized cry echoed through the room, but rang false in Lad’s ears.  Mya
felt no pain.  The Grandmaster jerked the blood-drenched knife free and stepped
back.

When her knees folded, dread pierced Lad to the
core. 
Did the blade pierce her heart
?
Was it poisoned
?

 “Mya!”  Lad caught her before she struck the
floor.  Her face was contorted in agony, her hands clutching the wound in her
belly.  Something wasn’t right. 
Why would she
—

The soft rip of cloth drew his gaze down.  She’d
torn her dress open at the bottom of her corset, and her bloody fingers pulled
two slim hilts from beneath the hard metal stays. 

She’s shamming
!  The Grandmaster didn’t know of
her runes.  Her ruse gave them a slim and transient advantage.

“You’re brilliant,” he whispered.

Her feigned cry trailed off pitifully, but her eyes
were clear as they met his.  “Flip me.”

Always thinking…lies within
feints within subterfuge
.

“Yes,” he whispered back, gripping her beneath the
arms. 
Two daggers
…
two targets.  Who
?  “Hoseph.”  The priest’s
magic was a deadly unknown.

Mya nodded minutely.

The Grandmaster backed away, the tread of his hard
shoes loud in Lad’s ears.  “Kill him.”

“Ready?” Lad asked Mya.

“Always.”

As the blademasters advanced, Lad flung Mya up in a
twisting flip.  Her voluminous dress fanned out like a crimson flower opening
to the sun, detracting attention from the short, slim blades that flew with
unerring accuracy.  One struck Hoseph in the upper chest, and the priest
staggered back.  Another plunged deep into a blademaster’s eye.  The man’s head
snapped back, his sword clattering to the floor as he fell dead.

Two more blades flew before Mya landed, but the
advantage of surprise had been spent.  Steel sang as one blademaster parried
the flying metal.  Another dodged so that Mya’s blade only scored a deep gash
in his cheek.  Bright red blood pulsed from the wound, but the swordsman seemed
not to notice.

Mya landed and drew two more blades, whirling to set
her shoulders firmly against Lad’s.  They assumed the opening position of the
dance of death, perfectly mirrored.  Her ploy had evened the odds slightly,
with one blademaster down and Hoseph struggling to remove the dagger from a
splintered rib.  But four blademasters remained; a deadly circle of steel.

“Kill them!” the Grandmaster shrieked.

With blinding speed and perfect coordination, the
blademasters struck.

Mya flung her last two daggers with little hope of a
lethal strike.  The flashing steel did force her opponents to parry and dodge,
however.  Mya used the opportunity to crouch and sweep a leg out from under one
of the swordsmen.

Lad’s foot whipped past her shoulder as he spun
high, striking Mya’s other opponent in the wrist hard enough to shatter bones. 
To balance his move, she spun low, tripping one of his opponents.  The man
turned the trip into a flip and slashed at her, his sword slicing frills from
her billowing petticoat.

Gods, they’re fast
!  Faster than any human she’d
ever fought.  Maybe they weren’t human.  Maybe they were monsters like her. 
What gifts might Koss Godslayer bequeath to his warrior monks?

As her spin brought her back around, Mya’s first
opponent lunged again, not at her, but at Lad’s back.  Mya parried the strike
to Lad’s spine with the flat of her hand and lashed out with a foot.  The hard
heel of her shoe struck the joint of the blademaster’s knee with a satisfying
crunch.  The man went down, splinters of bone protruding from his torn
trousers.  Before she could finish him, however, his companion slashed.

With a broken wrist
?  Mya dodged the surprising
attack an instant too late, and the tip of the blade snicked through three
corset stays.  Warm blood flooded down her belly, and for once she blessed the
restricting garment; it had saved her life by preventing her viscera from
spilling out.  Her wrappings slithered together over the wound even before the
flesh healed.

Two wounds already, and the
fight’s just beginning
. 
If she lost too much blood, she would weaken and slow.  Against these
opponents, that would be deadly.

Wood and metal crashed behind her, and she hoped
that Lad fared well.  With her would-be eviscerator slashing at her throat, she
didn’t have time to look.  Mya snapped her head back, and the blade passed
within a finger’s breadth of her nose.  Lashing out with a twisting double
kick, her first snapped her opponent’s elbow like a chicken wing, but her
second, intended for his head, missed entirely.  The man spun impossibly fast,
ignoring his broken arm as he shifted his sword for a reverse thrust.

No pain
… 
Not human
…

The blademaster with the broken leg was up—the
protruding bone vanishing back into the recently pulped flesh as he slashed.

We’re in trouble
…  Their healing would make
disabling strikes useless. 
Lethal strikes
…

As two blades came at her, Mya knew that she
couldn’t block both.  Realization struck like lightning as she assessed the
angles.  If she dodged either one, Lad would take a sword in the back.  There
was no choice to make.

Steel grated against steel as the reverse-thrust
pierced Mya’s corset, plunging through her flesh and emerging from her back. 
No
pain
…  Gritting her teeth against the madness of allowing herself to be
impaled, Mya clapped one hand over the sword’s guard to prevent the blademaster
from twisting it and severing her spine.  A chop to his wrist with her free
hand broke his grip, and a whirling kick deflected the other blade before it
could cleave her skull.

As Mya pirouetted, she drew the blade from her
viscera, cold steel slipping through her organs.  Lad was still unmarked.  He
slapped aside thrusts and slashes, keeping his two opponents at bay with
flashing kicks.  His jacket was slashed, but she saw no blood.

Thank the gods
.

Mya completed her spin, slashing out with her stolen
sword to deflect the predicted attack from the blademaster with the bloody
knee.  Steel rang, and the stroke passed harmlessly aside.  Her other opponent,
now swordless, had drawn two daggers, his broken arm also miraculously healed. 
He raised one dagger to deflect the arc of her slash, while thrusting the other
low, inhumanly fast.  Fortunately, Mya wasn’t merely human.  Altering the sweep
of her blade, she intersected the man’s wrist.  Hand and dagger tumbled away in
a spray of blood.   She deliberately took the dagger thrust, though dangerously
close to her heart—
Not used to fighting monsters, are you
?—and sliced
her sword back across his neck.  With one hand gone and the other trapped by
his own thrust, he couldn’t parry.

The blademaster’s head tumbled away in a crimson
fountain.

Heal that
! she thought, wrenching the
dagger from her chest to deflect yet another sword thrust. 
Three to go
! 
A sudden thought occurred to her; something didn’t add up.

Hoseph
…

Mya twisted to catch a glimpse of the priest. He was
still on his feet. 
Maybe he healed
…  With his crimson robes, she
couldn’t see any blood, but something silver glinted in his hand.  She flipped
her dagger, and cocked back her hand to throw.

Blackness pulsed through the room, dimming Mya’s
vision and gripping her heart in a vice of despair.  Every shred of shame,
every regret and horror she’d ever known, vomited forth in a flood of
self-loathing.  An anguished cry escaped her lips, and she missed a parry. 
Steel sliced through silk, flesh, and bone, like shears cutting fine linen. 
Weakness and despair folded her knees as a crimson fountain spouted from her
breast.

Mya watched helplessly as the keen edge of a sword
descended toward her face.