Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy) (56 page)

Kyrus slowly and carefully drew the cutlass from its
scabbard, turning away from Shao, lest he feel threatened. With equal care, he
pressed the blade against his forearm, gently at first, and when he saw no sign
of duress from the ward, pressed firmly. When that showed no sign of affecting
the ward either, he pulled back the blade and swung it lightly into his arm.
Again the ward held.

Grandfather Shao’s eyes were wide; he rambled
something in Kheshi that Kyrus could not understand, but seemed rather shocked.
Kyrus just slid the blade back into its scabbard and pointed to the markings on
his arm, which Shao had just tattooed there. Shao just pointed to himself in
confusion, incredulous that he was being credited with the result he had just
seen.

Kyrus caught the old man’s eye straying to the drawing
on the table, where he had left it after confirming it was an accurate copy.
Kyrus could see gold reflected in those eyes, which he could understand, even
if Shao could not understand that without the knowledge of how to activate it,
the ward would be nothing but decoration.

To save Shao some trouble in his future, Kyrus reached
over and picked up the drawing. He raised his own eyebrows in imitation of
Shao’s own gesture, and smiled. Then he incinerated the drawing with a quick
jolt of aether, sending it to the floor and ceiling, half smoke, half ash,
letting go of it just in time to avoid burning himself badly.

“Sorry,” Kyrus said. “ I hope this will make up for
it.”

He pulled a trade bar from his pocket and handed it to
the old man. It was worth twenty times the price he had been asked.

“Thank you,” Kryus told Grandfather Shao as he stood
to leave, gathering his tunic and pulling it over his head.

“Tanks you,” Grandfather Shao replied, wide-eyed.

*
* * * * * * *

Kyrus had a swagger in his step as he wandered the
marketplace. He had just put Kadrin wards and Acardian—or, in this case,
Marker’s Point—tattooing together in a way that he felt was sure to protect him
from anything that he was likely to get stuck, slashed, or run through with in
the marketplace. He was feeling rightly proud of himself as he casually browsed
the wares offered from all across the Tellurak.

It actually reminded him a lot of the day that the
trading ships’ merchants had set up shop in Acardia. He wished Abbiley could
have been there to see all the bizarre sights of Marker’s Point’s much larger
version. It somehow seemed more authentic here, without the backdrop of Kyrus’s
hometown making everything seem safe and compartmentalized. Here, there was no
scrivener’s shop to go home to, just a pirate ship.

He wondered what Expert Davin would think of him,
signing on with Captain Zayne.
I hope he would be able to see the
extenuating circumstances. I mean, I was going to be executed, and Captain
Zayne and that big fellow, Tawmund, came and helped me break out of jail.

While every marketplace had food, drink, and various
cloth and baubles, Marker’s Point seemed to go well beyond those hawkers’
staples. One stall was set up with displays of wicker baskets, each containing
a deadly venomous snake. Blades were widely sold, mainly the small, easily concealed
type. Though all were considered contraband in Acardia, here there was
mindroot, red-leafed clover, ru-spider venom, kokoi grass, firebat fur, dami
juice, and lichberries, all sold openly. Kyrus could not even remember which
among them were deadly poisons and which were recreational hallucinogens.

Kyrus kept one eye to seeing if he could spot Stevin
again, but generally he just enjoyed browsing among the various transient
merchants who had set up shop for a week, a season, or longer, depending how quickly
they ran out of the wares they had brought from their homelands. He stopped at
the more permanent structures as well, mostly run by trading houses and
longstanding traders who had goods shipped to Marker’s Point just to resell
them. It was slow going for a while, until Kyrus learned that with enough
persistence, he could usually find someone who spoke enough Acardian to help
make a deal.

By the time the sun had gone down, Kyrus had cleared
quite a lot of space in his pockets. He had purchased an entire new set of
clothing that fit him properly. He wore a new set of low-cut boots that the
shopkeeper who he bought them from insisted would help him keep his footing on
the deck of a ship. He also found a shop that had a comb made from a seashell,
a material that Kyrus was rather indifferent to, just wanting to get a comb of
any sort, and purchased that as well. Somewhere along the way, he also bought a
rucksack, as his awkward bundle was beginning to worry him. At what he best
thought was dinnertime by the ache in his stomach, Kyrus tried eel-on-a-stick
for the first time—though possibly for the only time, as it was not terribly
tasty. An impulse purchase of salt, pepper, and something nice-smelling called
“raosh” rounded out his shopping trip.

As Kyrus wended his way back toward where the
Harbinger
was moored, he found a place with an unbroken view to the west to watch the
colors in the sky change. He had never seen the sunset over the water before;
Scar Harbor only saw sunrises. The pinks and reds were supposed to mean
something about the weather the next day, but Kyrus did not care about that. He
just stopped to enjoy the colors over the water, again wishing that he had
Abbiley to watch it with.

Night had fully fallen well before Kyrus got halfway
back to the ship. He continued along in a circular fashion, keeping the bay to
his right hand as best he could manage. There was nothing quite resembling a
main thoroughfare in the whole of the city, just an endless web of interwoven
streets and alleys. The roads were often lit by lanterns, but many could only
be followed by starlight. Even as late as it was, there were the noises of
taverns and brothels keeping the night from seeming either peaceful or eerie,
merely seedy.

Kyrus had learned a few tricks of getting bearings by
the night sky during Stalyart’s first few lessons on navigation, and he used
them when he was unsure whether he was still proceeding in the right direction.
At one desolate intersection, when he stopped to look up, he heard a voice that
he could only surmise was addressing him.

“You lost, kid?” he heard from the shadows of a nearby
building. The voice spoke Acardian like a native, but did not sound friendly
toward its countryman.

Kyrus thought better of answering and just made a
hasty decision about a direction and got moving.

“Hey now, no reason to be runnin’ off like that,”
another voice joined in from an alley he was passing by.

“This is our territory here, and at night, there’s a
fee for passin’ through it,” the first voice came again, and this time Kyrus
could make out a figure approaching him.

Correction, several figures
, Kyrus realized as the friends of the first voice
came out of hiding.

Kyrus realized he had let his aether-vision slip
during his time admiring the offerings in the marketplace, and he fixed his
vision back into its hybrid view. Instantly the night came alive in Kyrus’s
sight. While the roads and alleys were as much of a mystery as before, his
antagonists came into clear focus. There were eleven of them, which was a larger
number than Kyrus had hoped for, and it seemed that they had all the routes of
escape manned.

“I shall pay no fee. I will just be on my way,” Kyrus
said to no one in particular.

“I thinks ya will,” replied a new, third voice.
“What’s ya got in that sack? We be takin’ that fer starters.”

“I think not, now stand back.”

Kyrus pulled his cutlass from its scabbard. He gave a
quick glance at his shoulder and could see the runes clearly even through his
tunic, glowing with aether. Kyrus drew in a bit more aether and funneled it
into the ward, making sure it would have all that it could need in what was
clearly looking like it was going to become a fight.

“O, ho! This one has some fight in him,” the first
voice called out, now clearly visible even in the scant light. He was a
smallish man, his bald head reflecting the starlight, and he was dressed in
dark work clothes. He looked like a longshoremen.

Kyrus heard blades being drawn all around him. He spun
about to see that the ring of men around him was drawing closed.

“Now why not set that sword down and hand over the
sack and whatever else you got on ya,” the first man said, clearly not asking
despite the phrasing of his statement.

“No man has crossed blades with me and lived,” Kyrus
bluffed, trying to manage his best impression of Rashan Solaran. He could not
help but think that if the demon warlock had been present, these ruffians would
have already been washing the cobblestones with their lifeblood.

“Sure. I heard that one before,” the first man said,
obviously the leader of the group. “Bag him. We can sell him off to that Hurlan
merchant ship that’s short on oarsmen.”

The ring of ruffians responded at once, approaching
from all sides.

Kyrus was holding the weapon correctly, as Brannis had
learned to wield a sword, but again his brawnier counterpart’s training failed
him. The first time one of the ruffians tried to hack at him, he blocked the
blow full on, and his sword was smashed back into him. The second strike, from
behind him, he had no time to even attempt a parry and the ward absorbed the
blow. By the third strike, a third man had also closed to arm’s reach and
joined in as well. Kyrus managed to parry one blow to the side before the other
nicked him in the arm—stopped thankfully by his ward—and managed to recover in
time to slash back and catch one of his attackers across the chest.

All pretense of proper sword-fighting technique blew
away like a fog before a gale, and Kyrus lashed out at any exposed limb or body
he could find, trusting in the ward to deflect any blows and his aether-vision
to keep an eye behind him.

“What the…?”

“I thought I got him!”

“Hey, what gives?”

His opponents began to catch on that there was
something not right. Each blow they landed seemed ineffective. It was
understandable when a single cut did not fell a foe, especially one who might
have leathers on beneath his comically oversized tunic, but too many hits were
being landed for their prey to have shown no effect. Finally one enterprising
thug took a new tactic and, with a great swipe, smashed the cutlass from
Kyrus’s hand after parrying one of his less graceful thrusts.

Uh-oh!
Kyrus
thought as the sword fight became a wrestling match.

Men who were intent to take him captive and sell him
off as slave labor aboard a ship no longer needed swords to defend themselves,
and dropped them. Arms grabbed at Kyrus, some pulling away the rucksack that he
had carried over his shoulder the whole fight and others latching on to hold
him. Someone threw a sack over his head, and all but the aether went dark. With
the press of bodies all around him and none of them identifiable by their
Source, Kyrus was not sure who was the one who pressed a big, meaty hand over
his mouth and nose, but it instantly made it impossible to breath. As Kyrus was
already beginning to breathe hard from the fight, the effect was immediately
dire.

Kyrus panicked and drew all the aether he could.

A moment later, Kyrus was coughing and choking,
gasping in the smoke-filled air to try in vain to catch his breath. He hastily
grabbed the scorched rucksack and stumbled away, picking no direction in
particular. All around him, buildings burned, and the ring of buildings closest
to him had been reduced to fiery rubble. There were screams and panicked
shouting filling the night air as people raced to escape the flames, but not
from any of Kyrus’s attackers, who were now nothing but ash on the night
breeze.

*
* * * * * * *

Kyrus sat in his cabin, protected behind two wards
now, the door’s and his own. The smell of smoke was unmistakable about him,
even though the scorched rucksack had been thrown into the bay once he had
unpacked its contents; the smell had gotten into his hair and clothing as he
had escaped the scene of destruction he had created.

He wondered what Davin would say if he had seen him
destroy a moderately sized chunk of a city. He wondered what Abbiley would
think of him if she knew that he had just killed not only eleven men who had
threatened his life—which she might easily forgive—but uncounted others who had
just happened to be too close by when it happened. Magic was so alien to their
view of the world that the fact of his magic use alone might easily cloud their
opinion of him. He then wondered what Iridan would think, or Rashan. He could
not help but wonder, despite his own and even Brannis’s better judgment, what
Juliana would think of him.

I worry that Abbiley and Davin would fear me. Iridan
and Rashan would probably applaud me. Juliana … she would make fun of my aim.

Kyrus was pulled from his musings by someone stopping
outside his door. He had not lapsed back into single vision again since the
incident with the thugs, so he could see the figure on the other side of his
door by its Source. There was a pause for a moment, then Kyrus heard a knocking
coming from the wall just next to the door.