The Seven Markets (27 page)

“I think my Captain has warned me against women and cards, in that order.”

Cutter ignored the joke. “The taller one. She is familiar to me, but I cannot place her. Something about her face. Her eyes.”

They watched in silence as the two women walked through the common room. Cutter waited for a sign that they’d come seeking the Prince, but neither of them spared him the slightest glance. They actually seemed to avoid looking in his direction, a feat which Cutter would have said was impossible given the racket the Prince’s table was making.

“Wait,” he said. A man entered the inn and stood in the doorway, looking over the assembled travelers, appraising the room. Cutter recognized him at once—and though it could not be possible, he knew who the tall woman was, as well.

“Quickly, with me.”

He set off across the common room, horrified to watch the Prince spotting the two women and summoning them over. The blond one hung back, letting her friend slide into the suddenly empty chair beside the Prince. The smile on her face filled Cutter’s heart with fear; there was not one atom of joy to be found there.

“Hurry. By the gods, hurry.”

The Prince pulled the tall woman’s chair so that it was touching his, and whispered in her ear. Cutter could only imagine what the daft fool was saying. He was too far away, too far away by half.

She laughed. The tall woman with the long braid laughed. She took the Prince’s hand, looked into his eyes, and leaned forward as if to kiss him. Her friend drew back, the false smile vanishing from her face. Cutter was only steps away, but he would never make it in time.

“Sire!”

The Prince looked up as Ellie MacReady dropped a gold necklace over his head. As his eyes met Cutter’s, there was a brilliant flash and a snap of collapsing air. The Prince’s eyes burned red with hungry fire. His spun-gold hair turned to ash as his flawless skin became brown and scabrous. Only the top of his head could be seen as he sank beneath the edge of the table. And his voice, when he cried out for help, had lost its sonorous lilt and now resembled the wheezing of an ancient bellows over a blacksmith’s flame.

“Cutter! Cutter, help me!”

Ellie dove away, scampering for cover before he could catch her. She vanished into the fleeing crowd along with her companion, their escape covered by the terror of people who remembered the last time the Market had come to the human lands.

Fools. What fools we were to come.

The Prince’s chair was overturned, spilling him onto the floor. Cutter threw a table aside with no concern for where it might land. He had to find the Prince. His King demanded it. At all costs he must protect the Prince.

Felwyn found him cowering in the kitchen, crouching in the space beneath one of the sinks. The Prince had wrapped himself in a filthy chef’s apron and refused to come out for fear of being seen.

“Your highness,” Cutter said, kneeling to meet the burning embers of his eyes. “That time is past. Now our paramount concern is ensuring your safety.”

“I will not go out. I will not be seen like this.”

The inn rocked with a series of thunderclap explosions. Screams sounded from outside. What use was the Prince’s vanity when people were dying nearby? His King reminded the bodyguard of his duty; to safeguard not only the boy’s safety but the integrity of the throne itself.

“Give me your cloak.”

Felwyn removed his cloak and handed it over at once. Together, they were able to fashion a makeshift sling and fasten it to Cutter’s chest. In his true form, the Prince could hide within the folds of his bodyguard’s cloak. They could make their escape without any more people seeing him this day.

“It will work, your highness, on my honor. But we dare not delay. Do you hear the fighting, the cries of the wounded? They are not so far away now. And this is the first place they will come looking for you.”

How much of his charge’s bravado was tied up in the glamour his father had cast? How much of his stubbornness was a result of the power he wielded but had never earned? Cutter resolved himself to clout the little pain and force him into the sling. He’d save the damned brat whether he wanted to be saved or not.

“I cannot,” the Prince said. “They will see me.”

Felwyn laid a hand on Cutter’s shoulder. “I hear them coming, sir.”

Cutter thought of his King and his course was clear. “Sire,” he said, drawing his dagger and flipping it so the butt protruded from his hand. Small as the Prince was, it took the barest of love taps to chase his consciousness away.

“Help me secure him. Hurry.”

The Prince weighed no more than a child. Hanging from the gold chain around his neck was a battered stone of purest black. Cutter attempted to remove the necklace, but try as he might, it would not budge. He gave up trying, pulling his own cloak closed over the unconscious Prince. If he was careful, and kept his cloak closed, no one would give them a second look. No one who wasn’t already looking for them, that was.

The common room was a shambles. Most of the south wall had fallen in. Flames licked the rubble as if tasting it for flavor, deciding whether to take their supper here or search for better fare. Cutter saw three men moving among the broken tables and unconscious bodies. They were tall, much taller than the humans he’d seen before. They moved mechanically, more clumsily then humans. At first he thought they might be constructs, golems cast not of clay but of living iron. When they spoke, Cutter understood he was seeing men in armor.

But what armor!

Their arms and legs were jointed in the wrong places. Their heads did not match their bodies in proportion. When the light caught the armor’s skin it glinted off, shimmering, reminding him of mirages he’d seen out on the open desert. Some kind of primitive glamour? He decided he’d save one of the men and ask him.

“Can you manage the third on your own?”

“Easily,” Felwyn said with a confidence Cutter did not recognize. He sounded older somehow. The boy drew his sword and stood ready by his side.

“Very well. Wait until he is focused on me.”

Cutter burst into the room at a sprint, head down, sword drawn. The men were moving in an alternating formation, but the one in the middle seemed to have less experience manipulating his armor. He stumbled as Cutter appeared, nearly losing his balance as he overcompensated, bracing himself for the attack.

Cutter swept past the lead man without touching him, confident of the confusion this would create. He took off the second man’s leg at the knee with a swift, low arc of his sword, following it with three quick strikes of his dagger. The man was dead before he hit the ground, leaving Cutter to spin in place and attack the lead man even as Felwyn dragged the final attacker down.

“Ooh, look who’s got a shiny swooord,” the second man said. He was still standing, his leg intact; his armor had not a scratch on it. “Burt, did you bring your swooord?”

“Brought this,” the first man said, his features visible through his armor’s skin. Cutter froze, all his years of training and hard experience leaving him. How could he fight a foe he could not wound?

“Cutter, get down!”

Felwyn dove at Cutter, tackling his legs and dragging him to the ground an instant before their weapons fired. Cutter heard a faint whistle overhead, buzzing bees hurrying from flower to flower. Thin trails of golden smoke hung in the air, tracing the path of their projectiles. More lines of gold quickly followed, bearing down on him and the Prince where they lay, slicing through chunks of ceiling and furniture as if they were made of nothing more substantial than air. Cutter rolled in place, pushed up to his knees, and bolted for a gaping hole in the south wall. He couldn’t see what waited beyond the dust and rubble, but it had to be safer than this.

Felwyn was at his back, shielding Cutter’s escape with his own body. They tumbled together out onto the street, slamming into the far wall and rebounding without losing a step. A low buzzing sound drew Cutter’s attention back the way they’d come. He saw the three men in their shimmering armor struggling to negotiate the fallen debris. Their difficulty did not prevent them from taking potshots at their fleeing prey.

What was the range of their weapons? What sort of projectiles were they firing? Cutter felt a burning pain in his shoulder, dodged around a corner, and paused to examine the wound. No barb, no arrow, nothing at all. It was only a tight, burning hole, smoldering like damp kindling.

“Sir?”

“Are you hit?”

“Twice, I think. What
is
this, sir? It burns!”

Cutter licked his fingers and dabbed at the wound. The pain flared for a second before beginning to ease. “It’s iron, no mistaking it.”

Felwyn hissed, his lips curling back in disgust.

The alley dead-ended, opening at its far end onto the high street. Cutter led them out, pausing just before the corner to gain the lay of the land.

The street was packed with combat. Shivari guards poured in from all other regions of the Market with their weapons high, battle cries on their dark lips. Some had taken the time to smear their bodies with rudimentary warpaint. Others had torn away their guards’ uniforms and were fighting with bare chests and legs. They fell upon the human soldiers like berserker warriors of old, a raging storm pounding the shoreline, crushing all in its path.

“Out there. Go.” Cutter pulled the boy out into the fray. The line of Shivari warriors surged forward and Cutter used them as cover, ducking and dodging to avoid being hit by the humans’ weapons. It went against his nature, leaving others to fight while he fled, but it was his King’s will. The Prince had to be protected. Above all other considerations, the Prince had to be protected.

The ground shook and Cutter beheld a sight from time out of memory. The giants, visitors to the Market in their man-size glamours, exploded onto the scene of the battle. He counted a dozen at least, towering creatures with craggy fists the size of houses. He yelled for Felwyn and dove out of the way, narrowly missing being squashed under the bare heel of a massive foot. He craned his neck and watched as the giant pulled its leg back and punted a handful of soldiers into the side of a building.

And the giants were only the beginning.

They came in groups and they came alone, all the creatures of the Market. Glamours cast aside, they sang the glorious song of battle. Red-skinned women hurled balls of roiling flame across the battlefield; a legion of fearsome dwarves, armored for battle, charged with their heads down and their axes high; a lithe black cat, big enough to ride, its eyes shot through with green and blue, tore at the humans’ armor, its jaws stained with blood and flesh; and more, so much more. Things he had never imagined and things he’d seen so long ago he’d convinced himself they were not real, could not be real. Legends and dreams fighting the invading humans shoulder to shoulder and back to back.

Where the subtlety of the blade had failed him, the brute force of these assembled travelers was winning the day. The humans’ armor could withstand his sword’s edge, but had no defense against a giant’s stomping foot or a bear’s bashing paws. They began giving up ground, mere steps at first. Then he saw scattered groups of two and three human soldiers turning tail and running for their lives.

In short order, the street was theirs. The Market’s creatures stood over many a corpse, the more bestial taking the time to pick meat and flesh from bones. Cutter was reminded of a bit of advice his father had given him the day he’d left to fight in the first royals’ wars;
a fighting man eats when he can, battle or no.

The giants roared in triumph, shaking their blood-stained fists in celebration. He watched one of them squat down to sit on the remains of a building. Its roof groaned and its remaining windows popped, but the building bore its weight well enough.

A general cheer went up as the last of the humans fled.

“That was too easy,” Felwyn said.

“Entirely too easy. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

Cutter sheathed his sword, indicating for Felwyn to do the same. Their blades were of no use, but perhaps there were arms to be scavenged from the bodies of the fallen.

The boy hefted a great two-handed warhammer in his hands. It looked too large for him to hold, but as Cutter watched, he swung it in a great, controlled arc before him.

“When this is over, son, we’re going to have a talk about who you are and where you’re from. You’re no duke’s son.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Cutter’s favored weapon had always been the quick, deadly blade, but the humans’ armor resisted it. Blunt weapons—maces, morning stars, flails and the like—they lacked the clever grace of the blade. Still, as a carpenter uses the proper tools for the job, so too the warrior. He selected a spiked one-handed mace and a broad oval shield from the ground, tested their weight, and decided they would prove sufficient to the task at hand: the war which had come to the Market.

There were only two options: drive the humans out or escape with the Prince. The humans had been bested, but Cutter had no doubt they would return with a fresh bag of tricks. Humans were crafty, devious creatures, and if he’d learned one thing in all his dealings with them, it was that they relented only upon pain of death. There had been entirely too many of them still breathing when the battle ended. They would be back.

“We must make for the portal. It is our only escape.”

“You wish to flee, sir?”

“I
must
flee. My King demands I protect his son.”

Felwyn pointed with his new warhammer, showing Cutter the impromptu army which had grown around them. Even with the fighting stopped, more travelers had come, their glamours stripped away. “Your King would demand you fight for his Market. Save the Market and you save the Prince as well.”

“No. My course is clear.”

“Sir, begging your pardon, but your course is hardly clear. Look at this rabble. If the humans return, who will lead them? Who will command them? There is no one here to do it but you, and they would follow the legendary Captain Cutter into the jaws of hell itself.”

“I’ve been twice already, son. I have no desire to return.”