The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,169

only half caught him.

He rolled, and rolled again—holy hells, he was fast!

In an instant, he was up on his feet, guarding his pained kidney, gasping, grunting.

He looked around, saw nothing. Maybe he didn’t realize she was invisible yet. He circled quickly, hands up in a guard, trying to get a view out the door, where he assumed his attacker was.

The unexpected motions of his guard broke the reaching tendrils of Teia’s solidifying paryl once again.

Chills shot down her back. She was good at fighting now. She was good at using paryl. She was getting good at using invisibility with the master cloak and even maintaining the fragile paryl cloud around it. But doing them all at the same time?

She was like a marksman also skilled at fencing and grappling, to whom someone had just handed two swords, a musket, and a brace of pistols and plopped her ten paces from a charging spearman. She had so many options to take down the threat, she was going to stand there with her hands full, choosing, until she got skewered.

Halfcock leapt, diving, rolling for the door.

She slashed with the knife she didn’t even realize she’d drawn. It caught something as he went past, but he popped to his feet. He swept the door closed with a bang, flipped the bar down across it with one hand, and grabbed a blade mounted above it in quick succession.

With the closing of the door, it was suddenly pitch-black inside the single-room house.

It wasn’t the boon it usually would be. Halfcock was a sub-red. Which meant—

Teia checked her paryl cloud, throwing back up the edges that had dissipated in the violence. She didn’t make a shell anymore. She’d gotten better than that. A shell was easier, but fragile; anything could break it, and when it went, she lost all the paryl inside it too.

With one eye dilated to paryl and one merely to sub-red, she could see Halfcock’s puzzlement. His eyes were dilated to sub-red, but he couldn’t see her.

But Halfcock wasn’t a thinker. He was already moving, circling, back against the wall, only out far enough to give his blade space. He spun his blade in an ascending flower.

Flowers looked impressive, but were terrible moves if you were actually fighting. Terrible, that is, unless you were fighting against someone you couldn’t see and you hoped to hit their body by simply covering as much space as possible with your blade in the least time possible.

Intentional or not, that blurring steel, white in her paryl vision, was also a perfect shield against her paryl attacks.

She circled opposite him, keeping low and quiet. He was bleeding from her earlier slash, warmth throbbing bright in the sub-red spectrum down his back. It didn’t look like enough to make him faint soon, though.

His jaw was tight. He was pretty sure that she was still in the room with him, but who could hide from sub-red?

Frustrated, he brought down a descending flower. Spinning a blade in a flower put his hands momentarily in predictable places, and Teia was ready. She grabbed hard for the nerves in his wrists.

The blade escaped from his enervated grip, but by terrible luck it flew right at Teia. It was twisting, sideways, impossible to judge exactly—she blocked with her own short blade, intercepting the blade, but the twisting hilt slapped around into her shoulder.

Harmless. Not even a cut. Flat of the blade.

It didn’t hurt her at all—but it destroyed the paryl cloud, and cost her a full precious second—and her paryl grip on his wrists.

Halfcock lost the blade and as his eyes naturally followed it, he saw heat bloom, the whisper of a figure.

He charged, instantly.

One moment Teia was disengaging from a flying blade, stepping aside, up onto the stuffed feather mattress she’d been avoiding, trying to recover her stance, and the next her entire view was blotted out by a charging warrior three times her size.

Her foot slipped, but she didn’t fall.

Luckier if she had.

She was crushed against the wall.

It drove the wind from her and smacked her neck against a wooden beam in the wall.

They dropped to the bed together. She had only mind to grope for her dagger. But it was gone.

Halfcock had driven his shoulder into her guts, but his face had met the wall with almost as much force.

She looked, hoping to see her dagger sticking out of him somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. She tried to roll free, but his hip was on top of her