simply could not have possessed and then taking cover behind…
Guns roared; geysers of splinter or dust erupted where lead balls flatted against wood and stone…
Voices shouted behind the smoke, the words tumbling over and wrestling with one another, and Shins understood none of it, wasn't entirely sure what it was…
Blood seeped across the stone floor from uncounted open wounds, and Shins watched it, fascinated by every ripple, struggling to recall why it was important…
Another detonation, louder than any flintlock, and the chamber filled with smoke, smoke of briny scent and peculiar violet hue.
That's not right. The smoke here's supposed to be gray, yes? To match the Shrouded Lord's…shroud…
More yelling, more gunfire, a touch of prayer…
Prayer?
She was sure she knew what was happening, if she could just have a moment to tell herself, to think, to—
“I've got her!” Hands closed around Shins's upper arms, hauling her upright. She decided, somewhat dreamily, that it was a good thing she didn't know if she ought to fight or not, since she really couldn't, anyway.
“Who've y'got?” she mumbled, then cried out as an arm brushed against one of the open welts across her back.
An indrawn hiss sounded from the figure holding her upright. “Good gods, Widdershins. What did they do to you?”
“Bad things,” she replied with a fervent nod, before bursting into tears.
The other voice quivered, as though on the verge of joining her. “Come, dear lady. Let's get you out of here.” Then, in a much louder shout, “Fall back! The smoke's not going to impede the bitch for long!”
“The hell do you think we're doing?!” someone else called out, followed by an abortive shriek and a sudden, sickeningly wet thump.
“You're right,” Lisette growled through the obscuring haze, from precisely where the prior call had come. “It won't.”
“It doesn't have to,” the man—definitely a man, she'd decided—holding Shins muttered. She felt herself being half-guided, half-dragged, from the room. More than once she stumbled…No. No, she was essentially in a single long stumble in which she occasionally managed a halfway steady step. Each time, her supporter's grip tightened or shifted to catch her, and each time she winced or gasped or wailed in agony.
“For the fucking gods’ sake, someone help me with her!”
Someone slipped beneath her other arm, balancing her between the two of them, and their pace increased dramatically. Every step, every jostle, every moment was a new blade of anguish, but Widdershins gritted her teeth and let herself be carried along, slowly reawakening.
The hall was choked with smoke, but not nearly so badly as the chamber had been. Olgun's touch, shaky but as comforting as ever, hummed around the edges of her wounds, worked at shoveling the thickest of the cobwebs from her mind. And finally, she began to more clearly make out what was happening around her.
The man on her left, the one who'd only just appeared, she didn't know, though the general posture and shabby upkeep said “Down-and-out thief” to her. But the other, shorter one…
Well, though he currently lacked his accustomed ostentatious hat with even more ostentatious feather—which he would no doubt claim he had plucked from the tail of a phoenix—she could not possibly have failed to recognize the ornate mustache or deep-blue eyes, to say nothing of the bright-blue and white and yellow and violet of the tunic and half-cape.
“Renard?!”
Her old Finders’ Guild mentor offered a genuine smile between harsh gasps for breath. “As ever and always at your service, Lady Widdershins.”
Had her arm not already been around his shoulders, and were she not currently being dragged at a near running pace through the Guild's chapel, she could have hugged him.
Wait. The chapel?! Why the—
But Shins received her answer before she could ask. Several more of who she presumed were Renard's people waited therein, standing perhaps a third of the way around the chamber from the idol of the Shrouded God—around a gaping trapdoor that Widdershins had never known existed!
“Bwuh?” she inquired.
“I know every secret of this place,” Renard said as he gestured for the others to clear a path. “This was the nearest hidden ingress to where I figured you would be. Well, the nearest one I trusted, now that Lisette knows of the concealed passage from the Shrouded Lord's chamber itself.”
“Let us,” a rather more imperious voice insisted, “save the questions and answers until we're clear. If that's all right by all of you?”
Shins craned her neck, wincing at the pain. Almost beside them was a dark-haired, dark-skinned, darkly-clad woman, of sharp and almost-but-not-quite regal