Less talking, more moving. We aren’t out of this yet.”
Van Gast leaned into her, watched the careful set of her face. Good and dead. That’s what she’d come for, not money or to test Van Gast or any of it. Revenge. Like the sea, like Forn the merciless. You didn’t play lightly with Josie, not if you wanted to live. Good job he didn’t want to play lightly then.
A rope fluttered down beside them, Skrymir at the top of it. Josie stepped over Rillen’s prone body and got Van Gast’s hands on the rope. His left caught at it all right, but the right, black and burning with pain, wouldn’t seem to work properly.
“Get a move on, Josie,” Skrymir called. “He’s right behind— Shit.”
Skrymir yanked on the rope and pulled Van Gast a yard up the wall. He swung there a heartbeat, still not sure exactly what had happened, or where the danger was. He saw now—Rillen, his face a study in bloody vengeance with a bullet score dug deep across his cheek and up into his hair, the rest of his face peppered with burn marks and a look of a hunting shark that’s scented blood. No gun, but a sword that was sharp enough.
“Josie, get on.” Van Gast held out his blackened arm.
She hesitated, casting a blood-filled look at Rillen. Damn woman. Once, just once it’d be nice if she did as he asked… “Josie, come on.”
He gave her no choice, grabbed her arm and yanked her, protesting, up with him. Her weight made his arm shriek, made him clench his teeth against a strangled scream, but she was there. He tried a weak grin. “Got something in my breeches for you.”
“Andor Van Gast—”
“Something better, right now. Hold the rope, I need my spare hand.”
Skrymir hauled on the rope again, and his grunt of effort echoed down to them. It was astounding enough he managed to pull them both, but then he was built like a bull.
Rillen reached the bottom of the rope, grabbed it and added his weight. Even Skrymir couldn’t manage that, and they heard his salty cursing as the rope burned through his hands and dropped them back into Rillen’s reach.
Josie reached for her gun, seemed to remember it was empty and then threw it. “I should have known it would take more than one shot to take that bastard down. Even a bullet in the face hasn’t stopped him.”
Van Gast lashed out with a boot. The blow missed, but it was enough to get Rillen to let go of the rope. Van Gast’s hand found what it was looking for and closed on them, the grip not tight, but tight enough.
“Last throw of the bones, Rillen. Want to take a bet?”
One of the first things anyone should learn about Van Gast was not to play him at bones. He dropped them at Rillen’s feet. Nine kraken winked up at them. Dead Man’s Hand—unbeatable, and so unlikely to be rolled that if it happened on your first throw, you had to be cheating and died pretty quick. Van Gast shut his eyes, yelled “Now, pull now!” and hoped that the man who’d given him the bones hadn’t been lying. He’d been a rack, so who knew?
Skrymir managed to get them a few feet higher—and then the blast shoved them into the wall, heat washed over them and the square fell silent.
Not for long. Smoke eddied in a fresh wind from the delta, left coughing and choking people behind, and not a few disgruntled guards. Most of who were now pointing their pistols this way.
Skrymir’s grunts echoed down the wall as he hauled them up and over in a sweating, bleeding mess onto the roof. Van Gast flopped on his back, trying to catch his breath and ignore the throb of his arm. He risked a glance at it—all black, none of his own nut-brown color anywhere until it reached his shoulder, where purple-black lines snaked across his chest toward his heart. Not growing now at least, there was that, but an agony he’d never known. Red hot pokers seemed to be jabbing at him, twisting under his skin. Real red hot pokers might even be preferable.
Skrymir’s voice sounded faint in his ears. “Josie, why did you shoot Van?”
Van Gast sat bolt upright, clamped down on the scream that wanted to break free and panted out his words. “You shot me? That’s a very good question.”
“Not now,” Josie said from her vantage at the edge of