slid in, right into his windpipe. Cast a spell now, bastard. The magician’s eyes flew wide and one hand scrabbled at his neck, at the blade. The other had hold of… Oh shit.
Vocho knew less than bugger all about magicians, but even he knew the scrap of paper with bloody shifting patterns on it wasn’t good. A stored spell, that was all it could be, blood marking the paper like written death. There were tales of them that Vocho had never believed, but he did now. A spell to do what? He’d heard of some men vaporised…
He knew enough to get the fuck out of the way. He whipped his sword free of the man’s neck in a gurgle of breath and blood and dived out of a window head first, rolling as he landed, screaming when the burning on his back caught on his shirt. Straight into the mud, but even he didn’t care about getting mud on his nice coat now.
When nothing obvious happened, no explosions and he was still all in one piece, he dared a look up. The carriage door flapped open. Inside, the only sign of the mage was blood on the seat and side of the carriage and a now burned and shrivelled piece of paper fluttering to the floor.
A lucky escape. You’re sitting in the mud, looking like an idiot while Kacha gets all the glory again. He shoved himself up and took stock. He’d ended up on the other side of the carriage from where Kacha and Egimont were fighting. Hadn’t she finished him off by now? When he thought on it, he realised how little time had elapsed from getting into the carriage and his rather ignoble exit.
He wriggled his shoulders – the burning had subsided as suddenly as it started – and made his way around the carriage to watch the show, maybe butt in and finish the job in case Kacha was having second thoughts. Flashy was still flat out in the mud, Berie either out cold next to him or pretending to be. Vocho rather thought the latter, but he wasn’t fighting so that was all right.
Kacha had Egimont on the back foot – quicker even than Vocho when she was at her best, and against Egimont she would make damn sure she was at her best.
“Can we hurry up?” Vocho called. “I’m freezing, soaked and pissed off, and the rest are all dealt with. Stop playing with him and get on with it.”
Egimont was good, but he was never going to be good enough to beat Kacha, who could thrash every man and woman in the duelling guild except Vocho. And it was that “except” that made her so deadly – she was always trying to up her game so she could beat him. Not to mention they weren’t in the guild any more so no guild rules.
A wink from Kacha above her mask, a thrust that would have killed a lesser duellist. Egimont was quick though, Vocho had to give him that. He slipped in the mud as he parried, recovered like a guildsman, used the movement to come up under Kacha’s guard in a classic action in the Ruffelo style that caught her off guard and made Vocho wonder whether she was going easy on him, then startled them both by not going for the thrust. He hesitated just a fraction, staring at Kacha like he’d never see her again, like all he wanted to see was her.
“Please, Kass.”
This was not good. Nor was the way Kacha hesitated at that “please”, the way she shook her head as though trying to shake some traitorous notion out of it. She’d lost her head over Petri bloody Egimont once before and got burned. Vocho wasn’t going to let it happen again.
“Kass, we need to finish this. Right now.”
“Yes,” she said slowly. “Yes, we do.”
With that, she spun behind Eggy, so quick he hadn’t a hope. Took him out with a well practised wallop to the base of the neck that rolled his eyes up into his head before her other arm came up between his legs with an audible whump, a move that the gallant Ruffelo probably never even considered. Vocho caught Eggy before he fell into the mud with the rest – he’d some nice clothes on him, no sense ruining them.
Kacha blew out a ragged breath, wiped a hand across what he could see of her face and picked up the gun. “Bloody things. Never