Swords & Dark Magic - By Jonathan Strahan Page 0,104
for sure.
“What are you doing out?” Jave said.
“Going for Bamore. He can’t be taken by them, Jave.”
“I’m ready to slit his throat myself,” the tall captain said.
“No!” She stood, holding on to his arm and blinking away dizziness. More arrows flickered in, their energy expended in Blades’ robes. Blood soaked the street, filling the spaces between cobbles. The crowds had drawn back now, but further along the street, close to a fountain, she could still see a few curious onlookers. She knew what some people thought of the Blades, and she hated the smiles she saw.
“Is he still alive?” she asked, a tremor in her voice.
“My Blades have him surrounded,” Jave replied, nodding along the road. “I don’t think an errant arrow has killed him yet.”
“It can’t. And neither can your blade. Jave, I have a secret, and if I speak it to you, you’ll be only the second person to know.” She let go of his arm and leaned against the carriage.
“You!” Jave said, nodding at the two Blades who had been guarding her. “Help them protect the prisoner.” They left Jave and Jan Ray alone.
“Bamore is a sorcerer,” Jan Ray said. Jave smiled.
“A sorcerer? What, like magic?”
“Magic,” she said. She nodded at the quivering body parts strewn across the street, all that remained of those strange, raving Wreckers. One severed head seemed to tilt this way and that, and she saw the moist pinkness of its tongue licking its lips. “They’re his.”
“I’ve seen worse on bad slash,” he said.
“Really?”
Jave frowned, and she knew that he believed. Any other soldier would think me a fool, she thought.
“So let me kill him.”
“He has to die on the Wall!” she said. “Anything else—anything unseen—and he’ll become a martyr, and they’ll follow him as a god. There’s one chance to rid ourselves of him, and I’ve taken it.”
Someone shouted, a man charged from the shadows beneath a shop awning, and his sword met a Blade’s. He was a Wrecker, tattoos and heavy piercings giving him a threatening countenance, but he looked terrified. He seemed to be looking past the soldier as he fought, striving to see his master. The Blade gutted him in the street, stepping back to avoid getting more blood on his boots.
“They still have us pinned down,” Jave said hesitantly.
“Get him in the carriage with me.”
“Are you mad?”
“You dare to talk to a Hanharan priestess like that, soldier?” she asked softly. Jave nodded slowly, and something about his face changed. Did I just spoil something special? she wondered. She could not care.
“Bring the prisoner here!” Jave shouted. The Blades dragged Bamore’s rack a dozen steps to the carriage, skirting around bodies, using the fallen tusked swine as cover. Five archers providing covering fire all the way. Now that the hand-to-hand fighting had died down, the ongoing battle had taken on an almost peaceful air. Arrows whipped at the air, feet scraped on ground muddied with blood, and occasionally someone grunted when an arrow found home. From along the street some people started to cheer, but a Blade fired an arrow their way. Shapes shuffled away and hid.
“I mean it, Jave,” she whispered as she climbed steps into the carriage. “His life is more important than yours, and mine. If he’s killed here, his death will be denied. If they take him, he heals himself of those wounds and becomes a god. Our only hope to rid ourselves of him is public trial and crucifixion.” The carriage’s inside was stuffy, and light slanted across from several places where arrows had struck.
“Get him in,” Jave instructed. A Blade slashed Bamore’s bonds and two of them threw his loose body into the carriage.
Jan Ray pressed herself back into one corner. She saw Jave looking, and knew that he believed.
Then he shut the door and locked the sorcerer in there with her, and the tortured man said, “What have you done to me, bitch?”
He shouts and rages as she turns to leave the torture chamber. She sees him bringing his hands up, forming shapes, whispering strange words, coughing phrases she cannot understand, casting sigils into the floor that glare briefly before fading away. The shapes his hands make remain silhouetted on the wall for a moment, but then they too fade, shriveling to nothing when he had expected them to grow.
“What have you done to me, bitch?” he shouts. She’s surprised that he can even speak that loud; one of Trivner’s favorite tortures is fire ants down the throat.