A Torch Against the Night (An Ember in the Ashes #2) - Sabaa Tahir Page 0,8

she darts around a tree and out of range of the knives I send hurtling back at her.

“If you think I need an army to destroy you, boy,” she says, “you are mistaken.”

She flicks opens the neck of her uniform, and I grimace at the sight of the living metal shirt beneath, impenetrable to edged weapons.

Hel’s shirt.

“I took it from Helene Aquilla.” The Commandant draws scims and engages my assault with graceful ease. “Before I gave her to a Black Guard for interrogation.”

“She doesn’t know anything.” I dodge my mother’s blows while she dances around me. Get her on the defensive. Then a quick blow to her head to knock her out. Steal the horse. Run.

A bizarre noise comes from the Commandant as our scims clash, their strange music filling the silence of the depot. After a moment, I realize it is a laugh.

I’ve never heard my mother laugh. Never.

“I knew you’d come here.” She flies at me with her scims, and I drop beneath her, feeling the wind of her blades centimeters from my face. “You’d have considered escaping through a city gate. Then the tunnels, the river, the docks. In the end, they were all too troublesome, especially with your little friend tagging along. You remembered this place and assumed I wouldn’t know about it. Stupid.

“She’s here, you know.” The Commandant hisses in irritation when I block her attack and nick her on the arm. “The Scholar slave. Lurking in the building. Watching.” The Commandant snorts and raises her voice. “Tenaciously clinging to life like the roach that you are. The Augurs saved you, I presume? I should have crushed you more thoroughly.”

Hide, Laia! I scream it in my head, but don’t call out, lest she find one of my mother’s stars embedded in her chest.

The storage building is at the Commandant’s back now. She pants lightly, and murder glimmers in her eyes. She wants this finished.

The Commandant feints with her knife, but when I block, she swipes my feet out from under me, and her blade comes down. I roll away, narrowly avoiding death by impalement, but two more throwing stars whistle toward me, and though I deflect one, the other cuts into my bicep.

Gold skin flashes in the gloom behind my mother. No, Laia. Stay away.

My mother drops her scims and draws two daggers, determined to finish me. She vaults toward me with full force, using darting strokes to wound me so that I won’t notice until I’m breathing my last.

I deflect her too slowly. A blade bites into my shoulder, and I rear back, but not fast enough to avoid a vicious kick to my face that drops me to my knees. Suddenly, there are two Commandants and four blades. You’re dead, Elias. Gasps echo in my head—my own breaths, shallow and pained. I hear her cold chuckle, like rocks breaking glass. She comes in for the kill. It is only Blackcliff’s training, her training, that allows me to instinctively lift my scim and block her. But my strength is gone. She knocks my scims from my hands, one by one.

From the corner of my eye, I spot Laia approaching, dagger in hand. Stop, damn it. She’ll kill you in a second.

But then I blink, and Laia is gone. I think I must have imagined her—that the kick has rattled my mind, but Laia appears again, sand flying from her hand and into my mother’s eyes. The Commandant jerks her head away, and I scramble for my scims in the dirt. I bring one up as my mother meets my eyes.

I expect her gauntleted wrist to come up and block the sword. I expect to die bathed in her gloating triumph.

Instead, her eyes flash with an emotion I cannot identify.

Then the scim hits her temple with a blow that will have her sleeping for at least an hour. She drops to the ground like a sack of flour.

Rage and confusion grip me as Laia and I stare down at her. What crime has my mother not committed? She has whipped, killed, tortured, enslaved. Now she lies before us, helpless. It would be so easy to kill her. The Mask within urges me to do it. Don’t falter now, fool. You’ll regret it.

The thought repulses me. Not my own mother, not like this, no matter what kind of monster she is.

I see a flash of movement. A figure skulks in the shadows of the depot. A soldier? Perhaps—but one too cowardly to come out and fight.