Crooked Kingdom (The Six of Crows Duology #2) - Leigh Bardugo Page 0,115

you afraid, Wraith?” Inej felt Dunyasha’s knife shred through her sleeve. The sting of the blade was like a burning lash. Not too deep , she told herself. Unless of course the blade was poisoned. “I think you are. You cannot fear death and be its true emissary.”

Was the girl mad? Or just chatty? Inej bobbed backward, moving in a circle around the silo’s roof.

“I was born without fear,” Dunyasha continued with a happy chuckle. “My parents thought I would drown because I crawled into the sea as a baby, laughing.”

“Perhaps they worried you would talk yourself to death.”

Her opponent drove forward with new intensity, and Inej wondered if the girl had only been toying with her in that first aggressive flurry, feeling for her strengths and weaknesses before she seized the advantage. They exchanged thrusts, but Dunyasha was fresh. Inej could feel every ache and injury and trial of the last month in her body—the knife wound that had almost killed her, the trip up the incinerator, the days she’d spent bound in captivity.

“I confess to disappointment,” Dunyasha said as her feet skipped nimbly over the silo’s roof. “I had hoped you might prove a challenge. But what do I find? A smudge of a Suli acrobat who fights like a common street thug.”

It was true. Inej had learned her technique from boys like Kaz and Jesper in the alleys and crooked streets of Ketterdam. Dunyasha didn’t have just one mode of attack. She bent like a reed when required, stalked forward like a prowling cat, retreated like smoke. She had no single style that Inej could grasp or predict.

She’s better than me. The knowledge had the taste of rot, as if Inej had bitten into a tempting fruit and found it foul. It wasn’t just the difference in their training. Inej had learned to fight because she had to if she wanted to survive. She’d wept the night she’d made her first kill. This girl was enjoying herself.

But Ketterdam had taught Inej well. If you couldn’t beat the odds, you changed the game. Inej waited for her opponent to lunge, then leapt past her onto the wire stretched between the silos, moving recklessly across it. The wind reached out for her, eager now, sensing opportunity. She considered using the balance pole, but she wanted her hands free.

She felt the wire wobble. Impossible. But when she looked back over her shoulder, Dunyasha had followed her out onto the high wire. She was grinning, her white skin glowing as if she’d swallowed the moon.

Dunyasha’s hand shot out and Inej gasped as something sharp lodged in her calf. She bent backward, taking the wire in her hands, and flipped her stance so that she was facing her opponent. The girl’s wrist snapped out again. Inej felt another bright stab of pain, and when she looked down, she saw a spiked metal star protruding from her thigh.

From somewhere below, she heard shouting, the sounds of a fight. Nina. Who or what had Jan Van Eck sent after her? But she could not afford distraction, not on the wire, not faced with this creature.

“I hear you whored for the Peacock,” Dunyasha said as she flung another spiked star at Inej, and another. Inej avoided both, but took the next in the meat of her right shoulder. She was bleeding badly. “I would have killed myself and everyone beneath that roof before letting myself be used in such a way.”

“You’re being used now,” Inej replied. “Van Eck isn’t worthy of your skill.”

“If you must know, Pekka Rollins pays my wages,” said the girl, and Inej’s footsteps faltered. Rollins. “He pays for my travel, my lodgings. But I ask no money for the lives I take. They are the jewels I wear. They are my glory in this world and will bring me honor in the next.”

Pekka Rollins. Had he somehow found Kaz? The others? What if Nina was lying dead below? Inej had to get free of this girl. She had to help them. Another silver star came whirring at her and she bent left to avoid it, almost lost her balance. She danced backward on the wire, glimpsed another glint of silver. Pain lanced through her arm and she hissed in a breath.

Our work is death and it is holy. What dark god did this mercenary serve? Inej imagined some vast deity looming above the city, faceless and featureless, skin taut over its swollen limbs, fattened on the blood of its acolytes’ victims.