The Walls of Air Page 0,45

of something hard and heavy whistling through the air. But weeks with the Guards had given her hair-trigger ' reflexes, and the leaded stick meant to crush her skull cracked instead on her shoulder with splintering pain, throwing her forward to the floor. The torch skidded from her hand, and darkness seemed to swim down over her eyes, even as she rolled. Feet approached at a run, and she drew her sword with a long sideways hack at floor level, bracing her body as best she could against the impact. One of the looming figures in the darkness above her jumped. The other one screamed and fell on her, kicking and writhing in agony and screaming with a voice that rang in the hollow enormity of the vaulted Aisle. The weight of him crushed on Gil's injured shoulder, the screaming rang in her ears, and hot, slimy wetness gushed over them both.

Irrationally furious at him for wallowing over her like that, Gil twisted out from under, pain ripping through her shoulder as she moved. Her eyes cleared. A bearded man she vaguely recognized hopped around on the outskirts of the encounter, a short sword in his hand. There was another man in the shadows behind him, also armed with a sword, his fat face pallid with nausea. Without stopping to wonder, Gil tried to get to her feet, but the bearded man, taking his chance, stepped in on her with a brutal downward swing of his blade. Through a welter of pain and darkness, Gil recognized

the blow as 'coffin bait,' a fool's move, and her reaction was as automatic as a blink. She took him under the sternum with a two-handed thrust of her longer blade and saw blood burst simultaneously from chest and mouth. His eyes glazed with shock and with the amateur's almost comical astonishment at death. The fat little man dropped his sword and fled. On her knees, her head reeling, Gil watched him run all the way down the Aisle; she felt nothing but a cold, queer detachment, mixed with a little contempt for his cowardice. The man behind her was still thrashing on the floor, still screaming wildly on that same high note, still clawing vainly at his leg. Gil turned her head slowly and saw she'd cut his left foot off at the ankle. It was lying, still in its gold-stitched slipper of green kid, about four feet away. Then she fainted.

'She be all right?'

The voices around her were fuzzy and confused. Gil whispered, 'Ingold?' through cottony lips, blinking up at the hovering shadows.

'You'll be fine, Babydove,' Gnift's soft, hoarse voice said, and an encouraging hand patted her hair. 'Just fine.'

Gil sighed and shut her eyes against the smoky hurt of the dim lights. I guess the Icefalcon was right after all. So much for queasy considerations about closing the gates on those three poor thieves who'd got left outside and all that eyewash about the value of human life. Put to the test, she'd killed a man without so much as a token what am I doing?

Gil knew that at the time she had known perfectly well what she was doing. She was saving her own life.

Absently she thought, Four for sure and one maybe, if the poor bastard bled to death.

And she began to cry, as she had done when she had lost her virginity. She had crossed a line that could never be recrossed. It was no longer possible for her to be what she had been.

'Hey, Angel Eyes,' Gnift's voice said again, and the sword-calloused hand wiped the tears from her cheek. 'It's all over. Just a little broken collarbone. Nothing to that.' But she could not seem to stop herself and wept, not for the pain, but out of a sense of loss and an understanding of herself.

The world returned slowly to focus. She lay on her own bunk in the barracks, the narrow room jammed with her fellow Guards in the blurred yellow glare of the grease lamps. Her shoulder was strapped and braced, and Gnift was wrapping up his crude surgical equipment on the next bunk, his elf-bright eyes kind. Melantrys was standing next to him, a bloody towel dangling from her hand. Caldern, who had replaced the Icefalcon as captain of the deep-night watch, towered over them both.

Melantrys glanced over at her. 'You did nicely,' she said. 'Clean. I told you she had a strong side-cut, Gnift. Took the foot off through both bones and halfway