The Sea Peoples(75)
Then they burst out into the darkness, lit by the eerie cones of electric light from the cast-iron standards, and she heard him curse. He had the shovel gripped as he would his spear, and he whirled it over his head and brought it down in a swiping blow that should have left Vance’s head hanging by a thread.
Instead the man jerked aside. It didn’t look like the tigerish drilled-in agility of a trained fighter; it looked as if the lanky bank-clerk had stumbled. But Toa’s strike missed by a hair, and the momentum was so utterly unexpected—impossible enough to freeze her for an instant, watching—that it pulled him off balance. Vance’s swipe with the knife looked as pig-on-greased-tin awkward as his dodge had been. But Toa bellowed again as he leapt frantically to avoid it, and did—but again only by a hair, and a thin shallow line of blood showed on his ridged belly in a shape that showed he’d have been gutted except for the astonishing swiftness of which he was capable.
Pip shot, a single flexing push with the left hand and pull back past her ear with the right. The ball-bearing was invisible with speed and darkness, though there was a whist of cloven air. They were only twenty feet away. At that distance she could punch the eye out of a rabbit—the vermin were a nuisance all over Townsville’s territories and children were encouraged to practice on them—from a galloping horse, much less planted on her feet. The three-ounce ball was a fraction of a second from smacking into the back of the mad clerk’s head. . . .
And he lurched around. Her mind gibbered as she saw the ball miss; miss closely enough that it took a patch of skin from the lobe of one ear, so that blood ran down his neck, but not enough to do more than frighten him. He did look frightened, his bloodshot eyes blank and glazed, his mouth slack and showing all his wet-sheening teeth, but she didn’t think that he was frightened of her, or her comrades.
Deor shouted and threw up his arms, chanting.
Thora pulled a long knife out of her bag, holding it expertly with the thumb against the crosspiece, stabbing up under Vance’s nonexistent guard. Toa thrust with the spear/shovel and Pip drew and shot again, this time conservatively at the center of mass—that wouldn’t usually kill outright, but it would crack ribs or cause real damage.
The razor-edged head of the shovel went between Vance’s arm and his torso, tearing nothing but his coat. It nearly hit Thora, who leapt back with a yell and a twist; that threw her blow off and the point of her knife simply ticked from a button on Vance’s waistcoat. The steel ball from Pip’s catapult struck the shovel-head with a keening bangggg sound and skittered off to break a window that tinkled broken glass into the street.
And Thora was backing rapidly, staring incredulously at a slash across her left forearm that dripped red onto the sidewalk.
And she began to fade.
“Hold hard, oath-sister!” Deor barked, grabbing her shoulder.
As he did Pip blinked and shook her head. Thora was there, but she looked . . .
Transparent. As if there’s a bed behind her, and a room with white walls.
And suddenly something else was there too, like a shadow on a screen. The shadow of a huge beast, roaring, its hump-necked ruff brisling. It drifted away, but Thora was solidly among them once more, swearing and winding a cloth strip around the cut on her forearm.
“Anything I should worry about with this wound?” she said.
Toa nodded; the slit in the skin of his belly was thin, but a trickle of blood was soaking the front of his laborer’s garments.
“Not poison, but it’s a weapon made to sever,” Deor said quickly.
“Too right!” Toa said. “Cut this denim stuff I’m wearing right and proper.”
Deor gave a hard grin. “Made to cut links, and not only of the body.”
Vance had used the moment to back away. Now he turned to dash for escape . . . and then swerved back into the door of the building he’d left.
“Get him!” Deor called.
People were beginning to turn and point, even though the fight had been mostly silent except for scuffles, clangs, curses and a little window-shattering. Pip was glad that the others hadn’t used the firearms their swords had translated into; she’d read that guns were loud, but until now she hadn’t quite realized how loud.
Deor went in on Vance’s heels, and the others followed. It was probably only moments before a mob started to gather; Toa seemed to get hostile glances anyway. He thoughtfully kicked the door closed behind him, and Pip went into the hallway on Thora’s heels. That let her just see Vance wrench open the door to the armorer’s rooms and slip through, slamming it behind him with the click of a Yale-type lock.
“Toa!” Pip called.
She could have just broken the glass pane in the door, but that would mean putting her hand through to get at the Yale . . . and that with a murderous lunatic wielding a cursed and supernaturally sharp dagger on the other side. Pip’s menace-gauge said that Vance should have been easy meat for any of the three of them at any time. But whatever possessed the man—and she suspected that possession was uncomfortably close to literal truth right now—was a match for them all together.
“Right,” he said.
The shovel slammed out into the jamb of the door, and Toa used the leverage of the long handle, the shaft like a straw in his massive hand. There was a popping crunch, and the doorway bounced open with a speed that shattered the frosted-glass centerpiece anyway. A woman’s scream came from within in the same instant, and a discordant unmusical clang.