Cursor's Fury (Codex Alera #3)(82)

People screamed and shouted, rushing back and forth. The signaling horns and drums of Ceres' civic legion were already converging on the spot. Other folk lay on the ground, curled up into a tight ball, sobbing in incapacitating hysteria, just as Isana was. Amara realized, with a sickening little burst of illumination, that whatever had incapacitated Isana had done it to those folk as well.

They were all watercrafters, the only folk who might possibly save the lives of many of the wounded. They had all been struck down, and though others struggled to close wounds and stop bleeding, they had little more than cloth and water to work with.

Blood had spread into a scarlet pool, half an inch deep and thirty or forty feet across.

And then the great chimes in Ceres's citadel began to ring in deep, panicked strokes, sounding the alert to the city's legions. Horns began to blow the Legion call to arms.

The city was under attack.

"Bloody crows," Amara whispered, stunned.

"Move!" Fade snarled. "We can't let her-"

Then the slave suddenly glanced up. He dropped Bernard and threw himself at Giraldi and Isana, hand outstretched.

An arrow, a black shaft with green-and-grey feathering flickered through the air and slammed completely through Fade's left hand. A broad, barbed arrowhead erupted from his flesh.

Without blinking, he pointed with his sword to a nearby rooftop, where a shadowed figure quickly vanished from view. "Countess! Stop him!"

Amara seized Fade's blade from his hand, called to Cirrus, and flung herself into the sky. She streaked toward the rooftop and saw the dark figure, bow still in hand, crouching to climb down.

Rage and fear made it impossible for Amara to think. It was on pure reflex that she cast Cirrus out in front of her, the sudden rush of wind throwing the cloaked figure from the rooftop to fall twenty feet to the ground. The archer landed with a sickening, crunching sound and let out a high-pitched scream of pain.

Amara darted down into the alley, alighting on the stone almost atop the fallen woman, and struck downward as the woman raised the bow. The sword shattered the wood, and the woman fell back with another cry.

Gripping the sword tight, Amara drove it down at the archer's throat and set the point against her skin so that it was drawing a bead of blood. She could see by the light of a nearby furylamp, and so she ripped the hood from the woman's head.

It was Gaele-or rather, it was the mask Kalare's head spy, Rook, wore when she was serving the Cursors in the capital, a spy within the midst of Kalare's enemies.

The woman met Amara's eyes, her features pleasant but plain, and her face was pale. Her leg was twisted beneath her at an unnatural angle.

And she was weeping.

"Please," she whispered to Amara. "Countess. Please kill me."

Events proceeded at a pace which Amara remembered as a blur of desperate communications, shouted commands, and scrambling dashes from one building to the next while the panicked city of Ceres girded itself for battle.

By the deepest hours of the night, it all culminated in a meeting within the private garden of the High Lord Cereus, within the walls of the High Lord's Tower, the final redoubt and bastion of the city's defenses, and the most secure location in the city.

Amara arrived first, with Bernard and Giraldi. Bernard had, maddeningly, staggered up from a healer's watercrafting tub and refused to leave her unprotected for the space of a minute since the attack at the restaurant. Giraldi claimed that he had to remain nearby as well, in order to protect his Count, but Amara was not fooled. The men had decided that she needed protecting, and as far as they were concerned, that was that.