An Ember in the Ashes(57)

Then the attacker flickers and disappears.
I freeze, doubting what I’ve seen. The other assassin takes advantage of my hesitation and shoves me back into the smoke.
It’s as if I’ve been dropped into the darkest, blackest cave in the Empire.
I try to feel my way forward, but my limbs are leaden, and in moments I slip to the floor, my body a deadweight. A throwing star cuts through the air, and I barely register the fact that it has grazed my arm. My scims hit the stone of the hallway, and Helene screams. The sounds are muted, as if I’m hearing them through water.
Poison. The word brings me out of my senselessness. The smoke is poisonous.
With my last shreds of consciousness, I scour the ground for my scims and crawl out of the darkness. A few breaths of clean air help me reclaim my wits, and I notice that Helene has disappeared. As I search the smoke for any sign of her, an assassin emerges.
I duck beneath his scim, intending to wrap my arms around his chest and slam him to the floor. But when my skin meets his, cold lances through me, and I gasp and jerk away. It feels as if I’ve dipped my arm into a bucket of snow. The assassin flickers and disappears, reappearing a few yards away.
They’re not human, I realize. Zak’s warning echoes in my head. The old creatures are real. They’re coming for us. Ten burning hells. And I thought he had cracked. How is it possible? How could the Augurs have—
The assassin circles me, and I shelve my questions. How this thing got here doesn’t matter. How to kill it—that’s a question worth answering.
A flash of silver catches my eye—Helene’s gauntleted hand, clawing the floor as she tries to pull herself out of the smoke. I drag her out, but she’s too bleary to stand, so I throw her over my shoulder and flee down the hall.
When I’m well away, I dump her to the ground and turn to face the enemy.
The three of them are on me at once, moving too fast for me to counter.
Within half a minute, I have nicks all over my face and a gash in my left arm.

“Aquilla!” I holler. She staggers to her feet. “A little help, yeah?”
She draws her scim and plunges into the fight, forcing two of the attackers to engage.
“They’re wraiths, Elias,” she shouts. “Bleeding, burning wraiths.”
Ten hells. Masks train with scims and staffs and our bare hands, on horses and boats, blindfolded and chained, with no sleep, with no food. But we’ve never trained against something that isn’t supposed to exist.
What did that damn foretelling say? Cunning to outwit their foes. There’s a way to kill these things. They must have a weakness. I just have to figure out what it is.
Lemokles offense. Grandfather created the offense himself. A series of full-body attacks allowing one to identify a combatant’s deficiencies.
I attack head, then legs, arms, and torso. A dagger I fling at the wraith’s chest goes right through him, falling to the floor with a clatter. But he doesn’t try to block the dagger. Instead, his hand flashes up to protect his throat.
Behind me, Helene shouts for aid as the other two wraiths press the attack.
One lifts a dagger high above her heart, but before it comes down, I whip my scim around and through his neck.
The wraith’s head plunges to the ground, and I grimace as an unearthly scream echoes in the hall. Seconds later, the head—and the body it goes with—disappear.
“Watch your left,” Hel shouts. I sweep my scim in an arc to my left without looking. A hand closes on my wrist, and piercing cold numbs my arm to the shoulder. But then my scim strikes home, the hand is gone, and another eldritch scream pierces the air.
The assault slows as the last wraith circles us.
“You really should run,” Helene says to the creature. “You’re just going to die.”
The wraith looks between us and sets upon Helene. They always underestimate me. Even wraiths, apparently. She ducks beneath his arm, light-footed as a dancer, and takes off his head with one clean stroke. The wraith vanishes, the smoke dissipates, and the barracks go still, as if the last fifteen minutes never happened.
“Well, that was—” Helene’s eyes go wide, and I lunge to one side without needing to be told, turning just in time to see a knife hurtling through the air.
It misses me—barely—and Helene is past me in a blur of blonde and silver.
“Marcus,” she says. “I’m on him.”
“Wait, you idiot! It might be a trap!”
But the door is already swinging shut behind her, and I hear the crash of scim striking scim, followed by the crunch of bone beneath fist.
I burst from the barracks to see Helene advancing on Marcus, who has a hand to his bloodied nose. Helene’s eyes are ferocious slits, and for the first time, I see her as others must—deadly, remorseless. A Mask.
Though I want to help her, I hold back, scanning the darkened grounds around us. If Marcus is here, Zak won’t be far.
“All healed up, Aquilla?” Marcus feints left with his scim, and when Helene counters, he grins. “You and I have some unfinished business.” His eyes inch over her form. “You know what I’ve always wondered? If raping you will be like fighting you. All those lean muscles, that pent-up energy—”
Helene delivers a roundhouse that leaves Marcus on his back with blood pouring from his mouth. She stamps on his sword arm and presses her scimpoint to his throat.
“You filthy son of a whore,” she spits at him. “Just because you got one lucky swipe in the forest doesn’t mean I can’t still gut you with my eyes closed.”
But Marcus gives her a vicious smile, unfazed by the steel digging into his throat. “You’re mine, Aquilla. You belong to me, and we both know it. The Augurs told me. Save yourself the trouble and join me now.”