The armsman licked pale sweat from his upper lip and swung his riot gun to hang in a bore-down safari-carry over his shoulder. “As the Knight commands.”
From the floor I showed the armsman teeth that tasted like blood. “Touch me-you’ll wish I’d killed you. .”
The armsman’s face wiped itself blank, and the armsman’s foot paused in midstep.
I rolled myself over and let the cool stone flags draw heat and twitching out of my face. “You and your fucking father. .” I spat into the floor. “Let me tell you about my father.”
I got arms and legs under me and heaved up to hands and knees. My head hung between my shoulders. I didn’t have the strength to lift it. “My father,” I said, “lived every fucking day of his life with a steel boot on his neck.”
There it was, the strength I needed, trickling up my spine from my wounded guts. I could lift my head now. I met Tyrkilld’s stare with my own. His was white.
Mine’s black.
“My father. . didn’t have armor of proof and the morning fucking star in his hand. . didn’t have a god to heal him, didn’t have speed of lightning and power of thunder and the rest of your shit. Only a man. That’s all. That’s enough. My father died a little every fucking day just to-”
I bit down on my breath.
“-just to keep cocksuckers like you from getting comfortable with ruling the world.”
Tyrkilld said, “Get him up.”
The armsman crouched and reached down with his left arm, turning to keep his riot gun slung on the opposite side of his body. For all the good it did him.
I reached up with my right to take the armsman’s left bicep in a grip that has been compared favorably to a bulldog’s jaws; my thumb dug into the nerve that ran up the inside of his arm along the radial artery. The armsman gasped and twisted instinctively to wrench his arm away from the unexpected pain, which pulled me off the floor and freed my left hand to stab a thumb into his right eye socket while my fingers crushed the armsman’s parotid gland in the process of hooking behind the angle of his jaw.
Where the head goes the body will follow, and so when Tyrkilld roared, “Tashhonall,” and catapulted himself across the cell in a blurring blue-flamed shoulder-rush, instead of meeting my chest and crushing the life from me in a shower of splintering ribs and shredded lung and spray of blood from a burst heart, he met instead the armored spine of the armsman that I had wrenched between us to absorb the impact.
The armsman never even had a chance to scream.
Tyrkilld hit us like a bullet train on meth and crushed us both against the wall, and though I took it hard-my head blurred into fireworks and something gave in my guts-the poor bastard armsman from kidneys to asshole was just blood fucking pudding.
I couldn’t breathe and couldn’t stand and could barely focus my eyes, but none of that mattered because while I was sliding half-crushed down the wall in a dogpile with Tyrkilld and the dying armsman, all I had to do was shift my grip from the armsman’s face to the trigger guard of the riot gun that was still slung bore-down over his shoulder, because Tyrkilld was yanking the armsman off me and winding up for a killing blow with a fist that smoked arcwelder flame, and because the muzzle of the riot gun was against Tyrkilld’s cuisse. It made a sound like bwank.
The full charge of buckshot blasted through the armor into Tyrkilld’s quadriceps just above his knee.
A spray of blood and meat and bone blew a fist-size hole out of the steel covering the Knight Householder’s hamstring and spun him and before he could hit the ground I had my other arm around the dying armsman’s chest, hugging him close while we fell together toward the floor; I managed to rack the riot gun’s slide and got off another round at one of the armsmen who was jumping to the side for a clear shot.
A couple thumb-size holes burst open on opposite sides of the second armsman’s pelvis and sprayed jets of blood as he spun and slammed back against the wall and a ricochet screamed through the cell-slug round. The third armsman’s weapon roared and a buckshot charge slammed the dying first armsman against my chest and punched my right side but I had bigger problems right then because blowing most of his fucking leg off just wasn’t enough to slow down Tyrkilld, Knight Aeddharr.
The bastard had ahold of the armsman again and even with one hand reaching into the mess of his leg to pinch off his femoral artery the other would be enough to pull the armsman clear one way or another which would be goodnightfuckingirene because killing fire still blazed around that fist. So I let Tyrkilld have the next round in the face. Or tried to.
While I was still pulling the trigger, an impossibly powerful grip latched onto the end of the bore, and Tyrkilld took the whole charge right in the palm of his witchfire hand. Which did not explode in a shower of blood and bone. The blast did no more than knock his hand away. Spent buckshot clattered on stone.
With the twitch of a what the hell shrug, I racked the slide and fired again.
Tyrkilld got that undamaged hand of his back in the way. . but its witchfire was gone. A hole appeared in its palm. And in Tyrkilld’s pauldron, beside his neck. And in the hip plate on the opposite side of his chest below his cuirass.
Another slug shrieked around the cell for what seemed like a long time before it stopped in someone’s body with a wet-sounding smack. Tyrkilld’s mouth worked, but no sound came out. Only a wheeze that bubbled with blood. He looked entirely astonished.
I racked the slide again and leveled the bore on Tyrkilld’s left eye. “Drop your weapons.”
I went on, louder, when I realized that I didn’t seem to be hearing anything except a long continuous clang. “By my count the next round’s buckshot again so fucking drop them or go home wearing his brains.”
Maybe one of the armsmen-the one standing with weapon shouldered or the ashen-faced one who was sliding down the wall, riot gun rib-ready in hands that were starting to shake-maybe one of them could read lips. They put down their guns.
“Kick them over here. Over by me. Now.”
They looked at Tyrkilld, but his eyes had rolled up in his head. Then they could only look at each other. After a second, they complied.
Carefully I shoved the spine-shattered armsman clear. Carefully I stood. My legs seemed to work. Hot syrup rolled down the back of my neck: scalp wound. I kept my elbow against the warm wet that spread down my right side, creeping toward my knee; no way to tell yet how bad I might be hurt.
Right then I felt no pain.
“Combat grades. Yeah, sure.” I hooked a toe under Tyrkilld’s shoulder and rolled him faceup. I lowered the riot gun’s bore to the Knight’s forehead. “School’s out till your next life, cocksucker.”
But instead of pulling the trigger, I stood motionless, head cocked, and listened to the singing silence. A second ticked over. And another.
“All right.” I tried a deep breath. It caught against a stab from my side. “You can come in now.”
I nodded at the uninjured armsman. “You. Get the door.”
The armsman looked blank. “Get the door for. .?”
“For whoever’s out there listening.” Wires of pain ratcheted my ribs tighter over my barbwire guts. “Whoever’s not letting a shitload of armsmen bust in here and kill me right now. Fucking let him in, will you? If I pass out, I’ll fall on this sonofabitch’s corpse, you get me?”
Light shifted in the cell, and a creak of metal on metal and the rise of dockside noise: the outer cell door had opened.
“Freeman Shade.”
This was a new voice: deeper, darker, low, and controlled, oiled and polished as ceremonial armor. “I am Markham, Lord-”
“I don’t give a shit. You heard?”