“Right,” Giraldi said.
“Amara, watch for those two that were shadowing us. Be ready to knock someone down if you have to.”
Isana heard Amara’s voice grow suddenly tense. “You think this is an attack of some kind. “
“I think we’re unarmed and vulnerable,” Bernard said. “Move.”
Isana felt her brother walking and opened her eyes in time to see the grotto’s pool passing beneath them as he walked over an archway. Desperate, she reached out to Rill, calling up the fury to let the emotions washing over her pass through her, into the water. If she could not stand against the tide of emotion, perhaps she could divert it.
The pressure eased, though it was strenuous to maintain the redirection. It was enough to let her remember her name and to have the presence of mind to look up and see what was happening.
Sudden excitement, exaltation and battle lust washed over her, near enough to make her feel as though she stood too close to a forge. She looked up and saw confusion, patrons and staff rising and moving toward the exits, and among them she saw a number of men in the clean white tunics of restaurant staff moving with professional, calculated haste, expressions sharp with eagerness and purpose.
Even as she watched, one of the men closed in behind Mandus, the Rhode-sian Fleet Tribune, seized his hair, bent his head back, and cut his throat with swift efficiency.
More excitement made Isana look up. Three more men stood on the ledge above them, crouched and ready to leap. Each wore a white tunic, each bore a short, curved, cruel-looking sword, and steel collars shone upon their throats.
Her own sudden terror destabilized her crafting and plunged her into an ocean of confusion and fear.
“Bernard!” she cried.
The three assassins leapt down upon them.
Chapter 13
Without Isana’s warning, Amara would surely have died.
Her eyes were scanning what lay before them, looking for the two men who had shadowed her and Bernard after the presentation at the amphitheater. A shrill scream of horror drew Amara’s eyes to the far side of the grotto, where she saw Fleet Tribune Mandus, his throat opened, the cut hopelessly deep and precise, fall to his knees and slump to his side to die on the floor.
When Isana cried out her warning, Amara had her back to the assassins. She spun and managed to dart aside from the nearest man’s first, sweeping cut. Two of the men were falling upon Bernard and Isana, and burdened as he was with his sister, Bernard would never be able to defend himself.
Amara called to Cirrus, and her fury came rushing down into the grotto at her call. She hurled a raw gale at the two men, catching them in midair. She flung one of them over the side of the walkway and he fell toward the pool. The other managed to get his hand on an outthrusting branch of one of the trees and flipped himself neatly down to the ground beside Bernard. The assassin turned to Amara’s husband, sword in hand, but Amara had delayed him for the few critical seconds that would have made the attack a success.
“Giraldi!” Bernard bellowed. He turned and all but threw Isana into the grizzled soldier’s arms. Then the Count of Calderon seized one of the heavy hardwood chairs, and with a surge of fury-born strength, swung the sixty-pound chair into the assassin, driving the man hard into a rocky wall of the grotto.
Amara turned to throw her hand out and force her own attacker back with a blast of wind, but the man hurled a small cloud of salt from a pouch at his belt, and Amara felt Cirrus buck in agony upon contact with the substance, the fury’s concentrated power dispersed, temporarily, by the salt.
The average hired cutter did not venture forth with a pouch of salt at hand and ready to throw-which meant that the man had come for Amara, specifically.
The assassin advanced with the speed of a professional fighter and sent two quick cuts at her. Amara dodged the first cleanly, but the second blow slid over her hip and left a long, shallow cut that burned like fire.
“Down!” Bernard thundered. Amara threw herself to the ground just as Bernard flung the heavy hardwood chair. It struck the assassin with a dull, crunching sound of bones breaking upon impact and drove the man hard against the trunk of a tree.
The assassin bounced off the tree trunk, seized the chair, and flung it out over the grotto and into the pool. Though his rib cage was horribly deformed by the power of the blow Bernard had dealt him, the man’s expression never changed-an odd little smile beneath wide, staring eyes.
Amara stared at the assassin in shock as he lifted his sword and came at her again, hardly slowed by the blow that should have killed him. She started to back away, but felt empty air beneath her heels and instead spun and leapt, arms reaching out to seize an overhanging tree branch. The assassin’s sword whipped at the air behind her, missing, and with a snarl of fury the man lost his footing and plunged into the pool below them.
Behind Bernard, the first assassin rose from the blow her husband had dealt him, and though his left arm dangled uselessly, broken in many places, he came forward with his sword, wearing the same staring, mad smile as the other man.
Bernard put the dining table between himself and the assassin, then drew back a booted foot and kicked it at him. It struck the assassin and knocked him off-balance, and in the second it took him to recover it, Bernard raised a hand and clenched it into a fist, snarling, “Brutus!”
Bernard’s earth fury, Brutus, came to his call. The stone arch heaved and rippled, and suddenly the rock stretched itself into the shape of an enormous, stone hound. Green gemstones glittered where a dog’s eyes would be, and Brutus’s mouth opened to show rows of obsidian black fangs. The fury rushed forward toward the assassin, ignored several blows from the assassin s sword, and clamped his jaws down on the man’s calf, locking him in place.
Without an instant’s hesitation, the assassin swept his blade down and severed his own leg just below the knee to free it from Brutus’s grasp. Then he rushed Bernard again, awkward and ungainly, blood rushing from the wound. He let out an eerie cry of ecstasy as he did. Bernard stared at him in shock for half a second, then the man was on him. Brutus tossed its great head and threw the severed leg aside, but it would take the fury endless seconds to turn around. Amara gritted her teeth but was effectively trapped, hanging there from the branch. She could climb up, then to the ground again, but by then it would be over-and Cirrus would not recover in time to let her fly to Bernard’s aid.
Everything slowed down. Somewhere on one of the levels far above their own, there was a flash of light and a thunderous explosion. Steel rang on steel somewhere else. More screams echoed around the grotto.
Bernard was not slow, especially for a man his size, but he did not have the speed he would need to have a fair chance of combating the assassin unarmed. He lunged to one side as the man swung, putting his body between Isana’s and the man’s steel blade. The blade struck, and Amara’s husband cried out in pain and fell.
The assassin seized Bernard by the hair-but instead of cutting his throat, he simply threw the wounded man aside and raised his sword to strike down at Isana.
Desperate, Amara called to Cirrus-not to push her toward the assassin, but away. She clung to the branch as the weakened wind fury pushed her back. She pushed with all of her strength, then abruptly released the crafting. The branch, bent by the force of the wind, suddenly snapped back. Amara swung on the branch as it did and used its backsweep to propel her, feetfirst back toward the assassin.
She drove her heels into the assassin’s chest, all her body rigid to support the vicious blow. She struck cleanly and hard, and the force of the blow snapped the man’s head forward and back. She heard bones break, and the assassin fell into a limp mass of bloodied flesh with Amara atop him.
She rolled away from him and seized his sword, crouched on all fours, blood staining her green gown. She stared in shock at the man. The assassin still clung to life, madness burning in his eyes as he let out a final, short, violent cry. “Brothers!”
Amara looked up. Several of the attackers in the grotto had finished their bloody work, and at the dying man’s call, the faces of another dozen men with metal collars and lunatic eyes turned toward her. Their path to the exit, a walkway through the trees and a second stone arch, was already filled with more of the men. They were cut off.