Tamas’s mouth was dry. He snatched up his knife and pistol, then put on his hat. He wasn’t about to argue.
“You’ve just killed yourself in the most painful way you can imagine, girl,” Dienne said.
“And you’ll kill yourself in a very fast way if you move even the slightest bit,” Erika said.
Tamas unlatched his door and swung it open with one elbow, trying to watch the guards and Privileged all at once. He checked to be sure his sword was still attached to his belt-the guard hadn’t bothered taking something that would be no use to him in such close quarters.
He stepped out the door and immediately began to sprint, following Erika’s tracks in the fresh-fallen snow. He slid around the corner, then around another until he reached the rear entrance to the courtyard behind his tenement. Erika met him there, pistol still in her hand.
“You saved my life,” he said. The thought floored him.
“Just returning the favor.”
Tamas was taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“No time to explain,” Erika said. Her hair was soaked with sweat, and as he clutched her shoulders he could tell that she was trembling fiercely.
“Powder,” he told her. “It’ll help with the nerves.”
“I don’t …” she fumbled with her belt pouch.
Tamas took a powder charge from his kit and tore it open with his teeth. He took her by the chin, pulling her lip down with one thumb, and pressing the powder into her gum. She licked the powder away and looked up at him.
She smiled as he pulled away. Her trembling had stopped. The whole exchange had taken just a dozen heartbeats, but Tamas knew that it had been too long.
“We have to run.”
“I took her gloves.”
“She’ll have extras.”
As if to prove his point, Tamas felt his sixth sense pricked as sorcery was pulled violently into this world. He hugged Erika to him and threw them both backwards. The fireball that tore through where they had just been standing cut through the brick of the tenement like a cannonball.
They leapt to their feet, sliding on the snow, and began to run.
“She won’t open up entirely,” Tamas said. “Not in the city.” I hope, he added silently.
They fled hand-in-hand down the alley, then cut across the road and down another. Tamas turned to see the four cabal guards barreling after them, sabers drawn.
“We’re going to have to fight them,” Erika said.
Tamas replied, “You’re bloody mad; we can’t stop for that long.”
“We’ll never lose them with a fresh coat of snow.”
Tamas swore. She was right. Even if they used their powder trances to outdistance the guards, they would be able to track them without too much trouble. “We’ll have to cut through taverns, inns. A few crowded places and we’ll lose them.”
“We’re not leading an angry Privileged through an inn full of people!” Erika said.
“It’s that or our heads.”
“That is not acceptable!”
Erika stopped, and Tamas almost fell on the slick cobbles. “Don’t be a fool,” he said.
“Run if you want, but I never took you for a coward, Captain Tamas.” Erika grasped the hilt of her sword.
This was a damned bad time for her to prove she was a better person than he’d thought. “Bloody pit,” he said, “Not here. We’ll choose better ground.”
Tamas pulled Erika further up the street, looking for an alley where they could face the guards two at a time, hoping to cut them down before the Privileged caught up. He felt a tug at his hand and turned to see Erika run down a narrow alley.
“This way,” she said.
“No, that will take us back around in a circle, I …”
Privileged Dienne appeared in the far entrance of the alley. Tamas didn’t bother finishing his sentence. He drew his pistol and fired, pushing the bullet around Erika and at Dienne, whose fingers had begun to move when she saw Tamas draw. Dienne darted for cover. Tamas’s bullet blew through her left hand, and she tumbled into the snow.
Erika barely seemed to register what had just happened. Tamas shoved her through the narrow alley and into the next street, where Dienne lay clutching her hand and bleeding. Tamas drew his sword. If he left her alive, he was as good as dead.
The cabal guards caught up too fast.
Tamas whirled to face them, discarding his spent pistol.
The four guards had heavy sabers and cuirasses, making them all but impossible to fence conventionally. Both he and Erika would be at a disadvantage with their small swords, even if Tamas had the experience of fighting heavily armored men.
He and Erika stood back to back, swords drawn, as the four guards surrounded them. “The Privileged won’t be able to fight without her hand,” he said to her. “It’s just us against them.”
“And them,” Erika said.
He glanced over his shoulder to see four more cabal guards heading up the street. They wore the same breastplates but bore long pikes in addition to their sabers, and they were coming on at a dead run.
“Let’s make this quick,” Erika said. She lifted her pistol as she spoke, shooting a guard in the face. She followed through by discarding the pistol and leaping forward, sword swinging at the next guard.
Tamas wasn’t able to watch how she fared. Two guards came at him quickly. One, the same person who’d elbowed him in the House of Nobles, was a tall, muscular woman. Her saber hit the base of his small sword with enough force that he worried she’d shatter it on a second blow.
He shoved forward but was unable to find purchase on the cobbles, his boots sliding under him. Abandoning that plan, he stepped to the side and let her momentum carry her past him. His sword flicked at the second guard, remembering the way Erika had showed him to use precision above brute force. He caught the tip of the man’s saber and slapped it aside, then stepped forward to plunge his sword into the man’s throat.
He spun, expecting to see the tall woman bearing down on him.
Instead, he found her on her back, twitching, blood fountaining from one eye. Erika stood panting above the corpses of all three of the remaining guards. Her face shone with sweat, her eyes alight with a kind of savage glee. “Pit,” she breathed, “I thought I was good, but with the powder trance …”
“Pikes,” Tamas reminded.
Erika turned toward the coming guards, and seemed to falter. “Do we run?”
Tamas caught sight of Dienne. She had gotten to her feet and fled during the brief fight and was now behind the other four cabal guards and running for a waiting carriage parked at the end of the street.
“No,” he said. “Load me a pistol.” He grabbed a powder charge from his kit, setting his own sword down in the snow and drawing his knife. He ran forward. Ten paces from the lead pikeman, he threw the charge overhand. It hit the pikeman in the face, and Tamas ignited the powder with a thought.
The pikeman went down with a cry, and Tamas was inside the guard of the rest of them within a moment. His knife flashed, opening two throats in the time it took to blink. A chance raising of the third man’s pike shaft knocked the knife from Tamas’s fingers. He grabbed the man by his cuirass and slammed his forehead against the man’s nose. The man went down in a spray of blood.
The first guard had recovered, his face a mess of blood and black powder, and rushed at Tamas with pike set. Tamas smacked the pike blade out of the way with the flat of his hand and bore down on the man. He snatched the guard by the throat and flexed his powder-strengthened fingers, crushing the man’s windpipe.
“Pistol!” Tamas shouted.
Erika finished loading the pistol and tossed it to him underhand. He twisted to catch it by the butt and brought it up, only to find Dienne’s carriage fleeing down the road and around the corner, out of sight.
He pulled up, knowing even he couldn’t make a shot around the corner like that. Erika came up beside him, steam rising from her face and shoulders.
Tamas retrieved his pistol and finished off the guards with his knife. He expected some kind of protest from her, but she watched silently. This was not, he decided, the first time she had killed. “You were magnificent,” he said.