With a shout of alarm, one robed man started up the stairs towards Gabriella and Crowe. He tried to thrust at them with a pikestaff. Deadly on the battlefield against horses, but a stupid weapon to carry indoors. With no room to manoeuvre it, the owner was all but defenceless as Gabriella's swords flashed; one guided the polearm harmlessly aside, while the other cut down into the soldiers collarbone.
Then Gabriella was past that one, and engaging the Brotherhood soldiers further down the stairs. She blocked with one sword and thrust with the other; she cross-blocked with both, then swept a soldier off his feet and stabbed the man behind him.
She didn't stop.
Crowe watched, dumbstruck, as Gabriella swept down the stairs. There was blood and screaming and a grace to Gabriella's movements that seemed out of place in such a grisly scene.
Then he plunged down the stairs after her, swinging at the fourth man with a short sword before he could stab Gabriella in the back. Crowe's blade split the man's skull, and he fell, silenced and twitching. Now Crowe was in the fight, but the fight seemed all but over. Gabriella was continuing downstairs and Crowe's legs carried him along behind.
Footfalls and the jingle of mail approaching alerted Crowe to the arrival of a new enemy behind him. He spun left, gripping the end of his sword with both hands. The quillon punched into the side of the man's skull and he dropped.
Then a man with a crossbow stepped through the door at the bottom of the stairs, several more soldiers crowding in behind him.
Moving faster than a crossbow bolt as it flew was impossible, but Gabriella knew she didn't have to try to move faster than the bolt. It was the bowman's hand to eye co-ordination she had to outmatch. The man was wearing no glove, and so Gabriella could see the tendons of his hand flicker as he began to press the trigger lever.
Gabriella was moving before the bolt was launched. Releasing her swords, she dove head-first downstairs. Her quilted gambeson would protect her from too much damage when she hit the marble floor.
The iron-tipped bolt passed over her back, ricocheting from a step above her.
Gabriella half-slid, half rolled across the floor and came up with palms outstretched to catch her swords. One of them was immediately thrust into the bowman's gut. The bowman looked at her, astonishment keeping the pain at bay for a moment. Gabriella could feel the warmth of the man's blood oozing onto her hand, and wished she could just plunge it into water and cleanse it. She settled for kicking him first in the groin and then in the face as she rose to her feet. He flew backwards, screaming as he slid off the sword-blade.
There was movement to either side; Gabriella was now standing in a knot of the robed soldiers. Four of them. The bowman collapsed in a writhing, screaming heap and a sword was swung at Gabriella's head from the right.
Gabriella ducked, cutting at the man's wrist with her left hand sword. She reversed the sword in her right fist, slamming it up into the attacker's throat. Then the man was down, Gabriella flicking the blood off her sword and into the faces of the other enemies, who flinched.
Crowe leaped down, drawing into two of the soldiers with a flurry of cuts and blows. Gabriella blocked a series of lightning-fast cuts from the man still facing her, then pushed, not cutting or stabbing, but simply shoving his enemy back by brute force. The man's sword was knocked aside and Gabriella stepped forward, slamming her shoulder into the enemy's chest. The man, knocked off balance, started to fall. Gabriella slipped in the offal spilling from the bowman and crashed to the floor on top of him. Both her swords clattered aside.
Gabriella knelt astride her fallen foe and punched, then again, and again. Grunts exploded out of Gabriella's chest in time to the flashes of pain from her knuckles as she beat the soldier down. With each punch, the soldier's bare head smacked back into the floor.
"Dez!" a voice called, "Dez!" There was a pause. "Gabriella!"
It was Crowe. Gabriella looked up, startled by his use of her proper name. Crowe was the only man left standing in the hall. "He's dead, all right? That slab of meat you're trying to drive into the floor is not going to get up again."
Gabriella looked at the soldier she had been punching. The man had not moved even though the punches had stopped. Blood was pooling under his head. His face looked like it was wearing a mask of stewing meat. The anger that burned between her ribs and under her shoulder-blades was not subsiding. It was boiling the breath in her lungs and rushing in her ears. "He was…" Gabriella didn't know what he was now. A dead opponent and no more. That was all that mattered; that was all that could matter.
Gabriella let go of the corpse, scooped up her swords and stood.
"His name was Pett Wynn. He was a Knight of the Order of the Swords of Dawn from Oweilau." She pointed to another body, without looking round. "Johan Kroun. Knight of the Order of the Swords of Dawn from Malmkrug. You get the idea."
Crowe looked dazed. "These were members of the Swords? What — "
"Not were. Still are. Kell's bodyguards are a team of the Swords." Her voice was very small. She felt as dazed as Crowe looked. A door clattered then and she reached through it and hauled out the last face she expected to see here, short of the Anointed Lord herself.
It was Brother Markus, who had once guarded a crossroads right outside Joachim the assassin's escape route. He looked different in his mercenary garb and she supposed she had too, when she had worn Kannis' company's gear to slip into Turnitia.
"Sister DeZantez… This isn't what it looks like!"
"Isn't it? What in the Pits is it, then? A meeting to plan a surprise party for the Anointed Lord's birthday? Well, my lad, what shall the charges be? Apostasy, heresy?"
"What are you talking about?" Markus demanded, his voice shaking as much as his bones, he was so terrified.
"You and your friends, playing bodyguard for a ranking member of a proscribed heretical sect. One who, as it happens, was involved in the assassination attempt on an Eminence of the Final Faith!"
"What about you yourself?"
"What? Me?!" She was outraged at his retort.
"Why are you here, then? If you are on duty, why aren't you in the garb of the Order?" Markus sidled closer, his voice dropping. "Or could it be that you're looking for a way out of the Order? That you came, like all those worthless dregs of humanity out there, to leave your old life behind and start a new one? A new life that's free of the dogma of the Anointed Lord?"
"If you want to be free of your life, free of the 'dogma of the Anointed Lord,' all you had to do was ask," Gabriella said. Then she slid forward, one sword batting his out of the way and the edge of her heel darting into his solar plexus, making a good attempt to go through it. He doubled over as she spun and rammed the point of her other sword into his throat. She could feel it scrape the collarbone as it went in, severing the vertebrae on its way out.
Markus' eyes bulged as he collapsed. He tried to take a breath, but his eyes were already glazing over, as blood flooded his lungs.
"Consider yourself free," Gabriella told him and withdrew the sword, which held only the barest smear of blood. As it had before, that neatness always pleased her. Markus toppled forward, the look of disbelief never leaving his face.
"Orders…" he managed to gasp, clutching at the hole in his throat.
Gabriella didn't believe a word of it. "Who's orders?"
"Eminence — "
"Don't lie to me, you whoreson!"
"Eminence…"
"Liar," she whispered, but too late. Markus was in the Pits of Kerberos.
CHAPTER 20
All hell was breaking loose as Crowe helped Gabriella out onto the terraces. More Brotherhood guards attacked them at every step of the way, but they were no match for Gabriella's dual short swords and Crowe's broadsword.