"Try it and she bleeds out," BD rasped, the skin between her shoulder blades itching; she made the knife dimple the skin again. "Better her than a thousand boys dead and a city burning."
In the seconds he needed to decide to draw his sword anyway Astrid and the others were there, and they made a shield wall around the ruler's family and two points were at his throat.
"Rangers!" Peters blurted, taking in the tree-and-stars blazons on their leather-covered mail-shirts. "God, what are you bastards doing here?"
"Nobody expects the Elvish Inquisition," Hordle said goodnaturedly… but his sword was four feet long, and he was holding it as effortlessly as if it were a yardstick.
"We're not going to harm you, my lord," Alleyne Loring said smoothly; the cultured tones conveyed sincerity… and the rock-steady point of the longsword did as well. "Your memory as a martyr would be a formidable threat. We just need to take you away for a bit of quiet negotiation."
As he spoke several of the Rangers grabbed the Peters family and trussed their wrists behind their backs. BD stepped back with a wheeze of relief… which turned to a yelp of agony as Estrellita Peters brought her narrow heel down on the instep of her foot, hard, the instant the steel wasn't touching the skin over her jugular.
"Toma! Cabrona!" she snarled.
The whole sword-edged circle of captors and captives began to move smoothly back towards the exit to the kitchens; the guests were mostly unarmed, and goggling with surprise anyway.
We're going to do it! BD thought as she hobbled along. The Kindly Ones be praised.
Then she made a propitiatory gesture with the fingers of her right hand to avoid the jealousy of the Fates. The Registered Refugee Regiment guardsmen had forced themselves through the crowd; there were a dozen of them clumped together in a bristle of glaives. BD saw horror warring with anger on their faces, but Peters had himself well in hand by now. Someone was beating on the door from the outside, and then it began to boom as someone quick-thinking organized a battering ram out of a stone bench. A few more of the guardsmen began beating at the chains with their glaives as the Dunedain there retreated to join the others.
Peters is going to tell them to stop. Apollo, but I'm glad of that! Those points look way too sharp.
The Bossman gave the Dunedain a wry look and raised his voice. "Well, boys-" he began to say to his men.
"Kill," Sethaz said.
BD gave an involuntary moan; the single word was not loud, but it seemed to vibrate in the little bones of her inner ear, running out along veins and nerves like a dry hot wind that made every sinew in her body creak. A guardsman leveled his glaive and lunged. Alleyne smashed the heavy blade of the weapon upward with his shield, but the other man turned it and caught the rim with the hook on the reverse, dragging it down so his mates could stab across it. Spears poised amid obscene curses; Peters shook his head in startled futility. Alleyne killed the man who held his shield with a single snapping lunge to the throat, withdrawing the longsword with a cruel professional twist.
The crowd had stood gaping as the black-clad Rangers swarmed in. Now they roared as the guardsman twisted, blood spraying ten paces from his slashed-open neck. Roared and surged forward; the first fell to the sweep of John Hordle's sword, three men spinning away, a hand flying loose, another slashed open across the chest, the last screaming through a split jaw. The four-foot blade looped up and poised, but the snarls of the ones beyond were bestially unafraid, teeth red with the spattered blood. The salt-iron stink of it mingled with the food and spilled drink until her stomach clenched and nearly climbed up her throat.
"Back to the doors!" Astrid called, in a voice like a trumpet. "Quickly!"
The Dunedain bows began to snap; the archers were backing up themselves, shooting as fast as they could draw shafts from their quivers and loose. A guardsman went down with an arrow through his face; there was a tunk! as another punched through a breastplate. The glaive clattered on the floor as its wielder went down on all fours, coughing out blood and bits of lung. The green-uniformed Boise men had closed in around their President in a flicker of blades; then he shouldered his way through with his saber out and led them to the attack, a reckless white smile splitting his brown face.
BD ducked behind one of the Rangers. The man fell an instant later when Thurston's curved sword bit through the mail beneath his jerkin, cutting the great muscle of the shoulder and breaking the bone with a greenstick snap that made her feel as if someone had run a copper pick along all the surfaces of her teeth painfully hard. Alleyne Loring stepped into the gap, and they were at each other in a rage of steel.
BD fell as well, then set her teeth and reached out to grab the fallen man and drag him backwards. Pain shot through her back; Estrellita Peters had kicked her just above the base of the spine and leapt over her, and her sons followed her, lost in the not-so-miniature riot.
Turnabout's fair play, BD thought, and set herself to crawl and pull the wounded man again.
That gave her a view through a momentary gap. The red robes and blue uniforms of the Church Universal and Triumphant had closed around their leader too, though they hadn't been allowed weapons. She could see him behind them; he was standing with arms raised and spread wide, on wide-planted feet, and his mouth was stretched in what might be a smile-it bared his teeth, at least, and there was a joy in it that made her want to close her eyes and beat her face against the hard tile of the floor in an effort to scrub the memory out of her head.
His eyes were an ordinary brown, but she could see something surfacing there, like a dead body floating up towards the surface.. . an absence, an un-meaning…
His hands swept closed on the head of the cowboy she'd heard called George. As they did the young man's expression became a mirror of that on the face of the Cutter prophet leering over his shoulder.
"Kill," Sethaz said again, and it was no louder than an ordinary speaking voice, but it seemed to echo back and forth within her skull.
The young man grinned, moving in jerks, like a man whose limbs were attached to strings. But these strings wove him through the complex obstacles of battle like a weaver's shuttle through the loom.
"Look out!" BD shouted, trying to move away on the blood-slippery tile and pull the man with her.
The sound was lost in the uproar, but a Dunedain arrow struck the young man in the shoulder. The arrow sank deeply; it was a powerful bow, and close. His lean body recoiled with the impact, flexing loosely; then he reached up and pulled the arrow out and threw it away, advancing with that same fixed grin. John Hordle stepped forward. The great blade of his sword spun up and around and down in a hissing loop, lost in the guttural roar that split his face beneath the thatch of bristling dyed hair.
George moved aside, just enough, and the greatsword sliced empty air and smashed into tile with a crackle and a shower of sparks as it pierced to the lime-rich concrete beneath. His fist lashed out and caught Hordle beneath the short ribs, and the big man's breath came out in an agonized huff!
Then he was past, and Astrid came at him in a lunge, fluid and smooth and so fast she seemed to stretch rather than move, with the round shield she carried hugged impeccably against her.
The young man's hands slapped together, and the blade of the longsword was imprisoned between them. Astrid Larsson froze, her silver-veined eyes going wide, and the hands jerked forward, punching the hilt of her sword out of her hands and into her forehead.
The thock resounded even through the white noise of riot. The sword clattered on the tile floor near BD's nose, the shimmering water-patterned steel flexing as it jumped and whined and fell back again. One of George's hands flashed out and caught Astrid by the throat as she began to crumple. The other clamped down on the top of the woman's head, ready to twist… and BD recognized the gesture. She'd killed hundreds of chickens that way herself, these past twenty years and more, and before then in Mexico when she was a girl.