Wei Dao prevailed over the commander and led the column to the right. Ruha brought a two-syllable sun spell to mind and, as the clumsy ensemble around her struggled to turn the corner, pretended to stumble. The ring of swordsmen jerked their blades back-Prince Tang had been most emphatic in saying he expected the pris- oner alive when he returned-and that was all the room the witch needed.
Slipping her gag as she had once before, Ruha picked her feet off the brick floor and kicked them both back- ward. Only one of her heels landed on target, smashing the knee of one of the guards holding her arms. The other missed its mark and slipped between the fellow's legs. As she pitched forward, the witch brought her foot up, catch- ing the soldier squarely in the groin. Both men screamed and released her arms, then landed beside her on the floor.
At once, Ruha rolled onto her side, looked toward one of the oil lamps hanging on the wall, then closed her eyes, covered her ears, and uttered her spell. There was an ear-splitting boom and a flash of light so brilliant it pained the witch's eyes even through their closed lids.
The next thing Ruha knew, she was lying beneath a heap of writhing Shou guards. If they were screaming, the witch could not hear them; the ringing in her own ears was so loud she could not have heard a thunderclap breaking over her head. Half expecting to feel a long steel blade driving between her ribs, she opened her eyes and crawled from beneath the heap of soldiers.
The entire line of guards lay on the white bricks, their
open mouths voicing screams the witch could not hear.
Some of the men held their ears and some covered their eyes, but they all remained too stunned to do more than writhe in pain. The oil lamp she had used for her spell was gone, leaving a huge sooty smudge above the sconce where it had hung, but neither the wall nor the ceiling had suffered any material damage from the detonation.
Ruha searched for Wei Dao's form at the head of the column, weighing the wisdom of wading through the tangle of bodies to retrieve her late husband's jambiya from the princess. Unfortunately, the witch could not be sure how soon her captors would begin recovering from their shock. The effects would normally last long enough for her to run an eighth league, but she had no way to tell how long she herself had been incapacitated. Besides, there were a dozen more guards at the entrance to the dungeon, and it would not be long before they arrived to investigate the detonation.
Ruha pulled a dagger from a soldier's belt, then stepped over him and three other quivering men and started down the left-hand corridor. As she moved, the witch kept a careful watch on the floor, stopping to pry out any pebbles lodged between bricks. It took only a few moments to fill her hand, for even the tidy Shou could not keep from tracking tiny stones inside, and it hardly seemed worth the effort to scrape them from the seams of a dungeon floor.
The witch glanced back down the corridor. Although
Wei Dao had not entirely recovered from her shock, she had risen and was picking her way down the corridor.
The princess's eyes had the blank, inert stare of sight- lessness, and she was moving her open hands in front of her body in an ever changing pattern of circular motions.
Ruha found her pursuer's determination more than a little alarming; only a very good fighter would feel confi- dent enough to carry the battle to a foe while both blind and deaf.
Ruha shook her pebbles and uttered the incantation of
a sand spell. The stones began to oscillate in her palm, scrubbing off two layers of skin before she could hurl them at the ceiling. They struck in a circle as broad as her shoulders and continued to vibrate, much too fast for the eye to follow. She heard a faint drone above the ring- ing in her ears, and a steady shower of powdered wood rained down on her shoulders. The witch hiked up the hem of her aba, then pressed her hands and feet against opposite walls and began to chimney up the walls of the corridor.
Ruha had climbed about ten feet when Wei Dao passed beneath her, still circling her hands before her body and staring vacantly ahead. The drone of the sand spell must have been loud enough for the princess to hear, for she stopped directly beneath the scouring pebbles and cocked her head. She turned her palm up to catch some of the powdered wood raining down her, then seemed to guess what was happening and started after the witch.
Ruha climbed to the ceiling and waited beside her circle of buzzing pebbles. The stones had dug a deep labyrinth of wormy grooves into the wood, and it would not be much longer before they scoured clear through.
Already, islands of plank were trembling as though they would fall at any moment, but the witch did not dare reach up to pull them loose. The whirling pebbles would take her fingers off.
A short distance below, Wei Dao had nearly climbed within arm's reach. She carried Ruh amp;'s jambiya clenched between her teeth, and her blinking, squinting eyes were fixed vaguely on the hem of the witch's aba. Down the corridor, the guards were beginning to rise and rub their heads. Deciding to attack before they gathered their wits,
Ruha pulled a foot away from the wall and thrust it at the princess's head.
Wei Dao continued to squint until the approaching kick had nearly reached her face… then she calmly slipped the blow by looking away and allowing the witch's heel to glance off her brow. Instantly, the
princess's hand snapped back, smashing the hard bone of her wrist into the tendons of Ruha's ankle. A sharp, tingling pain shot up the witch's shin, and her leg went numb below the knee.
As Ruha tried to pull her foot back, Wei Dao trapped the witch's ankle in the crook of her elbow, then locked it in place by clasping her hand against the back of her neck. She pulled her legs away from the walls and dropped, already raising her free hand toward thejam- biya between her teeth.
The witch pushed against the walls with all her might, barely keeping herself from falling to the floor when Wei
Dao's weight hit the end other dangling leg. From behind
Ruha, barely audible over the ebbing roar inside her head, came the muted clamor of the guards gathering themselves up to help the princess.
Wei Dao took thejambiya from between her teeth.
Ruha swung her second leg away from the wall and smashed her heel into the back other foe's skull. Wei
Dao's head snapped forward; then the knife slipped from her hand and her body went limp. The princess dropped a man's height to the floor, landing in the semi-rigid heap of someone caught halfway between consciousness and unconsciousness. A pair of guards appeared beside her immediately.
Ruha looked up and saw light shining through the grooved planks above her head. The pebbles were gone, having eaten all the way through the wood. The witch did not wait to see if the soldiers below would attack her or tend to their mistress. She braced her good foot against the wall-the leg that Wei Dao had struck was too numb to trust-then made a fist and punched it through the boards above her head. The wood fell apart easily, and she had no trouble widening the hole until she came to a solid edge. The witch grabbed hold and glanced down to see several guards climbing after her.