They ignored her. Boots tramped on stone. Voices rose in battle cries. The soldiers around her drew their blades, forgetting even her for the moment. She staggered back against the seawall itself, and her bank’s guardsmen fell on the Anteans. Halvill, his dark scales marked with white lines where enemy blows had already struck him. Corisen Mout, his teeth bared. Enen, her pelt matted with and dark with blood. Yardem Hane and Marcus Wester standing side by side, their blades moving with the simple economy of men so long accustomed to violence it had become a reflex.
“There’s spiders!” Cithrin screamed, and saw Marcus’s head turn to her. She pointed at the fallen priest, and watched understanding bloom in the guard captain’s eyes. The green sword in his hand flickered like a tongue of flame as he pushed in toward her. The Anteans, caught between the invisible threat spilling out from their dead priest and the advance of her guardsmen, retreated. Five of them were left writhing on the pavement, clawing at their own eyes and mouths and crotches. Marcus went to each in turn, sinking the poisoned sword into them, and then into the corpse of the priest. The others stood back at a respectful distance as he waved the blade slowly over the paving. A shudder of movement, almost too small to see, caught Cithrin’s eye. A spider shriveled by the stinging fumes of the blade.
He reached her, sheathing the sword. He was breathing hard, laboring. His cheeks looked sunken, his eyes fever bright. When he spoke, though, it was the understated, calm tone she’d known since she’d been a lost girl with a banker’s heartlessness, fleeing from a violence she barely understood. Little had changed.
“This?” he said, nodding at the city, the violence, the death that still spilled in the gutters. “It could have gone better.”
Marcus
Most days, from the seawall to the piers was the walk of minutes. A brief turn through the salt quarter with its narrow, dark streets, and then out into the broad ways built for carts and the traffic of trade. Most days, there had been puppeteers at the corners, playing out their dramas for coin. A large audience might slow things down a bit if they spilled too far into the street.
Now it was a meat grinder.
Even where there were no soldiers, there were people in the streets. Half-built barricades jutted out over the cobbles without plan or strategy. In the north, a great column of smoke might have been the Antean siege engines or the Governor’s Palace or the beginning of a conflagration that would turn the city to ash. Marcus didn’t know, and no answer changed what he had to do in the next hour.
Marcus and Yardem led the way, their blades clearing the way before them for the most part. The press of fear and humanity made the passage slow, and Marcus didn’t want to kill anyone he didn’t have to. Some of the citizens of Porte Oliva would likely survive the sack, and the ones that didn’t, he preferred that the enemy killed. His arms and back ached already, and the day wasn’t near done. Cithrin’s arm was around Enen’s shoulder. The thinness of frame that came with her Cinnae blood left her light enough that any of them but Halvill could throw her over a shoulder and run if the need came. Any of them but Halvill and himself. He tried to ignore the weakness in his arm and shoulder, the burning in his muscles that he hadn’t felt wielding a blade since before his voice had cracked. He told himself it was age and indolence, but it was the venom of the blade taking its toll.
It didn’t matter what it was. The job was getting Cithrin through a brief turn through the salt quarter, then the broader ways by the piers. That was all that mattered.
“She’s not looking good, sir,” Yardem said.
“She’ll keep.”
“Not sure she will.”
“She’ll have to.”
Marcus looked over his shoulder. Blood marked Cithrin’s neck and arm. He told himself it was her own, that she’d only been beaten and cut in the violence. It was a bleak thought to find comfort in, but the red hadn’t been from the priest. He’d gotten there in time to keep the spiders from getting into her, at least. Still, she seemed dazed, her eyes flat and empty. She was hurt, no question. And they were a long run from safe.
A wave of bodies spewed into the intersection before them, shouting, shrieking, moving singly and together like a flock of birds. At least three of them were bleeding. Marcus and Yardem closed ranks without speaking and marched forward into the throng. A Kurtadam man, his dark, glossy pelt adorned with silver and glass beads, stopped before them, his hands out in a commanding pose.
“You! All of you! In the name of Nerris Alcion, I command you to the defense of my warehouse!”
“You should move,” Marcus said, not breaking stride.
Snarling, the man put his hand against Marcus’s chest. Yardem kicked the side of the Kurtadam’s knee, folding it the wrong way, and tossed him into the gutter. The mewling sounds of pain were drowned out quickly. All around Marcus, the guards of the bank drew together, their blades at the ready. Down the length of the street, Marcus caught a glimpse of open space. It wasn’t a good sign. The only thing that opened a crowd like this was violence. He pushed ahead. In the clear space, the green and gold of queensmen dithered, caught between formation and free battle.
“Hey!” Marcus shouted. “Guardsmen! To us!”
“They can’t hear you, sir.”
“You try, then,” Marcus said, leaning forward into the unyielding bodies of the crowd. “People might make way for men in uniforms.”
“They can’t hear anyone,” Yardem said. “Wax plugs in the ears. Against the priests.”
With a roar, a dozen or so Antean soldiers as thin as reeds rushed at the milling queensmen. Marcus spat on the ground between his feet. “Well, God smiled,” he said, then turned again toward the port. “Make way! Move, damn it, or we’ll spit you before they can! Make a fucking path!”
The buildings of the salt quarter loomed, high and dark. The smell of smoke was growing thicker. Voices all around them were wailing, and the crowd in the street was nearly at a standstill. In front of him, a Firstblood woman stood with tears in her eyes. The press of humanity behind her gave her no way to get out of Marcus’s path, and her gaze was fixed on the thin, green-patinaed blade between them. She mouthed the words I can’t, I can’t, shaking her head, and began to sink down to her knees.
“Stand up!” Marcus shouted. “If you fall down now, you’re dead. Stand up!”
The woman blinked, stood. He had the sense he could have told her anything and she’d have done it. Whoever she was, whoever she had been until now, the trauma of the day had transformed her into another kind of puppet, ready to do what she was told because the part of her that could make decisions had already surrendered. Marcus sheathed the poisoned sword and took the woman by the shoulder. He pulled her into the center of the little knot of guards, and Halvill took her from there, shoving her out behind them. One by one, Marcus ate away at the crowd in front of them, moving the guards—moving Cithrin—forward another step, and then another, and then another. It was like chipping down a mountain with a hammer, but it was all he could do, so he did it.
The crowd before them broke, the blocking bodies streaming away, diving into doorways and shifting away. Seven men in light scale armor bearing blades whipped at them, cutting the people down like grass. They might have been Antean or some group of local thugs driven mad by panic. All that Marcus cared was that they were between him and the docks and that they’d already started fighting so he didn’t have to feel bad about killing them. They didn’t exchange words. There was no banter. He drew his sword, Corisen Mout came to his right side, Yardem to his left. The first blow almost wrenched the blade from Marcus’s hand, but then long habit flowed into him.
Yardem’s longer reach drove the attackers slightly toward Corisen Mout, crowding them against the wall. Marcus’s world narrowed to a few impressions, gone as soon as they arrived. The angles of the blades, the motion of shoulders. He blocked the attacks and pressed his own. The enemy weren’t very good, aiming for his face instead of his body, going for the quick kill. One left his foot too far forward, and Marcus drew off the man’s blade with a feint while Yardem sank his sword’s point into the enemy ankle. One less. Corisen Mout fell back under a rush, and Marcus slapped the enemy’s arm with the edge of his blade. The man’s elbow began dripping blood at once, and the venom doubled him over screaming not five breaths later. Corisen Mout finished him, and together they slid forward. The crowd was gone now, and they were moving in another of the little clearings of violence. At least there was room.