Richard unsheathed his sword. The slight curve of the long, slender blade caught the light from the lanterns.
“Our turn,” Richard said. “We must find the bookkeeper. Stay close to me.”
RICHARD marched down the gangplank, keenly aware of Charlotte following him. The Broken was forever closed to him, but its books were not, and he’d read extensively about the Broken’s military traditions. As a Marine, Jason was trained in the art of small wars. His particular branch of the military evolved to respond to an enemy employing asymmetric warfare, the tactic that involved striking against the vulnerabilities of the opponent rather than seeking to eliminate the bulk of its force. Jason would take a page out of that playbook: he would deliver brutal precision strikes against the vital points of the island, he would drown the island city in chaos and confusion, demoralizing the enemy and severing communication, then he would eliminate the fractured opposition. He would be ruthless and impossible to rein in, but he couldn’t blockade the entire island.
They had to hurry, before the bookkeeper caught on and attempted his escape. They needed his information.
He veered left, following the cobbled streets at a rapid walk. He would’ve liked to run, but Charlotte’s face had turned chalk pale after she’d eliminated the crew, and the color still hadn’t returned. He didn’t want to push her.
What she had done to the crew of the Intrepid Drayton shocked him to the core of his being. There was a kind of terrible beauty to her magic, and when he stood in the epicenter of her silent storm, a feeling of otherworldly awe claimed him, as if he became part of a mystical event that couldn’t be explained, only experienced. It was a peculiar, mesmerizing serenity with a touch of fear, the kind he sometimes felt when walking alone through the towering woods of Adrianglia or staring at the rough ocean and its sky, pregnant with a storm. He had encountered something greater than the limits of his ordinary life, and he was both alarmed and drawn to it.
Jason was right when he called Charlotte Silver Death. The name fit. Horror and beauty mixed into one. But underneath it she was a living, breathing woman, and when he’d looked at her, standing alone at the bow of the ship, vulnerable despite the potent magic swirling around her, while the rest of the people hugged the sides, afraid to step even an inch closer, he felt her isolation. He wanted to shield her, and he had.
He still wanted to protect her now. Despite everything he had gone through, despite his goal being in sight, if someone had offered him a chance to instantly transport her somewhere safe in exchange for having to relive the last six months over again, he would’ve taken it in a heartbeat. And she would deeply hate him for it.
Three people shot out of a side street, two men and a woman. Good weapons, good clothes of a similar cut—town militia or the Market’s slavers. They charged him.
He lent a part of himself to his blade, feeling the magic slide along the edge of his sword. In the Edge, becoming one with the blade took time and effort, but here in the Weird, where the magic was at its strongest, it required a mere fraction of a second. His flash surged along the blade, pure white, fed by the adrenaline coursing through him.
The first man stabbed at him with a short, utilitarian sword. Richard swayed out of the way and thrust into the man’s armpit. The sword slid into his flesh, cutting bone and gristle like it was warm butter. He felt the faintest resistance when the heart ruptured and freed his blade with a sharp tug in time to slam the pommel into the second man’s face. The second attacker stumbled back. The woman jumped into his place, swinging the heavy mace in a devastating sideways blow aimed at Richard’s shoulder to incapacitate his sword arm.
Richard leaned back, letting the mace whistle past him and sliced his sword across her throat. A shallow cut, all that was needed. She gulped her own blood and fell.
He grabbed the remaining man and hurled him against the wall, holding the blade an inch from the thug’s throat. The man’s eyes told Richard he was drowning in sheer animal terror.
“The bookkeeper?”
“House on the hill,” the thug said, his voice shaking. “Columns. White columns.”
Richard released him, and the man took off down the street at a dead run.
Charlotte stood unharmed, taking short, shallow breaths. An expression of deep frustration touched her face.
“Come, we have to hurry,” he told her.
She caught up to him, and together they started up the street, toward the low hill.
“Why do I always do that? Why do I freeze instead of helping you?”
“No killer instinct, remember?” he said. “It’s a natural reaction. When in danger, we fight, flee, or freeze.”
“You don’t freeze.”
“I’m too busy trying to impress you,” he said. “Is it working?”
She gave him an unreadable look. Perhaps now wasn’t the best time for levity.
The street ran into an eight-foot-tall stone wall. Small rocks, each paler than the gray stone making up the bulk of the wall, guarded its top, embedded about twenty feet from each other.
“Ward stones,” Charlotte said.
Climbing the wall was out of the question. The ward wouldn’t let them pass.
“New plan.” Richard turned, and they trailed the wall, heading down. Somewhere there had to be a gate or an opening.
Ahead and to the right, screams cut the silence. An orange-and-red glow lit the night, punctuated by a column of smoke. Jason’s crew had set something on fire.
The side street curved, and they followed it around the houses, closer to the fire and to another wall. An iron gate lay wrenched to the side. Richard ducked through the opening. A wide courtyard spread before him. To the right, near a blocky building, a fight raged between the slavers and a ragged mob armed with shackles and rocks. The slaves struck out, their haggard faces contorted with bestial fury, their bodies, gaping through the holes in their rags, bearing whip marks. They had no weapons. They ripped into the slavers with their nails and teeth like wild animals.
These weren’t the freshly acquired, to be sold as slaves. No, they were the rejects, probably used for manual labor on the island, little more than beasts of burden. No human being should have been treated this way, but they had been, and now they were finally venting their rage. They would kill anyone in their path.
Straight ahead, a raised platform with seven sets of metal posts stood, each post widening at the top. The slaves’ shackles would be fixed to the post, under that wide top, so they could be evaluated. To the right, another gate gaped open, and another group squared off for its control. Nine armed slavers in leather on one side and four of Jason’s people on the other. Neither was willing to make the first move. Jason’s people were good and looked desperate, but the slavers outnumbered them two to one.
He had to get through that gate.
Richard grabbed Charlotte’s hand and squeezed it. “We’ll have to cut our way through. Stay behind me.”
He strode toward the fight. A slave spun into his way. Richard knocked him aside and thrust himself between the two lines, holding his sword lightly at an angle.
The slavers surveyed him, spreading out. He heard Jason’s people move back.
Here, poised on the threshold between violence and peace, was his true place. Generations of warriors, stretching back through time to the fierce native clans that had first fled into the Mire to escape a magic catastrophe, had stood just like him, balanced on that sword’s blade between life and death. Here he was in control, serene and at peace.
In that brief moment, when their lives and his came together, he truly lived. But for him to experience life, his opponents had to die.
The first slaver moved to his right. Richard struck, piercing and cutting with a surgeon’s precision and speed honed by countless hours of practice. He spun in a fluid movement and stopped, his sword held at a downward angle.
The slavers looked at him.
The second, fourth, fifth, and seventh of them fell. They made no noise; they simply crumpled to the ground.
The remaining slavers froze for an agonizing second and rushed him. He melted into the moment, striking without thought, completely on instinct. Gash across the chest, reverse, throat cut, abdomen cut, stab under the rib cage to the right, free the blade cutting across a chest in the same move, reverse, cut across the throat, thrust forward . . . and it’s over.
Too soon. It was always over too soon.
The last slaver stopped short of his sword. The thrust never connected. The man lingered upright for the space of a breath and sank to his knees, struggling for air. Behind him, Charlotte’s magic coiled back into her body.
She stood very still, her eyes opened wide, looking at him as if they had met for the first time. This is it, he wanted to tell her. This is who I am.
He couldn’t tell if she was surprised or horrified or perhaps both or neither. Regret stabbed at him, but then it was better that she knew his true nature. They had to move. He took her hand, and they ran to the gate.
“Thank you,” he told her. “That was brave of you, but also unnecessary. Please don’t do that again. I don’t want to accidentally injure you.”
She pulled her hand out of his fingers. “I’m not helpless, Richard.”
Did she find his touch repulsive? He sliced through the lock securing the gate. “I know you’re anything but. But you’ve done your part, and it’s my turn. Save your reserves. We may need them.”
They went through the gate, and Charlotte gasped. Above them a corpse hung from a pole. A boy, Jack’s age. His eyes had been gouged out. His mouth was sewn shut. His nose was a broken mess of flesh and cartilage on a face scoured with burn marks. A sign hanging around his neck read, “We’re always watching.”
He had seen this before—the slavers’ favorite visual aid to discourage escape. He had pried Jason out of a hole in the ground just before he was about to end up on such a pole. Anger, hot and furious, burned in him, then died down to a simmer.
“He was alive,” Charlotte whispered.
“What?”