Chapter 214: Only One Arm

Safira dropped from the edge of the roof, rolled, and came up in the lee of a well.

Twelve soldiers in dark cloaks were already crouched there waiting for her, with the wrapped faces of the Faraja among them.

They looked at her without a word.

She raised two fingers.

They moved.

The Order’s many armies had never been the whole of the problem.

They were a hammer, but Eden’s people were not a nail they could reach.

The factions that had risen in its wake were the true danger: the scavengers, warlords, and rag-tag caravans that crept across Devil’s Maw to pick over the corpse, searching for them.

They did not carry Angels, nor did they carry armies; they carried a few hundred men each, scattered across a hundred villages, every one of them easier to kill than to hide from.

So Safira had stopped trying to hide from them.

She found them instead.

The first rule was the smoke.

A single scout, usually a quick boy from the lower tunnels, would climb a roof at dawn and light a green fire on the chimney.

It meant that the village was occupied, that the enemy had arrived.

By noon, five more scouts were scattered through the surrounding hills, watching the roads and counting wagons.

The second rule was the ground.

Eden’s Arcanists had mapped every cellar and every cistern in Devil’s Maw, and the Guard of the Fifth knew how to dig.

Safira’s people emerged from wells and from stables and from the backs of ovens, struck once, and went back down before the first shout had reached the nearest street.

The third rule was patience.

They never held a position.

They never stood their ground.

A strike lasted twenty heartbeats and never more.

A dozen men in dark cloaks came out of an alley, cut the throats of the guards at a gate, set fire to a granary, and withdrew.

By the time the enemy captain had gathered his men, the cloaks had melted into the walls.

Staying any longer would invite a people they could not yet face.

And the fourth rule was their leaders.

Safira, for example, was the one the enemy saw.

She would walk into a square in broad daylight, and then she would raise one hand.

A single punch.

That was about all she allowed herself to reveal.

It was for a similar reason to the third rule, avoiding the attraction of much greater danger.

In any case, with it, a wave of force rolled outwards, and the ring of swords went with it.

That was the signal.

Every window in the square opened at once.

The attack on the village went exactly as planned.

The first arrow came from the temple roof, a quick bright line that caught a sentry through the throat. Many more followed from the east wall. A volley of oil jars burst on the western gate, and a thin sheet of fire raced across the stones.

Panic spread through the red and yellow ranks.

Safira stepped out of the alley.

Without a hint of hurry, she walked across the square with her braid swinging at her back, and the men around her turned, shouted, and raised their weapons.

A man with a ragged beard pointed his sword at her face.

"There! That’s her! Take the..."

She punched the air.

The blast flattened him against a wall.

Two of the men behind him went through a door.

The remaining guards scattered, all but inviting the cloaks to come out of every shadow at once, silent and swift, cutting down the stragglers before they could regroup.

"Twenty."

They withdrew.

It was a kind of dance.

A man would drop through a trapdoor, and the one behind him would pull it shut.

Within a minute, the square was empty except for the dead drowned in rubble, their graves.

The enemy’s reinforcements arrived on horseback three breaths too late, and found nothing but smoke drifting up from the temple.

Safira crouched behind the shade of some place and let out a long breath.

Her hands were glowing.

She pressed them to a wound on a young soldier’s arm; the light flowed into it, and the flesh closed.

Safira did it without looking, her mind elsewhere, her eyes scanning the horizon.

"Did we lose anyone?"

"No, my lady."

"Good."

She stood up slowly, feeling tired.

Everyone was tired.

Days of dust, tunnels, and stolen sleep had worn the edges off all of them.

The bright smile she wore for the wounded had grown thin.

But a smile was a kind of armor, and she had learned to put it on.

She turned to give the order to withdraw, only to pause.

There... she saw it.

Far above the village, hanging in the clear blue of the sky, a faint smear of white still lingered.

It looked like a shape cut out of the world, a pale line of light, and it was drifting apart as she watched.

Someone had been standing there.

Safira had felt it back then, in the instant before the arrows flew.

She had felt a pressure on the air, immense and cold, as though a great eye had settled on the square.

It had watched them without interfering.

Then it was gone, and the village was just a village.

She stared at the place where it had been.

It must have been a man.

Again, she could not say how she knew.

She had caught only the briefest glimpse of the figure hanging in the sky.

But there was one thing that had easily stood out to her, and it was caused by the wind.

The wind caught his right sleeve, which flapped empty at his side, limp, snapping like a flag.

Remembering that figure made her fingers go still.

’Who was that?’

She did not know.

Nothing in her memory fit the shape.

Every great fighter in Devil’s Maw was a name she knew, a face she had bled beside, and none of them wore that... cold. No one she knew carried that much weight in the air.

"My lady?"

The wrapped faces were waiting.

"It’s nothing."

Safira did not turn away.

The wind pulled at her braid, and the white smear in the sky thinned and thinned until the blue closed over it.

’...he had only one arm.’