Chapter 112. Dancing With Two Partners While Being Stabbed

Chapter 112: 112. Dancing With Two Partners While Being Stabbed

I saw Corvane come fast and strike.

His sword came down in a long diagonal arc that I caught on the kingsteel and barely turned, and the force of it drove me two steps backward and sent a bolt of numbness up to my shoulder.

He didn’t pause.

He followed through with a short, savage thrust that I only just ducked. The point snagged my collar and tore it open.

’Close,’ I thought. ’Arm’s length...’

’We have to be close...!’

Which was a fine idea, in theory, if I’d had any way of keeping two other people within an arm’s length of me in the middle of a fight.

They had their own enemies. And they had their own footwork.

Asking them to stay glued to my side would be like trying to dance with two partners while being stabbed.

’Unless they’re attached.’

It was the stupidest idea I’d ever had, and I didn’t have time to think it was stupid. I reached into the pouch at my belt, where I’d stuffed a length of thin leather cord, picked up in Greywater for lack of bootlaces.

I snapped it in half with my teeth. I tied one end around my left wrist.

I tossed the other half to Laura, who caught it without breaking her stride, and I grabbed Alicia’s sleeve and knotted the first piece around her right wrist in about three seconds.

"What are you doing?" she demanded.

"Leash!"

"I beg... your pardon?"

"Not you on a leash! The connection! It has to be physical!"

"That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard," said Laura, tying the second cord around her own wrist and mine. "And I’ve watched you fight a bear."

"Is it working?"

For a moment, nobody said anything.

The cord went taut between us. And then something under my sternum clicked open, like a door sliding on a well-oiled hinge.

[Bond Resonance: Active.]

[Consumption: 0% (Resonance Surge Token used).]

[Static interference reduced by 74% through physical conduit.]

[Please note: this is extremely stupid, and it is working anyway.]

I felt them arrive.

Alicia is first, as bright and warm as an afternoon in the kitchen.

Then Laura, a clean blade of cold light.

They poured through the cord into my wrist, and I poured back, and for a moment the three of us weren’t three people standing on a catwalk.

We were one fighting animal with six arms and a single idea.

Corvane’s next blow didn’t land.

I’d seen it before it started. I don’t know how to say that more honestly.

The Combat Instinct showed me his weight shifting a half second before he moved, and the Resonance gave me the speed to act on it.

I turned the blade with a small circular motion of my wrist and stepped inside his guard, and Alicia came out of nowhere on the low side, sweeping her blade across the backs of his knees in a flat, vicious arc.

He jumped it, but only just. Laura came in from the right and drove her point straight at the join between his arm and his breastplate, forcing him to twist.

He hissed. It was the first sound I’d heard from him that didn’t sound rehearsed.

"Again," I said.

We did it again. And again.

I called the rhythm in my head, and they moved to it. Alicia low, Laura high, me through the middle.

Every strike came from a different angle, and every time he turned to meet one, another came in behind it.

The Aether we were using never left our bodies. It ran in a closed loop through the cord and through the three of us, with nothing to leak out and nothing for his crystal to read.

He kept lashing at the air where we should have been and finding us a fraction of a second elsewhere.

But he was strong. That was the thing I hadn’t wanted to believe.

He wasn’t guessing any more, because he couldn’t, and he had nothing to guess with. So he simply hit harder.

He took a cut across the thigh from Laura without a flicker.

He accepted a stab from Alicia that glanced off his shoulder plate and dug a groove in the metal.

Then he caught my blade on the flat of his sword, braced his legs, and shoved, with a strength that felt like being hit by a runaway cart.

I flew backward. The cord yanked at my wrist.

Alicia stumbled, and Laura went down on one knee, and for a second we were a mess of limbs on the planks of the catwalk with Corvane’s boots coming down on top of us.

"Holt!" Alicia shouted.

A great round shield swung into the gap, and Corvane’s blow rang off it like a bell. Holt stood over us with his feet planted wide, gritting his teeth, and for a moment I thought he’d hold.

Then Corvane kicked him in the stomach, and the big man folded and slid sideways with a grunt.

Across the cavern, Sharon was roaring.

She’d planted herself at the end of the middle catwalk with four of Varn’s knights in front of her, and she was fighting with the wild, joyful fury of a woman who’d been bored all week.

Her left shoulder had done most of the work at the gate, and now she’d found a use for her right arm too, in the way you find a use for a hammer that’s been left in the shed.

She cracked one knight across the helm, kicked another off the catwalk into the dark, and swore at the third in a stream of filth that made one of Varn’s own men blush through his visor.

"Don’t you dare get behind me, you gutless sons of bitches!" she bellowed. "Come at me properly! I haven’t had my breakfast!"

"Is that all you think about?" Holt gasped, picking himself up.

"It’s the only thing that’s ever mattered!"

The line held. That was the important thing.

It was ragged and bruised and full of gaps, but the team had split into three clumps, Sharon and her four, Holt dragging himself back to guard the stairs, and the three of us tied together in the middle with Corvane.

And every one of us was still standing.

But Corvane wasn’t tired. That was the other thing I understood, and it made my mouth go dry.

He didn’t breathe like a man in a fight. He breathed like a man at his work.

He knocked Alicia’s blade aside with the back of his gauntlet.

He swatted Laura out of the way with a punch that sent her skidding.

And then he came for me, straight, with his sword arm drawn back and the whole weight of his body behind it, and I knew, with the horrible clarity you get in the half second before something awful, that I didn’t have a block for this one.

The shield hit him first.

I don’t know where Garrick had found it.

It was a big round thing with a lion’s head on the boss, battered and scarred, and it had belonged to one of the knights Sharon had dropped at the stairs.

He’d taken it up with his left arm, slung his crutch away, and walked out onto the catwalk in the middle of the fight without hurrying and without ducking, like a man crossing a field to speak to a neighbor.

"Corvane," he said.

The big knight turned his head.

"You gave me a crystal and a lie," said Garrick.

His voice was low and rough and perfectly steady. "Come get both back, you bastard."