Chapter 26-Lyra Vane(2)

Chapter 26: 26-Lyra Vane(2)

"You took Voss’s eye?" Sol asked. He didn’t move his feet.

He stayed low, his left shoulder brushing Valera’s right, his glowing eyes locked on the bright silver-blue core burning in Lyra’s chest.

"The left one," Lyra said, her voice dropping into a conversational purr as her fingers tapped the guard of her right rapier.

Each tap sent a faint, freezing ripple down the six wires stretched across the brick tunnel between them. "The one that wasn’t already covered in scar tissue. He tried to lie to me at first. Told me you two went north toward the market grates. Then I put a thread behind his kneecap and pulled. It’s funny how fast a Slum King remembers his directions when he hears his own tendons snapping."

Beside Sol, Valera shifted her grip on the Night-iron spear.

"Why didn’t Cassian come himself, Lyra? Too afraid to get mud on his boots, or is he worried the Council will smell a Fyrn on his clothes?"

Lyra laughed. It was a short, dry sound. "Uncle Cassian doesn’t hunt rats, Valera. He pays people to do it. And I volunteered. Do you know how boring the Third Ring has been since your family burned? Ten years of sparring with cousins who stop the match the second they get a scratch on their cheek. Everything up there feels like it’s wrapped in wool. Dull. Quiet."

She flicked her left wrist.

Sol barely saw it happen. One of the hairline purple threads anchored to the mortar near the ceiling snapped loose, whipping forward like a striking snake across the thirty-foot gap.

"Down!" Sol roared, shoving Valera hard by the shoulder as he dropped to one knee.

The invisible wire sliced across the brick wall an inch above Sol’s head.

There was no loud crash, just a sharp zip, and a two-inch deep trench appeared in the solid brick, showering them with frozen stone dust.

"She’s moving them!" Valera shouted, rolling to her feet and slamming the butt of her spear into the water.

A thick sheet of white ice raced up the incline, trying to catch Lyra’s boots and snap the lowest ankle-wires.

Lyra didn’t even look down.

She stepped up onto thechest-high wire like a tightrope walker, her weight barely bending the frozen silver thread.

From six feet in the air, she crossed her twin rapiers and slashed downward.

Eight new threads shot out from the tips of her blades, weaving a shifting, razor-sharp net down the six-foot-wide tunnel.

"I can’t freeze them!" Valera yelled, parrying a low thread with the shaft of her Night-iron spear. The wire bit a fraction of an inch into the black metal, screeching horribly before sliding off. "Her mist is denser than mine! She’s almost at second-level!"

"Back up!" Sol barked, swinging his sword in a tight, glowing arc in front of them.

His Mid-Stage heat met two of the threads in mid-air. The orange fire along his blade hissed violently against the concentrated Peak-Stage frost.

The wires didn’t snap, they bent around his steel like hot rubber, the sheer density of Lyra’s energy resisting his heat long enough for the slack of the wire to whip around his guard and slice cleanly through the meat of his left calf.

Sol grunted, his leg buckling for half a second as cold blood spilled into his boot.

Behind them, two more Pale Hounds rounded the bottom of the tunnel from the sinkhole route, cutting off their retreat.

"I’ve got the dogs!" Valera spun around, leaving her back entirely to Sol.

The two hounds lunged together. Valera didn’t have room to swing the full spear in the narrow pipe. She hit the release catch in the center of the shaft, snapping the weapon into two short Night-iron batons.

As the first hound snapped at her face, she jammed the left baton sideways between its jaws, locking its teeth open, and drove the right baton straight into its eye socket, dumping a blast of pure frost into its brain. The beast dropped dead in the water.

The second hound hit her low, slamming its bone-plated skull into her ribs and pinning her against the damp brick wall.

Valera gasped as two ribs cracked, dropping one of her batons to grab the beast by the throat with her gauntleted hand, freezing its neck solid inch by inch.

Up the incline, Lyra saw Valera pinned.

"Oh, you poor thing," Lyra whispered, her heart rate spiking so high in Sol’s thermal sight that her chest looked like a strobe light. Her eyes were wide, drinking in the sound of Valera’s cracked ribs. "Let me help you with that."

Lyra didn’t jump down from her wire. She thrust both rapiers straight past Sol’s head, aiming down the narrow corridor at Valera’s unprotected back while Valera was wrestling the dying hound.

Four silver threads shot past Sol’s shoulders at the speed of a crossbow bolt.

Sol couldn’t swing fast enough to hit all four. And they were too dense to melt with a passing swipe.

"Valera!" Sol lunged sideways, throwing his body directly into the narrow lane between Lyra and Valera’s back.

He got his wrapped sword up in time to catch two of the wires on the flat of the blade, deflecting them into the ceiling.

The third wire caught him across the left pectoral, slicing through his skin and scraping loud and hard across his ribbone before stopping.

The fourth wire slipped right past his hip.

Thwack.

Behind him, Valera let out a choked, wet sound that wasn’t a scream.

The dead hound splashed into the water at her feet.

Sol whipped his head around.

The fourth thread hadn’t cut her in half, Lyra had whipped it at the last second to wrap around Valera’s torso and right arm like a snare. The monofilament wire had bitten straight through her canvas cloak, through her shirt, and buried itself half an inch deep into the flesh of her waist and shoulder, pinning her arm to her side.

And through that buried wire, Lyra was dumping every ounce of her Peak-Stage lunar energy straight into Valera’s bloodstream.

"Let go of her!" Sol roared, grabbing the taut wire with his bare left hand and trying to burn through it.

The wire was too cold, too thick with Peak energy. It sliced into his palm down to the tendons before his heat could even turn it red.

Up on the wire, Lyra jerked her left rapier back six inches.

At the other end of the tunnel, the wire buried in Valera’s flesh tightened and yanked her off her feet, slamming the back of her head hard against the brick wall.

Crack.