A trickle of watter melted from the blade. The moment a single bead connected with Hassani's hand she shifts her stance. A mercenary rushes her with a short spear. Tapping the spear away cracks it along its length before it explodes backwards, impaling the man with innumerable hand-length splinters. Darts fly from blow guns. Blade interposes instinctively and they vaporize on impact. Two more rush. Kicking a chair sends it flying into one and topples him. His blade hurtles his from his hand at the slightest parry to embed in the wall. A riposte punches a whole the size of his head in his chest.

Time's flow slows to a trickle for her, even the most explosive action casual and almost irritatingly slow. She's getting better at using the extra time to avoid shrapnelized weapons and other debris hurtled about by the force of her every movement.

Leaping atop the table gets her at them faster. Doesn't matter that is makes her a more exposed target. More darts, an arrow, a spear fly her way. All those she doesn't swat away with negligent ease she sidesteps and watches float past. Hurling herself into the midst of her enemies, she swings the flat of her blade about. Impacts don't cut, but hurl, shatter, or splatter targets on impact.

It comes down upon the Godge's obese body. Divan sunders. He craters through the floor and down to the next lower level of the tower. She backpedals as she watches cracks spiderweb from the hole. More of the floor collapses, taking several of the nearest bodyguards down with it but she's long clear before she's in any danger.

A giant woman hosting lupine skinlife hews a table leg off with her axe to throw Hassani off balance. Hassani launches forward to slide down the table's enameled surface. Her sword punches through the woman's armor like cloth.

A Small Master rises up with a jeweled knife. Hassani slaps it from his hand. Grabs his wrist and twists. It cracks. The Small Master screams as she kicks him out a window.

Three bodyguards make a wall of round shields, spears thrusting out. The Aze blade turns the first shield to shrapnel on the first swing then creates a thudding rain of severed limbs on a second.

Someone shouts at at her to stop as she runs out of bodyguards and begins methodically slaughtering Small Masters. Men and women like these captured Avani, sold her off who knew where. Who don't even realize they've done so as such casual horror is their livelihood.

She realizes the woman she's about to kill is a slave, cowering and sobbing at her feet. With effort greater than any she's seemed to expend during the fight, she sheathes the Aze Blade.

Hassani fell against the wall, suddenly exhausted. The past few minutes blurred to a haze of blood and death. Servants fled, a handful of surviving bodyguards dragged wounded fellows away. All the Small Masters save Fatma and Ijran lay in bloody heaps and sprawls. Those that she hadn't escorted out a window or driven through the floor anyway. A now-ownerless, doomed Feral stared out the window at their fallen Master, then slumped down, pressed her hands onto her mask, and sobbed.

The fight exhausted Hassani, especially in after being half-starved, plague-ridden, and sleep-deprived for who knew how long. She turned wearily back towards Fatma. Ijran's three bodyguards stared at her with mouths agape. Ijran talked to themselves, one eye still looking down at the tablet in their lap, the other assessing Hassani clinically. They puffed on their pipe.

Fatma leapt atop the slanted, sword-hewn table, pumping her arms. "Yes! It's ours now, Ijran, all of it!"

"Indeed," Ijran said as Fatma spat upon Ardina's corpse. "Now that the ugly part is done begins the hard part."

"That wasn't the hard part?" Hassani said, staring at the grisly redecorating she'd performed. "Easy for you to say, sitting there smoking your pipe the whole time."

"You made it look pretty effortless, gotta admit," Fatma said, picking up Godge's spilled goblet. "You're worth keeping around. Can think of a dozen more uses for you just off the top of my head. Plenty of people in Berujat need killing, much less the Book."

"No. You said you knew where Avani was," Hassani said, gritting her teeth as she picked splinters of wood, metal, and bone out of her arm. However much she had tried to be careful, the Aze blade had proved so overpotent again that she bled in a dozen places from splinters shed by exploding weapons, shields, furniture, people. "This is over."

Fatma looked her over then crossed her arms. "You speak as though you're the one with the advantage here. You're the one wearing my brand on the shoulder and I'm the only one who knows where your Palest-of-Pale daughter is right now."

"Tell me or when I leave this tower there will be zero Small Masters not two."

"No," Fatma said, planting her feet wide.

Hassani drew the sword and sliced into the huge table in a single cut. The force of the blow not only breaks it in half but casts radiating fracture lines throughout the surviving halves and sends shudders the floor. Creaks, groans, and creeping cracks emanate from Godge's hole before another chunk of flooring collapses.

Ijran's bodyguards form up before him protectively. Fatma crashes down into a heap of plates, platters goblets, fruit, cakes from the broken table. Hassani strides through the debris-strewn gap left between the sundered table halves. She stands over Fatma, her face a mask of fury lit by the blade's faint, pure-white radiance.

"Tell me where Avani is. Now."

Fatma scrambles to her feet warily. The motion seems sluggish though Hassani can tell the woman moves with full haste to get away from her. Blood runs from Fatma's nose. Coats her nose-chain and soaks her silks.

"Okay, okay! I'll show her to you." Her words take an age to form.

"Where is she?" Hassani says, her voice amplifying and echoing through the tower.

"Sheath that marvelous weapon, come, and we'll show you," Ijran says, somehow speaking in a normal cadence. He steps calmly past his bodyguards. "She's not far."

Hassani turns, levels the faintly-pulsating weapon at him. "If you lie, you die."

"Then I shall refrain from lying to you from this point on. Come."

He turns and walks towards the stairs. His bodyguards cluster about him, walking backwards to keep weapons aimed in Hassani's direction. Hassani sheathes and follows. Fatma trailed behind, holding a cloth napkin to her nose and glaring at Hassani.

By now, Hassani's past caring what Fatma thinks or wants. Only Avani matters.

Ijran paused for a moment as they emerged from the barricaded doors at the base of the tower. Outside, the Small Masters' retinues stood apart in armed camps. The corpses of the two Masters Hassani had thrown from the tower lay guarded by rings of their former followers.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Ijran raised their hands to silence the cries and questions greeting them as they emerged then proceeded to offer them all service in the reformed, reduced Small Master Council. As they spoke so, mercenaries Ijran and Fatma had hired over the last few days drew weapons as they emerged from passing traffic, amid various retinues, and poured from the barn. Insurance in case anyone felt like acting out any notions of revenge.

With an offer of work in similar positions to any who might return to the tower within the next few days, Ijran, Hassani, Fatma, and the three bodyguards pushed off into Berujat's teeming sprawl.

A wave of post-Aze fugue drugged her. Everything felt so slow and dead compared to the brilliant, hyper-aware rush when she connected with the sword. It took everything she had to not draw it again.

As they walked, Fatma argued with Ijran, suggesting she should have left Hassani rotting in the cage, just used the blade on her own to wipe out the Small Masters. Ijran's cool questions as to her abilities as a warrior and familiarity with Aze's handiwork stilled all the air from Fatma's sails. Fatma's dark looks might have bothered Hassani once upon a time, but the only person in the All whose opinion she cared about now was Avani.

In her exhaustion, their route became a blured march through brilliant sunlight and cool shadow. Slave chains marched by cringing at their fresh brands. Wretch Plague wagons ran to the Crowmen, pulled by onery striders. The winded narrow streets and stair-chiseled ravines. Sewer channels flowed sluggishly towards the Canyon of Cages. Rowdy brothels hosted catcalling crowds of spectators watching the action transpiring on open balconies and through wide windows. Spacious mancer school grounds thronged with desperate menials competing for entry while the Masters and their trained mancers looked on imperiously.

At one point as they passed a rugged, cliff-side trainings grounds hosting burly, naked Vengers showing off their writhing skinlife, Ijran turned to regard her with one eye. Ijran repeated themselves several times before Hassani realized they were asking her a question. "Ardina and Godge both claimed a Venger among their bodyguards. How did you manage to attack them without them sensing your hostile intent?"

"My training conditioned me to reflexively examine anywhere I enter for threats and lay plans at an instinctive level," Hassani said, only realizing how deeply her training ran as she spoke. She hadn't even noticed she was doing it at the time. "I planned how I would fight the room or the attacks of individual bodyguards, but with no more concern than I calculated the best course of action if a fire broke out or if one of you choked on a grape."

"So the Vengers couldn't sense your hostile intent until you actually attacked."

"I had no hostile intent even when I drew my sword. I focused merely on the next action or likelihood and dealt with it as it came up."

"Interesting," Ijran said, turning away to hold a hushed conversation with Fatma.

Her mind flashed to her last time training with Deia.

"How do you kill a man who can see the future?"

"By not having one."

She suddenly longed to speak to the old woman again, to find the peace and clarity that usually came after their odd training sessions. Once she found Avani, she would go to Deia's tower, hole up there with her little girl until the Dynasts finished fighting each other. When everything was over and all was back to normal, they'd come out and build a new life together.

Whatever normal might be after all this.

In her distraction, she didn't notice where they were heading until they trudged down the crude, worn stairs leading to the section of cliffs where her cage hung. She stopped and put her hand on her sword at the top step. The dozen-odd guards lounging near the entrance rose to alertness, but Ijran waved them down.

"What is this? I thought you said we were heading to Avani."

"We are, you Pale, stubborn-" Fatma snarled before Ijran spoke over her.

"Just a little further and you shall see why we return."

"I don't trust you."

"And that is your right, whatever I may have said. We go this way to resolve our current dilemma. Follow or leave," Ijran said, turning and descending into the gloom.

Fatma cast a cursing gesture in her direction, then followed Ijran. Warily, Hassani followed. All she wanted to do was hold Avani in her arms. That and sleep for a week. Who knew how long it had been since she'd last seen her precious child? Who knew what horrors Avani faced in the time since Adonissian dragged her from their home?

Against all her instincts and training, she followed.

When she reached the cave mouth against which her cage had been anchored, Ijran stood pointing past the cage and out across the canyon. "There, upon that ledge yonder."

Fatma grinned cruelly as Hassani pushed past her. "There's your precious little runt, you Inviolate whore."

Hassani squinted the direction Ijran pointed. It took her a moment to locate whatever it was they pointed to, but when she did her breath caught in her throat. Her heart skipped a few beats.

A burly, leather-clad man held a tiny, pale-skinned figure with curly white hair. Ijran whistled sharply and the man thrust the child out over the ledge. The girl screamed and clung to his arm, her voice reaching them in torn fragments thrown about by the wind.

"No!" Hassani shouted, stepping forward and clutching at her cage's bars involuntarily. She whirled towards Fatma and Ijran, hand flying to her sword hilt. "Let her go or this cave becomes a tomb."

Fatma grinned. "If this becomes our tomb then the shit-rivered chasm out there becomes Avani's excarnation site. Give me the Aze Blade and get back in your cage or watch her learn to fly."

Burning rage and crushing despair warred against each other in Hassani's guts as she looked from Fatma and Ijran to where her child screamed in terror in the clutches of some burly sadist.

"I told him to wait fifty breaths after my whistle then throw the child if he doesn't hear the appropriate signal from me," Ijran said calmly, one eye looking towards man and child, the other at Hassani. "Unfortunately, I'm not entirely sure he's entirely numerate so who knows how he'll interpret that?"

"All right, all right!" Hassani shouted, stripping the sword-belt from her hips and throwing it at Fatma's feet. She scrambled through the too-small cage door and rushed to the far side of the cage, reaching desperately through the bars. "Avani, amma's here! I'll be with you soon!"

Fatma laughed as she re-latched the cage door. Ijran's bodyguards worked the simple winch at the base of the arm supporting her swinging prison, jarring it in lurches out into the open air. Hassani whirled towards Ijran. "It's done, give the signal!"

Ijran whistled three times. On the far ledge, the man pulled the girl back onto safe stone and set her on her feet. The girl wailed and clutched at him, her terror of him dwarfed by her fear of falling. Hassani called to Avani and sobbed, her eyes blearing. "It'll be okay Avani. Amma's here. Amma's here."

"Amma's here and amma will do as she's told from now on if she wants that little girl over there to live," Fatma said. She snatched up the Aze Blade and grinned triumphantly. "I've so many more uses for a woman of your rare talents. Be a good girl and I'll maybe let you visit her sometime. Maybe."

Hassani slumped down against the wooden bars as Fatma and Ijran departed, wracked with sobs. Avani was led from her sight into the distant tunnel network, her relief that the girl was alive crushed in the grip Fatma held on her and the realization of how powerless she was to make things right.

In time, the sobs stopped and the same grim determination that had driven Hassani from nothing to Inviolate solidified within her.

"By the capricious Ascen, I swear Avani and I will be reunited. And when she's safe and back to me, I promise I'll cut Ijran down and deliver unto Fatma with a death worse than she threatened Avani with. Let the Mon strike me down if I break this vow."

Though waves of worry and depression washed against her, the vow buttressed her against their assault. Her mind shifted from the miseries of the present and focused on the future. On freedom, Avani, and justice. She stared despair in the face and carved tunnels of hope and action through its oppressive mass.

She'd destroyed most of the Small Masters for her daughter, but she'd tear the rest, Berujat, even the Book itself apart if that what it took to get Avani back.