Chapter 27 – True Darkness

Gron looked back at me. “Where’s the mongrel?”

I just stared at the heavy door. “He left us!” I said. I clenched my teeth. “Bloody left us! We’ve got to get out of here! Where’s Anna?”

“Raising a ruckus,” said Gron. He shook his head. “Lad, I’ve seen her fight. She was never like this before. What did you do to that girl?”

I took off down the hall, following the sounds of fighting. I vaulted over an unconscious Mayazian with filed teeth that were half in its mouth, half scattered across the floor. “Me? I didn’t do anything!”

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I began to make out thick graffiti smearing every flat surface. More of the sigils and strange symbols, splashed haphazard on the walls, the floor, even the ceiling. It smelled like a rotten bilge in the Mayaz safehouse. Another sentry was starting to come round as we passed. Gron cracked his head against the wall. “Well she sure ain’t the Annalisa from Jeedle’s pit.”

“Maybe she just needed a little faith,” I said.

“Then she ought have joined a temple and been a cleric.”

We found the stairs, and Annalisa barreling down them and into a pair of knifemen. The woman was in a rage, ducking one knife and shattering the owner’s wrist while she wrapped the arm of the other with her tail and pulled him off balance.

“Anna!” I shouted. She was going through fighters almost as fast as the dwarf and I could move. “We’ve got to go! Cavalry’s coming!”

I almost tripped down the stairs. One of the knife-men was down, and the other had his back to me. I cloaked my knife with the two of knaves and drove it into his back. The man gasped out, watery blood spraying from his mouth. He had the same strange, sharpened teeth and scaly skin disease as the one from the Mop. Gron finished off the other with a hit from knuckles as hard and heavy as stones. But Annalisa was already around the corner.

“There’s no time!” She shouted back. “I’m not leaving them!”

“No time until what!” I shouted. “The alarm is already on!” I felt the card directly underneath us. Whatever else, the girls were still here. Sub level, I was sure. Maybe the basement would open up into one of the adjacent shops and we could get out that way. But our path still wasn’t clear.

I turned the corner and came face to face with both the bitterdeep lamia and her pet mage. Worse, behind us I could hear shouts and boots on the ground level.

This time Kel wasn’t bare-handed. She had four thin swords with barbed tips. She raised them into position. Anna sized the pair up. The mage, I think, recognized me from the Mop. He pointed.

“You!” he said.

“Oh, we’re fucked,” said Gron.

“We’ve beat them once,” I said. “We’ll do it again! Just buy us time,” I said to Gron. He huffed, looking between us and the other pair. But he fell back to deal with the footmen coming from the street.

“I’ll try to hold ‘em away as best I can,” he said.

“We?” hissed the lamia. “So, there was a fix.” she flourished her blades as I fanned out my cards. “I knew this mewling blue whore could never have beaten me on her own.”

I leaned over to Annalisa. “We don’t have three rounds to knock them out.”

“We don’t need them,” she said. She launched herself Kel of Bitterdeep.

It was all I could do to evoke the stone skin of the two of towers before the blades crashed down against Annalisa. One of them shattered against her onxy skin. But it felt like my spirit had taken the impact instead. I actually grunted with effort.

Across from me, the web mage started working his spells. I brought the dragon’s greed to my hand and evoked its enhanced sight. I could see the strings the mage had tossed into corners of the corridor, making a chaotic mess of things. The other ends bound themselves to Annalisa, and me as well. I could feel their resistance, fighting my efforts to pull away. I had my cards fanned out and raked them across the strings like a sawblade.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

To my surprise (and his, I imagine), the web parted as our wills met. I kept my deck moving, flowing like a stream, and severed two of the bonds slowing Annalisa. She ducked back to avoid thrusts from opposite angles and punched the back of one of the swords. Its tip drove into the floorboards, and the deep sea lamia dropped it, focusing on keeping her two remaining blades moving. I severed the last of the webs within my reach, and on a whim, flicked a pair of cards through the air, severing another. It held my will long enough to cut the web. Just in time to let Annalisa slip to the side of a thrust that would have skewered her, shield or no shield.

“How are you doing that?” The mage across the hall demanded.

“Just sweeping up some cobwebs,” I replied. Just clearing the chaos of his magic and returning order to the hallway. I jerked as that resonated with something new in my deck. But I hardly had time to meditate on it in the middle of a fight for my life.

Still, I thought I might have stumbled upon a new way to use my deck. I pulled the two of knaves and flooded my will into it. But instead of drawing the effect from the card, I left it within the card itself and flicked it at the mage. It spun, to all appearances, just a regular card. But it carried murderous intent, and I was sure the paranoid Mayazian mage could feel that. He crouched down to avoid it, not quite fast enough. The two of knaves sliced a bloody divot in his arm and then circled back to me, where I caught it. He cried out, clutching at the wound.

It took a considerable amount of focus and will to keep the power within the cards. If I hadn’t been pushing myself to improve for weeks, I don’t think I could have managed it. But I had a solid way to perform ranged attacks, now.

The lamia hissed. “They’re just cards, fool!” As if to illustrate, she intercepted the next one I threw at the mage. Her blade speared the card, and it practically shrieked in protest. But I'd thrown the three of knaves, and evoked the three of dragons, as well. A flaming apparition sprouted from the card, reaching toward the lamia with fiery fingertips. She shrieked and recoiled from the heat, but the barb on her sword kept the shadow clone moving with her. It seized her wrist, and I could smell sizzling fish. She dropped the sword, and the apparition with it.

How’s that for just cards, bitch.

I nearly blacked out, maintaining the effects of all those cards at once. I had to release the stone skin and the dragon’s gaze. I hoped Annalisa would feel that she had become vulnerable, but apparently, I needn’t have worried. She had figured out how to use the chopper’s ring of alacrity. Moving faster than I’d ever seen her, she slipped inside the serpent’s guard. A black, glassy sheen crept up Annalisa’s hands. She drove the heel of her palm into the Lamia’s throat, in the same way the lamia had done to her in the fight the day before.

It wasn’t just flesh that she struck with. She’d called on the plane of obsidian and turned the side of her hand into a lethal, edged weapon. The Lamia had thick scales protecting her, but blood still oozed from the wound. Annalisa pulled back and straightened her hand. She planned to mimic the straight-fingered thrust, as well. Well, if her hands were sharp, this should work.

I charged the two of knaves and touched my will to Annalisa, projecting it onto her fingers. The darkness surrounding them deepened, coalescing until it was an inky black pitch. The devilborn fighter drove her hand home. Her fingers parted the scales at the creature’s throat, as well as the flesh beneath. Practically decapitated, the serpentine fighter flopped to the floor, leaving nothing standing between the web mage, and a bloody, enraged prize fighter and her personal pocket mage.

He knew the dance was up. Even if his comrades made it in, he would be dead. He pressed himself against the door opposite us as we approached down the hallway. I could feel my card, just beyond the threshold.

He put his hands against the wall, facing away. I pulled a card from my deck at random and pressed it to his chest. “This will burn your soul from your worthless body if you speak a lie to me,” I said. Nonsense, of course. “How many men with the girls?”

“None,” he said. “We weren’t to let anyone in with them. Mother Mayaz had plans, didn’t want their flesh fouled.”

“What plans?”

“I don’t know, I swear it!”

Without my card, I couldn’t do a reading to tell if he was being earnest, but I don’t think he would have lied to me. I looked to the side. “Annalisa?”

She put her fist across his jaw, knocking out his candle and a few of his teeth. Once he was on the ground, she also put a boot in his ribs, and I had to pull her away to keep her from stomping on his skull.

“That’s enough! Anna! What’s gotten into you?”

“They took our friends!” she screamed, pulling away. “How are you not angry? How are you not furious? What’s wrong with you?”

None of the girls from the Mop were what I’d have called friends. I wasn’t here for them. And I certainly wasn’t here for Kridick anymore, not since his main squeeze ditched us to die in another gang’s hideout. “Right now, I’m worried about you, Annalisa. I came to make sure you were safe.”

She huffed, sniffed, and wiped at her nose. “I’m supposed to be your bodyguard,” she said.

The cards pulled at me. The deck yearned to be completed.

“Come on,” I said. I pulled the rusted chain off the door, and we went down into the cellar.