They were just clearing the tops of the highest building in Drenth when the window shattered behind the force of steel-toed boots that connected into her sternum. Shrieks from the women on the gondola echoed as her head smacked the pane from the force of the blow.
“Zenith’s co—”
Her attacker pressed as Ashe gripped the railing for support and quickly blocked a punch aimed at her head, instinctively driving her knee upward into their gut as her Shard Form came alive. Her years of training under Cyan came rushing to the fore. She parried another blow and shoved the arm away, finally able to rise to her feet.
The attacker backed away, and judging from the physique, this one was female. Curvy at the hip and bust, not packed with gobs of muscle, and standing about her own height. The woman wore full firedrake armor and a black tinted breather that hid the face behind. Scourge.
The scourge drew a knife and lunged, but the mist sprang into action, creating a dense wall before her, and she whirled away, her hand jabbing the incoming wrist with the gale force of Aere behind it. The bone would have shattered had the woman not been already curling her arm backward with aetheric speed.
This scourge also possessed aetheurgy, she realized with shock.
But the scourge’s attack had obviously been a ploy as she kicked with her back foot and caught Ashe across her unprotected thigh with a bone-crunching jolt. Ashe countered with a series of kicks aimed at the scourge’s head, but the woman used her forearms to block the assault. Ashe spun in a circle, back leg dancing away from the stab of her opponent’s knife, mere inches from connecting with her artery. Her open palm struck the woman’s helmet, sending a shockwave down her arm.
The unfortunate guests and workers backed against the gondola’s opposite window, and the carriage swayed drastically under the intense shifts of their fight. The scourge lunged again, this time with a punch, then a feint with the dagger, jabbing quickly with both. Ashe used Aere to block the first two but took a fraction of a second too long on the third and a grunt escaped her lips as the woman’s aether-enhanced fist pummeled her gut, her legs rising from the ground with its force. It felt like being battered by an avalanche of warhammers.
The assassin tried to strike her again, but Ashe saw the attack coming, thankfully, and countered with her own, thrusting her fingers in a stiff jab into the woman’s crotch with enough force to grind seedpods into pulp had she been a man, but she wasn’t, so, the scourge merely staggered with a stifled yelp and a bowlegged waddle.
Bloody void, she’s strong. Ashe danced backward, wary. “Gonna have to do better than that.”
The scourge mumbled something to her barb, but it was a bunch of gibberish to Ashe’s ear. Then she sent a flying kick, to which Ashe blocked easily. Almost too easily.
And she was right, the woman was only trying to switch positions with her.
Now near the broken glass, the scourge grabbed one of the guests and pulled a woman in front, fighting back the woman’s date with her knife. “Back.”
The tall elfirish man bore a look that might kill, but the lapin stepped in front, holding him at bay. He isn’t a simple servant, is he?
“A human shield?” Ashe set her feet, raising her fists. “Coward.”
“We’ll see if your conviction stands after what you’ve learned last nightturn.” The voice was muffled but there was an air of familiarity within it, one Ashe couldn’t quite place.
“What’s in Zenith’s buggerhole is that supposed to mean?”
Her slight hesitation cost her as the scourge lifted the quite terrified woman and tossed her toward Ashe with aetheric strength. Ashe instinctively (albeit stupidly) sidestepped the sailing woman, who crashed into the already weakened pane. There was a sharp crack, followed by a high-pitched scream. Ashe dove for the woman as her body tumbled over the railing, catching her corset in an iron grip of aetheurgy. The woman, facing downwards to a view of hundreds of feet of empty air, kicked and screamed.
“Come on, lady!” Ashe growled.
And that’s when she felt the knife at her throat.
The scourge’s tinted helmet leveled next to her ear as she struggled to hold the weight of the woman and maintain a grip on the gondola. “You’re lucky Solanine wants you alive, otherwise I’d slit your throat right here and now.”
“Fuck you,” she seethed, her arms straining under the woman’s mass, her aetheurgy ebbing.
“Soon enough.”
The leather of the woman’s corset began to tear. Ashe’s head throbbed; her neck wet from sudden blood under the knife. Her fingers burned as she dug them deeper into the gondola’s metal. She spared a glance down toward the woman who floundered a hair’s breadth away from instant death, the woman’s aura ablaze in fear. Air, clear above the buildings of Drenth, no clouds, only beautiful midday sunlight.
I’ve found myself. Clarity at the oddest of times. Saving an innocent. Fitting, eh, Father?
And then the sun was blotted out by stone girded with metal rods, as the gondola entered Gargantua’s underbelly. Ashe dropped the woman, who unleashed an ungodsly screech only for it to become a pained grunt as she collapsed upon a girder, safely if not bruised.
Ashe eased herself back into the gondola, facing the scourge. “Parlay?”
XXIV
Lojen
“ALL THAT MATTERS is I get to poke Lu Har with my blade,” Ruane said as she sharpened her drakken longknife on a whetstone. She examined the edge with the tip of her claw.
“If everything works out, you might have to wait in line.”
There was something in Emre’s voice that bordered on madness. Lojen wondered if the scion of Drenth was relying too much on a plan that could teeter either way. Too many cracks they could fall through, too many bridges with a chasm on either side yearning for them to lose balance.
Emre handed Lojen a satchel, then he picked up a multi-barrel wheellock pistol engraved with the letter ‘B’ before passing it to him. Lojen wasn’t much for firearms, but he bagged the gun regardless. On the table were cylinders made of metal with capped ends that were perhaps about as wide as one of Lojen’s canines. They were bound into small batches, each wrapped with thick tape. Affixed to each bundle were small mechanical Aere-inscribed radios that were spelled for detonation. All told, there were at least sixty bombs.
“How are we supposed to get on the tethers?”
“With these, Lojen.” Emre handed him a pair of steel-shod, fingerless gloves with protruding grips on the undersides.
They were formed to fit a drakken’s talon. He examined the protrusions; they were dense and was a different metal than the rest of the grips. “Magnets?”
“Those magnets will stick to any metal. Drakken can climb godsdamned near anything, but we don’t want to take any chances. To unfasten them and re-grip, press downward with your palm, fingers… um, claws up to disengage from whatever surface you’re on. Otherwise, you won’t go anywhere.”
“You tested these?”
“Your father did,” Emre said. “Used it to scale the tethers himself.”
