“Don’t underestimate the Iron Sister,”Skartovius told me before I first met her.
Now I get to seewhyshe’s called that.
Skinny, evidently frail, and weighing less than a bag of potatoes. That’s Keffa Caernyd. Yet with the lightweight, guard-less sword that looks like an oversized needle in her palm, she is transformed.
She spins, she slashes, she ducks, she weaves. Her blade clinks off the assassin’s shorter weapons. She shows no opening in her quick-moving defenses. The assassin is forced back, surprised at his opponent’s skill, forced to regroup and rethink his strategy.
Keffa does not recklessly charge at the backpedaling vampire. She stands in front of Jinneth—half her width and a foot shorter—like a proud, incensed lover.
I come at the vampire from the side, carving into him with my shortsword.
With a grunt, he twirls, rips my sword out of my hand by keeping it impaled between his ribs, and scores a vicious slice across my forearm.
Blood dribbles between my fingers. I wield my remaining sword and come at him again, not feeling the pain—
Just as a fourth and fifth vampire emerge from the darkness. Equally hooded, equally cloaked, equally terrifying.
“Fuck!” I cry out.
The Chained Sisters are not combatants. Some of them used to be, perhaps, in a life long gone. Only me and Keffa standany chance against these five foes, and we currently stand zero chance of survival.
I have no explosives with me from Vallan’s stores. I have no smoke-bombs or shadow portals, no beast-charming or bloodsight to protect me, no unique things to aid us. Only steel and tenacity . . . which won’t be enough.
The nearest vampire crowds in with another, filling the street. I feel claustrophobic as they close in. Their blades whirl and I’m struck again, the pain lancing through my leg as I try to backpedal into a defensive stance.
This isn’t like fighting the younglings in the Firehold sparring room. These vampires, whoever they were sent by, were sent to kill. They managed to ambush usrightas the sun set, which seems impossible without careful premeditation . . . perhaps even staying in the building they emerged from during the day, until we crossed this threshold.
Rather than retreating under the overwhelming odds and the pounding despair that runs through me, I advance. If I’m going to die, I’ll die protecting these people I care about—a stark contrast to my mood just an hour ago when I chastised them for no reason.
I summon my courage, the strength of my forebears. I don’t know who the fuck to summon, so I grit my teeth and wade into the battle.
My body winds left, twists right, narrowly missing two life-ending jabs at my throat and chest. I elbow a vampire with little effect, spin before he can react, and gain a quick slice across the heel of another.
Keffa comes in too, panting and sweating and fighting with a sheer confidence that has me shocked. She is no stranger to the blade, and I wonder in her many decades of life where she learned to fight like this.
If we live, I can ask her.
Or, more likely, I’ll be asking her about it in the afterworld.
An assassin leaps against the wall to push off and stab at the top of my head, gaining unreal purchase in the air that has him ten feet overhead.
I look up, trying to time his descent—
As something yanks him back against the wall, pinning him there in black swirls.
My stomach lurches to my throat.
I wheel left, no time to think about the incapacitated vampire or what—
A conflagration of fire and wheezing cries splits the violent night. Flesh burns, clothes sizzle, Chained Sisters scream, as one of the vampires immolates in seconds flat.
I turn again, trying to gain my bearings, wondering what the fuck is happening.
A red-gold cloak flutters into view, stark and bright against the monotone grayscale of Nuhav at dusk. A shadow whips the cloak from Skartovius Ashfen’s body, circling it around an assassin and covering his face and body like a blanket.
The vampire bulges the cloak and stabs through it—
Only to get Skar’s blade rammed into his side, his chest, his belly, over and over again. Blackened blood spurts from the ruins of Skar’s nobleblood cloak, and the vampire blanketed and blinded by it crumples to the ground.