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Nona threw the stone. It bounced off Raymel’s helm. He didn’t turn.
‘Ruli! Jula!’ Nona screamed. ‘Darla! He’s coming. He’s coming for you.’
Fear ran through her, cold water through the marrow of her bones. For the first time in an age she felt the chill of the ice-wind, ragged now as it lost its strength but still icy now that she had no range-coat. ‘He’s coming!’ She didn’t know what to do. She wanted them to run, but if they left Ara, Zole, and Tarkax then Raymel would make the gullies ring with their screams.
Darla appeared at the cave mouth, Tarkax’s tular in her hand, still sticky with blood. Her jaw dropped as she took in the size of Raymel, striding across the corpses.
Nona cast her exhaustion aside and broke into a sprint. She caught Raymel five yards before the cave and threw herself upon him. Leaping and reaching as high as she could she drove her flaw-blades into the small of his back. One set punctured the steel plate armour, the other skittered across, leaving bright lines scored into the metal. Dragging herself higher, Nona reached up, slashing with all her strength to lodge her second set of blades just below his shoulder blades.
Raymel bellowed and began to turn. If the blades were hurting him, though, it was nothing more than scratches. There was no blood gushing or even leaking from the slots she had driven through his plate mail. She climbed higher as he turned, cutting and hauling her way up, an ice-climber sinking her axes.
A great hand reached back for her, large enough to wrap about Nona’s head and crush it like a nut. Releasing her grip, she grabbed a thumb and finger, each so thick in its gauntlet that she couldn’t close her own fingers about them.
Hunska speed enabled her to climb his wrist and reach the iron summit of his elbow before the grasping hand could close on the air where she had been. Locking one leg about his elbow, Nona slashed at Raymel’s visor, putting every ounce of her strength into two blows, a rising, left-to-right slash and, as she fell away, a descending right-to-left slash.
The obdurate steel resisted her blades until they met the first of the many perforations through which the warrior saw the world. Then, tearing in, the flaw-blades managed to cut from one hole to the next several times before jolting out to score the surface once again.
Nona turned in the air and landed on her feet, stumbling immediately and sprawling backwards across an injured soldier clutching his stomach wound. From her place on the ground she saw that the criss-crossing of her blades had cut out a number of diamond-shaped sections of the visor and she could now see one glaring eye, the cheekbone below, and part of Raymel’s nose. But his flesh had resisted her blades better than the steel, showing just red scratch-marks where his face should have been cut into shreds.
Raymel Tacsis’s great sword dropped like a thunderbolt, dividing the man that Nona had tripped over. She rolled clear as the blade hammered into the rock. Her speed was leaving her now, spent in too many acts of extravagant swiftness. Raymel straightened, scything his sword across the slope. Nona tried to dig into the moment but the gaps had grown slim and the spaces between heartbeats, once so cavernous, now squeezed her out. She leapt the cutting edge with just an inch to spare.
Where Nona was tiring Raymel seemed possessed of boundless stamina, howling a chilling mix of glee and hatred as he pursued her. Nona grabbed a discarded sword and, running beneath another swing, hacked at Raymel’s leg. It was like hewing a stone pillar. The sword jolted from her hands, and the shock transmitted along the blade sent white agonies lancing up her wrists.
The gleaming arc of Raymel’s next swing held Nona’s attention, and a kick caught her a glancing blow, coming from the side while she watched the sword. The impact spun her and she fell among the bodies, clutching the hot wet pain in her side: broken ribs at the least.
‘You’re going to wish you hadn’t done that,’ she snarled at him. ‘But not for very long.’ She tried to leap up at him, furious, but for once her body betrayed her, too broken and filled with too much hurt to obey.
Raymel towered above her, lifting his foot to stamp down on her legs.
Nona raised her arm in futile defence and as she did, something small and spinning tore through the empty space above her. It vanished through the gap she had made in Raymel’s visor and thunked into his eye.
With mad screams Darla, Ruli, and Jula came tearing down the slope, whirling stolen swords above their heads. Raymel, howling, dropped his own blade, and raised a huge hand to his face. The three novices thrust and hacked at every part of him from his ankles to his chest. Nona crawled clear of the melee, sliding down the gore-slick slope, holding her ribs.
Raymel weathered the sword-storm. He spun around amid the clatter and clang, swinging his left arm. Darla took the main force, his forearm slamming into her belly and lifting her off the ground. She landed yards away with a horrifying thump. Ruli and Jula, both knocked from their feet, tumbled down towards Nona.
Iron-shod fingertips closed on the point of the throwing star and pulled it from the ruin of Raymel’s eye. He flipped the weapon away. Behind the intact section of visor the scarlet eye, devil-owned, stared at the sprawl of novices, the hatred so intense that it seemed a physical thing, pressing on them, both burning and icy at the same time.
Nona seized a spear and rolled to her back. She would die facing her enemy, weapon in hand, not crawling away. Close by, Ruli lay dazed, her head bloody. Jula rolled over beside Ruli, her wrist at a sick-making angle, and took her knife in her off-hand, eyes blazing. And Raymel stood over them, all in shadow now with the setting of the sun, his huge sword recovered and poised to end three of them in a single slash.
From the darker shadow of the cave mouth a small figure broke, tottering and awkward on stiff legs. Arabella Jotsis, her golden hair in disarray, staggered weaponless down the slope towards them. Nona wanted to scream at her to run, but it was too late. Too late for anything. At least Ara might die with them, in a bloody moment, and escape Raymel’s cruelties.
Some warrior instinct – perhaps just sharp hearing – made Raymel glance back, but seeing a stumbling child he quickly returned his attention to the victims before him.
Ara tripped and fell most of the last few yards, jerking her arms overhead only at the last moment. And in that moment Nona recognized the power of the Path shuddering there in Ara’s empty palms. Ara clapped both to the giant’s backplate and the energies she had gathered, finding her serenity in the worst possible situation, pulsed into Raymel Tacsis. The raw stuff of creation detonated against Raymel as it had once detonated in the fight-dummy that had suffered Ara’s wrath in place of Zole. A light lit within Raymel’s armour and with a violent and deafening crack things blew apart.
Nona shook the echoes from her head and looked up to find that although Ara had been blown off her feet, Raymel had not. He stood in the fractured remains of his plate armour, five hundred pounds of bleeding muscle stacked three yards tall. The livid purple mark that reached up the side of his neck continued down across the broadness of his chest, swirling out into patterns that remembered the complexity and form of sigils. On his side and below his shoulder great patches of scarlet scar tissue, as if from old burns, seemed to hold leering faces in their ridges and hollows. Flying pieces of his armour had torn the odd furrow through his flesh, but by and large he stood unharmed. The force of the detonation had blown his helm clear and he stared at her with one eye ruined and dripping, the other a scarlet window into the mind of a devil. Below them hung an echo of the smile he’d worn when he broke Saida.
