Page 71 of The Tainted Cup

A cough, a gurgle, and the hot splash of blood in the dark. A salty flavor in my mouth, a stinging in my eyes. I blinked, and the figure fell backward into darkness.

I kept moving.

Another man was coming on my right, screaming, thrusting forward with his sword. If I had been even slightly slower he would have scored a devastating hit; yet I was jittering with clar-tea, and my eyesrecognized the movement, and my muscles summoned up the memory of when Trof had forced me to train against such an attack.

I danced to the right, away from the path of his blade. I hacked down hard against the narrow of his blade, putting maximal twist on his grip (The grip, children,screamed old Trof in my ears,is always, always the weakest point of all fights!), and then I kept moving forward and hacked down again, this time closer to his crossguard, trusting that my destabilizing blow would make it too hard to respond.

I felt the crunch of the bones in his hands, my blade perhaps severing a thumb. He cried out, swung around, and tried to raise his sword with his good hand, but it was too late. My muscles shoved me forward, thrusting my blade into his shoulder; and then, when he turned, into the side of his knee. He collapsed into the mud, shrieking.

A grunt to my right. The man whose nose I’d broken was charging at me, howling. No sword in his hand. I responded instantly, thoughtlessly: a simple jab into his midsection, near the neck, then dancing back. He staggered, tried to turn to see me, and kicked over Strovi’s mai-lantern as he did so. Blue light strobed the yard as the lantern fell open, and I saw him clearly: a man of thirty or forty, nose broken and dribbling blood, and blood spurting from the deep gash just below his left collarbone.

He locked eyes with me, mouth working. A piteous, lost look, as if he’d awoken from a bad dream. Then he fell to the side.

I was moving again, being moved, being pulled, dancing through the muddy yard. Strovi was there in the corner, still fighting two men at once, both with their backs tome.

Trof’s voice in my mind, screaming, howling—Rathras cavalry knew that when chasing down fleeing souls, strike at the backs of their knees with a spear! Down them first, then kill them!

I watched almost helplessly as my sword licked forward, its point diving down to shred the tissue at the back of the man’s knee. But then…

My left heel met slick mud. My foot slid forward. Instantly, I was sent sprawling in the mud and crashed into one of the attacker’s legs.

The man turned, snarling. I saw him raise his blade, its point aimed at my chest.

Then there was a flash of blood from the side of his throat. I felt my face fanned with warmth and wetness. Then he toppled over, stupidly pawing at his neck, and I saw Captain Strovi behind him, his blade black with blood.

I did not see how Strovi felled the final attacker. My eyes were filled with blood, and my head was reeling from where it’d struck the mud. Yet as I sat up, I was aware of only Strovi standing in the yard, his chest heaving as he sucked air into his body, and somewhere the sound of moaning.

I staggered to my feet, then stared around, dazed. The memories of my training withdrew from my body like a veil.

“Who…who are these people?” I mumbled.

“Who are they?” said Strovi. “Who areyou?”

“What?”

“Where the hell did you learn to fight like that?” he demanded. “You killed, what, two men? And disabled another?”

“I…I just recalled my training,” I said, taken aback.

“You just…justrecalledit? Yourbasictraining?”

“Yes. Why?”

He shook his head, stewing for a moment. “These are Legion deserters. You can tell by their uniforms. They must have been holed up in the house. I never would have thought to see a day when an Iudexii could outfight a Legionnaire, let alone three of them, but…” Another shake of his head. “Hell. I’ll go get a patrol. You stay here. Got it?”

I nodded. Then he sprinted away into the streets.

CHAPTER 21

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THE LEGION PATROL CAMEto deal with the deserters, and I left the scene in the stables and wandered into the mill, the smell of rot all about me. It was a cavernous, dark place, with bundles of fernpaper drooping in great clumps along the posts. Weak starlight dribbled through a high window, and the skeletons of machinery crouched in the corners. It felt like I was in a tomb, but I was so stunned I didn’t care. I slumped into a chair in the dark and just sat, listening to the mutterings and calls of the soldiers outside.

My eyes fluttered, shook. I remembered the spray of blood on my face, the saline taste in my mouth. The way that one man’s mouth had worked stupidly in the lamplight, his eyes so confused and hurt. Every part of my body was sticky and crackling with drying blood. It was best to not move at all.

Strovi returned, his mai-lantern held high. He glanced about the room and set the lantern on the table, his sweat-gleamed face a smear of light in the dark.

“Did you see a way down, Kol?” he asked.