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This joining proved far from easy and Undu had titled their efforts “pathetic,” but they had accomplished feats far greater than any of them could have managed alone. The key came down to trust, Undu said. Since the only place true trust had even a slight chance to exist inside the Academy was within the confines of a trio, these bonding efforts could never involve more than three acolytes. This limit clearly did not apply to those who had come for Mollandra.
“Something’s happening…” Gola, the largest and strongest girl in the class—at least of those still alive—stopped straining to hold the door.
All of them could feel it. Something wrong, some kind of offence against nature, dire as necromancy but different, unknown. The door looked changed somehow.
“The hinges.” Mollandra spotted it first. Rust bloomed across the old iron, bubbling up like a pot boiling over, the corrosion eating deep into the metal. Rust flowered and collapsed, flowered and collapsed, raining red to the floor.
BOOM!
The bodies hit close to the hinges this time and the beds, positioned to prevent the normal opening of the door, slid back several inches as the door came out of its frame. Dirty arms reached through the gap, pushing at the obstacles.
Sharp was the first to act, stretching through the forest of legs to jab her knife blade through a reaching hand. Other acolytes followed, but the weight of numbers outside drove the now-unstable blockade back, along with the girls trying to support it.
The children spilling in were younger than Mollandra, some just a year or two shy of her fifteen years, most around twelve. In the rush, she didn’t recognize individual faces, but she recognized the ragged mass of them all together, she recognized the smell of them. She had once been part of that terrified, terrifying mass, hounded through the dark spaces of the manor as her parents beat them into something new.
Mollandra’s former siblings broke through the barricades in an awful silence. Some among them were too small to have been part of the family back when Mollandra escaped. They came on, giving no voice to their intentions, giving nothing back to the acolytes’ angry challenges. The determination on their grubby faces held no anger; if anything it was closer to desperation. They held their blades close in the manner Father had instructed them, thin razors best suited for cutting throats and slicing flesh. The combat they’d been taught, Mollandra now understood, had been focused on ensuring their enemy died, with little care for their own survival. Accepting the opponent’s sword or knife in the guts was a tactic that could be used to trap the weapon and allow them to get close enough to open an equally grievous wound in reply.
“You don’t need to do this,” Mollandra shouted. She had been their leader. Cared for them. Protected them. Abandoned them. Just as, in the end, Strong had abandoned her. But Strong was forgotten and she—
“Just her!” The reply, also shouted, came from the corridor beyond. “Just her! She’s all we want.”
Many of the acolytes backed off at that. Jemna, too slow, went down under three of the children in a flurry of blades. It didn’t look like any of them would be getting up again with much blood left, but the numbers were with the intruders and against those still standing with Mollandra.
Scab, the first boy to reach Sharp, got a slash across his face from one corner of his mouth to the corner of the opposite eye. Even so, he nearly managed to grapple her. She twisted away, slicing a small girl’s shoulder and kicking a larger one to the floor.
Tmanga caught a boy’s wrist, broke his arm, and shoved him before her like a shield, stabbing at anyone who came round the sides. Mollandra recognized him as Grumble. His complaints tonight would be short-lived.
Mollandra climbed the unstable pile of beds. Over the past months she’d fashioned a small collection of darts from scavenged nails and timber, making weapons much like the ones Kindness Terra had trained them on.
She hesitated a moment, but just one moment. She couldn’t let the others fight this battle for her. With a curse she let fly with one of her projectiles, launching it at the head of a boy she didn’t recognize. Another followed, and another. Throwing them from the shifting stack tested her balance, but she managed to hit only her old brothers and sisters rather than her classmates. Even without piercing the eyes and throats she was aiming at, a dart in the cheek or shoulder could hardly fail to distract.
Brooth looked about to take a knife in the face when her attacker was hauled away by another of the intruders. This unlikely saviour, already perforated by several chest wounds, fell on his former friend, throttling her. Mollandra noted gratefully that Brooth had chosen a good time to successfully animate her first corpse. She flung the last of her darts to inconvenience an attacker running at Brooth’s undefended back, finding an eye for the first time.
In the heat of battle there wasn’t the time to care about who these others had been to her. The fight proved swift and gory, and promised to be short. Those standing with Mollandra were going to lose before an audience of those who’d rejected her and now pressed themselves to the walls, pretending not to be there. There would be more dead intruders than dead acolytes, but Mollandra would end up among the fallen, or worse, captured.
Mollandra leapt from her “castle” before it fell. In the moment she felt no fear, only anger that they had found her and brought her family’s sickness among those she considered her true sisters. The Academy had blunted her concern for the business of sharp edges, furious combat, and even for dying.
She crashed into the melee, taking two of her siblings to the floor, locking her legs around the neck of the smaller boy while stabbing the larger girl with precision wherever the opportunity presented itself.
Skill, speed, determination, these are all important in a knife fight, but they were a currency filling pockets on both sides of the battle, and in the end numbers tell. They always do when it boils down to arm and blade, muscle and flesh, blood and bone.
Mollandra never felt the knife go in, but over the next handful of heartbeats she understood that her strength was leaving her. She ended up on her back, straddled by a fair-haired girl with pale eyes who might have been her twin save for the two years or so between them. Mollandra recognized the girl’s piercing scream as much as her face. Years ago she had given the girl her name: Shrill.
They fought for control of Shrill’s curved blade, a straining battle taking place no more than two inches above Mollandra’s throat. A contest of strength that Mollandra was losing with each pulse of her traitor heart as the blood pumped out of her.
The razored edge touched her neck. It bit. It bit deeper. Had there ever been a time when Mollandra would have welcomed the fabled rage-storm of the Kindnesses, it would have been then. But Mollandra, staring up into what was so nearly a mirror of her own face, could find neither hate nor rage. She hoped Shrill, now out in the world, would run from the mansion, far and long, and never look back.
The wave of heat that curled Mollandra’s hair into tight spirals on her left-hand side did far more damage to the girl engaged in the act of cutting her throat. Centred in the blast, the girl’s hair and rags burst into flame, her skin shrivelling, splitting over her muscle. A scream of epic proportions accompanied the detonation, and as she came into view Sharp was still roaring.
Both Sharp’s knife hand and the empty one were wreathed in fire. She struck one scorched intruder an open-handed blow as she passed him, the force somehow ripping off his head. The decapitated torso flared like an oil-soaked torch.
The girl astride Mollandra stayed there, frozen in shock or paralysed with pain, until Sharp stabbed her in the stomach, lifting her bodily into the air and casting her over one shoulder to the floor behind.
Mollandra struggled up, bleeding heavily, and watched Sharp stride among the burned attackers, dispatching them with fiery blows.
All around, the acolytes not too busy dying or being dead struggled up to stare in wonder at Sharp’s holy fury. Tmanga, her other cheek sliced in a wound that might match the one that gave her her livid scar, crawled painfully towards Mollandra. An injured intruder made a lunge at her, but a dead one caught their wrist and dragged them into a silent grapple—Brooth’s work, no doubt.
“Sharp’ll burn too.” Tmanga’s voice sounded wrong, her open cheek making it hard to understand. “She would…never have survived the vault without…” The girl slumped to the floor. Not dead. Mollandra would have felt that. Surely.
