Chapter 36 #2
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.
Those of the intruders who could run did so. A tall girl lingered at the door, hauling away any who showed an inclination to stay. The girl’s gaze met Mollandra’s for a heartbeat. One eye reflected Sharp’s fire, the other, milky, glowed with the light.
Sharp, cutting her way through the remainder of Mollandra’s family visit, was now swathed in pale flame. She glowed beneath her skin, bright fracture lines shining through the thinness of her flesh.
For her part, Mollandra could hardly keep her feet, swaying as badly as when she had been poisoned in Instructor Jane’s class.
As she tried to gather both her strength and her courage, the last two intruders still in the room and on their feet backed towards Milk-Eye at the door.
Sharp was too close for them to turn and run.
Their rags were smoking in places and scarlet burns marked their arms. Mollandra had named them both: Lip-Scar and Runner.
She hadn’t even liked Lip-Scar, and Runner had earned his title for cowardice, though he had proved useful and even brave in later years. But to watch Sharp destroy them, under Milk-Eye’s horrified gaze, was more than she could bear.
Mollandra tried to throw herself at the backs of Sharp’s knees, but her own legs betrayed her, and she fell short, sprawling to the stone.
Sharp, in the grip of her rage, hurled herself at Milk-Eye and the others.
In that moment darkness pulsed from Milk-Eye’s outstretched hand, snuffing Sharp out like a candle flame.
The act seemed to surprise both of them equally.
A laugh burst from Sharp as she sank to her knees, then slumped to her side.
For a moment it looked as if Lip-Scar would step forward to stamp on her head, but other acolytes, emboldened by Sharp’s performance, were moving forward to claim part of the victory.
Milk-Eye’s hand snatched Lip-Scar back. She pulled him away, following the sound of Runner’s rapid retreat.