Chapter 9 #2
He stumbled aside, hands grasping frantically at his throat.
Yemi kicked the pistol down the hall to where he’d bleed out before he was able to reload and kept moving.
A quick trip through the adjoining hall to her own room found a handful of household staff dead or dying.
Enna sat on the floor, clutching an abdominal wound, and looked up at her with glazed eyes as Yemi peeked into Nova’s room. It was dark and empty.
“Enna.” Yemi knelt in front of her, propping the spear against the wall as she felt Enna’s face. As if it would do her any good.
“What happened to you?” Yemi asked calmly.
“We heard something. Like an explosion. Came out. He was there.” Enna sneered in the direction of a fallen man, half his body obscured by the door to Yemi’s room. “He shot.” She twitched, raising a pistol with a limp hand. “I shot.”
“My girl.” Yemi smiled. Her throat burned. She hadn’t noticed she’d started crying. “Was it just him?”
“No. Two others. Women with… cannons? In their hands. I don’t—” She began to choke, raising her hands to try and mimic what a hand cannon might look like. Yemi stopped her.
“It’s okay. It’s fine.” Yemi sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of a bloodied hand.
She looked up the hallway, unsure of what to do.
She might be able to carry Enna to the crypt entrance, but it wasn’t guaranteed safety, and anyone could round the corner at any moment.
She still hadn’t found Nova. Could she leave Enna here? Like this?
“Either of the women have white hair?” she asked, dragging the man’s body out of her doorway.
Enna shook her head no and screamed through clenched teeth as Yemi half pulled, half carried her into the room.
She knew the shot was spent in the gun Enna held, so she propped her against the bed and handed her the one she’d taken off the man in the crypts.
Her father’s ghost would forgive her for abandoning principle here.
“Right, so you have one shot, okay? I’m going to try to come back for you.” She kissed Enna’s forehead.
She made her way back out of the residential wing, following the sounds of pain and clashing metal, trying not to think of what she would do if Nova was as far gone as Enna when she found her.
Heading in the direction of the grand hall, she met a cluster of rebels clamoring for something she couldn’t see through a doorway on the other side of them.
Cutter?
She tried to glimpse the spear tip whenever it flashed over the heads of the mob to make sure, but in an instant, it was gone.
The rebels flooded the corridor, and Yemi began to panic.
She’d only managed to take a step to try and save him before another explosion, this one directly in front of her, sent smoke and dust and rebel bodies in a billowing cloud of debris rapidly in her direction.
The blast forced her hard into a wall. She ducked into an antechamber used by the household staff for storage and shielded her head as the stone around her rattled, an ominous, ground-glass sound emitted by blocks scraping against one another.
When the ringing subsided in her ears, she found the screams dying out before the dust settled. They were replaced by the sounds of begging and last breaths, the thud and squish and singe of pierced and burned flesh, the cracking of bones as they were walked over by patient, booted feet.
“Told you it would work,” said a man’s gruff baritone.
Cutter.
Relieved but heart still racing, Yemi stepped out of the room with her hands up to find Cutter and Nova walking among what remained of the fallen enemy, nudging them to check for life and then ending it abruptly.
Nova was first to notice her and took a stance poised to pounce.
“It’s me.” Yemi raised the mask.
“Fuck me, you’re alive.” Nova hugged her tightly, and Yemi inhaled her in return. She smelled of sweat and gunpowder and very vaguely of coconut. “You’re alright?” Nova pulled back to inspect her.
“Fine,” Yemi replied. “I killed a man. Men. More than one.”
“Real ate up about it?”
Yemi shook her head. “No time.”
“You’re not wrong.”
“You’re alright?” Cutter asked, joining them a second late.
His ornate spear tip was cracked and sparking bright blue against the dusty haze of the area.
He used a battle glove, which heated the core of the staff so that the tip sliced through flesh like butter and cauterized on its way out.
Her father had had the only other one like it. Gifts of the Obé’s banished armorers.
“Fine,” Yemi replied. “Did you just set off a bomb in the palace?”
“Found a clutch of leftover fireworks,” said Nova, brandishing a muted black ball about the size of her palm.
“We have to get you out of here,” Cutter said. He scanned the halls around them for the best exit route.
“Is this the Drakes?” Yemi asked.
“I’d put money on it,” Nova replied. “I know I’ve seen the father here.”
Before they could settle on a path of escape, the overloud cocking of a gun pierced the quiet. Cutter spun and placed himself in front of Yemi and behind his shield as a group of rebels led by two women with hand cannons marched toward them from the west.
When they fired, the shots were startlingly loud, and the force of them dented Cutter’s shield before the round clattered to the floor.
This was new.
The trio looked at one another. In a new rage, Yemi tried to move beside him to take on anyone who dared make it this far, but Nova stopped her.
“Not the time,” she said seriously, flicking her iron fans to their offensive position.
While the cannons were reloaded, Cutter and Nova attacked, battle cries of the mob ringing in the hall while Yemi stood helplessly by and watched.
All was a blur of clashing shields and swords, sweeping spears, and gutted bodies.
Nova’s fans flung stripes of blood at the blasted walls and Cutter’s spear lopped off limbs to the wails of their former owners.
Yemi felt sick. What was the point of finding them if she couldn’t save them?
How was she anyone’s Shield, anyone’s Light, if she was relegated to some useless burden?
“Where the fuck is the military?” Yemi yelled as they beat back the mob.
“They blew the bridge,” Nova replied.
Shit, Yemi thought. With the bridge to the barracks gone, her army would have to descend the mountain through the city and come up the main road. There wasn’t time.
Her only guardians occupied, she caught sight of the women with the hand cannons just as they caught sight of her and dove for the antechamber as the miniature cannonballs blasted chunks out of the pillar beside her.
Nownownow. Go now, her heart pounded. She took in a single angry breath and stepped back out into the hall. The women were closer now but reloading, the other rebels keeping Nova and Cutter from reaching them.
“Yemaya, run!” Nova cried.
Instead, Yemi roared and speared one of the gunners in the gut with short jabs until she dropped her weapon and took a seat against the wall.
The other had backed away, fingers fumbling to load a shot that would surely take Yemi’s head off at this distance.
Yemi lunged, bringing her spear low and sweeping high fast enough to stir the dust on the floor, carving a single, fatal slash from the woman’s sternum up through her nose.
Nova caught her eye for a fraction of a second and gave her an impressed smirk.
Yemi stalked toward what remained of the rabble as Cutter and Nova had them backed up into the main entryway between the outer gardens and the grand hall.
She’d planned to help make quick work of the stragglers when movement beyond the grand hall caught her eye.
The throne room doors were open. Dahlia Drake stood in the center of it, apparently unaccompanied, her back to the doorway and the cacophony of battle as she took in the empty chairs on their platform.
Wistful, covetous little snake.
The world fell away, and Yemi thought of nothing but the physics of launching a spear.
She’d never hit a target from so far off, but then again, she’d never wanted to this badly.
Dahlia was armed, from what she could tell.
Two pistols in shoulder holsters and a rapier at her waist. Yemi wondered how good she was at wielding them.
She kept her breath steady, her strides long, as she ran toward her and picked up speed.
Nova called her name. Back tall as she brought the spear up, balanced, angled, and then released with a grunt of effort.
She kept running as the spear flew, as it crested its arc and began its descent, as it missed by mere inches and stuck its landing in the torn carpet of the throne stairs and Dahlia turned around.
Yemi was there to greet her with a flying knee launched too early to catch her in the nose and landed instead in her chest, sending them both crashing to the polished hall floor.
“Did I interrupt something?” Yemi seethed, yoking Dahlia by her collar from her position on top and headbutting her in the face.
Dahlia cursed and kept her hands up to keep it from happening again before wrapping her hands around Yemi’s throat.
Something was off, Yemi noticed. Dahlia was surprisingly strong.
Her eyes had gone shark black, and she was grinning as she fought back.
The headbutt had jostled the mask, leaving it skewed and no longer secured to her head. Dahlia seized the opportunity to remove it and hit her in the face with it until she could be pushed off.