Chapter Thirty-Two The Lies of Desil Demothi #2
But Desil had leaped off his seat in a split second, the bolt piercing the back of his chair instead.
Its shaft gleamed with a pearlescent aura, telling of a baltascar core.
The bolt ballooned up then, spikes ramming out from the shaft.
Lythlet’s eyes bulged, imagining how painful that would’ve been had it pierced either one of them.
Fauna-augmented, she guessed, tempered to take after a pufferfish in distress.
Desil thrust his bound wrists down on the spike-bloated quarrel protruding from the chair, holes perforating the cloth. Those slight rents in the cloth were all he needed to rip the rest apart with his raw strength, the tatters falling around him.
“Chair!” he shouted, kicking his own toward her so she could free herself.
But she knew what he actually meant—she stood and kicked hers toward him.
He snatched it up and smashed it against both crossbowmen in one blow.
A chair leg snapped off; Desil caught it and rammed its end into the nearest crossbowman’s face like a spoke into a wheel.
As the crossbowman groaned in pain, clutching his jaw, Desil twisted his wrist sideways, trying to force him into releasing his weapon.
Meanwhile she sawed her hands back and forth on the bolt, snapping thread after thread. A brawler’s strength was not hers, and she needed more time than Desil had to snap the cloth loose. Her hands came free just in time to catch the crossbow Desil threw at her.
“Go after the governor!” he shouted, wrestling with the last armed guardsman to destroy his crossbow. The splintered edge of the chair leg he wielded smashed into the weapon, snapping its string in half.
She grunted in agreement—under no circumstances could they let Governor Matheranos escape the arena.
But she worried for Desil. He would be fighting bare-fisted against two men hired by the Eza for their prowess in brutal skirmishes.
She thought of Lorent Bicarda, the bellicose savagery he’d been all too happy to unleash, and imagined these men to be kindred spirits. Could Desil hold his own against them?
I must have faith in him , she decided, sprinting for the door Governor Matheranos had escaped through. Desil Demothi was a twenty-six-time bare-knuckle brawling champion, after all—that had to be good for something.
There was something in the last words she heard before she left the room that surprised her, though.
“Gentlemen,” Desil said, an unflinching, almost coy, color to his voice, one Lythlet had never heard before in her life, “I’ve never once lost a brawl. I don’t intend today to be the first exception.”
The sound of a fist meeting its target followed, and the sickening echoes of cracking wood and crunching bone chased after Lythlet as she hunted the governor down the halls.
Running, she glanced down briefly at the weapon Desil had tossed her—it was a repeating crossbow, three bolts loaded and waiting to be deployed.
Poetry in the hunt , she told herself, steeling herself. She noted the crystalline gleam of baltascar on the weapon’s risers, deducing that passing through that zone would trigger the baltascar-augmented abilities of the quarrels.
Her shadow shrank and lengthened on the stone walls as she raced down the halls, chasing the silhouettes of Governor Matheranos and his guardsman.
Statues of the Twelve Wardens dotted her journey, heralding every grandiose doorway she passed.
Then a stroke of luck—the governor had been halted by a door shut with bolts and a complicated series of morticed locks.
It was locked on their end, and they’d eventually open it—but it stalled them long enough for her to catch up with them.
Governor Matheranos turned back with a glare as she approached. He pushed his swordsman toward her. “Kill her,” he barked, turning back to deal with the locks.
The guard, a huge barrel-chested man, trudged toward her. He pulled his sword from its scabbard, and she took aim with her crossbow.
The first bolt missed him by inches, penetrating a pillar behind him. A few seconds later, the pufferfish spikes must have been activated, extra cracks fissuring on the pillar and threatening its structure. She cursed at herself—it was harder to control than she had expected.
He laughed. “Those things aren’t easy to aim for first-timers, Golden Thorn.
” He closed in on her, faster than she could pull the crossbow’s lever to reload.
She dodged his sword’s tip in the nick of time, the screech of metal on stone jarring her ears.
She pushed the lever up, felt a quarrel slip into place, and slammed the lever down as quickly as she could.
The guard howled as a bolt pierced straight through his knee. He fell to the floor, and Lythlet kicked the sword far from his grasp. But he grabbed Lythlet’s leg, pulling her down with him, and within breathless moments, he had his muscle-corded arm around her neck, squeezing tight.
She choked, grappling his arm in vain.
He cursed at her as he used his free hand to box her ears, getting his revenge.
Pain lanced her senses, blinding her momentarily. The way they were positioned, if she were to try to arc her crossbow to fire back at him, he’d easily duck or snatch it from her.
She slipped her fingers into the crossbow’s magazine, fishing out the last quarrel. Clutching it in her fist, she rammed the bolt tip straight into the groin of her assailant.
He bellowed in her ears with an agony that made her feel sorry for him. His arm loosened around her, and she pushed him off, letting him crumple into a ball, screeching in pain. Stray beads of blood dotted the stone floor beneath him.
She scrambled away from him, panting for air like a dog, her mind spinning as she regained her balance.
She returned the last quarrel back into the crossbow.
Lever shifting, she took aim at the governor.
He was hunched over the lower third of the door, an effigy of Ezrinara towering over his side.
There was one last mortice lock on the door he hadn’t opened.
“Surrender, Governor,” she shouted.
The governor did not even look at her, focused on unlocking the door.
“I’ll shoot you,” she warned. She did not want to. The divine were watching, and she dared not let the theft of a soul mar her divine record, but she had to deter him.
To her surprise, he spun around, clenching his teeth at her. “Do it. Shoot me.” He stepped away from the door, marching toward her with a wide smile. No more than an arm’s span away from her, he held his hands up in the air. “You can’t miss with me right in front of you, can you?”
His brazenness unnerved her.
I can’t kill him , she realized, another reason becoming transparent. His death would let his identity as the Eza remain buried—and my name would be splashed across the gazettes as the slumdog who killed the governor in cold blood.
Governor Matheranos smiled, knowing she’d arrived at the same conclusion as him. He wheeled around, making for the door and the last lock to disentangle.
Her mind leaped helter-skelter through her options. I can’t kill him, but I have to stop him .
She fired her final quarrel.
It whistled through the air, crashing straight through the feet of the statue of Ezrinara.
“You missed.” Governor Matheranos laughed at her, nearly drowned out by the sound of stone cracking and tumbling. A heartbeat later, more cracks sounded, the pufferfish spikes growing.
She shook her head. “I did not.”
Perturbed, he turned to follow where she pointed.
The bloated baltascar quarrel had worked precisely as she’d hoped, shattering Ezrinara’s enormous ankles and rocking the statue off its base.
The majestic form of the flame-wielding warden tumbled forward, crashing against the door the governor had worked so hard to unlock, covering it entirely.
He had nowhere to run but back—into the arms of the Coalition force.
He turned back to her with murder in his eyes. Then he sprang forth to where his guardsman’s sword had been kicked to.
She held up her crossbow, the empty magazine weighing heavily on her. “Be still or I’ll shoot!”
But he did not care for her bluff. He raced for the sword, and she abandoned her ploy, racing forward at the same time.
They collided into each other, and his fist connected with her skull, reducing her vision to a dizzying mosaic.
He wasted no time, rising to his feet and slamming the heel of his boot on her nose, on her chest, on her gut.
She had no time to rise, no time to breathe, no time for anything but to bring her hands up to shield herself in vain.
Pain pierced her like bolts of lightning.
The boot ceased, and she feared the worst as she vaguely made out his hand reaching for the sword.
Then the hand vanished, retracted backward, the sword remaining untouched on the ground.
A harried scream escaped the governor as something unseen ravaged him.
Her eyesight took a minute to settle. They came to focus on the governor, pinned to the ground by the knee of a tall, bloodied figure.
It was Desil, she realized, stunned at the bizarre sight of him. He was drenched in blood—his own, or others’, she could not tell. His hair was matted with sweat and blood, his clothes ripped, yet he tirelessly rained blow after blow into Governor Matheranos, looking like a man possessed.
Governor Matheranos retaliated, jamming his finger into Desil’s eye, making him scream.
But Desil yanked that finger to his mouth and bit into it, hard enough to force a pitiful howl from the governor’s throat, and he held it between his teeth as he resumed pummeling the governor.
Blow after blow, Governor Matheranos cried out, louder and louder, trying to shield his face to no avail.
His mane of white hair was starting to seep red.