No Clean Answer

The merchant reeled from the flooded table with ale soaking his coat. He caught himself on a bench, forced his way through the first opening in the crowd, and stumbled toward the hearth.

Rishi followed.

He managed one step.

The three men still standing closed around him.

An arm hooked across his shoulders. A second man drove into his ribs. The third swept his legs from beneath him. Rishi twisted, trying to keep the merchant in sight, and took a shoulder beneath the jaw.

The room turned sideways.

He fell among boots, table legs, dry rushes, and spilled ale.

Above the crowd, Maeril saw Rishi disappear beneath three bodies. She saw the merchant stagger on alone.

A pointing hand found her.

“Witch! She’s casting!”

Bowls shattered. Benches scraped. Travelers shoved away from Maeril’s chair, her raised hand, the bitter remains of magic in the air.

The house guards turned from the door toward her.

The woman with the broom lowered it without haste. The bend left her shoulders. Her weight shifted from the foot she had seemed to favor. When one hand entered the bundle of reeds at her hip, it came out holding a narrow, dark blade.

Her eyes rested on the merchant.

Cold moved through Maeril.

They kept us watching the table.

“Look out!” Maeril shouted.

Maeril thrust a hand toward the merchant. The crowd surged between them. Her chair rocked beneath her boots. Rishi remained somewhere below three men.

The merchant heard her. He began to turn.

The woman crossed the last step as calmly as if she still carried a broom. Confusion passed over the merchant’s face. She caught his arm and turned him half a pace.

The gesture looked gentle.

The blade moved once.

His mouth opened without sound. His hands rose too late. When his knees failed, the woman took his weight and guided him to the floor.

The house guards were still looking at Maeril. Beside the table, the first knife-man convulsed in the rushes amid the reek of sickness.

Across the room, a fist struck Rishi beside the ear.

White pain filled his sight. His cheek hit wet boards.

He planted one palm, but a knee crushed his forearm to the floor. Weight dropped across his ribs. A hand clamped around the back of his neck and drove his face down into ale, dust, and the sour remains of someone’s supper.

Rishi tried to turn.

Nothing moved.

No base. No breath. No angle.

His breath struck the boards and came back hot across his mouth. The knee ground into his arm. The weight over his ribs increased until his lungs could find only scraps of air.

His body jerked against the holds before he could master it.

Every answer he knew began with space.

There was none.

Darkness narrowed his sight. Form no longer mattered. Restraint no longer mattered. There was no time left to choose mercy.

Heat tore out of him.

White-gold light surged through every hand and knee holding him down. The man on his arm screamed and recoiled. The weight left Rishi’s ribs with a grunt and a crash against the table. Scorched leather stank behind him as the last man snatched back his hand.

Rishi dragged his arm under his chest and pushed.

His elbow slipped. A boot found his ribs. He caught the edge of the table, and smoke curled from the wood beneath his palm.

One knee. One foot.

He rose inside the radiance.

It clung to his skin, white at its heart and gold at the edges. Damp wool steamed around him. Rushes blackened beneath his bare feet. The air warped with heat.

One attacker came through it anyway.

Rishi caught a heavy clay mug and drove it into the man’s face. The mug split. The man’s nose went sideways, and he folded across a bench before sliding out of sight.

Blood warmed Rishi’s mouth. One eye streamed.

The two men still upright drew knives.

A traveling staff lay beneath the neighboring bench. Rishi snatched it up and struck before they could close. One man flinched out of reach. The other caught the wood against his blade, but Rishi turned the knife wide and swept the staff back through the space between them.

Both gave ground.

Rishi set his feet.

At last, room enough to breathe.

Maeril saw him rise. She did not see the woman coming behind her.

The dark blade drove for the soft place beneath her ribs. The wards Maeril had renewed that morning snapped tight around her and stopped its point.

The failed thrust carried the assassin into her. The knife fell. The chair tipped beneath them, and Maeril’s staff struck the floor and spun away.

Maeril landed on one shoulder. A horn clipped the table edge.

Light burst through her skull.

The assassin recovered first.

By the time Maeril’s sight cleared, the woman was reaching for the fallen knife. Maeril swept her hand across the floor and found no staff, only trampled rushes.

The woman closed her fingers around the blade. Maeril forced herself onto her knees.

Not far enough.

The assassin came low and fast.

Maeril had no staff, no footing, and no time to shape anything clean. She bared her teeth. Something from the abyssal dark in her blood rose bitter across her tongue.

She spat.

Green acid struck the assassin’s face.

The woman screamed. Skin blistered. One eye clamped shut. Her knife passed through Maeril’s sleeve instead of her throat, then dropped as both hands flew to the spreading burns.

Her momentum carried them together to the floor. The assassin writhed across Maeril, clawing at her own face.

Maeril shoved once.

The woman did not move.

She shoved again. “Get off.”

The only answer was another scream.

Then the house guards broke through with their cudgels. Caravan guards pushed in behind them.

Two fell upon the remaining knife-men. Others pinned the man still retching in the rushes and the one bleeding beside the broken mug. A pair of guards hauled the assassin away from Maeril.

Another forced Maeril facedown and dragged her wrist behind her back.

“Do not cast.”

“I’m not—”

He drove her cheek into the floor.

Across the wrecked room, three guards approached Rishi. He stood behind the borrowed staff with white-gold heat rolling from his skin.

“Drop it,” a guard shouted.

Rishi heard Maeril’s unfinished protest. His grip hardened around the wood.

I can’t fight them without hurting more people, Rishi thought.

He drew one breath and forced the radiance down. Light vanished beneath his skin. The air stilled.

Rishi lowered the staff and released it.

The guards rushed him. A cudgel struck his wrist. A shoulder drove into his side. Hands seized his arms and wrenched them behind his back.

He let them.

They turned him toward the ruin of tables and benches. Through a forest of boots, Rishi found Maeril on the floor.

Alive. Hurt. Furious.

Alive entered him first.

Then the rest of the room returned.

Teren had pushed himself halfway upright at their table. His injured arm remained in its sling. His face was grave, his attention moving from the fallen knives to the prisoners to each guard holding them.

The merchant was gone from the place Rishi had last seen him.

He had escaped.

Relief found Rishi for one brief heartbeat.

The guards dragged him another step. The hearth opened beyond a fallen bench.

The merchant lay beside it.

One hand rested open in the rushes, fingers slightly curled as if still waiting for the dice to return. Blood spread beneath his coat from the wound below his ribs.

Rishi stopped breathing.

The common room fell away. Only the open hand remained.

Then another room returned in pieces. A cup filled for the wrong man. Laughter turning a head. Watchers holding the exits. A story waiting to explain why spilled blood had deserved to fall.

He had seen the shape in childhood and been too small to break it.

He was not small now.

His hands had moved. Struck. Burned. Done everything the child’s hands could not.

The merchant still lay beside the hearth.

“No.”

The guards pulled him away.

“No.”

Louder.

Rishi planted a foot and heaved toward the body. “Let me go. Let me check him,” he shouted.

Hands tightened on his arms.

A pulse, he thought. A breath. Anything.

Light broke through his skin with the panic.

A cudgel struck the back of his head.

White swallowed the room. For one terrible instant, Rishi was still reaching.

Then there was nothing.