Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [23]
‘Enough of this,’ Tynisa decided, and let fly all the pent-up anger and frustration she had been nursing since before she ever reached Siriell’s Town.
She ignored the leader, in that first moment, hoping he would prove a challenge later. There were two archers within reach and she impaled one through the eye – after slashing the throat of a Grasshopper spear-carrier to get there – and whipped her blade back to sever the other’s taut bowstring. Her momentum carried her past the archer even as the cut string lashed the woman’s face – then she was standing between two spearmen who desperately tried to drag their weapons towards her, but too cumbersome and too close. She let the razor-sharp edge of her blade open one up, feeling her steel keen through layered leather as though it was not there – a move that served to draw back her arm so that she could ram the point into the other spearman’s chest. She watched her blade hardly bend as it punched through chitin plate and then between ribs, before sliding out again like water.
She heard Gaved’s stings crack and sizzle and knew, without looking, that his targets would be the other archers, the greatest threats towards him, who would now be turning to look for Tynisa in the spot where she had been standing just a moment before.
Then she had spears all about her, their wielders fighting to keep distance, the long, narrow points trying to fence her in, so that for a few tense moments she almost lost the rhythm, batting them aside with blade and offhand, vaulting and stepping aside to keep out of their lancing approaches. She kept lunging at every gap, making individual brigands draw back, but without breaking the cage that enclosed her. Then an arrow flowered in the shoulder of one, providing the key that unlocked it all, and she was out from their midst – two Grasshoppers spinning bloodily away, to mark her exit.
She felt it was time to engage the leader, who had been backing away since things had gone so very badly wrong. That she would be confronting four or five of his followers at the same time was just grist to her mill. Gaved’s sting spat again, and she caught its flash in the corner of her eye. Another arrow picked off the last archer, striking him low in the gut and doubling the wretch over.
The spearheads flurried for her like fish, but she turned sideways to them, her sword point-down as she advanced, parting their little hedge of spines until she was right amongst them. Even then, they nearly had her, moving faster as individuals and more cohesive as a group than she’d expected. Two closed with her, their spear-shafts walling her in, whilst another two stepped back to gain distance. She felt one spear point graze past her cheek and another cut her biceps as she twisted away, putting a knee to someone’s groin to her left, and her sword’s jagged guard into a face over to her right. The trap opened up again, and she cleared the air about her with her sword, forcing them to retreat or fall.
Close, too close. But wasn’t this just the sort of death that she was looking for, after all?
For a bitter moment she thought their leader was going to fly off, but then he screamed in her face and went for her, bringing his long sword down in a vicious strike that would have cut her in two had it only landed. He was fast, though, wielding the sword two-handed with a nimbleness she had not expected, turning each attack into the next without overextending, so that he drove her before him in a mad blaze of steel.
She watched, and learned his patterns and his limitations, and understood that what she saw was all there was: speed and fury but no precision, no flexibility. When she moved with his strike, letting the sword chop to her left as she moved right, so that he was past her before he realized, he could not recover in time. She almost held off,