Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles) (8 page)

“Kenta,” I say, as he offers his hands, fingers interlaced, for the Ghost to put his boot in. The Ghost glances blearily between the two of us. “Kenta! He’s not going to be able to jump now.”
 

Wood shatters—the back door has given in. Kenta whirls towards the hallway.

“Come on.” I grab the Ghost by the shoulder and hustle him under the broken stairs to where I had hidden before. He definitely isn’t doing well: he doesn’t even protest. “Kenta!”

The Ghost sits down heavily, his back against the wall, just as Kenta appears at my shoulder. “You too,” I hiss. “Someone has to keep him safe now that you’ve knocked his brains loose. You’re a better fighter than me.”

“They’ll see us,” Kenta murmurs as he drops down beside the Ghost.
 

“They won’t,” I promise. Kenta transforms to his tanuki form in the space of a breath. I try to gather my thoughts. No time, I think, as feet pound down the hall, coming to a stop before the Degaths’ door.
No time.
I kneel before them, center myself for what I have to do.

“Hitomi.”
 

I glance up, ready to curse the Ghost, and find him handing me the hilt of his short sword. His hand wavers slightly as he holds it out. His sword.
If they go down fighting, they might have an easier end.
I snatch the sword from him and pull my mind back to my spell. Fortunately, I’m surrounded by what I need most: darkness. Reaching out, I gather the shadows around me and lay them over my friends like a velvet cloak of night and smoke, pulling and tugging at the shadows until I can barely see the two men even though I kneel before them. It’s a clumsy spell, made too fast and with wrinkles and snags that might unravel at any moment, but it’s the best I can do. Distantly, I realize I can hear screaming.

“Don’t move,” I pant, my body drenched with sweat.

But an arm reaches out of the shadow and pulls off the boy’s cap I wear. I’d forgotten it.
 

“
Don’t move
.
” I pull up the cloak’s hood to complete my disguise. As far as I can tell, the spell has fallen back into place around my friends. “Good-bye,” I whisper. Then I run—or try to. The magic-working has unbalanced me, and I stagger as I start forward, barely managing to keep my feet.

A faint light still spills through the Degaths’ doorway. I can hear shouts and cries, can see the flicker of shadows through the doorway. But all I can truly make out are dimly lit forms and the brief gleam of light on blades as the soldiers in the hall turn towards me. These aren’t your usual soldiers, but an elite squad. They turn with practiced ease, swords in their hands, every move calm, calculated. Completely unworried.
 

I smile, a wild, feral thing Kenta would have been proud of, and launch myself at the foremost soldier. I have to make this look like a struggle, at least a little, before they kill me. The narrow hall works in my favor: only two can face me at a time. However, the fact that I never learned swordplay, and that I’m still off-balance from my last spell, makes the fight brutally short.
 

The first soldier meets my sword with his own, blocking my swing and throwing my arm back towards the wall. I duck and twist, just avoiding another blade, and bring my sword back around in time to clumsily block the second soldier’s attack—and lose my footing as my sandal skids on the floorboards.
 

I stagger, throwing myself sideways as a blade slides past my ribs. I’m not quite fast enough to outstep the second blade the soldier uses. It knocks my own sword from my hand. I twist away as it skitters across the floor, yanking my knife free from its sheath. A woman screams—Lady Degath?—but there’s no way I can reach her. I throw myself forward, slicing my knife towards the soldier’s chest, and another sharp edge flashes in the corner of my vision.
 

I don’t look at it, expecting it to cut into my neck, kill me. I see the eyes of the soldier facing me flicker, and then the flat of the blade slams into the side of my head.

I fall to my knees, stunned. A boot plows into my back. My face meets the splintered floorboards, and then a man’s weight slams down on me, pinning me to the floor. He rips the knife from my grasp, and, with the help of another soldier, binds my hands with ruthless efficiency. They search me quickly, checking my pockets, frisking my arms and legs, checking the empty sheath at my calf. I stare across the floor, trying not to think about what I’ll do if they realize I’m a girl, and find myself looking through the Degaths’ doorway into the glazed eyes of Lord Degath. A few drops of blood trickle from his lips to form a perfectly round coin of darkness on the floor. I swallow back bile.

“Who’d have thought the Ghost couldn’t fight worth shit?” one of the soldiers sneers as they haul me to my feet. They wear the uniform of the sultan’s soldiers rather than Blackflame’s mercenaries, and yet they don’t seem any different.

I look up, catch the measured gaze of the second soldier—not a soldier, I realize, taking in the embroidered rank marks at his collar. A captain.
 

“He wasn’t trying to kill us,” he says.

“Then what the hell—”

“He was trying to get killed.” The captain steps forward, holding my gaze. “Isn’t that right?”

I force a smile through bruised and bloodied lips. At least they haven’t figured out I’m neither a boy nor the Ghost. “Some people don’t mind blood on their hands. I do.”

The man holding me spins me around and backhands me across my face. I fall against a wall. My vision jumps, and all I can think of is how the Ghost must have felt when Kenta hit him with that board.

“
Hold.
” The captain’s voice rings out through the hallway. “We bring him in alive as we were ordered. You will not let him taunt you into killing him.”

“If only you’d been as stupid as the rest of them.” I turn my head to meet his eyes. He offers me the shadow of a smile, one fighting man to another, I suppose. Then he turns and walks into the massacre he had ordered.
 

I follow him with my gaze, forcing myself to keep looking past Degath’s sprawled form. Behind him lies his wife, her eyes rolled back, showing only white, her face taut with a pain now departed. Blood stains the front of her dress.
 

At the back of the room, the two girls cling to each other. I crane my neck to see the third form crouched beside them: their brother, clutching his arm to his side, blood seeping through his fingers.
 

A part of me is sorry, sorry that the little girl and her brother are still alive, that they will pay the price of their father’s choices and their sister’s betrayal. Just as I will.

The soldiers had prepared well for their raid. Outside, we’re loaded into a prison carriage: a metal box on wheels, with one small, barred window in the rear door. Further on, a wagon waits to take away the dead.
 

“You can’t do this!” Saira cries as she is pushed up into the carriage behind me, her sister clinging to her in silence. “Stop! Master Blackflame promised—you weren’t supposed to kill anyone! Wait—where is my brother?”
 

She gets her answer a moment later when Tarek is shoved into the carriage, the door slammed shut behind him. Leaning my head back against the cold metal wall, I listen to the lock click. If I still had my lockpick set, picking it would have been a moment’s work.
 

Saira continues to rail against the soldiers, half-hysterical, until Tarek says, “Saira, stop. It’s no use.
Stop.
”

His voice is low and weak, and I remember belatedly that he had been bleeding. If his wound hasn’t been bandaged, we’ll need to do something about it fast. I move towards him, sidling down the bench. Now that the carriage rattles along the road, I don’t trust myself to keep my balance. Not after the spell and the blow to my head.
 

I hesitate before I speak. They’ve all heard the Ghost’s voice, and with Saira’s betrayal as fresh as the blood on Tarek’s arm, I don’t want to risk anyone discovering I’m not him. Not until the Ghost has had enough time to escape.

I lower my voice to a whisper, barely loud enough for Tarek to hear me over the clatter of the carriage. “Where are you bleeding?”

“My arm. But they bound it for me.”

Saira makes a strangled sound.

“Shut up,” Tarek say tightly. “This is your fault. All of it. You
killed
them.”

“I didn’t!” Saira’s voice rises until it screeches in my ears. “No one was supposed to die! The soldiers weren’t supposed to attack
us
, just …”

“Just me,” I say, then berate myself for speaking aloud. I move back down the bench, training my gaze on the opposite wall.
 

“Why did you want to kill the Ghost?” Alia asks.

“I didn’t want—I just—it was a negotiation! Master Blackflame promised …” Saira shakes her head.

“Promised that he’d keep his political enemy safe if you handed over the Ghost? Oh, how he must have praised your smarts.” Tarek’s voice is heavy with sarcasm. “You’d save Mama and Baba from what? The sultan’s displeasure? While creating some amazing alliance with Blackflame?”

“The sultan wants Mama and Baba dead—”

“The sultan does what
Blackflame
wants!” Tarek is shouting now. “
Blackflame
wanted them dead, and you gave him the perfect opportunity to kill them and catch the leader of the Shadow League at the same time.”

“No,” Saira whispers. “He promised …”

“And you believed him.” Tarek’s words drip disdain.
 

Saira doesn’t answer.
 

As I had half-expected, instead of taking us to the city prison, we’re admitted through the gates to Blackflame’s private residence. Why take us to the sultan’s prison when Karolene’s Arch Mage is the true power? He meets us in the courtyard, smiling as if he has just been given a gift. And he has, I think grimly.
 

The soldiers haul me out of the carriage and shove me to my knees. I try not to wince as I hit the cobbles. Blackflame stands a few paces away, watching the spectacle of his prisoners being unloaded with undisguised pleasure.

Wilhelm Blackflame looks nothing like his mage-name would suggest. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, with a thick mane of golden hair that curls where it brushes his shoulders. His skin shows pale, marking him a northerner. He is naturally strong, neither big-muscled nor going to fat. With his wide forehead, defined jaw, and cleft chin, his features are a little too strong for beauty. But what his body fails to show and his mage-name only implies is this: the pure magical power lurking behind his eyes.
 

“Welcome, ghost-boy,” he says. He tilts his head to study me. The soldiers have pulled my hood back, exposing my face. Thankfully, with my hair shorn short and my grubby tunic and trousers, I look as much a boy as I do a girl. The additional layer of my cloak conceals anything my tunic doesn’t. Apparently, Blackflame’s sources aren’t as informed as they seem: he doesn’t realize that I’m the wrong race.

“Oh, it’s my pleasure,” I say, keeping my voice as low as I can. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep up the pretense of being the Ghost, but I intend to give my friends as much time as I can. “It’s good to know you’ve been losing sleep over me. Or do you make a habit of personally receiving your prisoners in the middle of the night?”
 

His nostrils flare, and I sense the soldiers shift behind me. I doubt too many people mouth off to him. But then he laughs, and I find I much prefer him angry to amused. “Say what you like now, boy. I’ll hear you screaming for mercy before I’m done with you. I’ll have every name of every person who so much as smiled in your support out of you.”
 

I swallow hard, trying to look unconcerned. I’m not so stupid as to think I’ll last long against a skilled torturer.

“Nothing to say to that? Ah, I thought you had a bit more courage. You might roar like a lion, but you haven’t the claws to prove it. More of a puppy, I think.”

“Easily said when you’re standing free with your mercenaries at your beck and call,” I snap. “I’ve never bought my loyalty.” Not that I’ve ever had anyone loyal to me, come to think of it. Not the way he means.