Gregor dove to the side as the man’s rapier slashed through the wall like it was made of warm cheese. Though it was dark in the rooms, he could tell that the rapier was, like Whip’s head, scrived to amplify its gravity, crashing through the air like a man ten times as strong had swung it. Which, Gregor knew from experience, was a dangerous weapon to face—but also a dangerous weapon to wield.
Gregor rose and flicked Whip out. The truncheon’s head flew forward and smashed the man on his knee, hard enough to knock him over—but he stayed standing. Not good, thought Gregor. Their outfits must have cost a fortune…
He did not have time to reflect on the cost of their armaments, though, because then the second thug barged in, almost knocking the door off its hinges. The thug with the rapier then pivoted, sword in his hand, trying to pin Gregor into the corner.
Gregor grabbed the mattress on Sark’s bed and flung it at his two assailants. The man with the rapier slashed it in two, sending feathers flying everywhere. Gregor used this momentary distraction to hurl yet more furniture at them—a chair, a small desk—though his goal was not to harm them, but to clutter the room, making it harder to move.
The man with the rapier hacked his way through, cursing. But now the space was too small for them both to confront him—only the one with the rapier could engage.
He led the man back, toward the window of the bedroom, and got in position. His attacker gave a rough shout, and thrust forward with the rapier, aiming for Gregor’s heart.
Gregor fell to the side and sent Whip’s head flying at the man’s feet.
His attacker tripped. And ordinarily this would not have meant much—but Gregor’s attacker had just thrust his rapier forward, expecting to plunge it into Gregor’s chest, and the weapon accelerated as it flew; and now that there was nothing to stop it, it just kept hurtling forward, pulling the man along like someone trying to walk a large dog that’s just seen a rat and bolted after it.
The sword plunged right through the window behind Gregor—and took its owner with it. Gregor stood and watched with grim pleasure as the thug sailed down three floors and crashed onto the wooden sidewalk.
Scrived defenses or not, he thought, the man’s brain is soup now.
“Son of a bitch,” snarled the second attacker. “You…You son of a bitch!” He did something to his stiletto—adjusted some lever or button—and the blade started vibrating hard and fast. This augmentation was new to Gregor, and he did not like it: that blade wouldn’t make a nice puncture hole, but instead would tear him to pieces.
The man advanced on him. Gregor flicked Whip forward, and the man ducked—but the man had not been his target. Rather, Gregor had been aiming at the bedroom door, which was barely hanging on to the doorframe after its ill treatment. The truncheon’s head punched through the door and even part of the wall, and the impact finally severed the door from its frame.
The man glanced back at it, then rose and growled as he started to advance on Gregor.
But then Gregor hit the switch on the side of Whip, and it started to retract the truncheon’s head.
And, as Gregor had hoped, it hauled the bedroom door along with it. The door crashed into the man’s back, and Gregor leapt aside just in time as the sheer momentum carried his attacker forward and into the wall.
Gregor stood, ripped Whip free of the shattered remains of the door, and started bashing the back of the prone man’s head. Gregor was not the sort of person to beat a fallen man to death, but he had to make sure the man stayed down, as his opponent’s defenses likely dulled the impact of anything that hit him.
After seven or so strikes, Gregor paused, chest heaving, and kicked the thug over. He realized he might have inadvertently overwhelmed the scrived defenses of the man’s clothing. A pool of blood was slowly spreading out into a gruesome halo around his head.
Gregor sighed. He did not like killing.
He looked out the window. The man with the rapier was still lying on the broken wooden sidewalk. He hadn’t moved.
This is not how I wanted the evening to go, thought Gregor. He didn’t even know who these men had been coming for. Were they Sark’s men, responding to his breakin? Or had they been looking for Sark? Or was it something else entirely?
“Let’s at least find out who you are,” he said. He knelt and started to pull the man’s mask off.
But before he could, the wall behind him exploded.
* * *
The second the wall erupted, two thoughts entered Gregor’s mind.
The first was that he had really been quite stupid: he’d heard the number of footsteps outside Sark’s door, and he’d known there had been more than two men who’d come to the room. He’d just forgotten it in the melee—a very stupid move.
The second thought was: I cannot be hearing this right now. It is impossible.
Because as the wall exploded, sending shattered wood and stone flying through the room, there was a sound over the fracas that was distinct: a high-pitched, wailing shriek. And Gregor had not heard that sound since the Enlightenment Wars.
He dove to the ground as dust and debris showered over him. He looked up just in time to see it—a large, thick, iron arrow hurtling through the far wall of the bedroom, flying just over him, and punching out the other wall as if it were made of paper. The arrow was burning hot, bright and red, leaving a trail of fire in its wake, and he knew that eventually it would erupt into a shower of hot, flaming metal.
He sat up, dust pouring off of him, and watched in horror as the burning-hot missile shrieked out over the Greens before exploding. Bright sparks and flaming shrapnel danced down to the buildings below.
No! he thought. No, no! There are civilians, there are civilians!
Before he could think further on it, the wall erupted again in a different place, and another shrieker punched through the walls of Sark’s bedroom, showering Gregor with stones and smoking splinters and passing just overhead.
Gregor lay on the ground, stunned. How is this happening? How do they have shriekers?
* * *
The Tevanni military had always used altered weaponry to terrific results. There were the swords, certainly, but its bolts and arrows were also scrived, much like Whip, to believe that they were not being flung forward but were instead falling down, obeying gravity. Thus they were able to fly perfectly straight, reach a high velocity, and go much farther than conventional ranged weapons could.
There were some downsides, however. The military had to lug around miniature lexicons specifically built to power such scrivings, and once the projectiles reached the limit of that lexicon’s range, the scrivings failed and the bolts began to descend as any normal projectile would.
So the Tevanni scrivers experimented. Their eventual inspiration came from the release scrivings on common bolts—for Tevanni bolts were not just scrived to believe that they were falling, since a bolt traveling the distance of, say, fifty feet at the constant acceleration of a free-falling object would not do much damage at all.
Instead, the release scrivings on the bolts worked so that the instant the bolts were released, they suddenly believed that they had been falling straight down for around seven thousand feet, give or take. This produced an initial release velocity of over six hundred feet per second, which everyone found satisfyingly lethal.
So, when pressed to develop an armament with a longer range, the scrivers had simply upped the distance. A lot. They’d developed a projectile that, when released from its caster, did not simply believe it’d been falling for a few thousand feet, but rather that it’d been plummeting toward the earth for thousands and thousands of miles. The second you released it, it’d suddenly roar forward, plunging through the air at a phenomenal speed like a black bolt of lightning. Usually the projectile would get so hot from sheer friction that it would abruptly explode in midair. Even if it didn’t, the damage it did was nothing short of catastrophic.
The name for this projectile had been easy to choose. Because as the projectile gained heat and boiled the air around it, it tended to create a high-pitched, terrifying roaring sound.
Gasping, Gregor started crawling toward the living room. He blinked blood out of his eyes. A stone or piece of wood had struck him on the head, and the room was now so smoky it was hard to breathe.
He tried not to think of Dantua, with its tattered walls and smoke, its streets echoing with moans, and the sound of the army laying waste to the countryside beyond…
Stay here, he pleaded with his mind. Stay with me…
Another shrieker ripped through the walls of the living room as Gregor crawled forward. Hot ash and smoking debris rained over him once more. He knew now that there was a third man in the hallway, armed with a shrieker, and he must have decided to use it when he heard the fight and his two compatriots did not emerge.
But this should have been impossible. For a shrieker to work, you had to have a nearby lexicon that would permit it. And that was strictly outlawed in Tevanne. A shrieker brought within Tevanne should have been just another piece of dumb metal.