Clay waited until their footsteps faded before moving on. Sometime after noon he emerged from the wide mouth of the Defile and began climbing the southern flank of Deliverance yet again. Sweat chilled on his skin, his ribs complained with every sucking breath, but still he compelled himself on, step by plodding step, desperate to reach the column of smoke before Larkspur’s skyship arrived.
The Dark Star beat him there, but barely. Clay was near enough to see it descend. Lightning cracked from sail to sail, the engines slowing until only a single gyre whirled within each—enough to keep the dreadnought hovering just above the rocky ground. A ladder was thrown over the side and a handful of monks came clambering down. Their crimson robes whipped around them in the wind.
Clay was laid out behind a nearby ridge, propped on his good elbow. He watched as Larkspur started down the slope, leaving her captive trussed and apparently unconscious beside the remains of her fire. If Clay could free Matrick, then maybe they could escape into the Defile, where the skyship couldn’t follow and Larkspur’s flight would make her an obvious target for giants.
A bitter chuckle escaped him. It’s a terrible plan, Cooper, but it’s all you’ve got. Now get up …
He made to push himself up, but his arm gave way beneath him. Clay’s jaw cracked against stone and his ribs muttered their displeasure. Breath fumed from his nose as he tried once again to rise. He failed. His legs were heavy as stone, and Clay could feel his heart shudder in panic at the thought of any more effort on its part. Don’t make me, it begged. You can’t make me!
“Fuck you I can’t,” Clay hissed. He dragged a knee beneath him, used it to push himself up. He swayed there a moment before staggering to his feet. A step took him onto the ridge behind which he’d been hiding, another took him over, and then momentum carried him down the pebbled slope toward Matrick. He glanced right and saw the monks abasing themselves at Larkspur’s feet, their faces pressed to the ground. The setting sun threw his shadow almost to the daeva’s back.
Clay stumbled to his knees between Matrick and the daeva’s signal fire, hoping the veil of smoke might obscure their escape. The king looked up, bleary-eyed. He’d lost some weight over the past few weeks, and it showed now more than ever. He looked drawn, grey-whiskered jowls hanging loose on gaunt cheeks. “Clay?”
“The one and only.”
“She said you were dead. She said you fell.”
“I fell,” Clay confirmed. “Not dead, though. Not yet.” He tried on a grin that didn’t quite fit.
Matrick scowled. “Where’s Gabriel? Is he with you? Where are the others?”
“They’re gone,” Clay told him, and when Matrick’s face paled he quickly clarified: “They went on ahead, I mean. It’s just us now.”
Matrick moaned. “You shouldn’t have come. She wants me alive, but she’ll kill you for sure.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” Clay murmured.
“Gods, your hand!” Matrick pointed toward the stump as Clay went hunting for bindings beneath the dingy fox-fur cloak.
“What about it?”
“Where is it?”
“I lost it.”
“You lost your hand? What do you mean you lost it? How—”
“Matty, I can’t … Are you even tied up?”
“What? No.”
Clay raked hair from his eyes, exasperated. “Where are your knives?”
Matrick patted the sheaths on his backside. “Right here, why?”
“Why?!” Clay forced the word though his teeth to keep from shouting. “Why are you still here? Why not run? Or fight?”
“What’s the point?” Matrick shrugged helplessly. “We’re fucked, Clay. Literally fucked.”
“Figuratively.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.”
“We can’t outrun her,” Matrick sighed. He looked as tired as Clay felt, and near to tears. “We can’t outfight her. We obviously can’t outsmart her. I mean, all that Sabbatha stuff? She was faking the whole time! Best to just let her take me and have done with it.”
Clay couldn’t believe his ears. He’d been pushing himself all day. He had reached the very limit of his endurance and then pressed on for several hours more. He’d risked his life to rescue Matrick, and now Matrick didn’t want to be rescued? It was too much. It really was. He closed his eyes, swallowed hard to keep the rage from rising in his throat, and said as calmly as he could, “Get up.”
“Clay!”
“Get up!” he repeated, realizing too late that Matrick had been trying to warn him. Clay spun in time to see a monk burst through the curtain of smoke, wisps curling away from an outstretched foot. The kick broke his nose all over again and split the raw wound on his face, spilling fresh blood in an arc as his head snapped around. Clay crashed in a heap, pain blaring in his skull like a bad song played too loudly with the wrong instruments. Someone grabbed his legs, dragged him over grating stone. His fingers scrabbled without purchase and his eyes swam, searching for focus.
He glimpsed clouds dark as bruises against the orange sky, and the swirl of red robes—like blood in water—as the monks swarmed him.
Clay could feel fists and feet pummeling him. The Warskin soaked up the brunt of it, but even still his ribs wept like a grieving mother. He was kicked in the shin, punched in the neck, and was trying to decide which was more painful (the neck—definitely the neck) when Matrick cried out.
“Sabbatha! Tell them to stop! It’s me you want! He was only trying to help. Let him go! Let him go and I’ll come along nice and easy.”
Silence from the daeva, and several more blows from her thralls. Clay curled in on himself, cradling his severed hand, good arm thrown up to try to protect his head.
“Stop it!”
A kick rolled him over and Clay saw Matrick leap to his feet.
“Stop, now!” he barked, but might have been a chirping squirrel for the attention they paid him. Between one kick and the next Matrick’s expression went from helplessness to frustration, from frustration to livid anger. He reached beneath his cloak …
Please, please the knives.
… and withdrew a flask. He tore off the cap and threw it away, then tipped the flask to his lips. His throat pulsed as Matrick gulped down its contents, then he tossed it as well and shrugged the fox-skin cloak from his shoulders. He wiped his mouth with the back of one hand.
“There goes nice and easy,” he growled, and finally, finally, out came the knives.
Gabriel killed with flash and flourish, Ganelon with the instinct of a natural-born predator. When it came to fighting, Clay tried only to keep himself and his friends alive. And Moog? Well, the wizard was full of surprises, most of them more distracting than deadly.
Matrick, on the other hand, was a cutthroat murderer. By the time Gabe finished toying with a foe or Ganelon wrenched his bloody axe from an enemy corpse, Matrick could punch holes in half a dozen men. He fought with a kind of meticulous fury, parsing out violence in short, frenetic bursts. Clay had once seen him go up against six men and come out on top. Of course he’d been much younger then, and a great deal faster, and not nearly as fat.
He didn’t kill any of the monks when he leapt to Clay’s rescue, but he slashed all seven of them at least once. They scattered like wolves driven off by a burning brand, but like wolves they came circling back, hungry for blood.
Matrick picked one from the pack and rushed him, ducking a chop aimed at his head and driving both knives into the man’s chest. He yanked the blades free, whirling as his assailants closed, and used one of his favourite tricks to help even the odds: he flicked a knife at the nearest man’s face. He didn’t throw it—it wasn’t an attack—but the blood on the blade spattered into the monk’s eyes, momentarily blinding him.
A moment was all it took. Matrick opened the man’s throat and moved on, slicing three fingers from the next monk to reach for him and ramming the other knife up under his chin, cutting short a scream.
Four, Clay counted, watching from the ground. One against four.
A kick sent Matrick rolling sideways, and he kept rolling, evading a stomp from one monk and taking the legs out from another. He came up slashing, fending off a flurry of blows with sharp-edged blades. He glanced over the shoulder of one attacker and grinned.
The man looked. Of course he looked, because nobody just grinned over your shoulder at nothing in the middle of a fight.