others that occurred around him.
But there were too many Regulators, and anyway, Ash could barely see. He missed with one strike and suffered a cut across his left arm, a sudden slash that would have taken off the limb entirely had the old man not somehow known to swerve aside in time. He took the wound with a grunt and a defensive sweep of his blade. A blackness dripped in the dim light from the sudden rent in his sleeve.
'Run!' the old farlander hollered, unaware that both his companions had been brought down. Another sword struck Ash, the flat of the blade crashing into the side of his head. He reeled, bounced off the wall, came off it with a snarl and his blade already lashing out. The Regulators jumped back beyond his range.
One drew a pistol, took careful aim at Ash's kneecap.
'Master Ash!' shouted Nico in warning, trying to fight free as the Regulator squinted and pulled the trigger.
There was the slightest of delays before the blackpowder charge ignited… and then something wholly unexpected happened.
A giant of a man crashed on to the scene. With a single swipe he took the top of the pistoleer's skull off, so it flapped against his cheek on a vivid hinge of raw scalp. The weapon fired even as the pistoleer toppled to the ground. The shot flew high. The giant charged onwards into those pinning holding down Nico and Serese.
It was Baracha, and behind him came a wild-eyed Aleas. As though felling wood, Baracha heaved and chopped with his oversized blade. Aleas followed him, covering his back, jabbing and cutting left and right. Ash pressed the attack.
On his back, still numbed by shock, Nico watched the three Rshun cut down their opponents in a grimly indifferent silence. Within moments, every Regulator was down.
A roar of applause erupted from inside the opera house. The perfomance drawing to a close.
Nico kept shaking, and his stomach heaved as he looked across the bodies bleeding out on to the cobbles, unable to stop gagging at the copper stench of it. His man was there somewhere, he knew, the one he had struck down. He could not even tell which one it had been.
He heard retching and turned to see Serese vomiting against a wall. It surprised him to witness that.
Ash was cleaning his blade on a cloak of one of the fallen. Baracha just stood there, breathing heavily, and looked at his daughter with obvious relief. Around them, on the wet cobbles, the fallen men coughed, wheezed, struggled to move.
'A fine mess,' the Alhazii growled at Ash. 'It's as well we've been keeping our own watch on the house. I feared this might happen when you finally arrived. You did not take adequate precautions, old man.'
Ash sheathed his sword with a firm shove. 'It is good to see you too, Baracha.'
A shrill whistle sounded in the distance.
'Perhaps we should leave our chit-chat for a later time?' This from Aleas.
Nico picked up his fallen sword. It took him several attempts to grasp it then he noticed the blood on his hands, and wiped his palms against his tunic. It would not all come off. He tried to sheathe the blade but he could not seem to manage it.
Ash settled a hand on his arm. 'Just breathe,' said the old man.
'Yes, master,' Nico said, and slid the blade home.
'Tomorrow then?' Ash said to Baracha.
'Aye, tomorrow – and be sure you take proper precautions this time.'
With quiet words, Ash instructed Nico to lead the way.
*
Ash's wound continued to bleed badly on the way back. He and Nico tried to stem the flow, but still the blood ran down to his hand, dripped from his glistening fingers. Ash refused to catch a tram back to the hostalio, considering his wound too conspicuous for that. He clenched a torn-off piece of his tunic against the wound for the entire journey back, making no complaint on the way. They stopped twice at deep puddles at Nico's insistence, where he tried to wash the gore from his own hands as best he could.
'Can you see again yet?' asked Nico, as he shook his hands dry.
'Yes, my sight clears.'
'I don't understand. What's wrong with you exactly?'
'Nothing is wrong with me. I told you, I suffer from head pains. If they get bad enough they can make it difficult to see.'
Nico did not press him further, not while his master was still in obvious pain.
When they at last reached the hostalio almost an hour later, they were bone-weary and beyond. They made it past the dozing night attendant without trouble, clambering up the four flights of stairs with thoughts of nothing but collapsing on their beds.
They first locked the door of their dark room with a quarter taken from the pile of loose change Ash had left in the washbowl for their purposes. They then fed another quarter into the slot beneath the gaslight, and lit it with a match. Another coin was necessary to unfold Nico's bed.
Before they could sleep, though, they needed to attend to Ash's wound. Nico used yet another quarter to run the spigot and fill the washbowl with water, the remaining coins still lying at its bottom. Meanwhile Ash took out the medico pack and rummaged through it for sterilized bandages, a vial of pure alcohol, also a needle and thread.
The old man dripped some alcohol into the wound, hissing through his teeth as he did so. The gash was not overly deep, but gaped open and pink. The flesh around it, for the entire span of his upper arm, was now bruised a dark purple. Some more of the alcohol he poured on to the bandages. He used a match to heat the end of the needle red-hot, then threaded it with precision, though his fingers shook as the blood coursed freely down his arm. Once it was threaded, he held the needle up to Nico, and said, 'Stitch me up, boy.'
Nico rocked back on his feet. He blinked, barely able to keep his eyelids apart. His body trembled with exhaustion, and he was close to falling down. There was no getting out of it though, so he took the needle and sat down beside the old man. He tried to pretend to himself that he knew what he was doing, that he had been listening during the field surgery lessons back at the monastery, that he had not been fooling around with Aleas at all.
Carefully, he stitched the ugly lips of the wound together, while Ash sat impassively and observed his work. In a way, Nico's exhaustion was a blessing just then; his brain was too far gone to become squeamish at what he saw.
At last Ash nodded with a sigh: 'That will do.'
Nico cut the thread with a knife and fixed a bandage, as best he could, around the arm. He then took off the old man's boots and helped lift his feet on to the bed, making sure his head was properly propped on the pillow.
Ash closed his eyes. His breathing grew shallower.
Nico thought of this old man dancing through the armed Regulators while near-blind, wielding his blade as though it was weight less, all the glamour and myth surrounding him suddenly bearing truth.
'I think I killed a man tonight,' Nico said quietly over his master's still form.
Ash inclined his head by the smallest degree to look up at him. 'And how do you feel, now it is done?'
'Like a criminal. As though I took something I had no right to take. As though I have become someone else, someone tainted.'
'Good, may it always be that way. Only worry if after the act is done and your blood cooled, you feel nothing at all.'
But that was what Nico wished for most of all, just to feel nothing. How could he ever return home to his mother and meet her eye, knowing what he had done?
'He might have had children,' Nico said. 'A son, like me.'
Ash shut his eyes, let his head straighten back on the pillow.
'You did well, Nico,' the farlander croaked.
The words barely registered on Nico. He kept his own boots on as he made the hardest climb of his life up on to the top bunk. He had barely sprawled on the thin mattress before his body gave up on him. He fell into a deep unconsciousness.
Both of them lay dead to the world, each covered in a sheen of sweat and dried blood, oblivious to the pounding of a fight in the room overhead, the coins falling and clattering endlessly behind other walls.
