suction cup in her pack, and was considering whether to use it or take a more straightforward route when a voice made up her mind for her.
“You so disappoint me,” Beniago remarked, coming out of the shadows at the side of the room.
Dahlia reacted as soon as the first word had left his mouth. She poked down with Kozah’s Needle in one hand, shattering the top sheet of glass on the case. At the same time, she flipped the latch on the eye-hole of her harness, freeing herself from the rope, and caught the rope enough with her free hand to spin herself over, dropping to straddle the case with one foot atop either side of its metal skeleton.
“I’ll try to do better,” she replied coolly, as if she’d expected the man all along. She went into a defensive crouch, setting her boots more firmly on the narrow rim of the case and turning her eight-foot staff slowly in her hands in front of her.
Beniago came closer, walking a zigzag path as if expecting Dahlia to throw some missile his way. Barely five strides from her, he looked at her then down at the broken case, and shook his head.
“The diamond,” he said, “offered to you by High Captain Kurth as a gift.”
“There’s no such thing as a gift.”
“Cynical, pretty lady.”
“Taught by bitter experience. Gifts have conditions.”
“And would those conditions have been such a bad thing, particularly in light of your relationship with Ship Rethnor, a formidable foe?”
“They don’t frighten me.”
“Obviously not.”
“Nor does Ship Kurth.”
“But still, I would be remiss in my duties to High Captain Kurth if I didn’t once more put forth our offer. Take your chosen diamond-”
The words had barely left his mouth when Dahlia exploded into motion. She pulled her staff into two four-foot lengths and turned them down like great pincers. With practiced control, she squeezed the velvet wrapping and the diamond between them and with a flick of her wrists, sent the stone flying up into the air in front of her. She snapped her staff back together, let go with one hand, and deftly used her free hand to redirect the stone as it descended right into her pocket. And all the time, even in the moment it took to execute the entire maneuver, Dahlia kept her gaze locked on Beniago.
The assassin showed his amusement, and perhaps amazement, with a grin and a shake of his head.
“Take your chosen diamond,” he repeated, chuckling beneath the words, “and I’ll even pay for the repair of the case-and glass is not so cheap in Luskan this time of the year! So you see? You have created a better bargain for yourself already. Join us…”
“No.”
“My good lady…”
“No.”
“Then I must take back the diamond.”
“Please try.”
A sword appeared in Beniago’s left hand, his jeweled dagger in his right-and for a moment, Dahlia thought that a strange combination, since her previous observations of Beniago had made her think him right-handed.
“No matter,” she whispered.
She leaped from the case, landing halfway between it and her opponent, setting her feet as she touched down perfectly to sweep her long staff out in front of her. She halted her subsequent backhand mid-swing, retracted it, and stepped forward, thrusting the staff as a spear for Beniago’s belly.
A lesser opponent might have been clipped by the swing and prodded hard by the thrust, but she got nowhere near to hitting Beniago-nor did she expect to. What Dahlia had hoped was that Beniago would slap at Kozah’s Needle with his sword perhaps, so that she could share a bit of lightning energy with her opponent, perhaps even jolting his sword from his grasp.
But Beniago not only avoided any such incidental contact, he smiled at Dahlia as if to show her that he knew what she was trying to do.
That didn’t concern Dahlia, though. Quite the opposite. She preferred her opponents capable and well- schooled. She stabbed again with the staff and jumped forward to drive Beniago back, and indeed he did retreat, but the aggressive elf warrior discovered something in that attack: Beniago had not disabled the floor traps!
The floorboards collapsed beneath Dahlia’s lead foot and only her agile reaction stopped her from sliding into the suddenly-revealed pit. Still, her foot did go in enough to tap the nearest of the many spikes within, wicked and pointed things that easily punctured the hard sole of her boot and pricked at the bottom of her foot.
She felt the slight puncture, almost immediately accompanied by a burning pain. She had no doubt that the spike was poisoned, but could only hope it hadn’t penetrated her flesh enough to deliver a killing dose.
Beniago seized the opportunity to charge forward, leading halfheartedly with his sword, and the off-balance Dahlia did well to slap it aside, though she couldn’t focus her energy enough to apply the weapon’s signature lightning blast. She did even better in her subsequent retreat, just barely avoiding the brunt of the man’s main attack with his jeweled dagger.
Dahlia fell away and turned her head, but still got scratched by the small blade. Just scratched.
And in that moment, thinking to reverse and press the man, Dahlia found out the awful truth.
She’d been barely nicked, a slight scratch across her cheek, but in that contact between Beniago’s blade and her flesh, Dahlia knew doom. True doom. She sensed her soul being pulled forth, as if the dagger drank of her very life essence. She felt the coldness of utter obliteration, the emptiness of nothingness. She felt as violated as she had on that long-ago day when Herzgo Alegni had assaulted her village and torn asunder her childhood.
She retreated as fast as she dared, not wanting to put her feet down with any weight on a floor lined with deadly traps.
And they were deadly, she knew now, for her punctured foot began to grow numb, and it took considerable concentration with each step for Dahlia to stop it from rolling under and buckling.
Beniago pursued, smiling as if his kill was surely at hand.
Dahlia forced herself through it all and shook her head against the unnerving and unholy power of that wicked dagger. She broke her long staff into two, then snapped those two four-foot lengths into flails and sent them immediately spinning, up and over and out at her pursuer.
With her wounded foot, time was against her, she feared, so she went on the attack, striding forward, lashing out with the flails one after the other. Her assassin opponent ducked and dodged left and right, and tried to keep her at bay with his long sword, all the while holding that awful dagger cocked at his side, ready to strike like a poisonous serpent. Dahlia quickly realized that Beniago was making the same mistake of so many before: He was trying to parry her spinning sticks in such a way as to cut the ties between the poles.
She launched her right-hand flail in an arcing, downward-diagonal attack, and Beniago backhand parried with his sword, forcing the blade in against the handle-pole of Dahlia’s weapon. As she followed through, Beniago slid his sword quickly up and out, hoping that the countering weight of her swing would create enough resistance for him to slice the binding tie cleanly.
But this was Kozah’s Needle, imbued with great and powerful magic, and no blade in existence had the edge to accomplish such a feat. To his great credit, Beniago was quick enough not to fall into the obvious trap, at least, retracting his blade before Dahlia could catch the swinging pole of her weapon and twist his sword from his grasp.
Instead the elf shifted her left foot forward and turned her hips, her second weapon coming in hard, driving Beniago back in full retreat.
Dahlia shadowed his every step, imagining his boot prints and filling them with her own feet.
“Well done!” Beniago congratulated after a few such rounds had him all the way back near the shadows where he’d first appeared. He’d barely finished speaking, though, when he darted out to the side, springing away and even turning his back on the pursuing Dahlia as he executed a series of darts left and right, combined with seemingly wild leaps. He jumped up onto the broken diamond case and sprang far away, and with that visual barrier between himself and Dahlia, he moved even faster, spinning sidelong in one leap so that he could disguise his landing.
Dahlia came over the case as quickly as she could manage, but there was too much room between her and
