warm in his hand.
The first swordsman closed on Paet, and Paet got a good look into the man's eyes. Black, empty black, stretching inward to infinity.
Bel Zheret.
Paet was a dangerous man. But going up against two Bel Zheret in a closed space was suicide. He backed up, toward the dingy window of waxed paper.
'You're a Shadow, aren't you?' said the first swordsman. He smiled pleasantly. 'My name is Cat. It would be my sincere pleasure to kill you.'
'It would be my sincere pleasure for you not to.'
'Just so. But I must insist. I have never killed one of you.'
'Oh. In that case I'm not going to fight you,' said Paet, sheathing the knife.
The Bel Zheret stopped short, flicking his blade in the air. The grin faded, replaced with sincere disappointment. 'Why not?'
'If I'm going to die anyway, I'd prefer to give you neither the pleasure nor the experience of engaging me in combat. The next time you come against a Shadow, I'd prefer that you have no personal knowledge of our tactics, our speed, or our reflexes. That way, you can be more easily defeated then by one of my colleagues.'
Cat pondered this, never taking his eyes off of Paet. 'Well,' he said, shrugging, 'we can still torture you.'
He waved the other Bel Zheret forward. 'Restrain him, Asp,' he said.
Asp moved with astonishing fluidity and quickness. He didn't seem to tread through the room so much as unfold across it, his limbs elastic, perhaps even multi jointed. No matter how many times Paet saw this skill employed, it unnerved him.
Paet took a deep breath and unsheathed his knife again, rearing back for a sudden forward attack against Cat, carefully weighing the cloth bag in his other hand. Cat prepared to block Paet's attack, but no attack came. Paet instead added to his rearward momentum by shoving off with his back foot, launching himself toward and through the window. The third-story window.
Falling backward, unable to see the ground, Paet considered his chances for survival. The descent seemed to go on for eternity. He concentrated and slowed his heart again, deliberately let his muscles go slack. He even willed his bones to soften and become more flexible, though he had no sense of whether it was a good idea, or whether it would even work.
Finally, he hit the cobblestones on his back, at the angle he'd desired. Jenien's head made a sick, muffled thump as it struck. In his hurry, Paet had forgotten the knife in his left hand, and felt the snap of his wrist as it was wrenched by the hilt's impact. How many of Paet's wrist bones broke simultaneously he couldn't guess. More than one. There was no pain yet, but that would come in a few seconds.
More prominent at the moment were the pain along his spine and his inability to breathe, the sharp crack of his skull against stone. So perhaps not exactly the angle he'd intended. He was still alive, however, and his legs felt fine; that was all that mattered.
Paet climbed slowly to his feet, looking up at the window. Cat was already drawing his head back inside the room. The waxed-paper windowpane fluttered down crazily in the shifting breeze of the cul-de-sac. He could already hear the steps on the stair, Asp already dispatched. He picked up the sack containing Jenien's head and ran.
Blindly at first, Paet raced out of the cul-de-sac and turned right, for no particular reason. He would need to make his way back west, but not by the most direct route, nor by the most secretive. He would have to split the difference, taking random turnings and inconvenient doublings in order to throw off a pair of Bel Zheret, who would already be considering all of the things that Paet was currently thinking. They outnumbered him, they weren't fleeing, and neither of them had just fallen out of a third-floor window. These were tangible assets that Paet couldn't at the moment figure out how to turn into disadvantages. On the positive side, the night that he fled into was growing more chaotic by the minute.
He kept running, the ringing in his ears from the fall replaced by the sounds of battle, ever closer, the clatter of feet and hooves on stone, shouting. He smelled smoke; somewhere nearby a building was burning. On some of the faces he passed, worry was being replaced with panic. The Unseelie were no longer coming; they were here. Life in Annwn was about to change significantly.
As Paet turned another corner into the wide avenue leading back toward Kollws Kapytlyn, his left hand, still somehow grasping the knife, slammed hard into the post of a pottery merchant's cart being pushed in the other direction. His vision dimmed and his gorge rose as the pain from the broken wrist leapt up his arm, into his brain and then his stomach. Continuing to run, though slower, he considered dropping the bag. He couldn't defend himself while he carried it.
Looking back, he saw Asp now entering the market from the same alley that Paet had. The Bel Zheret caught his eye and moved toward him, shoving a fruit vendor's cart aside with a strength that made Paet wince. Empress
