Nona went into a roll and came up onto her feet. The Noi-Guin staggered back towards the doorway. The black-skin across her face took the chain’s force but the shock of the impact still rattled her brain. Behind her two Lightless took off running down the corridor.
Nona followed the assassin, knocking aside the dagger thrown at her. They met in the doorway, one knife each now. Nona kicked at the Noi-Guin’s off hand, stopping her attempt to pull some new weapon or poison from her belt. They feinted, jabbed, slashed, Keot raging behind Nona’s eyes, howling for blood.
The Noi-Guin seemed to have gone on the defensive, maybe still recovering from the blow to her head. Nona reminded herself that the Noi-Guin was the better knife-fighter and had only to wait for her to tire and slow. Also, the cut on her arm had started to burn, more than a cut in the heat of combat should. The Noi-Guin’s knife had blade-venom on it, not useful in the scant seconds of a hunska fight, but if she slowed things down and drew them out, the venom would do her work for her.
Nona launched herself, releasing every piece of the rage and frustration that had built inside her since her capture and before, since her flight from Sweet Mercy. She slid through the air, knife angled for the Noi-Guin’s heart, her other hand coming forward too. The Noi-Guin, knowing her centre was protected by the armour that had stopped Nona’s earlier slash, focused on driving her blade at Nona’s chest. At the last fragment of a second, as her knife point drove under the Noi-Guin’s blade Nona angled it upward and tore a furrow from the base of the woman’s palm, down through veins, arteries, and tendons towards the crook of her elbow. Her other hand caught the Noi-Guin’s wrist before the blood had even begun to squirt, and pushed it up so that her thrust cleared Nona’s shoulder by a hair. Nona’s own knife-thrust carried on and hammered uselessly against the black-skin beneath the assassin’s jacket.
The pair of them went down together, Nona on top as they spilled out into the corridor. She dashed the Noi-Guin’s blade from her injured hand, sliding over her to control the other arm with both legs. The Noi-Guin hammered her knees up into Nona’s side. The white pain of breaking ribs threatened to take her consciousness but Nona hung on, cursing. She reached down to cut the arteries in the woman’s thigh. The Noi-Guin thrashed but Nona shifted her weight to keep her pinned. One surge nearly flipped her off, and then the assassin’s strength was spent, pooled in crimson around her.
At the far end of the corridor the heavy door slammed and a key turned in the lock. The fight had taken only the time required for the two Lightless to run the length of the passage.
Nona pushed herself clear and made an end of her enemy, cutting first the black-skin’s straps, then the pale throat revealed as she lifted it. The assassin made no cry, only gargled on her blood, then stiffened and went limp.
Painfully, Nona got to her feet. Her vision was blurred, her body weighed three times what it ought to, and her breath came laboured.
You are poisoned.
I know. It didn’t really seem important.
Do something about it.
I didn’t know you cared.
If you die here I have nowhere to go.
I might like you more if you were less honest. Nona felt herself floating up, out of her body.
Nona!
Almost with regret she fought the sensation. Inch by hard-won inch she clawed her way back into her heavy, painful flesh and found herself kneeling beside the Noi-Guin, knees in the blood-pool. She began cutting open the woman’s leather tunic. A score or more steel vials with glass liners studded the garment’s interior, arranged in a row of tight little pockets. All identical, marked with raised symbols that meant nothing to her.
Nona took the only one that stood out, being larger than the others, which were all the size of half her little finger. She worked the stopper free and sniffed from a distance. “Thought so.”
The cure?
Nona tried to laugh and ended up coughing, nearly spilling the contents. “No.”
She held her wristband up and dribbled liquid from the vial into the lock. Immediately it started to smoke and the air filled with acrid fumes that set Nona coughing again. She tried to open the band but found it still locked. She dripped more acid in. The lock fizzed and bubbled, the metal protested . . . and then gave suddenly. A hot spatter of half-spent acid drops ate holes in Nona’s smock and her skin. The wristband fell away.
“That took a lot.” Nona shook the vial. Most of the contents had been used.
Make your blades.
Nona tried, straining the nonexistent muscle that sat at the back of the mind. Her flaw-blades pushed into being, shimmering out to their full length, vanishing, appearing again, unstable. In Keot’s sight the blades were a blue-white that was almost painful to look upon.
Nona made to slice the other wristband off but the blades melted away from it, refusing to cut just as they had once refused to cut Raymel Tacsis. “Sigil protected.”
Burn it open.
Nona shook the vial. Not enough.
Her fingers sought the lock on her collar, hoping it would be smaller. It wasn’t.
She lifted the vial.
You will waste it. It is not enough. You said.
Nona’s fingertips found the sigils on her collar. Three of them. She fell back across the assassin’s corpse, tilting her head. Gritting her teeth, she spilled the acid across the sigil marks. Searingly hot trickles ran down onto her neck and Nona cursed, tearing pieces from her
