The crowd yelled. Gio lifted his shield and hastened across the square, shouting his rabble into a formation akin to a fyrd division. The Ghallain swordsmen he arranged at the front, then the biggest, roughest men, the Hacilith boys and a couple of harridan girls at the rear.
But the swordsmen at the library door refused to move and glowered when Gio beckoned to them. His authority had gone but he pretended that it didn’t matter, gave up and returned to the thick column.
Lightning thought aloud: “I can improve the odds for Wrenn and Ata.” He instantly flexed his bow and loosed. A man at the head of the column reeled with a scream and fell, the arrow through his thigh. Lightning selected another shaft from the quiver at his hip, let fly and the astonished lad behind the first man yowled and squatted to the ground. I could barely see the arrow projecting from his leg above the knee. Lightning started counting backward from thirty, “Twenty-eight, twenty-seven…” as he lamed each of the men along the nearest edge of the formation, who were arranged like targets in a gallery.
Hearing their screams, the column flashed shields along its length. It surged away from us, bending and abandoning the wounded men, leaving around twenty sprawling and crawling on the mosaic. One man cried loudly as he snapped the fletchings off the arrow and pulled the shaft out through his thigh.
Gio, invisible behind his shield, led his file to the boulevard. They emptied very quickly out of the square, hurried between the slender stone walls and snaked around the hairpin bends. They left the battered mosaic empty; Alyss and the Insects were carious with missing tesserae. Litter was stacked up in the corners against the library and ash blew out of the cooling bonfire into the colonnade. Lightning cleanly and methodically shot down the rearmost rebels in the column, hitting the left thigh of each man. “You, four; and you, three…two…one. There. That’s all the arrows I dare to spend. Is this not disagreeable work?”
Some footsteps scuttled on the floor below us. Lightning called, “Join our gathering, by all means. But please introduce yourselves so I know who I’m shooting.”
A movement at the Senate House caught our attention. A swordsman began to back out, lugging one of Gio’s heavy coffers between himself and his friend. Another followed, and a fourth, until all the chests and ornate boxes containing Gio’s fortune were lined up on the mosaic.
Lightning asked, “What are those?” but I hardly heard him because I was seething with anger. Tirrick, the goateed little creep, was stealing the treasure and I could do nothing about it.
The senators were next to stumble out of the door at the foot of the pillars. A frightened youth in a pale tunic, then a dumpy old man were corralled by the swordsmen. Vendace came out last, reluctantly, being goaded by Tirrick behind him. The tall, wiry Trisian leaned his head at a strange angle because Tirrick held a dagger across his throat. Tirrick shoved him out onto the mosaic, and looked straight up at our window with a bold smile.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
They’re parading the senators where we can see them,” I said.
“Tirrick,” said Lightning. “I know the type. Privileged but strident and embittered, the youngest son of a minor noble.” He licked his fingers and held them out of the window to judge the breeze. Then his fingertips rasped over the arrow fletchings and settled on the string. Tirrick angled his dagger across Vendace’s scrawny neck and called, “We’ll kill one of these for every shot you loose!”
Vendace rolled his eyes and stamped his foot. His brown arms were rigid by his sides.
I said, “The boxes are full of money. I think the swordsmen will take it to the ship, with the senators as hostages to shield themselves. It’s our chance to escape. Oh fuck, no it isn’t…”
Around twenty swordsmen ran out of the colonnade, carrying lamps and oil jugs with spouts. Lightning drew on them but saw Tirrick’s blade bite against Vendace’s skin, and didn’t loose. The guards around the library door let them speed through. Crashes came up from below, smashing pottery, rustling and tearing.
A heavy thump shook the floor as the men pulled a bookshelf over. I heard them kicking the scrolls into heaps. “They’re going to burn the library!” I darted to the stairs and called down, “Stop! In the name of San and the will of god. How
A voice shrugged, “Come out and be executed or stay there and char.”
But these are books-all the books of Tris. “You must not,” I yelled desperately.
A blue-gray twist rose from the stairwell like cigarette smoke. Within seconds it widened to fill the whole well. From the window I saw the swordsmen pouring out onto the mosaic, shoving the guards back in their haste to escape. “The fire’s caught! Ready yourselves, they have to surrender. It’s going up!”
Smoke billowed past me in a thick stream and drifted along the ceiling. Lightning released the tension on his bowstring. “We have to break out. There are a dozen fencing masters. We can deal with them, but the senators will die.”
“The books!” I wailed. “I can’t leave-”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“Maybe there’s another way down.” Gray wreaths shrouded the rafters completely and were descending extremely quickly to fill the room. I fumbled through a stack of leather-bound books on the table and slipped them into my coat pockets. I picked up the lantern. “Wait here. I’ll check the far end.”
Lightning began coughing loudly. I called, “Stoop low. Slouch down under it.” I had been in a burning building before and, as far as I knew, he had not. But my lungs hurt as I sucked smoke and I started choking more than him.
I had to save the books, as many as I could carry. I strode down the aisle snatching them from the shelves. I stuffed one in my waistband, another in my belt. I had no time to translate the titles; I couldn’t see with the smoke stinging my eyes. I didn’t know what I was snatching. I piled them frantically in the crook of my left arm, discarded a heavy tome, selected two more haphazardly. I thought, I’m rescuing a handful of volumes at random to represent the total knowledge of an entire culture. Which were most worthwhile? Were these engineering, cookery or poetry? Or even bloody fiction? I had no way of judging. I spat out the cloying smoke and the stack buckled in my arms. I reached the end of the library-which was just a blank wall-and I dropped all the books with a series of thuds.
Recognizable but horribly out of place, gray mottled, fibrous drapes strung between the last two bookcases: Insect paper. They looked folded but were as hard as concrete. They curved up from the shelves and blurred into the smoke creeping down from the beams.
Two long, brown forelegs emerged from the nest. The Insect’s black spiny foot clicked down onto the floor between my boots, and its three claws articulated shut. I backed into the opposite bay.
The Insect ducked its triangular head and slipped out from between the bookcases. Its eyes’ tessellations reflected the lamp-lit swirling smoke. It brushed a fringe on its front right leg over them. It must have pulled out Wrenn’s rapier, because the hole through its thorax was now a deep concavity filled with smooth new shell. It had sloughed its skin and was even bigger than I remembered. The high joints of its back legs loomed out of the smoke.
Two club-shaped black palps shuffled like a pair of hands rubbing together. They retracted and the scissor jaws opened and shut. It lifted a foreleg and cleaned its single crooked antenna through filaments inside its knee.
Lightning flexed his bow and spoke with his lips to the string, “Step aside.” Through the smoke he was just a silhouette blurred by the tears streaming from my eyes. I pressed my coat cuff to my nose and mouth. In another thirty seconds the room would be full and I could hear crackling from below.
“Wait!” The Insect stood still, close enough for me to see the scars and impressions I had made with my axe. A row of black spines four-wide supported the upper surface of its striped abdomen. The pale underside pulsed as it curled its abdomen under itself, pumping air through its spiracles which were wide open.
“Wait. It doesn’t like the smoke.”
Its antenna flicked forward, sensing for the clean air. It jolted into an involuntary crouch. “It’s going to run-let it pass!”
The Insect leapt. It hurtled past Lightning, stretched its full length and reached over the handrail, down into the stairwell. Its back sword-shaped femurs kicked and claws scrabbled on the blistering varnish, then it disappeared into the gusting smoke. I ran after it instantly; Lightning seemed bewildered so I grasped his arm and
