KINGSLAYER

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"I'll take the right, you take the left," Alexander whispered by her ear before leaving to find his first victim of the night.

Jaylah descended upon a pair of guards who were moving supplies down with a pulley system. They were impaled from the back, then fell backward as she jerked the corpses away from the edge. She killed four more before she was seen from below. Shouts arose as they tried to pinpoint her. Across the way, she recognized Alexander's similarly bloody war path. He made them appear as clumsy as schoolboys as he cut his way through.

There was one more on the left, but he was retying a rope on a platform suspended between two levels. Jaylah leapt down. The platform swayed under her weight. He surprised her by being ready enough to deal a powerful strike to her right arm, which was more dominant. Because his own arms were roughly the size of hams, she was forced back a step. Her heel was hanging in open air. She had to make a desperate grab for the rope so she would not tumble down.

A metallic sound squealed in Jaylah's ears. Then a low boom shook the walls. The lever had been pulled. The ship was heading down the tracks and into the black water. They were too late.

She did not know her heart could beat so fast. She was dimly aware of Alexander making his way to the ground, but he would never make it in time. As the burly man came forward to shove her off the platform, she frantically searched for the lever. There it was, nearly directly below her.

With the power of a last resort, Jaylah whipped her right sword across the man's neck and threw the left one at the rope holding up the scaffolding above them. Then she was dropping through the air like a rock until—wham—she hit the ground and rolled. The impact of the fallen scaffolding was so close that she felt the crash of it in her bones.

With a terrible creak, the boat stopped being propelled forward.

Despite her smarting right arm and aching body, Jaylah got to her feet to see that the lever had been successfully jammed. Everyone in its vicinity was reduced to smears of flesh.

Jaylah diverted her course long enough to retrieve her fallen sword, which glinted the same red-black as the still sea. She made it to the ship in time to be right behind Alexander on the ladder up to the deck. One of the slavers had a crossbow, which he had aimed down at their heads. Jaylah felt the wind from the first bolt on her face as she barely dodged it. Alexander stopped his climb to hurl a blade into the archer's face.

They got up to the deck just in time to see dozens of slavers heading for them. Some held swords, some crossbows, others fought with pieces of debris that had crashed onto the ship. Moving from the edge, Jaylah and Alexander took them on side by side. They were caught in the center of a deadly circle. When she saw he was overwhelmed, Jaylah drove her sword over her shoulder to pierce the neck of the man he was grappling with. In turn, the next moment she was desperately fending enemies off with wide, sweeping strokes of her blades, he performed a maneuver in which he sent one of his own pursuers tumbling into the mens' legs. As they ducked, Jaylah lobbed their heads off.

An archer from above shot a bolt that stuck in the boards between Jaylah's feet. Knowing their bolts would kill them faster than the swordsmen, she slashed her way out of the ring to get to them. Her arms ached as she climbed up the netting. Blood made her fingers slippery on the coarse rope. One of the archers was firing again. Jaylah jerked out of the way at the last second. The bolt barely grazed the end of her long braid in the place her head had been just moments before.