Blood of the Red

Chapter 33 - Shallo

Footsteps on stairs! Somebody coming, more than one. Shallo plucked two cross-knives from the belts over her chest. The first man to turn the corner fell backward with a cross-knife in his throat. The second man came on at a run. His sword cleared his scabbard in an arc of glimmers before the beam of his lantern. The heavy steel cross-knife left Shallo's fingers at blinding speed, shaken free with a cracking flick of her wrist. It hit the man in the forehead and punched through his skull. He fell thrashing.

Shallo plucked two more cross-knives from her belts. Each knife fitted neatly in her hand, little more than two inches across, four points, sharp as sin. In the Sister-Halls nobody had ever surpassed her with the cross-knives. No sister living, and none in the dusty archives - held in the attics for the rats to read.

The first cross-knife came easily from soft flesh. The second required the application of her dagger as a lever before she could pry it from the bone. She replaced them on her belts. Twenty-four knives, twenty-four lives.

No noise from the cells, snoring from the end of the passage. The prisoners slept on. Shallo considered her options. She let the prisoners live. On cat-feet she found her way along the corridor. Where the stairs led down, a door stood open. Shallo peered through the crack by the hinges. A fat man lay sleeping on a cot, a tin plate with a heel of bread and a few stray beans rested on his belly. A heavy sleeper. He'd have to be, to sleep through his own snores. Shallo stepped into the room, kill-spike folded in her palm.

A few chains and manacles hung from pegs on the walls. Some leather hoods. On the table by the bed, an unlit lamp, pincers, a hammer, a wedge of hard cheese. Not instruments of torture, just the tools of the trade, for adding and removing chains. Shallo stopped the snoring. In one of the cells someone woke with a jolt and a clatter of chain. Sometimes it's the absence of a sound that wakes us. Sometimes horror comes in the night, sometimes it's only death; tonight I'm death.

Shallo left the room and started down the stairs. Every nerve alive. She could feel her heartbeat, slow and clear. She felt coiled like a spring, wound exquisitely tight.

The men who ran up the stairs and now lay dead behind her had been stationed in the room below. A fire burned in the hearth, dice on a small table, a jug of wine. The archway commanded a long corridor from which many doorways led. Shallo moved on, passing each door with a momentary pause. Grethan spoke of a hole, a pit with steps. All that really matters lies below. Ingold will go down the pit, Ingold will come up the pit. Do you think you can just wait there for him? Yes. And the guards? The Blood Guard? The Red Priests? They won't stop me. What, you think you can kill a Blood Guard? I'll kill them all if I have to. You're insane. Let me show you how insane. Grethan did not die clean or easy, for him horror came in the night.

Left, first right, another stairwell. Three guards, non-bloods, the Blood Guard are in the streets. An older man, thin, with pouches beneath his eyes, a thickset fellow with black stubble and a low forehead, and a boy, blond and slim. Shallo threw two cross-knives as she stepped into view, one from each hand. An eyeball exploded around one sharp metal slug, the second found a soft throat. She ran, dived, rolled head-over-heels beneath a wild swing and rose with dagger in hand. Three more guards came running up the nearby stairs as the boy fell from her. Blood sprayed from his neck around the hilt of her dagger.

The first two stumbled over the boy, their swords clattering on the stone. Shallo vaulted over them, hands on their backs. Her heels took the third man beneath the chin. She landed as his head hit the edge of a step. Should have worn a helmet. She pivoted. Two cross-knives spat from her hands, killing the two surviving guardsmen as they rose.

Do you know how many men serve in the Cloister? I'll kill them all if I have to.

Shallo set to the gory business of retrieving her cross-knives.