Brass Skies vol 2 (Draft)

A little Charity for the Future Queen part 7 (end)

Two hours later found Charity standing over the remains of over a half dozen fresh corpses while Victoria hid nearby. She imagined herself to be a pretty horrid sight. She stood holding her own pistol; the captured one was long since discarded. Blood stained her apron, her hands, her arms, even her face. A bullet had lightly grazed her right arm just below the shoulder. Another had torn through the left side of her dress just missing her side but leaving her with a slight burn.

The heels from her pumps were now missing. One a victim of physics when she twisted to avoid a knife; the other broken off by her own hand at the first opportunity after losing the first. The ring with the garrote was missing from her fingers; the wire having bitten to deep into one of her victims for her to get out quickly enough, thus forcing her to discard the ring.

Off beside her, Victoria finally crawled out from her hiding spot. The woman looked wide-eyed before bending down and throwing up.

Charity ignored her for a minute while she spun the cylinder on her own revolver, checking to see how many shots she had left. With a wince she slid the cylinder back in place, and then slipped the revolver back into the holster on her thigh. She bent over to retrieve her knife, wiping it off on the shirt of one of the dead men before dropping it into its sheath. She took one look at the garrote and left it.

Silently she checked all the men's guns she could find. Only one still had any ammunition left. As luck would have it, it was of a different size than her own. She checked the men's pockets for ammunition or additional knives but found none.

With quietly slumping shoulders, she took that gun and carried it over to Victoria. She offered it to the other woman who accepted it with a silent nod and a look so bleak that Charity wanted desperately to be able to give her some assurance. Unfortunately, she had none to give.

Victoria straightened up and gestured for Charity to lead the way. Both women knew that it was past time to get moving. The sounds of the fight had already drawn attention of other groups and the sounds of their pursuers closing in were far too close for comfort.

Rarely had the certainty of imminent failure weighed so heavily upon Charity. Granted the price of failure could always mean her death, and granted failure to take out a target could mean the deaths of potentially dozens or hundreds of her countrymen, but this was the first time that the price of failure would cost her someone she had actually grown to care about.

Yes, she was an assassin, and a damn good one at that, but her kills were rarely this demanding, and never so numerous at one time.

She knew the next fight would probably kill her and she knew she was unlikely to be able to avoid another one. Charity was tired, mind-numbingly, so. She was losing her focus; that critical edge where her mind could sub-consciously pick out that one little noise, that one little shape out of place that meant the difference between life and death.

Because of that, she was going to die and with her—possibly even before her—the young woman that by all rights should be her enemy but had now become something of a friend would die too. Somehow that hurt more than all her wounds combined.

***

The two women stumbled through the woods as quickly and quietly as they could. Behind them the sounds of pursuit grew increasingly less distant with each passing minute as their pursuers unencumbered by the burden of having to stay hidden gained on them. Worse, the increasingly less distant sounds of dogs barking had joined in that chorus of sounds.

"The road should be this way," Victoria whispered pointing off in the distance ahead and to an angle. "If we can get there, we might be able to make it back to the estate or at least summon some help."