Ah! Good decision: there’s a live one, armed, the bastard, and swirling his cleaver about the place and gnashing furious teeth. Fine reet’n’harsefuckered… Edie skates towards him, thinking fast. Speed and heft are their own advantage, and this unconventional conveyance has confused him slightly. The man is a brigand in the pay of the Opium Khan; it’s not every day he is assailed by a willowy white lunatic in forest green, borne along on a wave of fire by a box on wheels. Indeed, there probably aren’t many people who have great familiarity with this situation.
He regains his composure and comes towards her. Edie grounds her heel abruptly, sends her carriage into a spin, then lets the heavy crate swing her around like a child at the village fete. Maypole budo! Her right foot catches him in the noggin, and down he goes like a sack of taters. Blast it, though, he has a friend in the corridor, a few paces away, and that’s a really nasty-looking knife, so it is, more a sword. Under Mrs. Sekuni’s tutelage, she has learned to identify weapons; this is a bastard crossbreed, of course, not a wakizashi or a cutlass or even a bowie knife, but the offspring of a machete and a cleaver. Damn, he’s big. Hypersomnia big.
The man raises his weapon, and roars.
Bugger.
Edie scoots out of the way, abandoning the precious crate, and has to duck very fast as Hypersomnia Boy comes charging in much faster than she anticipated. Just her luck: he’s got brains and skill to match his brawn. Surely that’s not allowed?
First thing: don’t die. Edie scoots left and he chops the other way, misses her.
Cla-boiiing! That sword’s a decent piece of work, too, throwing up sparks and vibrating, but not a chip nor crack as he drives it solidly into the mosaic floor and hauls it out. Hauls it out very close to Edie’s hips, and that would have cut her in half… she rolls away, regains her feet. Yama Arashi… a woman would have to be very skilled or very desperate, and in either case very brave… Edie wonders briefly whether the big lad would listen to a discussion on the relative merits of Asiatic Despotism versus planned economy and a dictatorship of the proletariat, culminating in a suggestion that he change sides, and concludes that Yama Arashi has the edge—but only just.
He comes again. She moves forward instead of back, and commits the cardinal sin of anticipating the attack, beginning the technique before he has given the opportunity. Fortunately, he misses the mistake, or doesn’t know what her movement portends. Edie’s arms slide between his, her hips come between him and the sword. Merge the ki. Or as Frankie Fossoyeur would no doubt say: let your centre of gravity and rotation displace your opponent’s… The movement continues, and she feels a feather pressure on her back, hears him land and swirls on. In the dojo, you finish with the sword against uke’s neck. In real life, the sword is heavier and Yama Arashi and mortal combat have their own logic… tchuck.
Scratch one giant.
Don’t look too closely. Don’t think about it too much. Collect the crate, and find the good guys.
Edie rattles away down the passageway, surfing the crate, scared out of her mind and appalled at what she has done and loving every primal second.
At the throne room, it all comes apart on her.
“Well, Commander Banister, goodness me. There seems to have been some tragic misunderstanding. Your men here are very eager to release you from some dungeon or other—I couldn’t persuade them you were an honoured guest. And in the meantime, my soldiers here are most anxious to protect me from any violence, and some unhappy soul has set my great palace on fire. Why, Commander Banister, whatever is that remarkable box?”
“A gift from your mother, Khan,” Edie says in James Banister’s voice, pats her face to make sure of her moustache, though God knows what difference it makes now… yes. She’s still a boy. “Wants me to take it to the King, apparently. Tell me, is this place full o’ bandits or did one of your fellows just try to cut my head off?” She gives it an extra sting, says awf rather than off. “Dashed poor form, if so, Khan, me being an ambassador and all.”
The palace guard of Shem Shem Tsien are not armed in the full modern style—the Opium Khan likes the feel of antiquity, or doesn’t trust his lads with serious automatic weapons—but there are a few pistols, and a crossbow will kill you just as readily as a bullet—or more so, if you happen to have taken shelter behind something. In training, Edie saw a crossbow bolt pass through a metal plate. There are comfortably two hundred of the Khan’s warriors in this room, all around their master. Standing opposite them are the thirty-odd marines from Cuparah, led by Songbird and Flagpole, looking very determined and very doomed. No sign of Frankie or Dotty Catty, which pray God means they’re aboard already, and the mission is all but complete. Now… just a question of everyone not dying here. Stand-off, but not the good kind.
The Opium Khan surveys his situation, and seems about to speak. Then he looks at Edie, and for the first time she sees the truth of him. The hectoring matinée villain fades away, the cheery roguish smile vanishes, and in its place is the thing which locked a family in a room and incinerated them. It’s like watching a snake emerge from the corpse of a wolf. Another explosion rattles the room, closer this time.
“This no longer interests me,” Shem Shem Tsien says flatly. “Kill them all. Put out the fire. I will want their heads, of course.”
The soldiers of the Opium Khan roll forward in a wave, and Edie’s boys go to meet them. It is the time-honoured tradition of the sons of England’s North: when all is lost, advance to give the enemy his scars. They are making a fight of it, too, impossible though that seems, and then Shem Shem Tsien unsheathes his sword and joins the fray, and Edie learns what butchery is.
Shem Shem Tsien is perfect. It comes from his feet, she’s fairly sure. His feet take him where he wants to go and you least wish him to be. He comes at your bad side, your wounded leg, your blackened eye. He is lithe and strong, but it’s not his arm and shoulder which power the narrow blade he carries, but his heels and hips. He moves through the battle like the shuttle on a loom, trailing threads of human extinction. Edie wonders, honestly, whether even the Sekunis were ever so graceful.
She moves towards him as he skewers a man whose name she has forgotten, one of Amanda Baines’s marines, and even the weight of the corpse adds to his momentum and his rhythm. He steps to one side and brings his wrists together as another soldier surges at him, then rolls his blade in a gesture she has always assumed is pure swordsman’s swank. The edge rolls around his opponent’s neck in a perfect circle, the man twisting as if trying to follow the hilt with his lips, his blood pouring from a massive wound.
Edie watches Shem Shem Tsien and knows she cannot beat him or even survive him unless God provides a miracle. She goes forward anyway. Her vision narrows to Shem Shem Tsien and him alone, and he sees her, and—to her fury—barely notices her intent. He draws a pistol from his belt and fires left-handed as if to swat her away, and only the broad back of Flagpole saves her from death.
Flagpole stares at her, genially lascivious. “Ey, Countess,” he says quietly. “Tha’s a shame.” And then he falls forward into her arms and she can see the hole in his spine.
Shem Shem Tsien smiles, and Edie can feel his satisfaction. She can hear him in her head. Alas for the limitations of budo, Commander Banister. I find it is a particular pleasure, to the sophisticated mind, to force an officer to watch the death of the soldiers in his care. It has piquancy. Wouldn’t you say?