Fear held her reins now, a wild thing urging her to kick and strike and cast with abandon. But the devils were stronger, faster. Wilder. Their swords were graceful and quick, the lightning strikes of their relentless storm.
She saw the trail of blood along her arm before she felt the searing pain of the blade, and as she noticed it, the sword bit again slicing through the robe and the leather of her shirt and into her wounded hip. The nearer one grinned down at her, her black eyes cold and malevolent.
Lorcan was right, Farideh thought. I’m going to die.
She had forgotten, as the devils had in their fervor to kill Lorcan, that there were more than the two of them in this fight.
They hadn’t counted on Havilar, that blanched and shivering girl, to shake loose her shock, take up her glaive, and become a blur of metal and blood, her blade as good as her right hand.
Havilar dived across the courtyard, throwing herself behind the weight of the polearm. With a crack, the blade-aimed just so-split the Hell-forged armor of the black-haired devil standing over Farideh, and buried itself in her back. Nemea’s eyes widened as the blade plunged so deeply Farideh heard a rib bone snap. As swiftly as she’d struck, Havilar twisted, planting her foot on the back of the devil’s thigh, just above her knee. She yanked loose the glaive and buckled Nemea’s knee in one motion. Then she spun the glaive’s spike-capped end upward as Nemea fell and Aornos turned, and smashed it into the redhead’s unprotected nose and cheek. The strike was imperfect-the bone didn’t shatter as it had when she’d hit the Ashmadi cultist-but it startled Aornos and bloodied her nose with viscous, black fluids.
Nemea’s sword sliced toward Havilar’s knees. Havilar moved to block with the haft of the glaive-it will snap, Farideh thought, and then snap Havilar as well.
“Assulam!” The word flowed out of her mouth on a stream of foul magic that engulfed Nemea’s sword and shattered it into a cloud of rust.
Another cry overtook Farideh’s curse, a fierce, wordless war cry chased by the sound of a sword unsheathing. Brin. Brin, but his voice was no half-grown boy’s, but a voice buoyed by the force of a god. Farideh remembered him yelling in the forest as he attacked Lorcan, his pitiful war cry, all the more pitiful next to this towering bellow.
The devils froze-as if they did not know the sound, as if they did not know what was happening. Lorcan’s sword lashed out, slashing Aornos’s sword arm. She stood the pain well enough to parry his following strike, but Brin’s sword drove forward, sliding under her pauldron. Aornos shrieked and kicked backward, catching Brin’s legs and throwing him backward and across the cobbles. Brin rolled and came to his feet-
Nemea’s hoof slammed into Farideh like a charging bull, knocking her to the ground and pinning her by Farideh’s right shoulder. Nemea reached down and pulled Farideh’s short sword from her belt. She tested the weight of it with a sneer. No match, it seemed, for her shattered sword.
Match enough to take Farideh’s hands off.
The butt of Havilar’s glaive cracked across Nemea’s face, rocking her back onto her other foot long enough for Farideh to roll away. Enraged, the devil swung her shield out to knock Havilar back, but the tiefling was too quick. As she clambered to her feet, Farideh caught a glimpse of Havilar’s flushed face, concentration and unbridled eagerness warring in her features, before Farideh cast another of the shimmering bolts of energy into Nemea’s chest.
Swords clashed. Aornos pressed Lorcan back. He parried and blocked, his swordwork nearly as clean as the devil’s, but one glance at Aornos showed she was hardly making an effort. Lorcan, on the other hand, looked as if a gnat across his field of vision would break his concentration, make him slip, and kill him.
It would be easy, she thought. Call out his name, and he’d look over. Long enough for the devil to break his defense.
She could lose him. She could let the pact go.
Her chest squeezed and the powers of the Hells churned her stomach sick.
Aornos swung her sword into Lorcan’s, catching the blade on his guard. One swift, savage thrust and the force of her blade broke his grip. His sword clattered to the ground. Aornos bashed her shield into his chest and he fell, splayed out on the ground like a sacrifice. She raised her sword again.
There was no place for thought. Farideh shouted the words of a spell she’d used only once, when Lorcan had shown it to her some other dark night in some other crumbling town. Screamed them with everything left in her. The ground beneath Aornos turned molten and swallowed her hooves. Then the fire that should have leaped out of the ground like a fountain instead burst forth like a waking volcano.
Aornos’s screams pierced Farideh to her very marrow. Still she readied the next spell, the blast of energy that she’d first learned. When the fires fell away, she cast it, and the crackling light enveloped the devil. Her screams broke off and she collapsed in a heap.
Only for a moment though-the body suddenly burst into greasy flames and within seconds, the fire had devoured Aornos.
Farideh spared the slightest, most secretive glance at Lorcan as he pulled himself to his feet and snatched up his sword, before turning her rod toward the remaining devil. But she wasn’t needed.
Nemea collapsed across the broken cobbles with a noisy clatter and Havilar’s glaive planted in her ribs. She groaned once and burst into flames as Aornos before her had done.
Havilar wrenched her glaive free and planted it in the scorched and ruined cobbles.
“Devilslayer,” she said with relish. She looked over at Brin, who still held his bloodied sword in a shaking hand. “Are you going to be sick again?”
“No,” Brin said, looking gray. To his credit, he kept his dinner down. Havilar patted his back.
The square was quiet-alarmingly so after the clamor of the devils and the clash of weapons. There was only the soft patter of the drizzling rain, which served to mute things further and wash away the smells of blood and brimstone. If anyone had heard them, they’d stayed well away. Lorcan crept up beside her.
“What in the Hells were those?” Farideh demanded.
“Erinyes,” Lorcan said, his voice taut and clipped. “The archduchess’s enforcers.”
“Are there more?”
“Not now. They were only supposed to take me.” He shifted. “There will be more if we wait much longer.”
“We need to get out of the street.” She started to walk, but the light, tentative touch of Lorcan’s hand stopped her.
“You could have let her kill me,” he pointed out.
“I could have.”
He waited, agitated, as if he expected her to say more. “You’re not terribly skilled at being a cold-blooded killer, are you? First you can’t blow my head off, then you can’t even let someone else’s sword take me.”
“You’re right,” Farideh said. “We need to get out of the street.”
There had been a building between the square and the temple, not yet demolished and partly swallowed by the last creeping edge of a lava flow that had obliterated the nearby street. Silent as a winter night, and empty. Brin and Havilar followed her as she strode briskly toward it.
There was a gust of flapping wings, and Lorcan landed in front of her. “Why did you stop her?”
“Stop it,” she said.
“Afraid your ‘sword’ would be ruined?” he said.
Farideh paused and looked him in the eye. “I’m not like you.” She pressed past him and farther up the street. The amulet would still hold for a good part of an hour; let him rage at her all he liked.
But she heard nothing but footsteps as she reached the broken building.
They climbed over the vein of rock and in through a window. The stairs had long since rotted or burned away. Lorcan flew to the upper story and disappeared, while the other three helped one another climb the crumbling stones of the walls. The floor above was mostly intact, although it, like the whole building, leaned.