Page 79 of The Book That Held Her Heart

With a hundred yards to go, the man discarded both handguns and pulled two more from his harness. With fifty yards to go, he began to fire again, aiming for the skeer’s head. It seemed clear to Arpix that whilst some of the bullets were turned by the thick chitin armour, many were not, and white ichor leaked from the holes they made, blackish-grey where a shot found an eye.

“Lie down!” a man shouted behind Arpix.

“Why won’t it die?” A child’s voice.

Scattered shouts of outrage mixed with fear went up along the bleachers. And still the maimed skeer staggered towards its small tormentor.

With ten yards between them the gunman exhausted his ammunition and reached for what might be his final weapon. The skeer dwarfed him, drawing back the arm with the lance-like end to it.

BOOM. The long gun spoke again, and this time the pieces flew from the back of the skeer’s head. With a shudder it slumped to ruin, its arm reaching for the man before it, and dropping to within a yard of his boot toes.

A shocked silence held long enough for the echo of the final gun to die away, only to be broken by the erupting cheers of the crowd. The people around Arpix surged to their feet and he stood too.

The man with the handguns turned and began to walk away, pausing to pick up discarded weapons. Arpix didn’t fully trust the skeer not to launch itself after him in a broken scramble. But the insectoids were just very hard to kill, not supernatural, and it lay where it had fallen, still twitching.

A new hush spread as the one Arpix had mentally dubbed “the pirate” stepped forward with an appropriate degree of swagger. People began returning their backsides to the benches.

“This’ll be good,” the old woman to Arpix’s left confided to a similarly antique friend.

The day dimmed slightly. High cloud in front of the sun, most likely.

At the far end, another black cloth whipped away from another cage.

The bars lifted and a second hobbled skeer skittered out, losing its footing on the flagstones. The mutilation of its “feet” was the only obvious measure taken with this one.

The pirate strode out to meet his opponent, heavy guns in hand. Something swift and glittering flicked by, momentarily eclipsing the pirate’s flamboyance. In the wake of this interruption the canith stumbled, fell to his knees firing both guns at the ground, and toppled forward.

“Where’s his head?” the old woman’s friend asked.

Blood sheeted in front of the fallen pirate, and Arpix found the same question on his own lips. Wherewashis head?

More guns boomed. People started to scream. And the missing head bounced on the flagstones. Arpix saw the flier then. Lighter than the skeer soldier, or even the long-legged runners, the flier was all limbs and sharp edges, white and hard to see against the sky save for the iridescent shimmer of its wings. More swooped in, a dozen perhaps. Plumes of smoke rose in front of the privileged seating as a score of the potentate’s troopers opened up, loosing bullets skywards.

The fliers dived in, spiralling as they came, hitting from multiple angles. One ploughed a furrow along the full length of the soldiers’ rank, razored limbs shearing through flesh, leaving a wash of crimson ruin in its path as it took to the heights again.

The mercenaries—or whatever they were—in front of Clovis threw a thunderous barrage into the air and several fliers came tumbling down with shredded wings or shattered limbs. Moments later, the glittering cloud descended. More shots rattled out. Arpix saw a young woman in the stands lose half the back of her head as a stray bullet emerged from her long hair.

Screams and yells from the mercenaries were lost in the general uproar of the crowd. Something about the situation, the fact that it was still an arena, and they were still an audience, had kept the great majority of people where they were. Some sensible few were escaping from the rear of the stands, dropping down and making a run for the edges of the square. But most either sat or stood where they were, shouting their anger, or screaming it behind the shake of a fist, as if some invisible barrier protected them from the skeer’s invasion.

The lone skeer soldier turned in place as if seeking some foe worthy of it.

As one the fliers lifted. A handful remained broken and twitching amongst the broken and twitching bodies of the humans and canith that had been chosen to show their superiority. An almost silence reignedbeneath the fluttering buzz of skeer wings as the five remaining fliers gained height in a knot, each weaving around the others. Arpix had seen skeer intelligence at work before. They had brought cratalacs to defeat the forbidding that protected the Arthran Plateau. They had dropped rocks to pierce the barrier that held them at bay. But this, this was a different order. This was warfare of the mind. The people of New Kraff craned their necks and watched the blood drip like rain. In moments the skeer would break formation andeveryonewould run. Arpix imagined that more would die beneath the feet of their fellow citizens than to the skeer’s predations. But either way, it would be slaughter.

Clovis’s emergence onto the square went almost unnoticed. It wasn’t until she was well clear and raised her white sword, with the transfixed head of a skeer flier impaled upon it, that the eyes of the crowd found her. The skeer soldier saw her too and started its hobbled advance.

Clovis had scooped up one of the fallen pirate’s short guns, and demonstrated that he hadn’t fully shot his load by firing it at the aerial display above her. The weapon’s boom, and the peppering of small projectiles, focused all insectoid attention on her, along with that of the crowd. The challenge had to be met, and as if animated by a single mind, all five fliers ceased the vibration of their wings, falling towards Clovis in a tumbling confusion.

Arpix had seen this before, when Clovis had arrived at the plateau with Evar and Kerrol. Even so, both his heart and his breath seemed to stop. When she had danced amid the thrusting cloud of needled limbs that first time, Arpix hadn’t even known her name. He had stood, amazed at her skill, but hadn’t properly valued what could so easily be lost at the slightest misstep.

The fliers reached her before the soldier did. Clovis moved with the blinding speed of her kind, scything the white sword through limbs that would have entangled any lesser blade. She let her foes crowd each other, and used their flight against them, carving ruinous wounds every time an opening presented itself. Two of the skeer hit the ground as if they’d made no attempt to check their speed at the last moment. Another lost two legs, then two more. A fourth fell into unequal halves. And as the fifth flierlunged for the skies, Clovis acknowledged the soldier’s arrival by climbing the thing.

She bounced from one leg to another and onto its back. Before the soldier could twist to lunge at her, Clovis had executed a huge leap, her lead foot powering off the soldier’s shoulder. Against all possibility, she caught one of the escaping flier’s trailing limbs, clamped a hand around the end of the leg, and forced the skeer to drag her into the sky with it.

She stabbed up into its thorax then dropped. Arpix’s gasp became one with the thousands watching. Clovis had released her grip too high: the fall yawning beneath her was more than from the roof of a three-storey building, onto hard stone.

Clovis slammed into the ground, landing on her feet, then hands, then knees. Her side hit the slabs next as she rolled to absorb the impact. She lay motionless for a beat. Two beats. The crowd held its tongue. Already the soldier had turned to face her. Now it started to close the five yards between them.

As one, the whole audience flinched when the forgotten flier hammered down in an ungainly tangle of limbs, almost hitting Clovis. The impact cracked the skeer or the paving slabs, or both.

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