The Claim

1-23-2015, end of Chapter 5

To quell it, he answered the easier question. “Your man Taho,” he said. “He killed her father.”

“Shame you didn’t just ask for him,” said the Tungsten Kid. “I might have thrown him in. Not sure he’s worth the food he eats, to be honest; he can’t fight much, and he wouldn’t know eld Art from a painting of his own asshole. I think I might enjoy seeing him killed by a little girl.” His face grew mournful. “Oh, Sepherene, we were nearly there. I don’t plan on ever seeing you where you’re about to go; but if I do meet you in the west, some years from now, I hope I hear that you’ve repented of letting women make you lie for them.”

The Tungsten Kid sang tem. The tent went wild with light; and, from within the light, a jet of fire reached out to cover Esker.

He had never been attacked with tem out on the high ice; the Salve Rooks used the light rune to distract and misdirect, but there were not many sorcerers among them with enough juice to blind. He felt faintly cheated that it affected him. But it did not much matter; he did not need to see. As soon as he felt the gentle warmth of his shirt falling to flinders against his skin, he took two swift steps forward to the Tungsten Kid, wrenched the staff out of his hands, and swept it up like a sword in a two-handed arc.

The Kid went down, but the light remained. Esker swung the staff down like a mallet where he thought the Kid’s head was, but he did not connect.

He felt the touch of the runic simples: fire, cold, lightning, force. The guards in red and black must have stepped in. They would cotton onto the problem soon, and then knives or guns would come out, and it would be over. He darted in the general direction of the door and smashed into a body, which toppled at the impact. Then he was out in the mid-morning light, which looked like deep dusk to his exhausted eyes, and the bullets began flying. He heard a voice roar “Kill that runner!” but his luck, it seemed, held; the gang was not as big as it seemed, spread out over the dirt park as it was, and there were lots of ways to run.

He took the chase to the same street where Mayet and her traveling companions had run out the night before—forcing himself to go slow, make sure the Kid’s gang didn’t lose him and give up on the chase. That had its risks, of course, and risk took its due; he felt a lance of fire hit his right side, staggered and fell, but he made the fall into a roll and pushed his body back up into the run before it knew to scream. When the pain hit, it hit into a stride whose rhythm had already been restored, and he could move through it.

He was approaching the claim-edge. He caught the gleam of rifles from the higher windows, a few doors down; he saw the shadows of figures with staves in the alleyways. Something sailed through the air above him, to land behind him, and he heard the air expand with a fwump and felt the heat of a furnace—no runic fire, this, his skin knew—rising behind him like a snake. He used the distraction of the flame to dodge inside what had been a restaurant of some kind, a small bare storefront and then a gnarl of machines, some evidently ovens or cabinets, some more obscure. He turned, verified that he was not pursued, and watched the proceedings through the window.

What he did not see for himself, his mind filled in. When Inber’s fire blocked the road behind, the Epseris brothers and Ozier were to have emerged ahead. They were outnumbered between two and three to one, Esker guessed, and the Tungsten Kid’s gang would surely not hesitate to attempt a punch-through—knowing, as they must, that the roadblock was a set-up; knowing, as they must, that some secret knife was about to fall from some sleeve into some waiting hand. The gang had run the numbers no slower than Esker, and bullets and simples poured forth. Teos Epseris had ush for that, though he could not hold it for long; but bolstering it was a Rook runeslinger skulking in the dusty hole just to his side, whose gaping shelves named it a library of some kind. The second note of ush must surely be lost in the cacophony, Esker surmised—though, then, his soldier’s ears could hear it, and who was to say there were not soldiers among the Tungsten kid’s gang?

Now came the reports of rifles from above, where Teos’ role became clear: He was not there to defend himself and his brothers against the attacks of the Tungsten Kid’s gang, he was a second roadblock, pinching the gang in for easier shooting. A runeslinger’s head burst into mist before Esker’s eyes; a rifleman seemed to leap from the street, glowing from within, his limbs twisting in wrong directions with bone-grinding noises. A new note of ush came from the gang, then two; Esker began to hear the spang of bullets leaping from up-directed shields. No more Tungsten men fell. “Lift us, Teos!” he heard Epaphos cry, and he saw tongues of fire and lightning join the bullets in raining on the Tungsten gang’s shields; but the two ush ’slingers were strong, or well-coordinated, or whatever it was that made an ush rune fail to give, and all the Tungsten men stood. Esker could not feel the fire begin to die behind them, but he could see their eyes cast back and knew the roadblock could not last long.

In the moment, he must certainly have picked Ruth’s voice out of the roar of chaos, but in his memory, later, it would hang in perfect isolation, like a single raindrop suspended on a spider’s web.

“We’re done here,” she called, just barely audible even to his soldier’s ears. “Finish the killers and get out.”

Three shots barked out from above. One spanged from a shield of force, but not over the Tungsten gang—rather, behind the claim-edge, behind the ush shield maintained by Teos and the Rook. One was followed by a roar of pain. One made a spock in flesh, and that was all. Two men howled in deep ragged voices, and there was a great soft heavy noise like the dropping of a mattress.

The Tungsten gang’s eyes swung forward, and a hail of lead and a hungry cloud of fire and frost boiled toward Ozier and the Epseris. The gang charged forward as one, no longer harried by fire from above, and disappeared from Esker’s view.

The silence in the street was unreal. He made himself leave hiding, made himself walk out into it and look. The battle had been taken elsewhere; he could see the flashes, hear the screams and impacts, from a nearby street. He looked at the bodies of Tungsten men, each deformed in unsound ways that tortured the eye; and at the body of Sethos Epseris. He lay face down, the crown of his head facing Esker, showing him the wound. He knew he should follow Ozier and the living Epseris, bring reinforcements from the rear, but he examined Sethos instead. The bullet had entered the crown of his head from directly above; it had exited the base of his skull. Esker could see it buried in the ground right near the body. The shot had come from above.

The flashes and noise had dissipated. Esker looked over toward where they had come from, calculating, estimating. He swallowed what felt like a mouse. Then he turned his back on the red-red-yellow-achrom line, the border of two territories of his existence, and walked deeper into the claim.