The Price of Eleven Seconds
Time is an essential aspect of all the Argosi talents. Arta loquit teaches us to recognise the distinctly different meanings between long pauses and short ones in a conversation. An Argosi’s ability to perceive that which is hidden using arta precis depends entirely on how many hours, minutes or fractions of a second you can afford to spend on it. All the dancing ways Durral had taught me in arta eres relied on developing my sense of timing. As for arta forteize, the talent for resilience – for enduring that which others cannot?
Time becomes everything.
By my reckoning, Binta needed an eleven-second head start to run to the barn and untether Quadlopo so the two of them could escape.
Eleven seconds is a long time when you’re holding off death’s embrace. But I swore to myself I’d hold the line, there in that doorway in the hall of that damned village, and walk the Way of Stone until I’d given Binta those eleven seconds.
Lyrida’s left hand reaches out for me. Instead of trying to brush it aside, I bring my left elbow up high and then drive it down into her palm. She might not care about the pain, but striking the nerves numbs her hand and prevents her from getting a grip on me.
That buys me one second. I need ten more.
Two other villagers catch up with Lyrida at the front of the pack. The first throws himself at me, which is lucky because all I have to do now is slip a few inches to my left and he falls off balance, hitting the ground face first. I drive my heel into his skull and hope that somewhere in the next nine seconds I’ll forget the hideous cracking sound his jaw makes as it shatters against the floor.
Nine seconds.
The next one . . . spirits of all things merciful and bad, he’s just a boy, maybe eleven years old. He’s trying to bite at me like a snarling dog. I bring up my knee, grab the back of his head and smash his teeth in, breaking his upper palate. He reels back, which is too bad because two kindly-looking folks with murder in their eyes who look like they might be his parents take his place.
I need eight more seconds.
Earlier than I’d planned, I take a step back, putting me just outside the hall so that the doorway now prevents more than two of them from attacking me at once. Problem is, the next time I give ground it will open up a gap that will let the others rush out to surround me.
The mother comes at me first. I duck down low, dig my shoulder into her belly and then rise up to throw her over my back. I know she’s going to get right back on her feet and come at me from behind, but that’s okay. That’s part of the plan.
Seven seconds. I need just seven more seconds.
The father gets a punch to the throat that turns his endless hissing into gasps. As someone drags him away from the doorway to make room, Lyrida grabs my arm. Her grip is stronger than I’d hoped, but she’s not much bigger than me and my knees are bent, which gives me surer footing. I yank her back as I turn, sending her into the woman who was about to grapple me from behind as predicted. I guess the sudden closeness confuses the two of them, because they wind up in a hideous dance, biting at each other’s necks as their fingernails search for soft flesh to tear.
Five seconds.
The madness infecting this place only seems to get worse. At first they were all after me, but now Lyrida’s ripping the throat out of some woman that might’ve been her best friend for all I know, and the others have so crowded the doorway that it’s become a mass of arms and faces all trying to get to me at once.
Their rage has given me two precious seconds. I spend them taking in a breath and reaching back to uncap the mapmaker’s case. As I draw the sword though, the strongest ones break free of the mass of bodies, and I know now that I can’t hold them back any more.
Three seconds. All Binta needs is three more seconds.
It’s Lyrida that gets to me first, ramming a bigger man aside with a strength that makes me wonder if that brief connection we’d had, the attraction between us, has been translated into a more burning hatred than the petty physics of muscle and bone can contain. I try to stab her with the smallsword, but drawing it was a mistake. I can’t hold the distance needed between us. She gets both her hands on me, one on each side of my face, squeezing so tight I think maybe she’ll crush my skull before her teeth get to my neck. I drop the smallsword and push back at her with everything I have left even as I feel her bearing down on me. Her lips part, and it’s almost as if she wants to kiss me, only the hissing sound from deep inside her chest tells me otherwise. Her mouth gets wider and wider, like she’s going to swallow me whole. I look inside that abyss, and suddenly find myself staring at the iron tip of an arrowhead.
Before I even know what’s happening, I hear the thwhip of a second arrow that takes out the man Lyrida had pushed aside. She’s still trying to bite me, but the strength has gone from her limbs. I pivot my hips and yank her head down to send her to the ground.
Like an idiot, I turn to see who’s firing the arrows into the mob, piling up bodies outside the doorway that become a barrier to the others. My saviour’s face is hidden from me by gauzy beige linen wrapped all around her head, her torso and arms, as if her clothing is all made from a single bolt of fabric held in place by straps of brown leather. She’s wielding a recurve bow about four feet long, not unlike the ones Zhuban warriors use on horseback.
‘I’d get down on the ground if I were you,’ she says to me in a lilting voice. I can’t place the accent, which is almost as unnerving to me as the fact that she sounds as calm as if we were discussing the weather.
‘You haven’t got enough arrows for them all,’ I inform her. To get some distance from the hall I dart between two burly men who look so alike they have to be brothers.
The masked woman sends them to their deaths with a pair of arrows as she walks casually towards me. She drops the bow, grabs me by the back of the hand and pulls me to the ground just as an eruption louder than any thunder deafens me and I feel a burning heat raze across my back as the hall explodes into flames.
‘Stay down,’ she instructs me.
When I look up, I see a few of the villagers running around, blinded by smoke, their blazing clothes turning them into torches that light up the night. There’s another crack, different this time, as the roof of the hall collapses.
Through the gauzy fabric of her linen garb, I make out a quizzical expression on the face of this woman who has just saved my life and consigned all these others to death. ‘I was perhaps too generous in the amount of explosive I used.’
As the hissing of the infected and the crackling of the flames becomes a symphony of chaos all around us, I lie there on the ground, on my belly, staring up at this strange woman who seems to barely notice the destruction she’s caused.
When she looks back at me, it’s like I’m this pitiful, lost waif she’s just found in the forest. ‘Do not worry,’ she says. ‘You are safe now.’
The tremendous relief welling up inside me, and the boundless gratitude I owe her, is stifled somewhat by just how arrogant she sounds.
‘Who are you?’ I ask.
She pulls down the fabric covering the lower half of her face, revealing skin darker than mine. The smoothness of her features suggests she can’t be much older than me.
‘You may call me the Path of Thorns and Roses,’ she tells me. ‘I am an Argosi.’