Too long living in a barracks does things to you.
The paryl was ready. Teia was ready. Through the velvet pistol bag at Halfcock’s right hip, her paryl revealed the exact forward tilt of its grip. A scabbarded short sword was on his left hip.
She’d have to be quick.
Halfcock turned to close and lock the door, key in hand.
Before the door swung shut, she launched herself at the big Blackguard. With fingers of paryl, she enervated both of his knees just before she slammed a shoulder into the small of his back.
She drove his face and body into the door, her hands snatching at the pistol and the short sword.
Her timing was flawless.
Halfcock slammed through the door, smacking his face against the rough wood and careening to the ground inside.
His falling made the pistol bag and the scabbard both pull hard in her grasp, but Teia held on to both of them. She flicked them out behind her into the street. No time to examine the workings or check the load of an unfamiliar pistol, and her shoulder and face were throbbing from where she’d hit the big man. What was he, made of solid rock?
She kept her feet, though, which kept her clear of him. That and disarming him made it a victory, despite the fact that the collision had stunned her, too.
Halfcock’s reflexes were better than she’d hoped, though. A lesser man would have been immobilized. Instead, he tried to launch himself up to his feet a moment before Teia could get a paryl grip on his spine.
His legs below the knee didn’t obey him, and he fell again, farther into his house.
She flicked a kick at his neck.
It caught him mostly across his jaw instead. He rolled with the blow, his legs jamming against the doorframe, and the motion broke the paryl crystals paralyzing his knees.
Teia hesitated. On the long list of things she didn’t want right now, getting stuck in an enclosed space with a bigger and stronger fighter was pretty high up. But she couldn’t get the angle to get at his spine from here.
The advantages of being inside the little house—where they wouldn’t be heard or interrupted—were only advantages if he was paralyzed. Her invisibility was far less helpful in a tight space, where she could be trapped.
But she had to attack or he’d escape and regroup.
She dodged in, kicking, just as he rolled head over heels farther into the house. She was aiming to stab the point of her boot into his kidney, but only half caught him.
He rolled, and rolled again—holy hells, he was fast!
In an instant, he was up on his feet, guarding his pained kidney, gasping, grunting.
He looked around, saw nothing. Maybe he didn’t realize she was invisible yet. He circled quickly, hands up in a guard, trying to get a view out the door, where he assumed his attacker was.
The unexpected motions of his guard broke the reaching tendrils of Teia’s solidifying paryl once again.
Chills shot down her back. She was good at fighting now. She was good at using paryl. She was getting good at using invisibility with the master cloak and even maintaining the fragile paryl cloud around it. But doing them all at the same time?
She was like a marksman also skilled at fencing and grappling, to whom someone had just handed two swords, a musket, and a brace of pistols and plopped her ten paces from a charging spearman. She had so many options to take down the threat, she was going to stand there with her hands full, choosing, until she got skewered.
Halfcock leapt, diving, rolling for the door.
She slashed with the knife she didn’t even realize she’d drawn. It caught something as he went past, but he popped to his feet. He swept the door closed with a bang, flipped the bar down across it with one hand, and grabbed a blade mounted above it in quick succession.
With the closing of the door, it was suddenly pitch-black inside the single-room house.
It wasn’t the boon it usually would be. Halfcock was a sub-red. Which meant—
Teia checked her paryl cloud, throwing back up the edges that had dissipated in the violence. She didn’t make a shell anymore. She’d gotten better than that. A shell was easier, but fragile; anything could break it, and when it went, she lost all the paryl inside it too.
With one eye dilated to paryl and one merely to sub-red, she could see Halfcock’s puzzlement. His eyes were dilated to sub-red, but he couldn’t see her.
But Halfcock wasn’t a thinker. He was already moving, circling, back against the wall, only out far enough to give his blade space. He spun his blade in an ascending flower.
Flowers looked impressive, but were terrible moves if you were actually fighting. Terrible, that is, unless you were fighting against someone you couldn’t see and you hoped to hit their body by simply covering as much space as possible with your blade in the least time possible.
Intentional or not, that blurring steel, white in her paryl vision, was also a perfect shield against her paryl attacks.
She circled opposite him, keeping low and quiet. He was bleeding from her earlier slash, warmth throbbing bright in the sub-red spectrum down his back. It didn’t look like enough to make him faint soon, though.
His jaw was tight. He was pretty sure that she was still in the room with him, but who could hide from sub-red?
Frustrated, he brought down a descending flower. Spinning a blade in a flower put his hands momentarily in predictable places, and Teia was ready. She grabbed hard for the nerves in his wrists.
The blade escaped from his enervated grip, but by terrible luck it flew right at Teia. It was twisting, sideways, impossible to judge exactly—she blocked with her own short blade, intercepting the blade, but the twisting hilt slapped around into her shoulder.
Harmless. Not even a cut. Flat of the blade.
It didn’t hurt her at all—but it destroyed the paryl cloud, and cost her a full precious second—and her paryl grip on his wrists.
Halfcock lost the blade and as his eyes naturally followed it, he saw heat bloom, the whisper of a figure.
He charged, instantly.
One moment Teia was disengaging from a flying blade, stepping aside, up onto the stuffed feather mattress she’d been avoiding, trying to recover her stance, and the next her entire view was blotted out by a charging warrior three times her size.
Her foot slipped, but she didn’t fall.
Luckier if she had.
She was crushed against the wall.
It drove the wind from her and smacked her neck against a wooden beam in the wall.
They dropped to the bed together. She had only mind to grope for her dagger. But it was gone.
Halfcock had driven his shoulder into her guts, but his face had met the wall with almost as much force.
She looked, hoping to see her dagger sticking out of him somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. She tried to roll free, but his hip was on top of her shin, trapping her.
Levering her other foot against him, and arching her back to press against the wall, she tried to push his weight off her leg.
He rolled with it suddenly, surprising her and snatching her leg with a hand. It sent her flipping over him. She was obviously lighter than he’d expected.
He threw a punch at her leg, but missed. Catching a glimpse of his face, she saw the collision with the wall had made him tighten his eyes from sub-red back to the visible spectra. In the dark, he was momentarily blind.
But vision wasn’t nearly as important when grappling.
She threw a knee into his face, and teeth and blood exploded everywhere.