Chapter 36

Tavi slid down the slender single strand of the snapped braid of rope and wondered briefly if he'd gone mad.

He'd been fortunate, in that the rope had broken fairly near to its end, and he was able to slide down it until his feet were no more than ten or twelve feet off the ground. He slid on off the end into a fall and tried to absorb the shock of his fall with his legs, letting his body fall backward, arms spread to slap the ground.

It worked better when one wasn't wearing all the armor, Tavi thought, but at least the turf of the lawn was soft enough to absorb some of the impact. It knocked some of the wind from him, but he forced himself to his feet, drew his sword, and rushed to Varg's side, just as the gargoyles regained their feet.

He never hesitated or slowed his steps, but once more reached into the steel of his blade, aligning its substance with his will. He let out a howl as he closed on the nearer of the two gargoyles from its flank, and swung his blade low. A shower of scarlet-and-azure sparks flared where the blade contacted the stone surface of the gargoyle, and the steel of the gladius sliced through the granite as if it had been moldy cheese. The blow carried so much force as it passed through the gargoyle's leg that it spun Tavi completely around from one step to the next- in time for him to repeat the same movement, upon the second leg, to another shower of angry light and a scream of tortured stone.

The gargoyle toppled onto its side, arms thrashing-but Tavi had severed its original contact with the earth completely, and the gargoyle began to crumble, beginning at the stumps of its severed thighs, as if bleeding gravel.

The gargoyle's companion evidently recognized the danger Tavi represented and switched its attention from Varg to the young man. Before Tavi had recovered from his assault, the second gargoyle bellowed, a sound like a small earthquake, dropped to all fours, and charged.

Tavi knew that if he waited for the fury to charge, it would crush him to pulp through sheer momentum, and in desperation he reached out for his wind-crafting, and the world around him slowed to crystalline clarity, his own movements becoming dreamy and dancelike. Off-balance as he was, he saw that he had no chance of avoiding the gargoyle's rush completely, so instead he simply focused on minimizing the impact. He leapt to one side, body stretching out, arms ahead of him as he spun in midair.

The gargoyle struck him across both calves while his body was parallel to the earth. The force of the collision flung Tavi's legs forward and sent him into a spin. The impact hurt tremendously, and the slowed perceptions of his wind-crafting gave him plenty of subjective time in which to experience it, fracturing his concentration. The world rushed back into its normal pace, and he hit the ground hard, landing on his belly. His left ankle burned viciously, and he was certain that he'd just sprained it at the very least. He drew on the steel of his blade, and the pain receded from his perceptions-not so much vanishing as becoming irrelevant, its significance forgotten.

The gargoyle turned in a broad arch, its furiously laboring limbs churning up a swath of the lawn, and attacked again. Tavi was on his feet by the time the gargoyle reached him, and, at the last second, he danced a step to one side, his sword striking cleanly through a section of the gargoyle's misshapen shoulder. Once he'd found the opening, he pressed his advantage, and while the gargoyle tried to turn on him again, Tavi pursued it, staying in close to its flank, so that it could never quite reach him.

The only drawback to the tactic was that he had to keep moving, and he never got the chance to plant his feet and deliver the kind of solidly grounded blow he would need to finish the stone fury, but he hacked it about the head and shoulders again and again with his short blade, carving wedge-shaped chunks from the gargoyle's body. Then his injured foot wobbled very oddly and refused to support him. He fell to one knee, and the gargoyle turned on him.

Without room to build up momentum, the gargoyle's pure mass was less of a threat as it slammed into him, but its strength was prodigious. Tavi stepped under a swiping limb and threw his armored shoulder into the gargoyle's chest, screaming, instinctively drawing up power from the ground beneath his legs. The earthcrafted strength surged through him-

– and stopped the gargoyle in its tracks.

Tavi let out a roar of excitement and drove forward against the earth fury, shoving with every ounce of strength he could muster. He drove it back an inch, and then six, and then suddenly the earth fury was reeling back, overborne, to fall upon its back.

Tavi's sword swept up, and he brought it down in a heavy stroke aimed for an indentation in the gargoyle's chest, a point which he somehow knew would be vulnerable.

The sword struck in another shower of sparks, and the gargoyle's torso cracked and split, then shattered into a dozen pieces with a sound like a thunderclap. The sheer force of it threw the pieces apart from one another, where they began to crumble away, some of them still twitching with the fury's presence.

"Varg!" Tavi shouted. "Get up!" His knowledge of the Cane's tongue was hardly exhaustive, but he could say that much in it. "Varg! Narsh raulg, crows take you!"

He went to the Cane's side, jealous of every second, and looked at the Cane. Varg's leg was bleeding most, where he'd taken that spear, but it didn't look like it had struck an artery. There was dust from the shattered stone covering his black fur, and there was a small army of gashes and incidental cuts on every part of his body Tavi could see. He didn't know Canim physiology well enough to tell for sure, but Varg's rib cage looked misshapen, and one of his arms was certainly broken.

Tavi ground his teeth and realized that the only reason he could see well enough to take stock of Varg's injuries was that the firehounds had come closer.

There were a dozen of them. Tavi had read the reports of the crafters who had prepared them, and he knew something about them. They had been created to behave according to instincts similar to those of wolves in the wild-to pursue those who ran, on the theory that they would be used to surround anyone attempting to leave the building in a wall of searing heat.

Just as they were doing to Tavi and Varg now.

They couldn't run. If they did, the firehounds would pursue them, growing more agitated and burning hotter. They couldn't stay, either. It would not take long for the Grey Guard to arrive, call the Tower's furies to heel, and clap them all in irons. Tavi looked up at the aqueduct overhead. He could escape that way, if it came to that, but with the heavy rope broken, they had nothing that could haul Varg up and out of reach of the firehounds. Besides, his injuries seemed to be too severe to risk anything so strenuous as tying a rope around him and swinging him through the air.

He had to find another way out. How?

The firehounds trotted in a circle around them, only twenty or thirty feet away, and the grass beneath their feet blackened to ash as they passed over it. The air grew hotter. Tavi raised a hand to shield his face from the heat radiating from the nearest firehound, but it did him little good.

Varg jerked his head once, snapped his jaws, then his bloodred eyes opened. He let out a heavy, rough-sounding snarl, then moved, his body tight with pain, pushing himself to a hunched, labored crouch.

One of the nearest firehounds suddenly rushed in closer, toward Varg, perhaps driven by a predatory instinct to assault the weak and injured first.

Tavi ripped off his soaking-wet cloak and stepped into its way. He swung the cloth at the firehound and it slapped hard against it. A cloud of steam boiled forth from the impact, and the fire fury let out a crackling cry of pain, retreating back to the circling members of the pack. Tavi glanced at his cloak and grimaced. Even the brief touch against the fire fury's surface had burned and charred the cloak, despite the water it had absorbed.