She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky

She Who Waits by Daniel Polansky

I huffed breath till my head was the size of a watermelon, then went to kill a man. A lot of men, most likely.

The address Guiscard had given me was in the far east corner of Offbend, a half hour’s walk through some of the city’s less savory boroughs. I had daggers in my belt and my boot, and my trench blade swinging at my side. The crossbow hung on my back, more bolts than I’d need in my pouch. I moved at a rapid clip, steel rattling with every step. The carnivores looked away as I passed, made sure to give me a wide berth.

One-forty-three Stamford Avenue was a detached two-story wooden house at the end of a street of slum tenements. It was bigger than I had anticipated, which was worrisome. Crowley had brought six men when he’d come looking for me last time, minus the two Adolphus had taken care of meant four that I knew about for certain. It was best to assume there were more, that he’d re-upped after the fiasco at the Earl, that he knew I was coming for him and was well prepared.

It didn’t matter. Crowley could have had a dozen men in there, two dozen, a hundred. The end was imminent, and I was bringing it to them.

I needed to get the attention of the men on the inside, focus them in my direction. A warning maybe, except that I didn’t want any of them taking heed of it and making a break. I settled for a statement of fact, though if you didn’t know better you might have mistook it for a threat. ‘Every man here is a corpse!’ I screamed. No one said anything, but from inside I could hear the bustle of movement.

I never had much use for crossbows. They break easy and they’re slow to reload, and they’re inaccurate as hell, or at least I am with them. But they’re powerful – a bolt will go through an oak door like it was paper, and come out the other end bloody. It was a good opening, which was why I’d taken it out from my stash.

I’d taken something else out as well, a cloudy jewel in a silver setting. Crispin’s Eye, the same one I took from his body after I’d gotten him killed six years earlier.

But first things come first. I nocked a quarrel to the crossbow and settled along the sights. This was one of the newer versions, a simple trigger as the firing mechanism. I hadn’t used one since the war, was unprepared for the kick against my shoulder that would swell into a bruise if I survived the next few minutes. The bolt spiraled towards the door, and I quickly forgot about it.

The Eye was warm in my off hand, warmer than a normal stone would be, and I concentrated on that warmth, let it roll through my palm and down my arm. Let it go deeper, coasting with my blood as it pumped into my body, down into my chest and somewhere deeper still. Swam in it, let it overtake me, breathed it down in place of air. It felt like I was under forever, though I knew from previous experience that it had lasted only a fraction of a second.

When I opened my eyes it was on a new world. A horsefly fastened around the discharge of a nearby outhouse, and I could count the beat of its tiny wings. The bolt I’d just fired spun lazily through the ether, and if I wanted I could have numbered each bristle of its feathers. I could have reached out and grabbed it in flight, sprinted ahead and beat it to the target.

Instead I dropped the crossbow, its descent slow as a feather’s, then sprinted around the back. By the time the bolt reached its destination I had reached mine, though I heard its effects with uncanny clarity – heard it puncture wood and rupture flesh, heard the sharp intake of breath and the scream that followed.

I made the second-floor terrace in a single leap, grabbing the balcony with an outstretched hand and swinging myself up after – an impossible feat, but then I wasn’t human any longer. The back door was locked and barred. I touched it with the palm of my hand and it burst like a ripe blister, splintering wood through the interior.

Inside were two men, very much not expecting to die. Their heads were turning towards me, swiveling in surprise or terror, it was never quite clear, because before sentiment could manifest on their faces I did for both of them, two strikes with my trench blade, the hardened steel cutting through flesh as easily as air.

I was into the next room before their bodies bounced off the ground. An injured man lay groaning on a bed in the corner. His face was wrapped tight with cloth, Adolphus’s handiwork presumably, and I took a thin sort of pride in thinking of my old friend’s strength. I finished what he had started, one quick severing stroke doing for the man’s body and the bunk he lay on top of.

Three down in less time than it took to finish a sentence, four if you counted the one downstairs, screaming his short way to death. I was burning through my future quickly now, sunny afternoons in the shade and cool autumn evenings, but I didn’t expect I’d ever see them so there wasn’t any point in being miserly. There were more men than I’d thought there would be, I could hear them shuffling below but what did numbers matter? Stack the deck all you want, I had the high card stuffed into my cuff.

Down the steps and there was one in front of me, and then there were just parts of him – a hand clutching a sword in the corner, a half-shorn head in the other, lips still quivering. The next one was faster, or maybe the buff was starting to wear off, whatever it was he got his sword up to parry. My movements were too swift for the steel to take it any longer, and my blade shattered, fragments flying off in all directions. I was too quick for this also, ducking beneath the shrapnel, but my opponent was just a man, and he screamed as the cloud of metal entered his face and his neck, leaving him blind and disfigured and well on the way to death.

I thought about grabbing a weapon off a corpse, but decided there wasn’t any point. My hands were a personal introduction to She Who Waits Behind All Things. In the front room a man rolled on the ground with my bolt stuck in his chest, two others standing over top of him. The first had his back turned and I could hear his spine shatter as I set my foot against it, internal organs rupturing into pulp. The second had his sword out, a long saber that he tried to keep between us, an admirable if useless tactic. I slipped past his guard like he was a stone statue, brought my fist up to his cheek, watched his head rotate halfway around his spine.

There was a noise from behind me and I whirled in time to catch Crowley burst through the door. It took me a second – not really a second, it felt like a second but it wasn’t that, wasn’t a tenth of that – to realize that we were moving at the same speed. It made sense – we’d both gone all in at this point. He started to draw his weapon, the gleaming, beautiful short sword that’s the second most valuable object an agent possesses, and I wound up and kicked him in the crotch hard enough to ensure whatever bastards he had running around wouldn’t walk right for a solid week. A blow like that would have put a normal man out of action, hell, a blow like that would have outright killed most men, but Crowley and I were both well beyond that.

Still, it was enough to stun him for whatever fraction of a moment we were both operating in, and while it lasted I knocked the weapon from his hand. I had a selection of daggers about my person and I was damn sure Crowley had the same, but neither of us went for them. We went for each other, our hate so pure as to allow no intermediary.

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