Asunder: A Gathering of Chaos by Cameron Hopkin (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

girl was unlikely to be quite as apt. The village girl was hunkered in the corner where she’d been sitting, and two attackers jostled each other as they closed in. They had ignored him completely. It was trivially easy to come up behind and flick his foot out at the one nearest him. His balance and aim held true, and the man screamed in pain as his left knee folded sideways. He crumpled like a rag doll. The man would never walk again. Under calmer circumstances, Gamarron would have felt bad about that, but instead he focused on other one. The attacker whipped around to face him, needle-sharp stabbing claws extending from between his knuckles.

Gamarron fell into the rhigot pose of the koda, hands held high and open to each side of the face, knees and hips loose in a light crouch. The masked man waded into the fray, weapons flickering in lightning jabs at his midsection. Gamarron batted one fist aside with a downswept forearm and spun sideways into the man, letting the other set of ten-centimeter punching claws cut into his robe without grazing his skin. Demonsilk was perfect for this sort of thing: its loosely-woven fibers slid aside when penetrated by a sharp object but did not give or break under lateral pressure. Gamarron’s spin tangled the weapon and pulled it out of the assassin’s grasp. There was an audible snap as the man’s forefinger caught in the handle of the weapon and snapped. Gamarron used the momentum of his movement to push his opponent into the center of the room. The punching sticks fell from his clothing and clattered to the floor, dislodged by their own weight.

Strangely, the man disengaged, turning back around to face Nira. He was fumbling at a pocket with his good hand. Why is he so focused on her? What is this about? Gamarron didn’t waste the opportunity – he stiffened the flesh around his hand bones even further and aligned his fist perfectly with his forearm. He covered the distance separating them in one running step and drove his hand like a battering ram into the curve of the man’s spine two handspans above the hips. The attacker gave a piteous wail and collapsed like a puppet with cut strings. He gasped and writhed on the floor, grabbing at his back, but his legs were still. Bending over him, Gamarron straightened his hands into blades and gave a precise chop to both sides of the fellow’s neck just where the blood flowed into the head. He went limp, immediately unconscious.

He turned to the others only to find the job already done. Renna bore a gash on her cheek, and the shoulder of her leaf tunic was torn, but she held her assailant on his knees with his mask off, his movements jerky and uncoordinated. Poisoned, no doubt. She had him by the hair with his head back so his face looked to the ceiling, Gamarron’s half-drunk cup in her other hand. From the gurgling sounds the man made, he was currently drowning in that little bit of water. Renna watched coolly until the wet choking stopped, then let the body fall to the floor. She dropped the cup on the dead man’s face.

The last assassin was sobbing on the floor, curled up as if he was being beaten, his hands covering his eyes. Nira stood over him. Tear tracks stained her cheeks, but her eyes were clear. She looked triumphant. Powerful. What did she do? “I think this one might like to tell us what he knows,” she said with a smile.

Renna snatched up a fallen punching knife, wrapped her fingers around it, and crossed the room in three steps. “Renna, stop!” Nira exclaimed, holding out her hand. Without slowing, the rangy woman bent down and buried the weapon in the crying man’s throat as the girl leapt away, screaming.

Gamarron caught Renna by the waist and pulled her away, shocked by the woman’s brutality. “Why did you do that?” he cried. “He might have told us who sent him, what this is all about!”

The Weaver woman shook him off with a warning glance. “We don’t need him to tell us,” she snapped. “Look at the colors – brown and yellow. That’s the personal guard of the Governor of Far East, and he didn’t mind who knew it.” Looking about, Gamarron could see that the men had yellow piping about the shoulders and down the sides of the trousers that matched their sashes. “He’s angry that we escaped. He knows what Nira can do, and he fears her power.”

Remembering something, Gamarron crossed to the man whose back he had broken and fished carefully in his pockets. He found a flat, oval pod of wax not too dissimilar from what Renna had used on him. “The Governor isn’t the only one, apparently.”

The lanky woman snatched the thing from his fingers, examining it. “Sleeper seed? No, a choke pod, maybe. Clumsy design. They probably wanted to knock her out and take her back after they’d killed me. My dear old Mother Superior Megda never liked me, for some reason. They didn’t expect you, though.” She smiled jauntily. “It’s a good thing you stuck around.”

He breathed his anger out through his nose. “This is your fault. I ruined these men’s lives. I should have let them have you.”

“My last dying act would have been to crush my little bloodthorn seed,” she said sweetly, “so be glad you didn’t.” She straightened her clothing and looked him in the eye. “You are gathering power, Lord Gamarron. Me, her, the boy, and soon this chaos wielder. There will be others that challenge us, and you will ruin them too. You’ll have to; you’ll be right to. Otherwise, your demon lord will rage across the whole world. You don’t have to like it – it’s probably best you don’t. But don’t lie to yourself about it.”

There was a shuffle of feet in the doorway, and the well-dressed proprietor of