Gifting Fire by Alina Boyden (read my book .TXT) 📕

down it in my wet clothes until my legs were dangling off the side. I grabbed a decorative row of lotus blossoms with my fingers, swung my body back once and then forward hard, and let go, tumbling to the hard marble floor and landing flat on my back with a thud that knocked the wind out of me.

A figure loomed out of the shadows, and I raised my hands to defend myself, but she took them in hers and jerked me to my feet. Hina.

“You’re crazy,” she hissed.

“The ropes?” I gasped, fighting to catch my breath.

“We were only able to make one,” she replied, gesturing to her celas, who were busy lowering it over the side of the balcony, tying it off on one of the columns.

“And the guards?”

“They ran off to deal with the attack,” she replied, “but I would bet anything that Asma will be returning with them as soon as she figures out what is going on.”

“We have to do something to stop them getting in,” I muttered, but I wasn’t sure what, not until I saw the lead boat rushing toward us, and I spotted all the swivel guns mounted along its railings. They were light. They could be hauled up easily. One of them might be enough to hold off a group of guards. It was worth a try anyway.

I rushed to the railing just as the boat reached the rope. One man was already taking hold of it, but I called down, “Tie a cannon to it first!”

“What?” Sanghar shouted back, horrified at the prospect of our taking a cannon and leaving his men in the boat, but there was no time to argue. One or two men with a toradar weren’t going to stop thirty guardsmen, but a swivel gun loaded with grapeshot might.

“Just do it!” I hissed.

That got through to him. He tied off a cannon whose match cord was still burning merrily above the touchhole, and Hina and I hauled it up as fast as we could. It wasn’t much heavier than Lakshmi, so it didn’t take much time, but all the while the shouting was growing louder. And then the men in the guard tower to our left spotted us, and they fired their toradars, the long-barreled guns belching flame and white smoke.

Chips flew off the sandstone columns. Something nearly hit my face. I pulled the makeshift rope of silk dupattas through my hands as fast as I could, driven by a blind panic. There was nothing I could do to take cover, not until I had the cannon. The men on the tower were reloading, and behind me a cela shouted, “Hina, they’re coming!”

The cannon crested the railing and I rushed to untie it, my shaking, stiff fingers fighting with the knot for what seemed an eternity. Once it was free I gathered it up in my arms, told Hina, “Get the men up!” and ran into my bedchamber.

I heard the jingle of the guards’ armor, the pounding of their feet on the polished marble floors. They were right on top of us. I needed to find something to stabilize the cannon, but what?

My eyes landed on my bedpost and I slammed the spike at the base of the swivel mount right into the top of it, digging it in deep, fighting to make sure that it wouldn’t come loose, or it would be more danger to me than to my enemies.

“You’ve crossed us for the last time, you little slut!” Asma herself screeched as she rounded the corner and entered my bedchamber’s doorway, more than a dozen guards packed closely behind her. She froze, her eyes going wide as she took in the muzzle of the swivel gun aimed at her, the red glow of the match cord hovering over the touchhole, my finger on the trigger mechanism, my eye sighting down the barrel.

I grinned at her, savoring this moment, because who knew whether I would survive the night or not? As she reared back in terror, I said, in my most dulcet tones, “Good-bye, mother-in-law.”

CHAPTER 24

I pulled the trigger. The burning match snapped down, burying a red-hot coal in a pile of fine black powder. There was a hiss, a stream of white smoke, and then a boom as loud as Sultana’s thunder. The bedpost cracked from the force of the cannon’s recoil as flames and smoke poured forth from the muzzle, which had been cast from bronze in the form of a fire zahhak’s gaping maw.

A pound of musket balls tore through the hallway and everything in it, the lead shot punching through cloth and armor, flesh and bone, and carrying straight through into the marble wall beyond, gouging out thirty or forty holes, each one dripping with blood and gore.

I had never seen anything like the carnage the cannon had left in its wake. Nothing in that hallway could have possibly survived the wall of death that had been spewed out of the mouth of the bronze zahhak. Asma was barely recognizable as a person, the musket balls having torn the clothing from her body, and the flesh from her bones, sawing her completely in half and obliterating her hateful face. And each and every guard lay still, drenched in blood, their corpses covered with makeshift shrouds of shredded steel.

“Move!” Hina roared, shunting me aside from the rear of the gun. She was carrying a steel mug in her hand, and I didn’t know what it was, not until she grabbed the D-shaped handle at the breech of the cannon and jerked free a matching mug, this one empty and smoldering. She tossed the used-up breechblock aside and slammed in the fresh one, twisting it so that it locked into place. She pulled back the lock, poured loose powder into the touchhole, and then pointed the muzzle at the hallway just as another troop of Mahisagari guardsmen came rushing into