++The account now returns to that of Vara. Apologies if the alternating perspectives appears a touch dramatic, but given the nature of this information—the unlikelihood it will ever be circulated beyond a tiny minority of people among my order—it struck me as acceptable to add a shade of theatre to the experience.++

  There were four of them, these men, and all of them were big. I didn’t know this at the time, didn’t have chance to work out much of anything in my state of panic, but looking back on things I’d guess they made a career of this sort of work.

  Which was not good for me. Gruin was quick in raising his hammer and readying himself to get stuck in of course, while I followed suit in his pragmatism and backed away to lean against a far wall and start whimpering. The men came on all at once.

  But not as fast as Gruin. Evidently they’d not expected to be on the defending side of a four-on-one, because not one of our assailants reacted in time as the Grynkori came charging across the room on his stubby little legs and swung low. The air filled with a sickening crack, and I saw two knees bend almost fully backwards with that single impact. Their owner fell hard, screaming in a heap.

  The others didn’t shy back as many men would have, though. As Gruin was probably counting on. They closed around him like the jaws of a great beast and swung themselves, clubs and cleavers from three directions at once. The Grynkori twisted aside from one, but into the remaining two. A gash ran along one shoulder where the skin split and a great welt appeared on his back as a bruise’s ancestor was born.

  Gruin roared as pain took him and swung out again, though this time his enemies were ready for the blow and it came more clumsily for his pain and distraction. The target caught iron hammer-head at the base of a wooden club, stumbled back as their weapon almost slipped from clumsy fingers, but found no more of their bones broken.

  The other two struck again.

  I didn’t know much about Grynkori or their limits, save that I had now seen evidence enough to know they were a great deal sturdier than most any human, but even I could see that this fight wasn’t going to end in our favour. Gruin was just too outnumbered, and faced by competent foes.

  When he died, I would die. Then these men would disappear and…what? Face justice?

  I doubted it. In all likelihood whoever was orchestrating this—the place’s owner, or his boss—had plans to dispose of our bodies and keep any inconvenient questions from getting asked. I’d just…

  Disappear.

  It was that thought, more than the dying, that spurred me on.

  There was no hope of me helping Gruin physically, not alone at least. I’d gotten lucky with a few shamblers before—impossibly lucky—but I wasn’t about to push that against men who so clearly knew what they were doing, and my hidden dagger was far from a match for their longer blades anyway.

  Fortunately, I had Thaumaturgy to call on.

  Unfortunately, I was terrible at it.

  My training so far had delved into the very basics, which meant heat and fire. Those were the fundamental energies, the primal, simple things that were most easily displaced by a trained mind’s will. I couldn’t draw heat from another creature’s body, not without permission, and to do so with just my own would be dangerous.

  So I drew it from the air around everyone, instead. Three men and a Grynkori moving around and fighting, great muscular exertions raising their temperatures and flooding that excess out into the air of the room.

  If Morlo were here, he’d have left the whole room frigid in an instant. I couldn’t do that, my powers were puerile enough that I was limited to drawing the heat away from around one or two men at a time, but even that much left power buzzing in my fingers. I let it out in a single burst.

  Fire roared out, the most fundamental expression of any heat-based Thaumaturgy. This was where science met magic, where the sterile facts of the world turned into something mystical and primordial. Fire needed fuel to burn, it couldn’t fly out on its own as mass.

  But that was just what it did at my order, and it kept searing as it flew despite the insistence of natural law.

  My aim was off but my luck wasn’t, the fireball’s target lurched right into its path at the last moment and got a face-ful of flame. Only a faceful, mind, I didn’t have the power Morlo did, couldn’t light up an entire limb let alone a body, but having one’s scalp suddenly jump up several factors in temperature was an evidently unpleasant experience. Instantly the man started screaming and stumbling off.

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  That left Gruin to face two killers alone, and if he’d been struggling before he was more than able now. Skill left him moving with an economy that turned all his explosive strength into a weapon that lurked everywhere the enemy’s aim was settled, and he stopped taking hits.

  In response to this, Gruin’s enemies decided to start taking more hits themselves. Or close to it. His attacks were fast and aimed with all the precision of a barber’s knife, clipping rather than connecting solidly but boasting enough sheer weight and strength that it scarcely made a difference. After one particularly close hit sent a man stumbling, another came down on his foot and shattered the appendage well beyond use. He fell screaming, just as his kneeless friend had, and left the bout a one-on-one.

  Or almost.

  The man I’d burned chose that moment to recover, and unseen by Gruin began closing in on the Grynkori from his flank with a dirty cleaver raised high. I didn’t have time for Thaumaturgy, and had to think fast.

  Well, thinking fast often meant thinking badly and today was no exception to that. I suppose I should be pleased I even remembered I had the fucking knife on me and managed to draw it before my screaming, panicked tackle saw me smashing bodily into the thug.

  If I were Kyvaine, he would have gone flying. He would have gone flying, and I wouldn’t have even thought about it. I’d have just watched that grown man launched on impact with my six-four frame, planted my feet and stood there on my pillar-thick legs thinking; ‘well yes, there we are, just as I expected, another grown man sent flying against me, because that is what grown men do when you tackle them.’

  I was not Kyvaine. I was five-four, not six, and with my recent weight loss and his recent muscle-gain I might well have weighed half what he did.

  That man I ran into probably saw me go flying after I hit him and thought; ‘well yes, there we are, just as I expected, another grown woman sent flying against me, because that is what grown women do when they tackle me.”

  But he wouldn’t have thought it for very long if he did, because a second after I landed he seemed to register that my knife was now jutting out of his gut.

  “...Bitch,” he gasped, then promptly fell over. I just stared at him as he lay there, twitching and groaning and growing weaker by the second. I kept expecting him to get up, for all of that muscle and masculinity to once again trivialise all the dangers of the world and make them my problem but not his.

  Instead he died, because that’s what people do when you stick a bit of steel in the right place, no matter how big or strong they are. And that was the day I learned it.

  My lesson was not given long to set in though.

  More men were at the door, a lot more. I didn’t have a chance to count them before they started pouring in, just scrambled back and felt my blood run cold.

  Cold.

  Heat.

  I drew on more of it, and the one advantage to being so close to so many enemies was that it let me suck in far more power than before. The limits of range and area were gone, now I could draw on as much as my mind could handle.

  As it happened, that was enough to leave one man completely ablaze from top to bottom.

  Instantly I caught a whiff of burning skin, then I caught something else. The air was warming up, despite chilling just a moment earlier, and I realised that the flames I’d conjured were producing power somehow. That felt like it violated one of those conservation laws Morlo had rambled about in-between describing the wart on his right testicle, but I had more pressing concerns than my educational quality right then.

  Several pressing concerns, with about half closing on Gruin—who was now rushing the door to fight them while they were pinned in by entering—, a few more panicking and trying to extinguish their friend, and…

  And one coming for me.

  He moved unfairly fast, fast in a way that something so much bigger than me ought not have been allowed to. Life was full of these little injustices though, and just as he would never struggle to push a brat out of him he didn’t struggle in wrapping an arm around my throat and pinning me against a wall.

  I punched him without any technique or care and felt my wrist spike in pain, barely fazing him. I screamed, or tried to with my neck constricted, feet stomping down on his and nails scraping at his skin. It was like trying to fight off a moving statue, like trying to free myself from chains. My heart was soon pounding in my ears and my eyes were tightening to focus on the blade he was bringing up. I was dead.

  Except I wasn’t, he was. I don’t know how Kyvaine had slipped past everyone unnoticed, even to this day, but he did. And the first I saw of him was the bloody steel suddenly left twitching a scant hand-width from my face.

  The rest of it was run through my attacker’s head.

  Kyvaine gave one twist and yanked the sword out in a foul-smelling squirt of something that was clearly meant to stay inside a body, then the body in question fell. I saw him turn without even looking at me, already seeking out other targets. It struck me, in that moment, just how much he’d changed. Back in the Dungeon Kyvaine had surprised me by holding together almost adequately, but now there wasn’t a note of panic to him.

  With his stupid, ear-to-ear terror-grin firmly etched across his face, he rushed for the rest of our attackers to help Gruin out.

  That was quite the ask, though, because the Grynkori looked like he was about two seconds shy of meeting his maker. Wounds littered him, most shallow but some deep, and all the grace had gone right out of his movements. Kyvaine made an instant change to the fight by walking right up to the man with the clearest shot at him and running the sword deep into his back.

  I winced, felt like puking as I saw a human being turn into cooling meat, but couldn’t look away, not while Kyvaine was now getting tangled in a fight himself.

  Not while the air was suddenly cooling so much.

  Outside, a pillar of flame shot up like some eruption from the earth. I heard men screaming, panicked cries…a madman cackling. Inside Kyvaine had killed another man and was now fighting two at once, his blade moving like a blur and seeming to just appear wherever blows threatened him, sparks hissing out. Neither of his opponents wielded long blades like him, and it didn’t take long before another’s throat had been opened and the last started running.

  Kyvaine let him go, then focused on Gruin while he, injured, lost his own two-on-one. It didn’t take long for things to tie up after that.

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