Page 44 of City of Stone and Silence

Garo’s already moving. He grabs a colorful cloth napkin and ties it over his face, covering everything but his eyes. Then, as the captain starts toward the curtained doorway, Garo explodes out of it. He plants his knee in the Ward Guard’s stomach, moving with easy grace, and brings an elbow down on the top of the man’s skull as he collapses gasping to the floor. The other five stare at Garo for a moment, stupefied. Then they heft their clubs.

Garo raises his arms. Green energy shimmers into existence, encasing each of his forearms in a cracking, spitting field of power, as though he were wearing a set of translucent gauntlets. It has to be Melos energy, the Well of Combat, though it’s a form of it I’ve never seen before. Certainly it seems to take the guards aback, and they shuffle away, looking at the sergeant uncertainly.

Unfortunately, the captain, writhing on the floor, chooses that moment to regain enough breath to shout.

“What are you waiting for?” he wheezes. “Get him!”

The soldiers step forward. Garo rushes them, intercepting a downward strike with one gauntlet. The solid wooden weapon shatters against the Melos energy in a spray of splinters, and Garo’s fist lands in the man’s midsection with a sound like a giant stomping its foot, a wave of power blasting the guard off his feet.

Okay. He’s holding them off. Time to get out of here. I turn to Genza and the back door.

“Is that locked?”

He shakes his head frantically. “But—”

I yank at the door. The latch moves, reluctantly, but the door doesn’t open. The three boys have piled out of the storeroom, distracted by the fight, but after a moment Bel notices what I’m up to and comes over to help. Between the two of us, the door swings inward an inch, scraping against its frame, then finally comes unstuck all at once and throws us to the ground. I roll over, gasping for breath.

Instead of an alley, there’s the back side of a brick wall, roughly mortared.

“I was saying,” Genza moans, “they built over that alley years ago, there’s no way out.”

A cold hand grips my chest for a moment, and I force it away. No time. “Garo!”

“A little busy!” he shouts back.

I scramble to the curtain on hands and knees to see him facing off against a pair of soldiers, with the rest laid out on the floor in various states of distress. The remaining pair have split up to attack from both sides, forcing Garo to swing his gauntleted fists first one way and then another to drive them off.

Focused on this pair, he doesn’t see the officer on the floor. The man has crawled to within arm’s reach behind Garo, and he’s drawn his sword. Even as I watch, he gets his legs under him, preparing a thrust.

“Behind you!” I shout. But one of the other soldiers has begun a feint, and Garo has already moved to block, off-balance. In that frozen instant, I can tell he won’t move in time. The sword seems to crawl through the air, but I’m just as slow, one hand extended—

—and I lash out, Kindre power whipping around me, an invisible wind that sets my hair to whipping wildly. I feel the Ward Guard captain’s mind—his acid fear, his thumping humiliation, the copper tang of bloodlust, a hundred other emotions—and I reach for it. There’s no time for subtlety, so my demand is simple.

Stop.

It slams into the delicate garden of his thoughts with all the force of a meteor strike. His eyes go very wide, and he freezes in place, sword still aimed at Garo’s kidneys. A moment later, Garo spins, his boot slamming into the man’s hand and sending the weapon skittering across the floor.

I reach out for the two remaining soldiers, flooding their minds with the same simple command. Stop. They freeze in turn, and Garo takes full advantage, his Melos gauntlets sending first one and then the other crashing to the ground. For a moment, things get quiet, broken by groans and the scramble of the lone customer frantically making a run for it.

“Tori—” Garo says, turning.

“Later,” I tell him. “There’ll be more patrols out in the street. Can you break through a brick wall?”

“Probably.” Garo looks down at his gauntlets. “I’ve never tried.”

“Try.”

Bel, Wik, and Gokto scramble backward as Garo comes through the curtain, his green glow throwing weird shadows. Genza flinches as Garo’s fist pistons into the bricks, raising a cloud of pulverized mortar. The third blow breaks through, making a hole the size of my head. Garo quickly widens it enough to squeeze into a dingy brick-lined hallway. At the far end there’s another door, which I’m hoping leads out into the backstreets.

“Follow him,” I tell the boys. I feel sick, my guts knotting as though I’d drunk a pint of cooking oil. The sensation of the captain’s mind folding up under my power, giving way like wet paper—Not now. I turn to Genza. “You should get out of here, too.”

He nods frantically. “I’ll go out the front, tell them you threatened me and made a run for it. It might slow them down.”

“Good. If you need help, come to Grandma’s. We owe you.”

He scrambles away. Garo has reached the other end of the hallway, splintering the locked door with another blow. Beyond, blessedly, I can see an alley. The three boys hover some distance behind him, reluctant to get too close, and I go through the hole and follow them. Genza shuts the door behind us.

“You’d better lead the way,” Garo says, beckoning with a green-shrouded hand. “We’re going to have to stick to the side streets.”