Full-Blood Half-Breed (36 page)

Rebelde’s dragón pneuma leapt from Paladin’s thoughts in a panic. Wherever he was, Rebelde was fearful and in danger. But he had been alive when he broke contact. Paladin had the sense that the others had survived as well. They had all survived Creador’s Bastards in the arena. That gave him hope that they would endure. He tried to spy out the West Gate, but there was too much smoke in the ether. He could see by the fires burning in the distance that he would have to
travel by street.

He climbed down into an alley behind Sweettoe the Shoemaker’s shop and peeked out into the street. It was littered with piles of debris, but he saw no people. He watched for several heartbeats just to be sure. He took three steps out of the alley and the shouting began. A child rounded the corner at the end of the lane, screaming, fleeing. Paladin recognized the boy’s voice as belonging to Lalo, the ten-year-old Castillos y Conquistadores prodigy. An instant later Paladin saw what chased him. Caballeros. A large force. They rode beneath banners, torching viviendas and shops in their wake. They laughed as they chased Lalo down. It was a game to them. One of them shouted, “A bottle of Oestean gold for the first to kill twenty híbridos!”

“Gods be good,” Paladin gasped. He recognized the first banner. It was a bumblebee on a field of orange. The totem of House Próspero.

Paladin darted out into the street, nocking an arrow. He cursed his trembling, clumsy fingers. As he closed the distance between himself and Lalo, he got a better look at some of the piles of garbage littering the street. Not all the heaps were of debris. They were dead people. Gods be good, they were his murdered neighbors. He saw Henning von Brickmaker and Sommer von Fullbounty, their bodies covered in stab wounds. The same had happened to their niños, Svenja, Kreszentia, and Götz.

A veil of crimson fury dropped over Paladin’s vision as he took aim at the first rider, a massive caballera in plate armor. Lalo screamed as she and her huge charger bore down on him. Paladin prayed Schöpfer grant him speed and accuracy, knowing his appeal was in vain even as he pulled back the bowstring. At the very instant his fingers released, Lalo’s scream stopped with sickening abruptness, replaced by the cracks and pops of young bones crushed beneath heavy hooves.

The rider punched her fist into the air. “Twenty! I win! That bottle of Oestean gold is mi—”

Paladin’s arrow blasted her from her horse. “No whiskey in hell, cabróna.”

He reached into his quiver for another arrow even as the other caballeros trampled over Lalo’s tiny body like it was garbage.

“There!” one of them shouted. “An archer by the shoemaker’s shop!”

Paladin’s body moved of its own accord. Conscious thought deferred to rage and fear, instinct and training. He threw himself into the street, growling like a beast. If he died now, it would be on his terms. If he met Golanv tonight, it would not be alone. He would take these Próspero and Lupina warriors with him. As many as he could manage. He was invulnerable,
shielded by the righteousness of his purpose. He darted into a tenement doorway, launching arrows at the closest caballeros, but they were ready for him. Their shields were up and his arrows clattered broken and useless to the ground.

Then he saw Urbano.

The Próspero heir and his mamá, papá, and sister wore expensive armor, with cuirasses of finely crafted plate. Don Spicebringer pointed at Paladin and yelled, “There is the híbrido, Urbano! The One God has blessed you! Now is your chance to avenge our honor! Attack!”

Urbano shouted orders at three caballeros flanking him, then spurred his mount forward, making sure to stay safely behind them. Such cowardice didn’t surprise Paladin. He had known Urbano for more than a year, and the heir of House Próspero had lived each of those days as an unrepentant craven.

Today, Paladin vowed, he would die as one.

He slid Storm from her scabbard without uttering a word. He didn’t need to speak. The sword voiced his rage. Wrath thundered through the ether and shook the world, sending every horse in the street into a frenzy of screaming, bucking terror. Riders flew from their saddles like slung stones. Don, doña, and their retainers brattled to the ground in a jumble of swords, shields, and mail.

“Witchery!” Don Spicebringer bellowed, struggling against his heavy armor to get to his feet. “Kill that damned Muumban witch! Kill him!”

Urbano’s mother and sister scrambled for their mounts, but the narrow street was bedlam and chaos. Horses trampled their riders, hysterically fleeing the thunder and steel in Paladin’s fist. Urbano staggered about in the middle of it, his helmed head swiveling back and forth in confusion. The fool barely avoided getting his skull kicked in by his own horse. The panicked beast reared a few feet behind him.

“Urbano!” Doña Moonhunter screamed, holding out her hand. “To me, niño! To me! To me!”

Urbano ignored his mother and picked up his sword. His warriors closed around him protectively and they advanced on Paladin as a unit. Urbano screamed, “Get him!”

Paladin grabbed one of the fallen shields and hurled himself at the closest man, slashing. Storm blasted through armor, flesh, and bone and the caballero fell to the ground howling beneath a gust of steel splinters and smoking blood.

A long sword darted at Paladin from the right. He shield blocked and countered with a low, short thrust that exploded through the caballero’s hip and sent him crashing to the ground screaming, half his pelvis scorched away.

Urbano and a caballera from his mamá’s House instigated a synchronized assault, Urbano slashing low, the caballera thrusting high. The caballera was well trained, her technique
exquisite, but she was slow, Paladin thought, as slow as a three-legged turtle, and Urbano might as well have been standing still.

Paladin beat back the caballera’s thrust. Mance-lightning decimated her weapon, blowing bits of steel back into her face. Before she could scream, he cut high, ending her pain and life with a concussive boom. Her headless body toppled backward, vomiting smoke from the scorched chasm between its shoulders.

He sidestepped Urbano’s sword and slashed, blasting the weapon away, searing Urbano’s hand into a blackened, fingerless stump.

Urbano gawked at his ruined paw, howling, “Please don’t kill m—”

But it was too late.

Paladin had committed to his thrust.

His sword streaked toward Urbano and time seemed to slow to a snail’s crawl. An epiphany dawned in Urbano’s swampy green eyes, and Paladin bore witness to it.

Urbano had understood little in his short life, but in that sliver of a moment he recognized the truth of his mortality. That minuscule bit of time was more than enough for Urbano Del Spicebringer of House Próspero to grasp the true preciousness of his life and grieve its loss. The regret in Urbano’s eyes seared itself into Paladin’s mind, a memory he would take to his grave, and then Storm exploded into Urbano’s chest. Urbano’s ravaged body soared through the ether and crashed to the ground, mere feet away from Don Spicebringer and Doña Moonhunter.

The don and doña stared, popeyed and hang-jawed, at the ragged black hole scorched through their son’s middle and the expression of remorse frozen eternally on his slack face.

In that silence Paladin was struck by a realization as profound in its way as Urbano’s epiphany had been.

He was changed.

He was not the boy he had been upon waking that morning, and the transformation was beyond revocation. In killing Urbano and his caballeros, he had slaughtered something within himself. Something pristine and precious was now lost to him. He yearned for that missing component of his soul as surely as the caballeros yearned for their severed limbs scattered across the ground. Or would have if they still lived.

He was a killer now.

And so he killed.

His blended martial technique seemed blessed by Golanv the Death Raven itself. The caballeros attacked and died by twos and threes and mores. Paladin danced. Steel clashed. Lightning flashed. Thunder roared. Blood rained. At the height of the fighting, Doña Moonhunter directed two Lupina caballeras to collect Urbano’s remains. As they tossed Urbano’s body over his horse, the doña pointed at Paladin. Her voice rough with loathing, she
hissed, “You god-damned híbrido witch. I will see you in hell.”

“Come, cabróna,” Paladin growled. “Let’s dance, then.”

Doña Moonhunter shook her head in disgust. “Your time will come, filth.” She signaled to the others. “Retreat! Now!”

Dust whirled. Cloaks and banners flapped and cracked. Horses snorted and squealed, fretful around the stink of burning flesh and the cries of dying men and women. The remnants of Houses Próspero and Lupina—fewer than ten caballeros—withdrew in a tumult of chaos, riding over the bodies of their fellows, some still living. The Próspero standard bearer rode at the rear of the evacuating Viles, waving the Próspero bumblebee in a stubborn show of defiance. The haughty insect seemed to taunt Paladin before the clouds of black smoke hanging over the streets swallowed it up. Paladin may have withstood the Viles, but the neighborhood had not been so lucky. Ciudad Vieja burned.

For hours Paladin skulked toward Westgate. The hammers of Santuario del Guerrero’s smithies were as still as the hearts of the torn bodies clogging the gutters. Fire, both manced and natural, feasted on buildings all across the city with complete impunity, strangling the ether with dense black fumes. He ghosted out of Ciudad Vieja, as much a phantom as his babu. He hid in the doorways and alleys of Oeste Verdadero whenever he sensed anyone nearby, and all night long he kept his senses open, praying he would receive a Sending from his papá or babu. They were silent.

At least one building on every block Paladin passed had been burned or vandalized, and usually several had been put to the torch. There had been one entire city block in Ciudad Vieja that had been burned to the ground. So it was odd that he should discover an entire section of Oeste Verdadero storehouses that had gone unmolested. It was only a few blocks from the West Gate, and these pristine warehouses stood like a brick and mortar island in the sea of smoldering rubble that was Santuario del Guerrero. It was only when he noticed the pennant flying above one of the storehouse doors that he understood. It was the Próspero bumblebee. He couldn’t see what pennants flew over the other warehouses, but he would have bet every penique of his Torneo winnings that they were Próspero properties. Fanaticism, Paladin thought bitterly, had its advantages.

Somewhere deep in the smoke and murk a woman screamed. A baby squealed. Other children cried out from around the corner, one block over. He ran toward the noise, taking care to keep as much to the shadows as he could. Silently, he crept up to within a few feet of the scene,
keeping close to the walls of another storehouse.

He was too late.

A young woman lay in a pool of blood. Her dead eyes were open wide, staring at her last moments now passed. She had not just been terrified at the instant of her death; she had been incredulous at the details of it. She clutched her dead children, a baby and two young boys. They were covered in deep, three-pronged stab wounds and loaded down with travel packs and gear, ready to flee the city.

Their murderer knelt before them, leaning against the bloody pitchfork he had used to kill them. Oddly, he was weeping. His accomplices stood a few feet away, watching the killer grieve. They were all Oestean, but not from Santuario del Guerrero. They wore poorly made cloaks of Santosian white over rough homespun. Their weapons were simple farm implements. Their heads were close shaven. The woman and her children were clad in unrefined rustic wear as well, though none of it was white. Paladin circled closer to get a better look.

The killer was a young man, not ten full years older than Paladin. His face was a crimson smear of pimples and pocks. He dropped his pitchfork and clutched the dead woman to his chest, braying miserably, “Oh, Jacinta. Why could you not have accepted the truth of The One God? The boys—
mis hijos
 …”

“What?” Paladin stepped into the street, startling Pock-Face and his companions. “You killed your own wife and children?”