Chapter 73
Song ran out barely took three steps onto the pavement, fingers tight on her pistol’s grip, before deeming it a lost cause. Ai was simply too fast.
Silver eyes peered through the curtain of pale, rolling mist being pulled across the street and the district beyond but it was not perfect. Not for a failure of her contract but because the thick, horrid stink accompanying the pale pricked at her eyes and she had to blink away tears. It would do worse to her throat should she breathe it in too much, so she pulled up her scarf up to cover her mouth. Ahead, near the end of the street, lay worse news yet. Streaming out of a wrecked house were men and women wearing cloth masks and simple garb.
Most of them were Asphodelian in looks, but with the leathery skin of seagoing folk. Fighting sailors from the magnate fleet, come in clothes that would not draw attention. The allegiance of the handful of Tianxi among them was made plain by the yellow sashes they wore. All had muskets and blades and moved like men who knew how to use them. Ai took refuge among the rebels, Song glimpsing her green-glazed shell coming apart and swallowing a scream of frustration.
One more shot. All it would have taken was one more shot, but now she was back where she started. No, perhaps even behind that. Ai would be warier of her now if she had any sense.
“Song?”
She glanced at Captain Wen, who stood frowning in the dark of the entrance hall with his hefty blunderbuss propped up against his shoulder and a cloth tied over the lower half of his face. The frown deepened when shouts echoed from up the street, the Yellow Earth partisans getting the locals into a firing line. They act like officers, Song noted, mentally tallying the numbers.
“Muskets up the street,” she said after. “Fourteen, most using guns that look like the same workshop muskets Angharad described. Magnates’ men with Tianxi sergeants.”
Tupoc was by them a moment later, smirking and maskless. Song did not even begrudge his presence – he was here on her behalf, after all, for all that the contract hiring him had been brokered by Wen and the Fourth’s own patron. She grimaced at the latter thought, for the ambush she had thought to spring had involved Lieutenant Mitra and a largely decorative Bait striking at the Yellow Earth’s back while they stormed the brothel.
The pair were either already dead or had thought twice of attacking a force both larger than expected and in the wrong position. No, Song decided, they must still live. Lieutenant Mitra was a Master of the Akelarre Guild, not some dabbler. Such men, in the face of open violence, did not die any other way than loud.