Another explosion broke the night's calm and Grecco felt his ear vibrate as a round metal bullet passed only inches from his head. It had been traveling fast enough to pierce conventional armour.
"That's a Poorian rifle," Grecco said, his voice calm. It was no use getting worked up about an inevitable death. He turned his head to Thanojax and spoke with an air of certainty. "We didn't come equipped to fight this kind of battle."
Thanojax started to say something but his words were cut off by a blast that sprayed dirt into Grecco's face. A second later, Grecco felt his own mount's spirit break. With a tremor, the brown and white steed began to pace and shake his head. Before the dirt had hit the ground again, the horse was bucking. Grecco knew better than to try to hold on. He pushed himself backwards and dropped off the back of the horse, landing hard on his knees. He stayed frozen for only an instant, his eyes searching past the horse's flailing form to find the house. The next flash of fire drew his eyes instantly to the upstairs window. For a brief instant a form was illuminated there. He caught a glimpse of long hair... was it a woman? Another flash of fire and Grecco decided he should move. He hadn't gone more than a foot before a horrific sound nearly split his eardrums.
Someone who has never heard a horse scream cannot understand the horror behind that sound. It's worse than hearing a human scream. It's almost a mechanical noise, like the piercing screech of metal being scraped together, but there's a wetness to it, the wetness of someone coughing fluid out of their lungs. Grecco heard the scream building in the steed, shuddering its way out of his throat. Then the steed collapsed on his side with a ghastly sigh The animal's head was twisted at an odd angle, one wide black eye staring at Grecco above lips pulled back and flecked with saliva as it became deathly silent. The horse's legs were held stiffly away from his body and they twitched with each hurried breath he took. Blood was clearly visible in the moonlight, pouring onto the grass from a small hole in his stomache. Every time the head tried to move towards the wound there was a scraping sound of bone against bone. Several of the bones in his neck had been broken by the fall. It was incredible how long something so broken could stay alive.
Whoever was in the house fired again and Grecco threw himself behind the body of his horse. Even as Grecco disappeared behind its bulk, a bullet slammed into the dead body. Grecco felt the brown and white skin ripple with the impact. Blood sprayed into the air and rained down into his long black hair, glueing it to his face. A thick strand fell across his lip and he tasted salt and horse flesh. He kept his body low. Laying parallel to the horse, he pressed his back against the still dying animal, trying to provide as little a target as possible. He cursed the brightness of the moon, but he did so without conviction. As always happened to him in a fight, he had become filled with a feeling of dead calm. It was hard to build up any emotion. Instead, he was consumed with memories. A voice, his mother's voice, was speaking to him...
"When your long journey
reaches its end...
the heavy burden that
rests upon your shoulders
will be lifted at last."
... and he cursed the moon again, but really his thoughts were on the poem and the meaning he had never been able to decipher. Thanojax had disappeared from the battlefield; Grecco heard the canter of hooves coming from somewhere, but all that told him was that Thanojax's mount was fleeing; it said little about whether its rider was fleeing with it.
The sound of silence was as loud as the gunshots that had come before it. Grecco knew that the gunner was either waiting for him to come out or was reloading. He thought over his options. If the gunner was reloading, then this was Grecco's chance to make a run for the house. The gun would still be deadly in close quarters, but so would Grecco's fists. If the woman was waiting for him to come out, though, then Grecco wouldn't take more than five steps before being shot down, not under such a bright moon. The gunner had already proven that she had skill. Idly, Grecco wondered how they had planned this so badly. To attack on a clear night and to approach the house without cover was an unthinkable error. Even using horses that hadn't been given time to get used to their scent; these were amateur mistakes. Had Thanojax been all talk? Grecco wouldn't be surprised, except that Bill had hired him. Grecco had seen Bill a lot after entering the King's employ. He had gotten the impression that the counselor could tell when he was being lied to. Nothing stayed hidden from those steel blue eyes.
Grecco forced himself to rise while his mind was distracted by other thoughts. They hadn't planned the attack so far, so why start now? This was the last thought to brush across his mind before every sense became a blaring alarm, shooting dire warnings at his brain as every muscle in his body expected to be ripped apart by bullets. Nothing happened on the first step. The second step carried him in a sprinter's gait a full five yards from the horse's body. By the third step he was too far from cover to turn back, but he still had nearly 400 yards to travel before he'd reach the house. Odd memories were running through his mind. He was remembering snippets of conversations shared with people who were barely more than strangers to him. He remembered a sobbing boxer back in Choras whose nose he had helped set when it was broken in the young man's first fight. He recalled the one-eyed man in the bar; he recalled the way his eye had boiled when Thanojax had tossed it into the fire. He had a fleeting image of Crono holding his crown when he had forgotten that Grecco was there. The King had looked exhausted. This last thought was cut off when a flash of fire erupted from a downstairs window of the house, only 200 yards directly in front of him. The gunner hadn't reloaded; she had moved. At that range, she couldn't miss.
It had been a long time since Grecco had been faced with death. He'd thought that he'd been courting it for the last decade, but faced with that flash of light and the burst of smoke, he realized he'd only been chasing its shadow. Suddenly the calm was gone. The flash of fire was all there was, then, and Grecco knew that he was about to die. Grecco felt the air shift as the bullet came at his chest. His loose black shirt suddenly felt like a poor choice for this night's mission. The horse's blood across his face smelled stronger and grossly sweeter than it had before. Grecco didn't want that to be the last thing he ever smelled.
The revelation that he did not want to die was almost as shocking as the realization that he was still alive. Grecco questioned how the bullet had missed, but no answer came; he continued to sprint, feeling his muscles contracting and expanding with each pounding stride. He changed his direction slightly as he approached the window. He rolled one shoulder in front of his chest, pulling his body into a tight curl, and launched himself at the house, aiming not for the open window that the gunner stood at but the closed one next to it.
It felt like hitting stone. His shoulder exploded into dancing lights of pain that spotted his vision and ripped away his breath. For a moment the window held, then it buckled inward, spitting him in a shower of glass into a living room lit only by the sputtering flame of a single candle. Grecco felt razors of glass scrape his skin as rolled across the wooden floor, crashing into a chair and slamming against a small table. The table fell and the candle on it spun to the ground, splashing hot wax across Grecco's cheek and hands, which were drawn up to protect his face. His knuckles burned briefly and then stiffened as the wax hardened over them. The candle rolled across the floor, coming to rest a few feet away against the bare feet of the long haired gunner. Grecco saw the woman turning towards him, the gun in her hands; pivoting on her heels to aim its barrel at his chest.
Grecco pushed himself up with his heels, using the strength of his body to catapult himself across the room. Glass fell off of him with a sound like water. Two steps brought him to the gunner. His right hand clamped over the barrel of the gun and pushed it away from him. His left hand sought out the finger on the gun's trigger. The two of them wrestled with the weapon, reminding Grecco absurdly of a game he used to play as a child, where one child would try to steal a stick from the other. Grecco had always won the game. He won it now, but unexpectedly. The gunner released her grip on the gun and reached down to her waist, pulling free a knife: he recognized the flash of metal in the light of the candle underneath his feet. Never assume you've taken your opponent's only weapon: another amateur's mistake. For the second time that night, Grecco saw his death coming at him. The final blow he landed was an act of desperation. He couldn't have expected it to accomplish anything. Planting a fist in someone's side might injure them, might turn the tide in your favor over a long boxing match, but it won't save you from knife sliding between your ribs.
The knife pierced his thin black shirt and cut into his tanned flesh. He felt pain ricochet its way through his nerves and blood pool in a warm flow across his torso, trapped between flesh and cotton. But the knife's thrust was weak, weaker than it should have been. Grecco pulled away from the knife and it slid cleanly out. He brought back his hand to knock the knife away and its owner did not protest. Something besides the knife shimmered in the candlelight: a large piece of glass protruding from the side of the gunner. Grecco wondered when the glass had entered his hand and what instinct had caused him to wield it as a weapon. He looked at his palm. It was covered in blood; not only from the gunner's wound, but from two twin cuts where the triangular glass had bitten into his skin as he gripped it. Even the sight of the cuts did not awaken a memory of holding the glass, however. Instead Grecco experienced a rush of fear. Who had he stabbed? Was this "her" blood on his hands?
The gunner sagged forward into his arms, the long-barreled rifle dropping from her hand to the ground with a hollow clatter. Grecco caught her awkwardly as her knees sagged and her head fell forward. Their foreheads briefly rested against each other and Grecco, for the first time, looked into her eyes. He caught his breath.
"I know you," Grecco said.
It wasn't a woman. Though his black hair had grown longer, Grecco recognized the rugged features of the soldier who had been stationed in Truce. Samdel had hated the man and not entirely because he was a soldier in charge of prisoning their freedoms. The soldier had been too much like Samdel in all the wrong ways. He was handsome, charismatic, and able-bodied. If there was something he lacked, it was Samdel's cynicism and short sightedness. For Samdel it must have been like looking into a mirror and seeing someone better reflected there.
Ghetz. That was his name. Ghetz. Now that he'd remembered it, Grecco doubted he'd ever be able to push it from his mind.
Ghetz's eyes looked into his. He opened his lips and they were so close that Grecco could see they were pink with blood. The blood had bubbles in it. Grecco had cut open one of his lungs.
"Safe?"
The word struggled its way out of Ghetz's mouth. It was a question Grecco didn't know how to answer. Ghetz's body was sagging in Grecco's arms. His eyes alone refused to yield, keeping their hold on Grecco's face. Grecco nodded slowly, not understanding what he was agreeing to. Ghetz's eyes softened. He shuddered once and died.
Grecco didn't let the body drop, but bent at the knees, carefully lowering it to the ground. He didn't bother with anything elaborate. He closed the eyes and moved away. Before he stood up, without knowing why, he picked up the rifle. It was, as he'd thought, a Poorian model. He didn't know a lot about guns, but he recognized its main features. Only three months ago, Poore had developed a rifle with a top-loading clip that fed the bullets to the hammer, removing the need to reload after every shot. This rifle had two such clips, sitting side by side. Judging from the even count in each clip, Grecco determined that it alternated between the clips as it fired. That would make it an incredibly fast weapon, compared with other guns. What was more, the clips held twelve two inch shells in total and still had three shots left, which meant he'd been lucky when he'd broken cover. Had Ghetz not been changing position from the upstairs to the downstairs window, he would've had Grecco for sure.
He should've had me anyway, Grecco thought as he remembered the shot he had practically charged into.
A spluttering hiss came from the candle. Grecco bent down again and picked it up carefully, minding his injured hand. The candle had continued to burn on its side, so that the wax had been worn down into a sloping shape. It forced the flame to give off an uneven light and Grecco found it a difficult task to make out the details of the room. He swept the candle back and forth as he walked around, not entirely sure what he was looking for, but finding things all the same. They were brief glimpses... a half burned letter in the fireplace signed by a man named "James," a bag on the table filled with vegetables and other groceries, the shimmer of a windowed cabinet filled with more dishware than one person would need...
... but they told a story all the same.
It was an L-shaped room, with Ghetz's body laying beside the table and the fireplace at the cross of the "L," and a dark staircase on its longer tip. Grecco almost ran into the couch opposite the fireplace; he'd been examining a framed photo above the squat piece of furniture. The shot was taken from a hill which overlooked a seaside town. Grecco was a far cry from an art historian, but he had a secret fondness for art nonetheless. In his opinion, this photographer wasn't particularly skilled. The picture was slightly overexposed, so that the sky, instead of representing the full, rich, day it must have been, instead looked grainy and faded. The subject, too, was non-existent, unless the town was the subject in a general sort of way. Yet, the photographer had done something right. The photograph captured, maybe by accident, the peacefulness of the town so that even though the photo as a whole bored the eye, it stimulated a calm in Grecco that felt oddly familiar. Then he recognized the place. It was Truce; Truce before the fall.
Grecco stared for a moment later at the photograph, disturbed that viewing it now caused an unsettling chill to settle in between his shoulders. He turned away and found himself staring at something flowery. A discarded dress with a petal print lay over the back of the couch. It was a light blue colour and it looked perfectly uncreased and layered with a thin film of dust. Grecco ran his finger over the material, finding it less soft than he had expected. He pictured the woman that would've fit into its tight caress.
His body reacted to the sound before his mind did, so that he was turning towards the staircase before he knew why. The candle light illuminated the edges of a small figure halted on the final step on the stairs, one foot already pressing against the soft carpet, littered with glass; the other was poised on the creaking stair that had given her away. The little girl, for it was a little girl, stared at him. He could feel her eyes even though he couldn't see them. He realized, after a moment, that the candle must be illuminating his features better than it was revealing hers, but he made no movement to douse the light or to otherwise halt her examination of his face. When she spoke, the voice was innocence described.
"I know you," she said.