A/N: Wow, lot's of positive response to last chapter. Responses are in my forums as normal. And now, a longer chapter than normal. Thank you all for reading.
Chapter Six: A Shadow in the Night
The repulsor coils in Taylor's flight suit were corroded beyond repair.
Ser Jorah and Ser Barristan were in the common room of their new inn-a cheaper place that catered to sailors from the Free Cities of eastern Essos and the occasional Westerosi man who made his way that far east.
In the room Ser Barristan rented, Quaithe sat primly on Ser Barristan's bed. Her mask lay on her lap as her dark eyes studied Taylor intently. Taylor, for her part, did her best to ignore the other woman as she went over her suit. With the repulsor coils gone, the easiest way of topping those walls was lost to her.
"Tell me about these warlocks," Taylor finally said as she checked the charge of her blaster. Forty-four charges left. As much as she wanted to keep them, the charge cannisters didn't last forever. They had a shelf-life of about five years before they had to be recharged.
"The House of the Undying is no more, but the Warlocks remain," Quaithe explained. "With the dragons came a return of their magic, and they are powerful once again. It was the Warlocks who created the red wastes north and west of the city. They turned the fertile grasslands of their ancestors to desert to kill the Dothraki using ancient, forbidden arts"
Taylor looked up in concern. "Could they do that again?"
"I do not believe so."
She checked her helmet. The targeting system was still working, but her vambrace/helmet computer system was down to just 15% charge. She needed three solid days of direct solar to get it above fifty. With a disgusted sigh, she put the flight suit across her mattress. She had essentially two hours' worth of charge left.
Taylor checked her helmet. "Tell me about their magic."
"Illusions and glamours powerful enough to touch," the shadowbinder said without hesitation. "Poisons powerful enough to blacken your heart in a single breath. The Undying were many and ancient, but those that remain are younger and more powerful. More so with dragons in their grasp. They will not let the creatures go lightly."
For the second time since she crashed on this primitive world, Taylor undid her saber case and removed one of her lightsabers. She briefly inspected it for any damage before flicking it on. The sudden snap-hiss as the white beam of coherent plasma made Quaithe gape.
"Azor Ahai!" she whispered.
Taylor deactivated her blade but didn't return it to it's all-weather case. Instead, she hung it and its matching saber to her weapons belt for easier access. "The city gates remain closed at night?" she asked.
Quaithe nodded. "I am known, and even I cannot return until dawn."
Taylor had changed out of her Shadowmaster dress but had yet to dress in anything else as she tried to choose the appropriate garb. With the repulsor coils gone all the suit provided was free, easy movement and a black surface. Her helmet had just enough charge left to provide thermal and infrared imaging, but not enough to boot up her full computer system.
The thermal imaging would be worth it, though. With a sigh at having company, Taylor stripped off her locally-made undergarments and pulled on the suit. It felt grimy against her skin with only a hand-washing to remove weeks of sweat and salt. But it fit snugly while having enough flex for her to move easily. She strapped on her weapons belt.
The door banged twice. "Come in!" Taylor called.
Ser Barristan entered. He'd changed out of his full plate armor and now wore a woolen tunic. Ser Jorah had only the filthy clothes on his back as he followed. The man was in desperate need of a bath and a shave. However, he already looked better for a meal and heavily watered wine.
Mormont stared now at her, unused to seeing such form-fitting clothing on anyone, much less a woman.
"I suppose we have some decisions to make," Taylor said. "Ser Barristan, I came here with you. What would you like to see happen next?"
The old man stared at her for a long time. "My land has been ravaged by civil war and bad kings," he said in a slow, ponderous tone. "I came here in the hope, desperate as it was, to find a queen to heal a land I have sworn to serve with my life. What would I like to see happen? I would like to see a Targaryen of sound mind on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, with dragons in the skies once more."
"The last Targaryen burned not an hour past," Ser Mormont said.
"But her dragons live still," Ser Barristan said. "And we have one among us who might be able to command them as the Targaryens did."
"Of that, I have no doubt," Quaithe said softly, drawing the two men's eyes to her.
The implications of Ser Barristant's words sat as uncomfortably with Jorah Mormont as they did Taylor. Unwilling to take on that particular tangle, she turned her mind to more practical matters. "Is there any doubt that all the spies in this city know who we are?"
"None," Barristan said, much more confident in his answer. "The eunuch at the Harbor Rose undoubtedly told the guards of us. The dockmaster as well. They will know we are here, and will be watching us."
Taylor took off her backpack kit, removed all its continents and bundled them with her new clothes-all save for one of her black cloaks and hood. Who knew what she might need to carry? "How quickly could Captain Groleo escape the harbor?"
The old knight understood exactly where she was going. "Not before they could raise the chains. Those towers we sailed by? They have a chain they can raise to block the harbor, I have no doubt. The harbor of Qarth is famous for never suffering a successful pirate attack. We'd need to escape this very night and set anchor up the shore to be safe."
"If you were to just anchor the ship a few hundred feet into the water, near where we held the funeral, I could reach it."
"You're that strong of a swimmer?" the old knight asked.
"No, but I can run on water." She turned to Quaithe. "You came to me. What do you want, and what do you bring with you?"
The question surprised the other woman. "I...I am a Shadowbinder of Asshai. I have been trained in the ancient arts of magic and divination. I speak and read the Shadow Tongue as well as five other languages. I can cast protections and see what is to happen in the flame. I can…" The woman physically shuddered. "I can bind shadows to kill any who you seek, though it is a terrible and dark act."
"Can you cook?"
"If just barely," the woman admitted.
"And what do you want?"
"I want you to save us for when the Long Night returns."
Once more all eyes in the room turned to Quaithe. She ignored the two knights and stared intently at Taylor. "Is that a risk?" Taylor asked.
"It is. It is happening even now as we speak."
Looking at Ser Barristan, Taylor could see in his face that he recognized the term and was concerned by it. It felt in his mind like a theoretical concern, though, like global warming or an asteroid strike. An event so large it was difficult to wrap one's mind around it.
"I guess you're coming with us, then."
"I cannot. This is my home."
Taylor snorted. "You made your choice when you stepped into this inn with us. Look into your flame and tell me you're not in danger. I can sense it around you, like a cloak. These Warlocks know who you are. Is your magic strong enough to protect you?"
Dark eyes met hers for the longest time-searching for some answer that Taylor could only guess at. Whatever Quaithe looked for, though, she found. Her dark eyes dropped. "I will come."
Glancing back at Barristan, Taylor smiled sadly. "Will you allow it?"
"Of course."
"Good. Barristan...I don't know how long this will take. Hours at least. Can you keep the ship anchored in the bay near where we held the Princess's funeral?"
"We will, even if I have to beat Groleo about the head to do it."
"Good." Taylor stood and pulled her helmet on, though she kept the face place open. She then pulled on her great cloak. The hood was large enough to cover her helmet. "Can you fit my things in your chest?"
"Aye."
Before he had a chance, Quaithe stood and gathered Taylor's things before placing them in the old knight's chest.
"You'd better go," Taylor said. She lit a saber, and with a quick, easy hand cut a hole in the ceiling. As she hung it on her waist, she saw Mormont staring again, jaws agape.
"It is as I said, Jorah the Andal," Quaithe told him. She had a satisfied smile on her face. "She is Azor Ahai, and her sword of flame will light the world."
"Hold that thought until you're back on the ship," Taylor said before jumping up easily onto the roof of the inn. The moment she did so, she knelt down and extended her senses in the Force. Almost immediately she felt eyes watching the inn. From her perch on the roof, she watched as Ser Barristan and Ser Mormont walked out with Quaithe in their midst. To Taylor's surprise, the Shadowbinder had taken one of the extra cloaks of Taylor's and pulled it on. With her own mask and the cloak, she could easily fool the watchers.
Speaking of, Taylor watched as four separate people, two men and two children, followed the small party down the docks to where Groleo's ship sat docked. In the moonless night, the only light were long torches set along the docks, or oil lamps at the doors of those few businesses that remained open after dark.
Otherwise, the city was stunningly dark. No electric streetlights, stop lights or signs. No car headlights. No engines running; no street workers working. In the distance she could hear a woman singing. She could hear it not because it was loud, but because the rest of the night was silent.
The western horizon still held a faint glow of blue, but already the skies overhead glistened with uncountable stars, a spectacular nebula low on the horizon, and several planets like bright darts of orange or red in the sky. It was almost impossible to believe she was within a city.
How much we lost when we gained electricity, she thought to herself.
Still, she had a mission and limited time. She kept her helmet face-plate up to preserve its charge and rushed to the edge of the inn's roof. The next building of similar height was opposite a much lower business. Taylor jumped it, her cloak fluttering behind her. The buildings were all built side-by-side, crowded together to take advantage of the limited land the city allotted to the foreigner's quarter of the harbor.
It made a good path. Unfortunately, she wasn't the only one to use it. She sensed the thieves well before she saw them. Her mission didn't leave her time to dawdle, though. When she landed on the roof the two thieves were trying to cut through, they spun around and scrambled away in terror.
One was a boy of ten. The second was the girl-the cutpurse who got a purse of almonds from the Summer Islanders. Taylor flipped her faceplate closed long enough to activate her voice modulator.
"Leave," she said. The voice that emerged was a full octave lower with a mechanical echo.
The kids didn't scream. They were too terrified. They scrambled to their feet and were quickly lost in the shadows. Flipping her faceplate back up, Taylor continued her stroll across the rooftops until she reached the end of the foreigner's quarter.
Ahead, the first of three walls. The walls were thirty, forty and fifty feet high respectively, each with bazaars in the spaces between.
Infiltration was not the time to be brash. Taylor leapt from the last roof of the building and dropped lightly to the ground, born from the Force. In the barely lit path, she gathered her cloak around her, drew her hood over her helmet, and walked toward the nearest gate. In the Force, she projected out a suggestion.
Only a shadow. Nothing to see. Nothing to fear.
During her days as a parahuman in the Joint Rapid Operational Deployment team, her obfuscation field was one of her most effective uses of the Force. It served her even better during the War. And it served her now.
The two men in bronzed armor, kilts and helms who stood alertly on either side of the closed gates did not notice as she walked toward them. They did not blink or follow her movement as she stepped off the path onto the rocky soil that led down to the filthy, sewer-stink of the river that ran under the city walls. Rather than go through the sewer, Taylor squatted, pulled the Force into her until she tingled from it, and launched herself into the air.
With the Force flowing as richly as it did, a thirty-foot jump was nothing. She cleared the parapets at the top of the wall easily and knelt down as she once again draped herself in the suggestion of non-interest.
Guards walked the walls, but at long intervals. There were none on the middle wall that she could see. With a running start, Taylor jumped the thirty-foot span and the ten-foot height difference and this time landed with a roll to bleed off momentum. Once more she squatted down to see if she would be detected, but there was nothing. And why not? Qarth was at peace with its neighbors. It was rich and powerful, with a permanent army that few other city-states could afford.
The lone guard walking picket-duty on the inner gate passed ahead, barely visible on the top of the completely unlit section of the innermost wall. She could see those long-burning, fern-shaped torches near the gate tower, but the section in front of her was dark.
Another running start, and she found herself on top of the innermost wall of Qarth, looking down into the mostly unlit city. She saw several torches and fires throughout, but the light produced was only bright enough for a small area. Otherwise, the city was cast in darkness and shadow.
Fifty feet was a good drop. Taylor once more gathered the Force and stepped off the innermost parapet. Her cloak flapped behind her, threatening to flip over her head. She pushed down with the Force at the last moment, halting her descent until she touched with barely a bending of her knees.
Drawing her cloak about herself, Taylor extended her obfuscation field and began a steady, quick walk toward the area Quaithe told her she could find Warlock's Way.
The city was not asleep, at least not completely. She could hear voices and see torchlight from some of the buildings she passed by. When she reached Tourmaline Street where the merchant princes lived, she saw several of the palatial gardens well lit with torches and lamps. She could hear people speaking and laughing within as they enjoyed the spoils of their wealth.
The gates of such homes were invariably guarded by thugs with cudgels. None noticed the shadow that walked quickly by.
The darkness in the Force felt palpable, as if a Sith Lord might jump out at any moment. Nor was her presence unrecognized. The darkness coiled about her like a snake, sapping at her suggestive field. The Warlocks knew she was near, but could not find her directly.
Warlock Way had no torches nor signs. It had a ten-foot wall with a closed iron gate that she easily hopped over. Crossing an old stone bridge that spanned a stream that seemed to emerge at the north end of the city, she found herself on a street of featureless walls. The buildings had no doors or windows facing the street. She saw no torches nor lamps. Only the dense shadow of the area.
At the end of the street she saw a collapsed stone tower. In the force, it writhed with hate, betrayal and pain. In a thousand years, she could see such a place becoming a Darkside Nexus.
With an unlit saber in hand, Taylor moved away from the collapsed tower and lowered her faceplate. She used her vambrace to switch from normal to thermal imaging, wincing at how much faster it burned through her puny power reserves. What she saw left her chilled.
In the featureless, windowless houses that sat on either side of the flagstone boulevard that stretched down from the collapsed tower to the city below, she saw bodies within the unheated homes. The bodies were almost all significantly below normal human body temperatures, ranging from ninety all the way down to eighty degrees. It was only because the night was cool that she could see them on thermal at all.
Within the third house on her left, she saw three, tiny little supernovas of body heat. The lizard-shaped, cat-sized creatures had constant body temperatures of over a hundred degrees, and blazed next to the lower temperatures of their captors.
And of the captors, there were many. She counted two dozen bodies packed tightly into the small room. She started to inch closer, pushing her obfuscation field out harder, when she felt a strange...hiccup in the Force. The hiccup moved out of the building. Confused, Taylor turned off her thermal scope and lifted her face plate.
Where the odd little blip of Force energy moved, her naked eyes saw what looked like a floating, lightly glowing tortoise shape. It flitted off into the shadows.
What the hell was that?
The Force felt corrupted in this place. It didn't warn her of imminent danger, but rather of a constant hunger that permeated every stone and every leaf of the twisted juniper trees that lined the boulevard.
"Taylor!" Dinah Alcott's young, scared voice echoed across the night.
Illusions real enough to touch. Taylor had no doubt the Warlocks were concocting some elaborate illusion to lead her into a maze, or to doubt her mission, or otherwise slow her down. The fact that they drew on her memories of Dinah frightened her, because it meant they either had some form of telepathy, or their magic was somehow reacting with Taylor's mind directly.
Either way, she wasn't willing to give them the chance to build it any more.
Throwing caution to the wind, Taylor surged forward toward the home with the dragons. When the earth shook under her feet and a massive chasm opened up in front of her, she gathered the Force and fought the illusion by leaping over it. The illusion collapsed almost immediately, as if the Warlocks knew it wouldn't stop her. When the glowing turtle shot out of the house, she braced herself and charged through it, believing it too was just an illusion.
This time, they proved her wrong.
A burst of fire and kinetic force exploded right in her chest. If not for the armored plating of her suit and her helmet, she would have lost her face. As it was, the blast was powerful enough to send her flopping painfully on her back while her head bounced within her helmet. It took a long, semi-panicked moment before she could even draw a breath.
Right. "That was definitely real enough to touch," she admitted as her helmet flashed power warnings at her. With a mental command, she turned her face shield transparent and then deactivated all other powered functions. She was just in time in doing so, since more of those blasted glowing turtles were right above her.
She rolled away from one, using the blast of it to help her regain her feet before the two others could hit. Realizing there was no pretense in sneaking, she reached out with all her will and blasted the walls of the home in front of her apart.
Despite what her Thermal scope told her; the house stood empty.
It was possible they moved to another house and were playing hide and seek with her, but her gut told her it was something else. She lifted her hand, and instead of trying to dispel the illusion, she went with a much more straight-forward approach.
A cascade of blue Force lightning exploded from her fingertips.
A chorus of yowls and shouts answered her. The illusion shattered, revealing easily two dozen bone-colored men and women, all with bald heads and deep blue stains about their lips and eyes. Her blast was powerful enough to send all of them stumbling to the ground. Around her, other warlocks emerged from their homes, and the sky above her took on a strange glow as more iridescent magic turtles appeared.
What the hell is it with the turtles?
In the middle of the floor of the shattered home, on a stone plinth, sat a wicker cage. Three mewling, snarling winged lizards raged within, snorting little streaks of flame and spit. The things were obviously pissed off about losing their mother.
As the turtles of doom started to descent, Taylor grabbed the cage by its whicker handle, ignored the hissing, angry little beasts, and started to run. Her suit was at only five percent power and her helmet was damaged, so she left the faceplate transparent.
She didn't make it ten feet down the boulevard before she discovered what that first little turtle she saw was for. The warlocks had used their magic to send for help.
A wall of men and horses appeared, riding shoulder to shoulder with spears in hand. At a glance she'd guess at least twenty mounted men. Behind her, filling the sky, she saw almost fifty of those damned turtles. The glowing Dark Side constructs were actually speeding up as they approached her. Framing the walkway were more of the low, windowless homes.
The basket was heavy, but she was pleased to see it had leather straps on the bottom that allowed her to secure it over her shoulders. One of the little reptilian shits began clawing at her backpack.
The horsemen charged. Taylor charged right back, running at them. Fifteen feet from them, she veered sharply to her right and easily Force-jumped onto the roof of one of the homes. The line of cavalry tried to stop, but they were so tightly packed they couldn't maneuver in the narrow street. She ran right past them, hopped ten feet to another roof, and another ten feet after that to a third.
The air whistled as arrows sped past. One hit her shoulder but bounced off the armor weave. It would definitely leave a bruise, though. She ignored it for the greater threat-the front line of attackers were on horseback, but behind that line were at least another fifty men afoot. Those men were running along below her, struggling to keep up while shooting arrows at her.
Warlocks Way ended up ahead on Tourmaline Street. Tourmaline wasn't quite as wide as the main boulevard, but was wide enough to make jumping a challenge.
On the other hand, there were lots of rich people on the street. Taylor would need some coin if she was going to make a home on this world. Who better to steal from than merchant princes who liked killing young girls?
When she reached the last of the warlock homes, she launched herself into a Force-borne leap that sent her sailing over the wall that separated the warlocks from the rest of the city. She landed with a somersault to both bleed off momentum and keep from crushing the dragons, and spun about to see men running toward her. They had opened the gates when they came for her. Through those gates she saw that the horsemen had broken formation enough to turn and follow.
Taylor gripped the wide bronzed gates in her power and slammed them shut, momentarily blocking the sight of them.
She recognized the home of the Silk King by the Qartheen symbol for silk-a large spindle of gold. In the fresco over the gate, the spindle was held in the hand of a woman who was passionately copulating with a man while others watched.
Shaking her head at Qartheen preoccupations, Taylor easily leapt the merchant prince's walls. Beyond the gates were a spectacular garden filled with statues of remarkably lifelike young women and boys who…
Oh. OH!
Taylor quickly realized that she wasn't looking at sculptures. Averting her eyes, she left the rich denizens of the city to their pleasures and instead snuck into a massive palace that seemed as open to the outside as it was to the inside. Whole rooms within were open to the sky, admitting light and rainwater with large fountains or pools to collect it. There were small trees and large shrubs in almost every room, along with the trademark pornographic tapestries the Qartheen seemed to love so much.
The dragons at her back snarled as she snuck through the house, up until she found a servant. The girl was easily four years younger than Taylor and wore nothing but paint and ribbons. At the sight of the black-clad, helmeted ghost with dragons on her back, the girl started to scream. Taylor cut her off with a hand to her mouth.
"I won't hurt you. Promise."
The girl went very still, though she trembled in Taylor's hands. Looking into her eyes, Taylor didn't bother asking where the Silk King kept his coin. She lifted the information directly from the girl's mind before sending her into a deep sleep.
Gently laying the girl onto the tiled floor, Taylor continued down the hall until she found a set of narrow stairs leading to an underground level. She went down, lifted the interior lock with the Force, and stepped into a room guarded by three men.
She had one of her sabers out on its highest stun setting before the first could realize what he was looking at. In a second, all three were on the ground unconscious. Taylor stepped past them until she came to a heavy steel door set in solid granite.
A flip of an internal toggle with the Force switched her saber from the PRT-approved hard light stun baton to an actual lightsaber. She burned through the steel door in a second. Grabbing a hanging lantern from the hall outside, she stepped into a good-old fashioned dragon's hoard.
The real dragons didn't seem impressed with the piles of gold. Instead, they continued to hiss and spit as she put them down and filled her emergency backpack with gold. Taylor knew it was going to be ridiculously heavy with the gold and dragons, but she was determined to stop abusing Barristan's coin. Whoever this Silk king was, he obviously participated in Daenerys' death. That made him fair game as far as she was concerned.
The kit pack slotted back into place on her back. The weight of it made her spine ache. With a sigh, she picked the wicker cage back up and secured it over the kit. Even filling the backpack up to capacity, she barely touched a fifth of the man's fortune. And that was just concentrating on the gold coins. He had twice as many silver and copper coins.
Her knees began to ache from the weight before she even reached the top of the stairs.
It should not have surprised her to find herself surrounded by the soldiers from Warlocks way.
"Hey, guys!" she said brightly in English, before blasting the whole lot of them with Force lightning. The foot soldiers screamed and fell back, but Taylor had to admit that despite what should have been an impressive display, the men on horseback surged to attack anyway through sheer force of discipline.
She lashed out with a saber, sending the torso of one of the soldiers falling opposite his legs. More soldiers came brandishing large, curved blades that looked like something Sinbad the Sailor might have used.
Taylor lit her second saber and lost herself in the Force, slashing and spinning. She blasted men with lighting or short bursts of kinetic energy, all the while moving back to the gates of the palace. It dawned on her, at some point, that it was stupid to stay on foot. She selected one particularly brave man, sent him flying with a Force push, and then jumped onto his horse.
She hadn't done any riding since she was nine, and that was at a horse-riding camp Emma's father paid for. But with the Force as her ally and a lot of men trying very hard to kill her, she figured it out quickly.
Mostly.
The horse neighed angrily at her and kicked a few times, but she finally got it galloping toward the gate of the palace, if one used a broad definition of "toward". More soldiers arrived and swung the gate closed, but she fixed that problem easily enough. A kinetic blast of Force energy didn't just open the gates, it blasted them off their hinges, sending splinters of wood shooting into the soldiers trying to stop her.
She burst out of the palace at a full gallop onto Tourmaline Street. She suspected from the way her ass bounced painfully on the strangely shaped saddle that she was probably doing something wrong when it came to riding, but she didn't care. She had an intense need to not be in the city any more, and a galloping horse was even faster than repulsor coils for going forward.
Qartheen voices called out warnings ahead of her. She could hear men on horseback racing behind her, and they actually appeared to know how to ride since they were catching up to her so quickly.
The only thing that might be considered an advantage was that she wouldn't get lost. Once she reached the main boulevard, she could see the gate ahead.
Unfortunately, that meant the guards at the gates could see her as well. More importantly, they could see the dozens of men on horse right behind her, swinging their swords and shouting angrily. How many had she already killed? If they caught her she had no doubt they would try to kill her. As powerful as she was, even the most powerful Bendu Master could be overcome eventually.
City guards poured out of various doors around the gates. The gates were closed, of course, and the tops of the wooden gates sat flush to their frame, ensuring no possibility of Taylor slipping through. More importantly, the innermost walls were fifty feet tall.
With what felt like eighty pounds of gold on her back and another twenty of dragons, she knew she couldn't make that jump even with the Force. Even her repulsor coils would have been hard pressed with the gold that made her back ache so much.
Nor were the gates simple wooden doors. The walls weren't just tall-they were as thick as most buildings. They had barracks within them, and the tunnel through them held at least three iron portcullises, all three of which were down.
She was going to have to fight her way through. And she was going to have to do so without her horse. With that grim determination, Taylor decided to get a jumping start. However, trying to do a trick on a horse without any knowledge proved harder than Taylor had hoped. When she pulled her feet out of the stirrups and tried to stand up on the saddle, the damned beast stopped abruptly with an angry neigh.
Taylor flew right over the bastard animal's head and would have landed on her own head if not for the Force. Instead, she was able to turn the uncontrolled fall into an awkward somersault. Her weight was completely out of balance because of her burdens, and so she stumbled right onto the face plate of her helmet. Her head rang as she bounced. The Force helpfully suggested she get her ass up and moving before she found herself filled with swords and spears.
With a grunt of pain at the effort, Taylor pulled herself up and ran forward toward the soldiers who ran toward her. Like those she saw earlier, they wore the bronzed breastplates and heavy weighted kilts. Their conical helmets shown under the sputtering light of their giant Roman-candle torches. They were shouting at her to stop, while the men coming quickly behind her were shouting at the men in front to kill her.
Lightning blasted from her fingers. Men screamed in shock and pain. She followed with kinetic blasts and continued running forward toward the gate. She could feel more men within the wall, taking stations at the many murder holes that lined the passage.
Don't think so. She skipped the main gate, pulled her blaster, and blew the latch off the door of the guard gate. She entered the wall itself, moving up narrow, ancient stairs. A single man stared at her with bow and arrow. She levitated him up to the low ceiling and then sent him sprawling down the stairs head-first behind her. She emerged into the low-ceilinged chamber that stretched the length of the arched gate tunnel. The men within stared in shock, as if it never dawned on them that she might be there. Then again, the whole structure was meant to keep enemies out, not in.
The Force and her lightsabers cleared a path to the far wall; and a blast of energy opened a way onto the middle bazaar. The jump was only fifteen feet down, but made her knees buckle from the weight on her back. She kept going, knowing that anything else meant her death.
Fortunately, there weren't any men in the open kill area. None expected her to get so far. It was to her benefit that the second wall was built the same as the first. She didn't encounter any guards as she made her way through the wall and into the last courtyard.
Here she found five confused, alarmed soldiers. She switched her sabers to stun and put them down seconds after she landed, and then made for the third wall.
With a last burst of Force power, she jumped free of the city walls. Her knees buckled as she fell, dumping her once more to the ground hard enough to scratch the faceplate of her helmet on the ground. For one split second, as exhaustion and the pain from her knees and back swept over her, she was tempted to just lie still.
The sound of gates opening behind her overcame the feeling. With effort, she stood and turned as one of the original horsemen charged her. She pulled her blaster and snapped off a shot that took the man in the face, flipping him backward off his horse.
Too desperately tired to ignore the option, Taylor caught the startled horse's reins and mounted.
Her breath came in ragged gulps even with the Force refreshing her. Behind her, an entire army of horsemen exploded out onto the trade boulevard that ran the length of the wharf. Foot soldiers followed behind them. Together she guessed over a hundred men, with more coming.
The horse fought her. It was well-trained enough to recognize she did not belong. Though she hated doing so, she quickly overcame the animal's mind. She didn't direct it through the reins or her heels, but through her mental control.
Though the horse was faster, the motion of it felt brutal on her knees and back. She noticed since the fight began that the dragons were not snarling any more. Instead, they were mewling pitifully, either scared or hurt or who knew what.
People were emerging from the various taverns, inns and brothels to see what the noise was about. They saw a faceless shadow in a scary black cloak riding a horse followed by an army of angry Qartheen cavalry. They all quickly ducked back inside.
Taylor reached the end of the wharf and left her mount. The rocky beach would not have been safe to try riding a horse through in the dark. Despite her aching back and knees, now reaching a point where she knew she was actually hurting herself, Taylor made her way through the rocky, treacherous shore. Behind her she could hear men dismounting to take up the chase on foot.
In the distance, barely a shadow, she could see the ship.
This is going to suck. Gathering the Force into her body almost to the point it hurt, Taylor reached the water and burst into an explosive run. The Force bore her feet on the surface of the water, but barely. She could feel her concentration lagging as she sped across the gentle, nighttime sea. The night erupted in angry shouts behind her, and she could feel arrows falling like rain around her. Twice arrows bounced off her helmet. She heard one of the dragons screech in pain, but couldn't afford to stop and check. Because with each step, despite the Force, her feet were going deeper and deeper into the water.
She could see pale faces on the deck of the ship ahead, now. One threw a rope overboard. That rope became the sole purpose of her existence, calling her with the hope of safety and food and rest. With a last, desperate burst of Force power she pushed herself another ten feet before all but leaping for the rope. She sank entirely into the water, causing the already upset dragons to screech in alarm.
The rope pulled her up. She was so tired she almost lost her grip, so she wrapped the rope around her arms and clung to it with shaking legs as men heaved her up onto the deck. Ser Barristan's face was the first to greet her.
"Hey," she said by way of greeting. "Got the dragons. Stole some gold, too. But they're really, really mad at me. We should go."
"I agree, my lady," Barristan said.
The rowers had their oars in the water seconds later.