Page 41 of To Clutch a Razor
Niko puzzles over them. He knows the Knights’ belief system has no real depth to it—every culture has Knights, and Knights always use the religious rhetoric of whatever place they come from to justify killing monsters—but he thought there was at least theappearanceof consistency. It seems he was wrong.
“Do they trouble you?” Marzena asks him, and she sounds polite, if detached. He’s not surprised she hasn’t attacked him yet. From what he’s heard of Marzena, she loves to play with her food before she eats it.
“I can look at them without bursting into flames, if that’s what you mean.” Maybe he should attack her right now, before she’s ready for it—but there may also be value in learning as much as he can about her before he does.
“When I was young, I believed in them.” She wiggles her tattooed fingers at Niko. “But now I’m aware they have no true power. There’s nothing otherworldly about you.”
“Oh really?” Niko laughs a little. “The fact that I can make you see things that aren’t there, that seems completely ordinary to you?”
“A hallucinogenic mushroom can also make me see things that aren’t there. I don’t call them supernatural, either.”
Niko raises his eyebrows. “That’s a good point, actually. And here I was thinking all Knights were mindless brutes.”
Marzena stops in front of him and folds her arms. She’s wiry, her body all sinews and tendons.
“The wieszczy was your doing, wasn’t it?” she says. “How did you get it to cooperate? I found it to be… rather stubborn, myself.”
“Let me tell you the secret to getting any creature to do your bidding,” Niko says, and he leans closer, theatrical. “You have torealize they’re peopleandtreat them accordingly.”
Marzena smiles.
“Let me tellyoua secret, zmora,” she says. “I have never been under the impression that you and your kind are soulless monsters, or whatever the usual Knight sermons are these days. I believe what my eyes see, which is that you have feelings, you have families, you have all the same shit we have.” She rolls her eyes, like families and feelings are just inconveniences—and to her, perhaps they are. She doesn’t strike Niko as particularlymaternal,whatever that really means.
She goes on: “We’re all just meat, I know that. Animals, eating whatever food we find, and trying to keep other creatures from killing us. But your kindfeedson my kind—you’re our only natural predator. You’re fast and strong and long-lived, and you have strange abilities we don’t fully comprehend. The way I see it, our only advantage is that we outnumber you. And it’s my job—my duty, as a member of the human race—to make sure it stays that way.” She shrugs. “I take no particular joy in killing a harmless little zmora. It’s nothing personal.”
“Can’t really say the same. For me, it’s definitely a little bit personal.” Niko smiles. “And I’m not a zmora, you idiot.”
And then he lets the ropes that Ala pretended to bind his hands with fall away… and he transforms, shrugging off the temporary body Ala loaned him like it’s a suit that he’s grown out of, and relaxing into his sowa form, the owl version of himself that shifts beneath the surface of him, always waiting to emerge.
It’s painful to change—it always is—but it feels like wiggling a loose tooth, the way the beak grows out of his mouth, the way the fine hairs all over his skin turn into feathers, the way his eyeballs elongate, pulled backward into his skull like taffy. Wings grow from the bones of his spine, so rapidly they’re just a white-hot burst of agony before they explode from his back, and talons split open his fingertips. All of it happens in a flurry of sensation, and he’s already launching himself into the air to collide with Marzena Mysliwiec, the Razor, with all the force he can muster.
He carves ten long, bright gashes into her chest, and she screams—not like she’s afraid, but like she’senraged. He’s not prepared for how ready she is to make use of the pain he gave her. She spits a spell at him, hurling him backward with a powerful breath of wind, and he slams into the cabinets as she puts both hands behind her head and buries her blunt fingernails in her flesh.
He hears it, this time. The splitting of skin and the piercing of muscle, the way her bones creak and crack to release the sword. She breathes hard and fast, and red stains her palms, her arms. Red stains her eyes, too, making her look like—of all things—a vampire from an old movie.
He lands on his feet, his balance aided by his wings. Marzena is already on top of him, swinging her bone sword hard at his head; he just manages to roll away asthe blade lands, breaking one of the planks on the cabinet door with its force.
He twists and kicks at her left leg, the one she’s so careful to take weight away from when she walks, and she howls, grabbing her knee with her free hand.
He uses her moment of distraction to reach into the cabinet she broke open and grab the first sword he can get his hands on. It’s a szabla—a little old, if the roughness of the blade is any indication, and a little curved. Heavy at the hilt, but he adjusts to it, letting the owl sink back into him as he charges his opponent.
He’s even-footed and he uses the saber as a cudgel, bashing at Marzena’s head. She blocks him and pushes him back with that startling Knight strength. Light on his feet, he rebounds, but only in time to defend himself against three blows in quick succession. The impact makes his wrist ache; Marzena is stronger than the last Knight he fought, though smaller, and he’s not sure how that’s possible, unless it’s by magic—
He tries to cut her, but she only laughs, and digs her bloody fingers into one of the gashes he left her at the start of all this.
“Rozszczep,” she says, in a tone of command, and the skin over his heart simply… splits open, like a burst grape. Blood runs hot down Niko’s torso, and he swallows a scream, but she hasn’t finished.
“Zlam!” she commands, pressing down again with herfingers in her own wound, and one of his fingers twists in the wrong direction and cracks, the bone unmistakably breaking—
—and in her smile, he sees that no amount of preparation could have aided him in this task. She’s fearless and she’s ready and she has a mouth full of Knight curses and he gave her all the pain she would need to use them.
He really was sent here to die.
19A WHIFF OF PERFUME
Dymitr is familiar with pain.Pain is a part of any life,his grandmother used to say.But for a Knight it’s even more essential. Pain was where their magic came from, it was the sacrifice that magic required, but it needed no bargaining, no deal-making, no pleading, as other forms of magic did. Pain magic was control, it was command.Pain is power.
This pain is not like that.
