Page 40 of To Clutch a Razor
“Am I?” Ala raises her eyebrows. “Or did you lose your grip on your beloved curse-bearer?”
Before Joanna can respond, Ala lunges with the knife outstretched. She thought, in this moment, she wouldbe half-hearted—not accustomed to killing, maybe she wouldn’t be able to strike as hard as she needed to. But her body doesn’t hesitate, as she feared it would. She aims for Joanna’s belly, and the movement is strong and committed, the point of the blade about to bury itself in the old woman’s soft abdomen.
But she realizes right away how badly she miscalculated. Because Joanna may be an old woman, she may be finished with her life of hunting innocent creatures down, but she’s still a Knight.
In the space of a breath, Joanna draws a dagger from the sheath over her spine, and counters Ala’s blade. At the same time, she elbows Ala hard in the jaw, so hard she sees stars and lurches back, gasping.
Desperate, Ala projects the darkness illusion that she favors, the one that renders her opponent blind. The problem with her illusions is that she has to see them, too; she’s never figured out how to exempt herself from the projection. But she knows where Joanna was when she saw her last, so she rushes forward with her arms outstretched and collides with the Knight’s legs, shoving her back into the wall.
A line of heat along her arm; Joanna cut her, but not very deep. Or maybe Ala is just choking on adrenaline and can no longer feel pain. She stabs, and the illusion fails just in time for her to see her knife buried in Joanna’s leg. The old woman roars and kicks Ala off her, sending her sprawling on the dirt.
Ala is ready with another illusion, this one inspired by her memory of the zmora. She makes herself look like a bear
and then a snake
and then a fox.
She’s hoping the reminder of the zmora Joanna once killed will destabilize her. And it seems to—the Knight’s steps falter, though she keeps coming, and Ala tries to roll out of the way, but Joanna is too fast. She’s already grabbing Ala by the ankle and punching her in the gut by the time Ala registers movement.
As Joanna’s fingers close over Ala’s throat, she thinks,It was a mistake to come here. She thought she knew how fast Knights are, how strong, she thought sheunderstood—
But as Dymitr said, there’s knowing and there’s knowing.
“Tell me, zmora,” Joanna asks her, as she chokes Ala. “How many of your kind have you watched die?”
This time, Ala isn’t interested in joining in the banter. She’s busy imagining the courtyard from Joanna’s perspective. The tangle of greenery and the bits of gravel; the side of the house lit blue by the moon. She imagines it without Ala there to interrupt the flow of space. And then, like she’s tearing out a piece of fabric, she twists away and stitches herself a few feet to the right, so Joanna will think she’s somewhere she isn’t.
It’s a trap, and Joanna falls into it, swinging at the illusory Ala and ignoring the one right in front of her. Her dagger hits nothing but air.
Ala is already moving toward her when she realizes she made another critical error:
Joanna’s last swing was a feint.
Her weight has already shifted, and she’s stabbing low and fast at Ala’s undefended side. She buries the blade in Ala’s gut. Ala screams.
18A RAZOR’S EDGE
The first time Niko killed a Knight, he was ready to die. Statistically speaking, that was the most likely outcome for a strzygon who had just taken the zemsta oath. Most of them rushed in too fast and got skewered by a bone sword and then the next strzygon in the database, some cousin creature, a Greek strix or a Jewish estrie or even the rare Japanese tatarimokke—who could fully shift into owls, something Niko can’t even imagine—would be called forward for the job.
So Niko didn’t rush in too fast the first time. He got a tip from a double-crosser in Boston that a Knight had come calling about a suspected changeling, and he flew out there a few days after taking his oath. The oath made it so he could do simple tracking spells, so he used them to sniff the Knight out, to plant a few rumors, to lure them to the place of his choosing, and so on.
In the end, though, it came down to sword against sword. And you couldn’t really prepare for what it was like to cross blades with a Knight. They were all good at it—every single one Niko had come across. They trainedfrom childhood. And more than that, they were driven by the deep conviction that anyone they drew their sword against was a soulless, life-sucking, humanity-torturing being thatneeded to die. No matter how much Niko hated Knights, he could never believe that of them in return… because he simply didn’t believe that anyone was beyond redemption.
Which is how he’d ended up in this pickle to begin with.
But his first Knight—
His first Knight was American, not Polish. There were chapters of the Holy Order, after all, in almost every country in the world. And the Knight was a boy, too—only eighteen. Acne dusted his cheeks and he was still gangly with youth and Niko desperately didn’t want to kill him. So Niko almost got himself killed, instead. Because when thatchilddrew his bone sword, and his eyes turned bloodred, and he came at Niko with all the strength and fervor in his body, it was damn hard to survive him.
But one thing Knights usually weren’t was tricky, and Niko was born with a superabundance of trickiness. So some clever footwork and some well-timed light spells—always his favorite—caught the Knight off guard. The boy ended up bleeding out in a little alley next to some trash cans. To be disposed of the following day by the local family of banshees.
One thing Niko never told anyone is that he requested a mass for the Knight. The boy was young, after all, evenif he was on a mission to murder achangeling,which was really just a child—albeit a child of a very different nature.
The whole debacle was an important lesson in preparation: its importance, and also its insufficiency.
Marzena paces the edge of the weapons room, and Niko listens to her footsteps. Sometimes he learns things from listening that he doesn’t learn from watching, though his kind have both good vision and good hearing, as a rule. From Marzena, he learns that she’s favoring her right leg. She must have injured herself on her recent hunt.
The weapons room is hexagonal, though the exterior of this part of the house is round. A bench that must have been taken from an old church is leaning against the wall near the door, and all along the walls are cabinets that Niko assumes hold weapons. They’re locked, so they’re of no use to him, but they’re made of dusty, rough wood, like an old ship. And above him, etched into the vaulted wood ceiling, are protective symbols—some of them are Catholic, some not, like a six-pointed rosette, or a triquetra, or an Auseklis cross.
