Shadowblade: a Dance of Fire & Shadow, #1 by Jay Aspen

Author:Jay Aspen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fantasy, adventure, romance, epic, dragon
Publisher: Sandfire Publishing Ltd
Published: 2022-08-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

I FOLLOW MARIN WITHOUT a word as he leads me back to a different section of the city wall, dodging away from the deadly patrols with uncanny skill. It must help to know the streets the way he does. We run up the stone steps to the battlements near the section where I climbed in. I can still feel Marin’s anger in the air between us and don’t dare ask how we are going to down-climb the outside.

“Here.” He squeezes a pair of thick leather gloves over my hands, then clips a short length of rope onto my harness. He stands on the edge and points below. “There’s another rope fixed to the wall, twice your height below you.”

He braces my rope against the stonework and pushes me over the edge. The rope comes tight, scraping my body against the rough blocks. I scrabble to turn myself toward the fixed rope, reach out and grip it with the strange gloves. Marin immediately drops the rope he is holding and I start to slide.

This would be a lot easier if I had the sort of practice and advice Deris gave me with climbing. The gloves prevent friction-burns on my hands as I descend but they are getting painfully hot. I grip tighter and slow down. I know I must not stop because I can hear Marin fighting the guards on the top of the wall and he is going to have to jump for the rope any minute now. I may not have much experience of ropework but I know he’ll have a better chance of grabbing it if it doesn’t have my weight on it.

A scream suddenly bursts on my ears as a body flies past to hit the ground below with a sickening crunch. Too close to how I imagine my own descent ending if I don’t get this friction-ropework right. I look up. Marin is leaning over the edge, trying to see how far down I am. I loosen my grip and fly down the last section almost in free fall before clamping my fists closed at the last minute.

It’s all I can do not to scream with the burning in my hands as I let my knees fold under me and roll clear of the wall, letting gravity take me down the grassy slope. When I look up again, Marin is halfway down the rope and there are two guards above him, jostling each other to get their crossbows at the right angle to hit him while he is so close to the wall.

It’s a long shot from here. I shouldn’t have rolled so far. Hastily, I let fly an arrow. In my hurry it misses but at least it makes the guards duck back out of sight. The next arrow is nocked and I steady my breathing to focus on the moment the silhouette shows against the moon. A scream, and the outline of the head disappears.

Marin is beside me now, dragging me toward the trees as the bolts start to fly from above.

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