Warlord Of The Pit

Returning through the archway, she saw a dozen armed men ranged around the railings of the gallery. They exchanged a flurry of gunfire at point-blank range. Two of them clutched at themselves and folded over. The racket of the gunfire and the whine of ricochets stunned Brigid’s senses.

Men rolled on the deck—keening, strangling with their hands, clubbing with empty revolvers, struggling hand-to-hand with knives. She could not differentiate between Captain Saragayn’s men and the insurrectionists, and she didn’t try.

Taking a breath, she focused her attention on an area of the gallery free of combatants and lunged for it, running flat-out. A man in a coverall suddenly loomed out of the darkness and straight-armed her. His slamming palm caught her in the upper chest, driving almost all the wind from her lungs and sending her sprawling.

Brigid slid across the deck on her shoulders and back. As she did, she squeezed off two quick shots between her outspread legs. The man’s shirt sprouted a pair of holes and he went over backward. Dragging air back into her lungs, she climbed to her feet and sprinted for the railing again.

Before she covered much of the distance, two men raced to intercept her. Brigid saw them coming, but she kept going, knowing a retreat back to the archway would only give them clear shots at her back.

She altered direction, racing toward them, firing with the TP-9 at the end of an outstretched arm. They returned fire with handguns and she felt a bullet pluck at her hair, ripping out a few strands by the roots.

Wincing, she kept her finger pressed down on the trigger, directing precision bursts. A man’s face broke apart in flying arcs of blood. Then the slide of the TP-9 blew back into the locked-and-open position. Since stopping or slowing meant an instantaneous death, she increased her speed, the length of her stride, legs pumping fast and furiously.

She flung her weapon in front of her. The metal frame of the TP-9 smashed into the face of Saragayn’s soldier barely half a second before her knee slammed into his solar plexus. Carried by the momentum of her rush, she bowled into him and both of them went down. A shot from the man’s pistol went up into the sky.

Going into a shoulder roll, Brigid cartwheeled up and over the man, using his chest as a springboard. She landed on her feet in a deep squat, and then sprang up and onto the Pandakaran. His face was spattered with blood from a laceration on his forehead. Her right foot, with all her weight behind it, drove into his neck. She pivoted sharply and smartly on her heel, crushing his larynx, grinding her foot into his windpipe.

Clutching at his throat, a flood of scarlet spilling from his open mouth, the man went into convulsions, clawing at the deck with his free hand, legs kicking spasmodically.

Brigid raced for the edge of the deck, leaped atop the railing and then jumped feetfirst into the black water far below. As she fell, she inhaled a deep lungful of oxygen and held it. She slammed through the oily surface of the harbor cleanly. The water felt tepid, almost as warm as the air. Water gushed up her nose and filled her sinus passages, trickling into her throat.

She let herself plunge downward, pulled by the weight of her boots and clothes. Brigid tamped down the panic surging within her. Over five years before she had nearly drowned in the Irish Sea, and since that day, she had developed a morbid fear, almost a phobia, of dying by water.

Slitting her eyes open, the brine stinging them, she stared at the roiling surface above her. She glimpsed only intermittent flashes of light. Her ears registered the muffled, multiple thumps of bullets striking the water. She saw the bubble-laced streaks of the slugs punching into the sea around her.

When her boot soles sank into the soft ooze of the bottom mud, she carefully pushed off at angle, stroking in the general direction of the waterfront. Only when her lungs began to ache intolerably did Brigid decide to surface. She came up slowly near an area of the pier crowded with sampans. She fought the impulse to cough and gasp.

Raking strands of hair away from her eyes, spitting out water, she tried raising Kane and Grant via the Commtact. She received no response and wondered briefly if immersion in seawater had caused the comm unit to malfunction.

Brigid swam underneath the pier. Close overhead was a tangle of timber braces and struts. Long growths of moss dangled from them, like the beards of old wise men she had seen in pictures.

A dull pounding shook the air for a couple of seconds. Looking toward the Juabal Hadiah, she saw a plume of white steam billowing out of a hole in her port-side hull. She assumed various combustibles had exploded within the ship. Treading water, she looked for a way to climb out of the harbor without being seen. Voices shouted back and forth, and slowly they diminished in volume.

Brigid swam quietly toward the shoreline, still keeping just beneath the pier, the barnacle-encrusted pilings scraping her arms. She pulled herself along by the cross struts until her feet touched the bottom and she was able to wade. She reached a wooden ladder made of crudely hammered-together slats, and after resting a minute to regain her breath, she climbed it as quickly as she could. The weight of her sodden clothes and boots dragged at her as she pulled herself up, hand over hand.

When Brigid reached the top, she raised her head by degrees so she could see over the edge of the pier. The first thing she saw was the bore of a gun, staring directly into her face like a hollow, cyclopean eye.