He’d no sooner done so than N’ashap emerged from the cell, with one hand in Pie’s ringlets and the other holding his sword, a gleaming sweep of steel, to the mystif s belly. The scars on N’ashap’s swollen head were inflamed by the drink in his system; the rest of his skin was dead white, almost waxen. He reeled as he stood in the doorway, all the more dangerous for his lack of equilibrium. The mystif had proved in New York it could survive traumas that would have laid any human dead in the gutter. But N’ashap’s blade was ready to gut it like a fish, and there’d be no surviving that. The commander’s tiny eyes fixed as best they could on Gentle.
“Your mystif s very faithful all of a sudden,” he said, panting. “Why’s that? First it comes looking for me, then it won’t let me near it. Maybe it needs your permission, is that it? So give it.” He pushed the blade against Pie’s belly. “Go on. Tell it to be friendly, or it’s dead.”
Gentle lowered his hands a little, very slowly, as if in an attempt to appeal to Pie. “I don’t think we have much choice,” he said, his eyes going between the mystif s impassive face and the sword poised at its belly, putting the time it would take for a pneuma to blow N’ashap’s head off against the speed of the captain’s blade.
N’ashap was not the only player in the scene, of course. There were three guards already here, all armed, and doubtless more on their way.
“You’d better do what he wants,” Gentle said, drawing a deep breath as he finished speaking.
N’ashap saw him do so, and saw too his hand going to his mouth. Even drunk, he sensed his danger and loosed a shout to the men in the passageway behind him, stepping out of their line of fire, and Gentle’s, as he did so.
Denied one target, Gentle unleashed his breath against the other. The pneuma flew at the guards as their trigger fingers tightened, striking the nearest with such violence his chest erupted. The force of the blow threw the body back against the other two. One went down immediately, his weapon flying from his hand. The other was momentarily blinded by blood and a shrapnel of innards but was quick to regain his balance, and would have blown Gentle’s head off had his target not been on the move, flinging himself towards the corpse. The guard fired once wildly, but before he could fire again Gentle had snatched up the dropped weapon and answered the fire with his own. The guard had enough Oethac blood to be indifferent to the bullets that came his way, till one found his spattered eye and blew it out. He shrieked and fell back, dropping his gun to clamp both hands to the wound.
Ignoring the third man, still moaning on the floor, Gentle went to the cell door. Inside, Captain N’ashap stood face to face with Pie ‘oh’ pah. The mystif s hand was on the blade. Blood ran from the sliced palm, but the commander was making no attempt to do further damage. He was staring at Pie’s face, his own expression perplexed.
Gentle halted, knowing any intervention on his part would snap N’ashap out of his distracted state. Whoever he was seeing in Pie’s place—the whore who resembled his mother, perhaps; another echo of Tishalulle, in this place of lost mamas?—it was sufficient to keep the blade from removing the mystif s fingers.
Tears began to well in N’ashap’s eyes. The mystif didn’t move, nor did its gaze flicker from the captain’s face for an instant. It seemed to be winning the battle between N’ashap’s desire and his murderous intention. His hand un-knotted from around the sword. The mystif opened its own fingers, and the weight of the sword carried it out of the captain’s grip to the ground. The noise it made striking the stone was too loud to go unheard by N’ashap, however entranced he was, and he shook his head violently, his gaze going instantly from Pie’s face to the weapon that had fallen between them.