“I hope not. Now turn around.”
This was it. Arms still held away from her body, Shada rotated ninety degrees to face the skylight&mdash
And taking a step backward, she dropped off the edge of the roof.
She’d half expected Karoly to get a quick blaster shot off before she disappeared over the edge. It didn’t happen; Karoly either freezing with surprise or else too self-controlled to fire uselessly. But Shada didn’t have time to speculate on which it was. The safety line snapped taut, and suddenly she was caroming off the wall as she swung down and to her right, pivoting about that last anchor she’d set near the rooftop. Another two seconds, she estimated, and she would pass the midpoint of her oscillat ion and swing up again to the rooftop where Karoly and her blaster waited.
She had just those two seconds to find a way to take down her onetime friend.
The startled blufferavian didn’t even have time to squawk as Shada snatched it from its nest. She managed to grab one of the eggs with her other hand, and then she was swinging back up toward the roof.
And her two-second grace period was over. Even as she cocked the bird over her shoulder in throwing position Karoly appeared above her at the edge of the roof, hurrying toward the spot from which Shada had jumped, her eyes and blaster tracking down the side of the building. She caught sight of Shada-floundered off balance for a split second as she tried to halt her forward movement and shift her aim&mdash
And with a grunt of exertion, Shada hurled the blufferavian at her face.
There was no time for Karoly to think, no time for her even to pause and evaluate. There was a sudden confused flurry of wings in front of her as the blufferavian tried to recover its equilibrium; and in the absence of thought, powerfully ingrained Mistryl combat reflexes took over. She jerked back, the movement eroding her precarious balance even further, twisted the muzzle of her blaster toward the incoming missile, and fired.
The blaster bolt caught the blufferavian dead center, and suddenly the flapping wings became a turmoil of flame and sparks and acrid smoke. Karoly ducked away from the fireball, twisting her head to the side&mdash
Just in time to catch Shada’s thrown blufferavian egg squarely across the bridge of her nose.
She gasped as the egg splattered into her eyes, throwing her free hand up to try to wipe away the semiliquid mass blinding her as Shada hit her safety-line feed release again and vaulted up onto the rooftop. Circling a couple of meters to her right to get out of the line of fire of the blaster still waving in her general direction, she angled in.
She reached Karoly just as the younger woman got her eyes cleared, kicking the blaster out of her hand as she tried to bring the weapon around toward her. The blaster hit the edge of the roof behind Karoly and bounced off into the darkness below. “Shassa,” Karoly hissed the old curse, jumping to her right out of Shada’s reach and producing a gleaming knife from somewhere. “Shada-“
“I’m obeying my duty,” Shada said, sidestepping to her right away from the knife tip. “You’ve still got the option of getting out of my way.”
Karoly hissed something else and lunged forward. Shada sidestepped again toward her right, feinted toward Karoly, took another quick step to the side and then changed direction back toward the skylight.
But Karoly had anticipated the move. Blinking more of the egg out of her eyes, she took a long step the same direction, her knife waving warningly. Shada countered by stepping perilously close to the roof edge and taking two quick strides along it in an attempt to get around onto Karoly’s left side away from her knife hand. Karoly spun around in response, knife held ready. “Don’t make me do this, Shada,” she snarled.
Snarled. And yet, Shada thought she could hear a buried note of pleading there as well. “All right, Karoly,” she said softly. “I won’t.” Snapping on her climbing harness’s feed lock again, she leaped backward one last time along the edge of the roof&mdash
And the safety line that her carefully choreographed sparring maneuvers had threaded neatly around behind Karoly snapped up tautly to catch the younger woman across the tops of her low boots. Flailing her knife uselessly as her feet were yanked out from under her, she fell with a painful sounding thud flat onto her back.
Shada was on her in an instant, one foot coming down on Karoly’s knife wrist as she slapped away the other hand and then jabbed stiffened fingertips into the soft spot beneath her rib cage. With an agonized grunt Karoly folded up around the impact and toppled over on her side. Shada jabbed again, this time behind Karoly’s ear, and the younger woman relaxed and lay still.