“It’s not a great one, but yes.”
Shouts echoed from the corridor they’d recently exited.
Tynan glanced back at her. “There are too many of them for me, warlord or no, to shoot down. But we can’t expect to just outrun them either. They’ll be able to track us from their cruiser, and wehave no way off-planet with our shuttle destroyed.”
She swallowed hard, his detached assessment so at odds with his impassioned kiss. “We can’t give up.” That much she knew.
“Not this time,” he agreed. “But we need to scatter them, distract them, give the ones left on the cruiser something to do besides hunt us.”
She grimaced. “Seems a shame to set fire to that much ghost-mead on their ship.”
He cupped her cheek. “I like the way you think. But instead of fire, we’ll use what the storm last night gave us: water.”
Glancing nervously down at the courtyard where the alcohol-fueled flames were already dying out—why did she keep thinking about dying?—she fisted her hand in the front of his tunic. “You want to pray for rain?”
“It rained already. All that water is stored in the cisternson the peak above us. I’m going to lure them into the ducts and you are going to flush.”
She blinked. “That is a shitty idea.”
He snickered, then sobered when he noticed she wasn’t laughing too. “What it lacks in elegance, it more than compensates for in irony, don’t you think?”
“I think you’re crazy!” She didn’t bother not shouting since his whole stupid idea was the bad guys chasing him.
“You’re the one who believes I’m the God of Beloveds,” he reminded her. “What does that make you?”
While she was grinding her teeth, she almost took a stunner blast to the back.
“Blackworm!” The scream of fury from below was more personal than any unpaid mercenary.
“It’s Radek,” she gasped as the rest of the mercenaries boiled out of the corridor into the courtyard.
“Larf it,” Tynan snarled.“He’s not going to be bought off with trinkets or anything else that doesn’t include Blackworm’s head.”
He grabbed the second bottle of liquor from her and tossed it out over the courtyard. One shot from his blaster nailed it in mid-air, raining fire down on the mercenaries who ducked and scattered. Her universal translator struggled to decipher the dozen profanities aimed up at them.
Not tomention the barrage of yellow stun-setting energy also aimed up at them, brighter than suns. They raced onward, taking the left-hand ramp, dodging the plasma until Tynan yanked her through a narrow doorway in the wall, out of range.
For the moment.
The doorway took them to an outer ledge along the castle wall. She gasped and shrank back at the breath-stealing sight of the sheer, seemingly bottomlessdive off the side of the cliff.
He’d called the castle his mountain stronghold, but having only seen the sheltering jungle arms at the front, she hadn’t realized the ruins were set right up against the edge of a gorge. Too steep to support any plantings except the most tenacious of vines, the chasm plunged into deep shadow. From somewhere far below, a low roar drifted up along with a cool breathof air. A river, she guessed, swollen from the storm.
They were standing in the archway of something like the ancient aqueducts on Earth. Though only a section was visible from where they stood, she could imagine smaller pipes feeding the castle proper. But the main duct was large enough to stand upright. She clutched at his arm. “This is too dangerous.”
His dark eyes bored into her. “You saidyou believed in me.”
“I do.” She couldn’t keep the despairing truth from her voice.
And they couldn’t go back. The rumble of booted feet slamming up the ramp was louder than her frantic heartbeat.
She kissed him, hard and fast. “Show me how to flush the bastards.”
He pointed. “The control center is that way, through that third arch. You’ll see the diagram that shows where you open and closethe sluices to direct the flow. Send everything from the cistern through the main channel. That’s where I’ll be leading them.”
“I do think tanks, not septic tanks!”
His lips twitched. “You’ll do whatever you must. That’s one of the things I love about you.”
“How will you get out?” The sound of boots, of the water, of her pulse slushing in her ears made her quaver.
“This was my home, and Iknow the tunnels. I’ll let myself out through one of the side channels.” He slapped the blaster into her hand. “Now go.”
Without waiting for her reply, as if he had no doubt she could do this, he wheeled and raced back the way they’d come, to lead Radek and the mercs into the trap. Biting back a cry of anguish, she ran for the controls.
He said he loved her.
And she hadn’t told him she lovedhim.
