The thud landed on the carriage roof with the weight of a person who had dropped from a tree rather than climbed, which meant they were in a hurry, which meant the forty minutes of patience had run out.
His eyes opened.
Not gradually. All at once. The eyes of someone coming out of awareness rather than sleep — alert and already assessing in the same moment.
The roof buckled.
Not the wood — the canvas over the wooden frame, the specific give of something taking concentrated weight in the center. And then the sound of it tearing. Not accidentally — deliberately, a blade drawing through it, and the pale morning light coming in through the gap in a thin line that widened, and framed in it—
A figure.
Short. Masked — the mask covering everything above the jaw, black, functional. No house colors. No identifying marks. Dark clothes. The blade in their hand caught the light coming through the torn canvas and held it.
The figure looked down at him.
He looked up at them.
"Excuse me," the figure said. The voice was — he filed it — disguised. The specific flatness of someone pitching their voice away from its natural register, speaking lower than came naturally, the effort of it almost invisible. Almost.
A pause.
"But you are needed dead, Mr. Falke."
He looked at the blade. At the figure. At the torn canvas through which he could now see a strip of grey sky and the fog sitting in it.
He put his head back.
Forty minutes, he thought, and this is how it starts.
He laughed.
Not because it was funny. Because it was his and because the laugh had been with him longer than anything else he owned and because he was not going to give anyone the satisfaction of the alternative.
"Apologies," he said pleasantly, "but it's quite not the time for me to meet Death." He looked up at the figure with the blade and the mask. "Either way, I can send you ahead if you are so eager."
The blade came down.
He was already moving.
The blade hit the carriage seat where he had been — deep, the specific depth of a strike that had been aimed to end the conversation immediately and had found cushioning instead. He was on the floor, the space too small for anything elegant, working with the tools available.
The figure in the canvas gap was fast.
He gave them that.
They came through the torn roof with the controlled drop of someone who had done this before, landing in the carriage's cramped space without the stumble that should have accompanied it, the blade already repositioned before their feet settled. Trained. Someone had paid for training.
He caught the blade hand at the wrist — both hands, one on the wrist and one on the elbow, redirecting rather than blocking because in the available space blocking was for people with more room than he had — and drove his elbow back the other way into the figure's face.
The mask absorbed some of it.
Not all.
"Might I add," he said, adjusting his grip, "that it's incredibly rude to interrupt someone's nap."
The figure wrenched free with more strength than their size suggested, which he noted and recalibrated for, and they were in the small carriage together doing the ugly close-quarters thing that looked nothing like fighting in books and everything like two people trying very hard to end each other's morning.
He got a hand on their coat.
The other hand — the figure was trying to drive the knee up, he deflected with his thigh, cost him his footing for a second — found the figure's face. The mask. Fingers closing on it to pull.
The mask came away.
He almost lost his grip entirely.
Not because of what he saw — he did not fully see, the carriage was dim and the moment too fast and he registered wrong before he registered specifics. But his other hand, in the chaos of the moment, in the attempt to get purchase on something to use as leverage — his other hand found the figure's chest.
Not the flat chest he had been expecting.
The figure made a sound.
He made a sound.
They stared at each other.
"What?" his brows rose in surprise.
She hit him.
Full force, the flat of her palm to his jaw, and it was a good hit — he had been hit harder but not often, and the specific angle of it made stars appear in his vision in a way that suggested she had done this with intention rather than panic.
He hit the carriage side.
"Damn," he said. Genuinely. Not performance — genuine surprise. The stars settling. "What are—" he paused, processing. "You're a girl."
She had her blade back.
Her mask was gone.
He looked at her face for the first time — the specific half-second of now I know what I'm dealing with that fights allowed before they resumed — and processed: young, very controlled, the face of someone who had been angry at something for a long time and had directed the anger usefully. The kind of face that had been pretty once and had decided pretty was not the point and had moved on from it. Short-cropped hair beneath where the mask had been. Dark eyes that were covered with messy bangs — he would think about the eyes later. Not now.
"What the actual—" he started.
The carriage door was wrenched open from outside.
He looked.
The three riders from the tree line.
The fourth from the road behind.
Seven of them total, now, surrounding the stopped carriage on a road in the fog with the specific quality of a situation that had gotten away from its original parameters.
He looked at the girl with the blade.
She looked at the riders.
Then at him.
"You have five seconds," she said, low, "before they decide the carriage is a liability and just burn it."
"I know," he said.
He reached into his coat.
The revolver was not the kind of weapon that belonged to this century or the next one. It was a Guild artifact — six chambers, the mechanism a Guild artificer's solution to the problem of rate of fire, a problem the Guild had decided was worth solving. He had acquired it at significant expense and had been told, when he acquired it, that each round cost more than a week's inn stay.
He looked at the seven people surrounding the carriage.
Then he looked at the revolver.
"These are the latest model," he said, mostly to himself. He checked the cylinder. Six rounds. "I loaded them for safety precautions, I really intended not to use the babies." He looked up. The seven people were looking at the weapon with the specific expression of people recalibrating their immediate plans. "They're darn right expensive. Each bullet costs a fortune." He stood up in the carriage's open door, which was not a tactically ideal position and was an aesthetically committed one. "But I guess you die expensive."