The carbon-fiber limbs groaned under eighty pounds of tension. Nadirah exhaled, timing the release to the hollow between two heartbeats. The arrow whistled across the dark, a blur of engineered death. Crack. The steel-tipped shaft punched through the torturer's knuckles, driving bone, flesh, and sinew straight through the seasoned cedar of the stake. The short iron knife spun from limp grip, clattering into the gravel. The man shrieked, a high, womanish sound choked by utter shock, his hand pinned flat like a drying hide. "Move!" Nadirah barked. She cast the bow into the sand, her mind wrenching open the pocket inventory. In her palms rested two smooth, cylindrical aluminum canisters. She hooked her index fingers into the pins, ripped them free, and lobbed both cylinders into the belly of the encampment. Psssssh. A thick, pale fog erupted, hissing furiously as it rolled across the burning tallow braziers. Instantly, chaos ripped through the Ash-Throats. The riot-grade CS gas invaded eyes, nostrils, and cracked windpipes. Men who had slit throats for crusts of bread fell to their knees, vomiting violently, clawing at their own faces as chemical fire burned their skin. "Witchcraft! The hag brought demon-spit!" someone howled through choking coughs. Soraya came in low and fast, a curved scimitar gleaming in each fist. "Demon-spit or not, it tastes like iron!" she snarled. She swept beneath a blinded raider's clumsy spear thrust, hamstringing him with a fluid butcher's turn, then kicked him backward into the sizzling fire pit. Jalil advanced like a walking fortress. His short spear punched through a throat, withdrew, and caught another raider in the liver before the man could draw breath to scream. He was favoring his bandaged side, yet every movement was lethal precision. Nadirah ignored the carnage. She sprinted toward the cedar post, modern serrated combat knife already unsheathed. The second sentry lunged at her through the chemical smog, swinging a rusty cleaver. She slipped inside the arc of his swing, shoved her heel into his instep, and drove the butt of her knife into his temple. Bone cracked. He collapsed like a sack of damp grain. With two swift strokes, she sawed through the coarse hemp binding Kamran's wrists. The boy folded forward, raw skin peeling from his ribs where the ropes had bitten deep. Nadirah caught him before his knees met the dirt. Her arms locked around his thin, shivering frame, hauling him against her chest with an intensity that rattled his teeth. "Grandmother..." Kamran choked out, coughing on the stray edges of the gas. "I didn't talk. I swear by the tombs, I told them nothing—" "Shut your mouth, foolish child," Nadirah said. Her voice cracked, the brittle stone facade shattering into dust. She pressed her face into his matted, grime-crusted hair, smelling the blood and sweat on him, and squeezed until he gasped for breath. "You stayed whole. You endured. Enough blubbering, Kamran. On your feet before more come." Kamran froze in her grip. A ragged sob broke from his throat, buried against her collar. For all his boasting of scimitars and blood, he was just fifteen, trembling against her wool wrap. The ground shuddered beneath their boots. A roar split the night, guttural and massive, tearing through the haze of tear gas like a horn blast. The fog parted under sheer physical momentum. Warlord Chakar burst into the clearing. He stood seven feet tall, wrapped in the boiled hides of steppe cattle, his face smeared with grease and gray ashes. A monstrous iron sledge swung in his twin fists, its head as large as an anvil. His eyes were streaming yellow tears from the gas, inflamed and murderous, but he needed no clear vision to spot the knot of survivors. "Old sow!" the brute roared, the veins in his neck bulging like ropes. "I will crack your skull into meal!" He brought the heavy iron down in a crushing overhead descent, aimed straight down at Nadirah and the crippled boy in her arms. Nadirah threw herself over Kamran, shielding his spine with her own body, her knife entirely useless against three hundred pounds of plummeting pig iron. She braced for the impact. It never came. A blur of gray beard and leather crashed across her vision. Jalil hurled his entire weight into the giant's midsection, tackling the colossus off balance. The massive maul altered course by inches. The blunt iron head clipped Jalil's shoulder with a sickening, wet crunch of splintering bone. The force of the glancing blow flung the scout five yards across the hardpan, tossing him like a bundle of rags into the stones. He hit the earth limp, motionless. "Jalil!" Soraya screamed from the perimeter, parrying two panicked raiders. The giant stumbled, roaring in agony as his forward momentum carried him past Nadirah. He fought to recover his footing, dragging the weapon back for a sweeping blow. He was too slow. Thirty-five years of survival instincts, of cold modern butchery and maternal wrath, converged into a single white-hot needle of focus. Nadirah rose from the sand. She did not scream. She did not hesitate. She closed the distance in two steps, grabbed the braided beard dangling from the warlord's chin, and yanked his head down with all her leverage. As his bull neck exposed itself, she drove the eight-inch carbon-steel blade upward beneath his jaw, punching straight through the soft palate and deep into his brainstem. Chakar's roar died into a wet, bubbling gargle. His tiny, ash-rimmed eyes bulged. He stared at the silver-haired woman clinging to his face with the ferocious grip of a mountain cat. Nadirah twisted the handle a quarter-turn, wrenching the steel sideways to sever the cord of life completely, then ripped it free in a spray of dark arterial froth. The hammer slipped from dead fingers, thudding into the dirt. The Warlord collapsed like a fanned mud wall, crashing face-first at her feet. [Major threat neutralized.] [New inventory aisle unlocked: Power & Infrastructure.] The blue letters scrolled silently before her eyes, completely irrelevant. Nadirah let the dripping knife tumble from her hand. She spun on her heels, kicking Chakar's corpse aside without a glance, her boots churning the sand as she sprinted across the clearing. "Jalil!" She dropped to her knees beside the scout. His head rested awkwardly against an outcropping of gray shale. Blood seeped from his nose, running into the silver whiskers of his beard. His chest did not rise. When she grabbed his wrist, pressing two fingers hard against the radial groove, the skin beneath was slack, cool, and terrifyingly still.

Tear Gas and War Hammers