There was a curious absence of sound, not the thump of blade in flesh but not the wooden thok of a miss. Maybe he ducked and I hit the bed. She was already making her next move, pushing herself out and spinning across the doorway to the other side. This was reasonably safe; even if he was waiting for her to appear, she’d be moving too fast for him to throw or shoot, and she’d have a quick glimpse of him and the room beyond.

As she cleared the doorframe, she saw a figure in dark clothes, across the sitting room in the doorway to the bedroom, right where she’d expected him. He wore a linen mask over his face, and it glittered darkly, as though covered in shards of black glass. Of more concern to Sothe was his posture, right arm forward, as though just finishing a throw of his own.

Something punched her hard in the midriff, throwing off her momentum. She grabbed the doorframe and pulled herself sideways, out of view, but at the last moment she could see the intruder’s left hand was still raised in front of his chest. Steel gleamed between his fingers—what looked very much like her knife, as though he’d picked it out of the air. Which is impossible.

She thumped against the wall, awkwardly, and flattened next to an ornamental table. One hand went to her side, where she found the bare-metal hilt of a throwing knife much like her own, the blade buried deep in her flesh.

Pain was just starting to bloom, and she fought it down with all the ruthlessness of two decades’ practice. Her heart wanted to pound, and her breathing to deepen. She denied these requests from her body, keeping her mind clear. The situation is not what was expected. Reassess.

First step, damage control. She pulled the knife free, took a deep breath, and evaluated the resulting agony dispassionately. Tolerable. Judging by the wound depth and location, it wouldn’t be seriously hampering, and blood loss would remain within acceptable levels.

Second step, threat assessment. That throw was impossible. The flight time of a flung blade was an appreciable fraction of the time it had taken her to spin across the doorway. That meant her opponent had made his move before she had, timing the throw so perfectly it had intercepted her in midmovement. Even if she had known someone was going to leap across a doorway, and had been waiting for precisely that moment, she didn’t think she could have done that. Which means that nobody can.

And my knife— He’d caught it. There had always been fanciful stories about men so fast they could catch a blade thrown at their face, but experiments and experience had taught Sothe that no one was that fast, except by luck. He doesn’t seem like the lucky type.