Authors: Saje Williams
One of the wolves gave a low growl and she moved to the edge to check it out. A small contingent of what could have been city watchmen were approaching the Stronghold gate. Four of them paused, still in www.samhainpublishing.com 189
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formation, as one of them walked forward and pulled a cord that rang a bell deep inside the keep’s bowels.
Interesting, on one level, at least, but it didn’t look like it had anything to do with them. She left the edge in disgust and made her way back to the makeshift chair she’d constructed toward the center of the roof. As an assassin, she’d grown accustomed to lying in wait for long periods, but since she’d given it up, she discovered she really didn’t have the patience for it anymore. It just went to show how quickly important skills atrophied once they were no longer being used.
Face it, Morrigan,
she thought
. You’re just getting lazy.
Bryon had to put down a feeling of unease as he walked into the dockside tavern. It was well known as a thieves’ den, and most likely the thieves’ guild base of operations. It was said that no honest man, or woman for that matter, would dare step foot across the threshold of
The
Burgher’s Bane
.
Silly ass name for a thieves’ den,
he thought cynically, but it was in keeping with the whole corrupt power structure in this city.
If it didn’t affect those in charge, they pretty much ignored it. They probably got a chuckle out of such an obvious slap in the face of the middle class—such as it was these days.
He was dressed in a commoner’s outfit, though his mustache and goatee made it pretty obvious he was not. Commoners wore full beards or mustaches only as a general rule. Most didn’t have the free time it took to groom a goatee to make it look as good as his.
The barroom swam with smoke and noise and he winced against the stench assailing his nostrils from entirely too many unwashed bodies.
Not the burglars, of course—they, at least, knew that they could as easily be betrayed by their scent as by making too much noise—but those who performed other, perhaps less savory tasks had better things to do than make themselves ‘smell pretty.’
A
shakkir
game at a corner table threw out a wall of sound, laughter, flashing jibes, and growls of frustration, but Bryon knew that no violence would be forthcoming. Those who managed such places as this rarely 190
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tolerated bloodletting in their establishments unless, of course, the bloodletting was done on their orders.
The tavern fell into an uneasy silence as the patrons turned their gazes upon him. He cleared his throat. “I seek an audience with The Spider,” he said, referring to the unknown entity who ruled the thieves guild and its membership.
“Good for you,” said one of the patrons, rising to his feet. He stood nearly two feet taller and nearly twice as wide as Bryon, and glared down at the governor’s son out of tiny, dark, pig-like eyes from within a jungle of facial hair that made his features nearly indiscernible. “You ain’t getting one.”
Bryon felt his spine stiffen a little and smiled up at the towering man-mountain. “The question here is not whether I get to talk to The Spider, but how many people I have to injure or kill to gain that audience.”
The sound of several dozen chairs scraping against the wooden floor filled the tavern and Bryon let out an inaudible groan. That had been a remarkably stupid thing to say, he realized. He was letting the rush of power go to his head. He might be a vampire now, but it didn’t make him indestructible. He was no Raven, that was for sure.
He did, however, have his own methods of persuasion. He reached inside his jacket in a movement so quick he felt certain no one could track it, and pulled out one of the pistols Raven had passed out to their crew. He pointed it at the man and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The trigger didn’t even move. Frowning, he brought it close and looked it over. He’d forgotten to take the safety off.
He remedied the oversight, but by the time he managed that, the giant of a man had roared in fury and charged him. He was snatched off the floor and slammed into one of the support columns holding up the roof.
He smiled down at the man-mountain and clipped him behind the ear with the butt of the pistol. The man’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and he folded like a beach umbrella, dropping Bryon back to the floor. He nudged the unconscious body with a foot and spread his gaze across the room. “Well, that was fun,” he said slowly, pretending to www.samhainpublishing.com 191
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brush imaginary dust off his long jacket with a free hand. “Anybody else want to play?”
Out of the crowd two men rushed him. He calmly lifted the pistol and shot one in the leg. The second he met with an outstretched arm, effortlessly slamming him to the floor. He placed one boot on the man’s face and grinned out at the crowd. “I’m really finding it hard to believe that you people are this stupid. I could kill damn near every one of you without breaking a sweat. Take me to see The Spider and we can be done with all this. I’d hate to have to hurt anyone else.”
He flicked his gaze to the guy squirming around on the floor, blood pumping from a hole in his leg. “Better get that guy a healer before he bleeds to death.” He smiled, revealing his extended canines. “I mean
now!”
This last came out as a roar, easily as loud as the pistol report had been.
Raven should have done this himself, he thought. Somehow he just didn’t have the whole menacing thing down very well. He stifled a sigh.
Maybe he could take lessons on how to frighten mortals.
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Chapter Twenty-six
Val opened her eyes to the sound of conversation, but, as had been the case for several months now, could see nothing of her surroundings.
They kept her in darkness so absolute, she could see nothing but the pulse of her heartbeat against her eyes. It was strange, but remarkably effective as a way to negate her primary power. She would never have considered it herself, but, in the darkness, she had no way to focus her telekinetic gift.
Her other psychic gifts, never quite as powerful, had risen to take the place of the one she could no longer exercise. The minds of her captors occasionally opened to her, their thoughts, fears, and ambitions flowing unbidden into her own consciousness.
She even knew where she was, though the information did her no good. The estate was about a day’s ride on horseback from the city—on land deeded to Goban by the Church itself. She was locked into the estate’s cellar, in a dungeon constructed specifically to house her.
One of the voices was Goban’s, and he sounded anything but happy.
He’d apparently been instructed to bring her to the Church Preceptor in the city, and thought it would be too dangerous. He’d heard rumors—
that strange creatures stalked the city, and he was certain that Raven and his crew was somehow behind it. They were looking for Val, and wouldn’t give up until they found her.
She tried not to allow hope too much of a foothold in her heart, but she needed something to keep going. Trapped in this ever-present darkness, with nothing but the thoughts in her head and the thoughts of her captors to keep her occupied.
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She had a small hole in one corner—a hole she identified originally by smell alone, and food and water was shoved through a thin slot in the bottom of the door twice a day. She slept on a narrow cot on the opposite wall, under a thin, itchy blanket that smelled as if it hadn’t been washed in a few years. But it had kept her warm enough in this cold prison.
How she wasn’t mad already she couldn’t guess. Sheer stubbornness, perhaps. All she knew was that she was holding onto hope of rescue, and, if they made one misstep, she’d bloody this bunch like a ferret let loose in a henhouse and rescue herself.
“You can’t use a gun to scare people who don’t know what one is,”
Raven growled with a shake of his head.
Bryon looked pained. “The damned thing sure scared
me
at first.”
“Yeah, but you already had an idea of what it was. Tomorrow we’ll both go down to the ‘Bane’ and I’ll show you how it’s done.”
He couldn’t really be too hard on the kid. It wasn’t as though he’d had any real training in intimidation. It was an acquired skill. Most people who tried to intimidate without any practice flopped badly. And Raven was certain that the people he’d tried to spook were themselves pretty damn good at it.
Dawn was coming fast now. Raven could feel it in his bones. They stood in an alley next to a an abandoned building they’d appropriated, one with a very deep sub-cellar. He gave a low whistle and Cerberus seemed to materialize out of the darkness, trotting up and sitting down in front of them with an expectant look on his doggy face.
“You know the drill,” Raven said. “Keep an eye on this door until dusk, all right?”
Cerberus nodded, which always looked a little weird when a dog did it. Raven opened the door leading to the sub-basement and walked across the low-ceiling room in a crouch until he came to the two crates they’d snuck in one night soon after they’d arrived back in the city. The two vamps crawled into their respective ‘beds’ and pulled the lids over themselves.
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“Hey, Raven?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry for screwing that up.”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll learn.”
Then the first rays of the sun sliced across the horizon and both vamps fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Morrigan sprinted to the end of the alley and cut a hard right around the corner. She glanced around, shooting her gaze up toward the top of the building and smiled to herself as she threw out a transit tube and made the jump.
The four members of the city watch skidded around the corner, their epithets clearly audible as they foraged for some sign of her passage. She ducked back as one looked upward, a rather unusual act in itself.
Humans didn’t tend to look up. Smart of this one to think of it. On that note, she decided to keep an eye on him, if she could.
She quickly crafted a three-strand spell and dropped it off the roof. It fell the fifty or so feet and lodged in his clothing, just as she’d intended.
Now she’d be able to track him wherever he went.
Maybe overkill, but maybe not. She didn’t like leaving things to chance. If he proved to be a problem, it would be easy enough to activate the contingency built into the spell and toss him a half mile out to sea.
The notion of bloodlessly killing someone like that didn’t bother her in the least. In fact, she found it rather amusing.
She wasn’t sure if they’d identified her, but that wasn’t really much of a concern. Like most of her kind, she could consciously alter her appearance just enough to foil any visual search. It didn’t work all that well in a technological setting, but, then again, that wasn’t likely to apply here.
She chuckled to herself. Napoleon had once been quoted as saying something about not interrupting an enemy when he was making a mistake. She took it one step further. Don’t interrupt an enemy when www.samhainpublishing.com 195
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he’s making a mistake, and, if he strikes you as the kind who’s going to make fewer mistakes, take him out of the game entirely.
Raven wouldn’t necessarily agree, but he was a do-gooder. Silly thing for a vampire to be, if you asked her, but, then again, no one was.
Morrigan wasn’t morally opposed to doing the right thing, if it was too inconvenient, but she sure as hell didn’t understand those types who centered their whole world around it.
Doing the right thing, in her lexicon, was doing whatever made her life easier.
Once they’d continued on, she took a deep breath and trotted across the rooftop in the direction of the abandoned warehouses where they’d set up shop. She felt amazingly cheery, considering how close a call she’d had.
Not that she was ever in any physical danger, really, but the danger of being discovered, being outed as what they’d assume was an enemy agent—or worse, a traitor—was real enough. If they’d faced her and she’d been forced to do her worst, she would have had no choice but to slay them all, lest they return to base and start a city-wide manhunt for her.
And the manhunt—or
woman
hunt, more accurately—would doubtlessly unearth the hybrids, something that they simply couldn’t risk.
And though she would never have admitted it to anyone else, she really didn’t like the idea of slaughtering people willy-nilly like that. One or two, in the interests of security, would be one thing. Any more than that would be a bit over the top, even for her.
She was a professional assassin, not a mass murderer.
She stopped at the edge as she drew down a mana thread and allowed herself an evil little chuckle. She’d once prided herself in never killing for personal reasons—for killing people who deserved death for money. Now she’d gone far beyond that and become tied up in a freakin’
cause. She thought causes were stupid.
Who knew being a revolutionary and a weapon smuggler could be so damned ethically challenging?
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A dark fog rose from the bay at nightfall, sending black tendrils creeping through the city streets. Upon arising, Raven and Bryon were led to a spot along the wall overlooking the bay and shown a huge, black-sailed ship sliding silently into the bay, nearly invisible against the dark water and shrouded by the dark boiling haze.
Even Morrigan looked concerned, Raven noted, as he passed his gaze over her face. “What do you think it is?” he asked her.
She shrugged and shook her head. “Whatever it is, I doubt it’s good.”
“You never ran across a ship like that while you were playing pirate, did you?”
“No. I’d remember if I had. I would’ve probably also tried to scuttle the damned thing.” She looked uneasy, an expression Raven never expected to see pass across her face.
“So what do we want to do?” Bryon asked him.
“For now—nothing. Or at least nothing we hadn’t already planned to do. I’ve got to make a stop at the Mayor’s house, then we need to drop by the Bane and see if we can’t convince them to give up the location and identify of the Spider.”
“I’ll check out the ship coming in,” Morrigan told them. “You tend to your business and I’ll let you know if there’s a problem.”
There was a time, not too long ago, that Raven would’ve looked at her with nothing but distrust, but the last several months had made it pretty clear that they were on the same side in all of this. The Morrigan he’d heard about when he was working for the PAC wasn’t quite the same woman he knew today.
Whatever the reason, he was thankful for it. He nudged Bryon with his elbow. “We’ve gotta go.”
They nodded farewell to Morrigan and jogged into the night.
The black-haired immortal crouched on the edge of one of the piers, gaze stabbing through the night as she tried to make out more of the details of the ship’s design. The swirling black mist didn’t help matters any.
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She considered using a transit tube to get to the ship but rejected it instantly. She didn’t know what she’d be facing and the notion of jumping in blind left her cold. She wasn’t prepared to dive into something deadly without backup. She had the feeling that something truly frightening awaited her aboard that ship.
She wasn’t even sure why she had that impression. She seemed to be pulling it out of the ether. Her intuition wasn’t usually so specific. She didn’t usually rely on it all that much, but in this case she considered it wise to pay attention to it. Obviously her subconscious had noticed something her conscious mind had not.
Her other option, of course, was to go back to base and scare up some of the cats to accompany her. She allowed herself a feral grin. That sounded like a plan.
Before she could summon a mana thread to jump back, however, the ship suddenly banked, revealing a double row of gun ports and the gaping black maws of dozens of cannons pointing directly at the city.
Holy shit!
She didn’t have time to go back and get help. She needed to intercede
now.
She dialed up her magesight and groaned aloud. The ship was warded from the top of the mast all the way into and below the waterline.
Who could be aboard that ship? The spells were far more complex than she would’ve expected from any of the locals, but what other out-worlders could be mucking around here? The Cen? Regardless of Raven’s suspicions in that direction, she found it nearly impossible to believe the aliens had set aside their prejudice against magic. She felt certain that some unknown power was involved here—someone maybe they’d never encountered before. In an infinite metaverse, it was certainly possible.
Would they fire? Or was this some kind of bluff? She had no way of knowing until the first cannon spoke.
Bryon lifted his head and stared into empty air. “Do you hear that?”
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“Hear what?” Raven asked, then realized he did. A far-away whistle, coming closer. He’d noticed it a moment earlier, but it hadn’t impacted his consciousness until Bryon said something.
They stood in the darkness outside the mayor’s house as Raven scouted for any unexpected security. There was no telling whether the mayor had decided to be difficult and try to prevent Raven’s return. Not that he could, but he probably wouldn’t be willing to accept the inevitable.
Too bad for him.
Raven had run out of patience. If the man wouldn’t cooperate willingly to take down the Church’s bastion, the vampire knew all too well how to force the issue.
The whistle grew louder and, in an instant of sudden clarity, Raven swept up the younger vampire and dodged away from the building just as a large sphere descended from the sky and struck the front of the mayor’s manor like a huge iron fist.
And exploded into a raging storm of flames and fury.
Raven threw up a shield as a burning slab of debris struck near them, showering the alley with flaming bits of wood and melted glass.
“What was that?” Bryon cried out, raising his voice against the roar of the conflagration scant yards away.
Raven wasn’t sure how to answer. It looked like a cannon ball, but the explosion that ripped the house apart came from no ordinary cannon. “I’m not sure!” he yelled back. “Come on.” He led the other vamp through the alleyways of the city, threading past panicked civilians and the booted feet of both the city watch and the Church soldiers.
“Stay here,” he murmured to Bryon, who watched uncomprehendingly as Raven vanished before his eyes.
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to steal the breath from his lungs, far distant from his fellow soldiers. He fell to his knees, gasping for breath.
Then a man was mere inches from his face as he was swept up and his back planted back against the wall. Fingers like steel rods tangled themselves in the front of his jacket. The voice was cool, detached, and somehow frightfully intense at the same time.
The face from which it issued seemed disembodied, startlingly white, and hewn from ice itself. It could not be the face of a mortal man. “Let’s make this simple. I need information. You give me what I need, you live.