Death's Avenger

by Charlotte E. English

  Kovalev opened his eyes, and lifted an eyebrow at Konrad. ‘Ah. The bone thief.’

  Konrad bowed. ‘I do apologise. No doubt you can divine the reason for my disgraceful conduct.’

  ‘Mm.’ Kovalev looked Konrad over, expressionless. ‘I would like it back.’

  This request Konrad was more than happy to fulfil. He tossed back the rib bone, glad to have it out of his possession. ‘If you could manage to keep that to yourself,’ he ventured.

  ‘Secrets are a lamaeni’s bread and butter,’ said Kovalev.

  Konrad looked to the other two, Arina’s victims. They were all three beginning to look healthier. Many of the wounds they had suffered were already healed; had been before they had retrieved their bodies, no doubt. To Konrad’s fascination, the rest were closing up as he watched.

  The others had joined him by this time. Bykov was clearly torn between a desire to prove his might by way of an instant attack, and confusion at the unthreatening picture the three made. Loronin merely looked appalled.

  ‘Radinka,’ said Kovalev. ‘You weren’t so lucky.’

  Radinka made a disgusted noise, perfectly expressive of her feelings.

  ‘What happened?’ Konrad enquired. ‘In as much detail as you can, please.’

  Nuritov intervened. ‘Bykov, Loronin. Guard the door, please.’

  A sensible move. The presence of the lamaeni in Ekamet was not common knowledge, and that secret was not one to entrust to such people as Nuritov’s despised colleagues. At the door, they would be out of hearing but not out of the lamaeni’s reach.

  The three were probably drawing upon Konrad and Nuritov as well, of course, but Konrad did not mind. On the contrary, he hoped he was every bit as delicious — and therefore, every bit as alive — as Nuritov. The inspector did not seem to mind being sustenance, either. Three fewer corpses to deal with was well worth the loss of a little energy.

  Bykov and Loronin went away — the former protesting vehemently, the latter not at all — and Kovalev began. ‘Favin,’ he growled. ‘An old… friend. Must’ve been following me, and my wits were asleep, I didn’t notice. I stopped to talk to Dubin, Favin shoved him aside like he was nothing, took him up like some kind of puppet and Dubin came at me with those damned knives. Knocked me about pretty badly. I saw him off in the end, but he’d torn up my body so much, there was nothing I could do with it right away.’ He eyed Nuritov with distaste. ‘Then your lot stuck me down here, where there’s hardly any food. Not my best week.’

  ‘Sorry about that,’ muttered Nuritov.

  Konrad looked to the other two, both of whom stood a little way behind Kovalev. They appeared shy, or perhaps just uncertain.

  ‘Our story is much the same,’ said one, the younger man. ‘Mother and I were travelling into Ekamet. We wanted to wait for Myrrolen’s Circus. When we alighted from the coach, a woman we had talked to along the way produced knives from nowhere and attacked us. Almost hacked my head off, and stuck so many holes in poor mother…’ He paused, and swallowed.

  Konrad sympathised. The fact that all three had survived an attack which had previously appeared as the slaughter of innocents was so positive an outcome, it was easy to lose sight of the extreme trauma of the experience for them. How must it feel, to suffer those kinds of wounds while unable to die? To be, eventually, expelled from your own body, able to do nothing but watch as it bleeds out before you? Kovalev appeared to have taken it in stride, but the other two looked shaken and sick. The young man’s mother still seemed unable to speak.

  ‘Did you know him?’ Konrad asked. ‘This Favin?’

  The man shook his head, and so did his mother.

  ‘What about Sword? The one who slew Radinka.’

  ‘I never saw him,’ said Kovalev. ‘But Favin was always as thick as thieves with his brother, Lazan. Whatever befell the one probably befell the other.’

  So Knife and Sword were Favin and Lazan. ‘How did you repel Lazan?’ Konrad asked.

  ‘Pure bloody-minded stubbornness.’

  ‘While I applaud you for that, I was hoping for something a little more concrete.’

  Kovalev shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We had a battle of wills, and I won.’

  Konrad looked to Kovalev’s companions, neither of whom had spoken. The lady merely looked at him with wide eyes, mute. Her son shook his head, and said helplessly, ‘I don’t know. I… was unconscious for a time, and when I woke, he was gone.’

  Nuritov had held his peace for a time, listening to the various reports in quiet thought. Now he removed his pipe from his mouth and said, ‘How many more of your kind are there in Ekamet, to your knowledge?’

  ‘When the circus isn’t here?’ Kovalev considered the question. ‘I do not know. But we are not numerous.’

  Konrad saw the direction of Nuritov’s thoughts immediately. He cast an eye over the two other lamaeni, whose names he had still not learned. There might be more like these, recently arrived in Ekamet and, as yet, known to none.

  ‘We had better keep an eye on them,’ Nuritov said. ‘Lazan will probably try again.’

  Kovalev shrugged his big shoulders. ‘Yes, at some point. These failed attempts would weaken him. He’d have to recover first.’

  Konrad smiled at Tasha, who instantly grew wary.

  ‘What do you want?’ she said, and took a tiny, probably involuntary step backwards.

  ‘How would you like to be used as bait?’

  Tasha adjusted her cap. ‘Of all the offers I’ve ever received, that might just be the worst.’

  ‘You’ll be fine. Stubborn, bloody-minded Kovalev will be there.’

  Kovalev folded his arms. ‘Oh, will I?’

  Konrad smiled at him, too. ‘Lazan still needs a nice, cosy lamaeni-corpse to warm his incorporeal bones. He can chase hitherto unharrassed ones around the city and see if any of them prove an easier target. Which he might, if he can find any. Or he can have another go at one of you three. Fancy your chances a second time around?’

  Kovalev growled something. ‘All right. What’s your idea?’

  ‘Collect all of you into the same place and wait for Lazan to show up. We ought to be able to deal with him.’

  ‘So we’re all bait.’

  ‘Yes. And all helping each other not be evicted.’

  The lamaeni woman did not speak, but she nodded her head in obvious agreement, and with such vehemence that Konrad was slightly taken aback. Of all the assembled lamaeni, she seemed the meekest, the most damaged, the least likely to consent to anything that could put her in harm’s way. He studied her carefully, and read a burning urgency in her eyes that he had no idea how to interpret.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, hoping she would say something, elaborate upon her decision. But she did not.

  ‘Fine,’ growled Kovalev. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

  ‘Excellent plan!’ said the young man with enthusiasm, though he hesitated before he spoke.

  Konrad looked at Tasha, who scowled back from beneath the brim of her dark cap.

  ‘Fine,’ she muttered. ‘But if I end up homeless, I will be moving into your house as a poltergeist.’

  ‘That is fair.’

  Tasha nodded once.

  Radinka’s voice echoed out of the air a few feet away from Konrad. ‘What about me? I can scarce understand how I came to be the only one unlucky enough to fall victim to these schemes. It’s embarrassing. I want my life back.’

  ‘I hope that the same stone will kill both of our birds at once.’

  It passed through Konrad’s mind as he spoke that his personal involvement in this case was no longer necessary. No one had been killed. There was nothing for the Malykant to do. He felt compelled to finish it because… because he disliked leaving a job undone. Because of Tasha, whose youth and stature caused him to feel a little protective, even if her obvious toughness and wily intelligence made him feel a little foolish for it. Because lamaeni like those Arina had killed deserved to be championed, too, even if the undead wer
e not strictly under his purview. Because of Dubin and Sokol and Arina, used and discarded like faceless tools, left for days to cope with the horrific belief that they had taken lives.

  And, of course, because of Nanda.

  ‘All right,’ said the young man, a little ungraciously. ‘But how do you propose to catch Lazan?’

  Konrad smiled. ‘I have ways.’

  Those ways might get him into serious trouble, of course, but Konrad admitted that to no one. He settled for hoping that the confidence with which he had spoken would not embarrass him later.

  Well… he admitted the risks to nobody but Nanda, anyway. After the meeting in the morgue (and Konrad privately felt that far too many of his social activities took place in rooms full of dead people), Konrad went alone to Nanda’s house. He found Arina still there, looking better: cleaned of the blood she had unwittingly spilled, calmer, less frightened. She was still quiet, and perhaps shy, for she barely met Konrad’s eyes as he went in, and urgently occupied herself with some activity in Nanda’s tiny kitchen before he could ask her how she did.

  Nanda took Konrad into her workroom, and shut the door. Weveroth, her golden-furred monkey, sat upon the table with his tail curled around his legs. He sat eerily still, only his eyes moving to track Konrad’s movements around the room.

  ‘Creepy,’ Konrad murmured, staring back at the monkey wide-eyed.

  ‘Wevey,’ said Nanda with gentle reproof.

  The monkey’s tail flicked, a gesture Konrad interpreted as faintly disdainful. His behaviour did not alter in any other respect.

  Konrad turned his back upon him.

  ‘How is Arina?’ he enquired.

  ‘Recovering, I think, but slowly. She’s in a bad way. Afraid to leave the house, or to be alone at all.’

  Small wonder. An experience like hers would be hard to forget. ‘I need your help with something,’ he said.

  ‘Anything,’ said Nanda promptly, and with a smile of such warmth that he was taken aback. He forgot his words and merely blinked stupidly, his mouth falling open.

  ‘You’re my friend,’ Nanda said, her tone making it fully clear how much of an idiot she felt him to be. Well, she wasn’t wrong. ‘Also, you’ve cleared Danil, and proved that nobody died by his hand at all. I could hardly be happier with you just now.’

  Konrad pulled himself together. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Though I do not think you will be so happy with me once I tell you what I need.’

  Her smile faded. ‘I suppose it was too much to hope that you’d come here with a simple, easy, unobjectionable request.’

  Konrad shrugged apologetically. ‘Mine isn’t exactly a simple, easy, unobjectionable life.’

  ‘I can’t argue with that.’

  Weveroth appeared to have got over whatever his objections to Konrad might have been, for he decided that Konrad’s shoulder might make a more agreeable seat than the table top, and availed himself of it with a flying leap. Konrad jumped violently, and almost threw the monkey off again in his irritation. But Nanda laughed, the golden smile once more lighting her face, and Konrad judged it worthwhile to hold his peace. He even stroked the monkey’s furred tail as he talked, curling the tip around his finger.

  Nanda did not like Konrad’s idea.

  ‘To be clear,’ she said, with a wide-eyed stare at Konrad that clearly expressed her opinion of his sanity. ‘You want to lure a rogue, bodiless lamaeni out of hiding by wafting the prospect of several fresh, new, lively undead bodies under his incorporeal nose. And you propose to ensure that you are the only living, mortal person at hand for him to possess in order to overpower one of them.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘So that he’ll obligingly possess you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want him to strap on the Konrad-suit and use you to hack off a few heads.’

  Konrad coughed. ‘Actually, it’s his brother that goes in for decapitation. Lazan likes to stick holes in people.’

  Nanda responded to this enlightening comment with a flat stare.

  ‘He won’t get very far,’ Konrad reassured her. ‘Or, he shouldn’t. I am the Malykant, I have resources at my disposal that Dubin and Sokol and Arina do not share. He won’t dislodge me.’

  ‘So you are going to use yourself as a prison. A kind of live incubation system via which to kindly escort him into your Master’s care.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Konrad beamed.

  ‘While you are awake.’

  ‘Of course I’ll be awake.’

  ‘You don’t think it will be uncomfortable to have two souls squashed into one body?’

  ‘Probably it will.’

  ‘Please understand that when I say uncomfortable I mean searingly, appallingly, intolerably unpleasant.’

  ‘Oh,’ Konrad faltered. ‘Do you think it will be?’

  ‘Undoubtedly.’

  He sighed a little, thinking of a recent case which had involved just such a scenario. Though happily he had not been the one to endure it, then. ‘Ah well. I’ve suffered before.’

  Nanda stared. Konrad thought he saw her eye twitch. ‘If you were going to share body-space with somebody else’s spirit, I wish you would not choose a crazy, ruthless, homicidal lamaeni.’

  ‘I wish that, too. Wouldn’t it be nice if bright, cheerful, well-adjusted and charming people would cause a little public menace from time to time? They would be so much nicer to deal with.’

  ‘This is not a joking matter.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Nanda scooped Weveroth off Konrad’s shoulder and clutched him close, putting her cheek to the little monkey’s soft fur. ‘You are hard work,’ she informed Konrad.

  ‘I know. You really should pick better friends.’

  ‘I didn’t pick you.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  Her eyes twinkled a little, and she gave the great sigh that meant capitulation. ‘Very well. I know it’s hopeless expecting to talk you out of it. What do you want me to do? I collect you do not wish me to be present, or I might prove an unwanted decoy.’

  ‘Indeed, the last thing I want is for Lazan to use you instead. I need you to be my insurance.’

  ‘In case of what?’

  ‘In case of failure. I believe I can hold my own against Lazan, but I could be wrong.’

  ‘So if Lazan overpowers you and you pass out, the way Danil did, you want me to… somehow fix it before you have chance to stick a bunch of holes in Tasha or Kovalev.’

  ‘Yes, please. Tasha or my serpents will know to send for you, if anything goes wrong.’

  Nanda rolled her eyes. ‘You credit me with near godly powers. It is flattering, to be sure, but the pressure.’

  Konrad grinned. ‘You are equal to anything, I am sure.’

  ‘There are one or two problems with all this. Or rather, questions which have not been answered.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘For one thing, how did that nameless young man and his mother avoid being dispossessed like Radinka? Did they ever offer any explanation for that?’

  ‘They did not know. Tasha thinks that Lazan had made too much of a mess of their bodies and could not take control of them while they were weakened to such excess.’

  ‘Sounds plausible, but what became of him after that?’

  ‘No idea. The two of them were unconscious, and he’d gone when they woke.’

  ‘Curious, don’t you think? And why was Lazan having so much trouble, when his brother succeeded first try?’

  ‘I don’t know that either. Favin is presumably stronger, or Radinka is very weak. Or maybe he was just lucky.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe.’ Nanda frowned. ‘Something is wrong.’

  Konrad smiled. ‘Which part of any of this strikes you as right?’

  ‘True. I’d ask you to be careful, but I know it would be futile.’

  ‘I will be fine. I always am.’

  Nanda eyed him with vast scepticism. ‘Something like that.’

  Chapter Seven

  Lur
ing his prey into the trap did not, in the end, prove difficult. All Konrad had to do was to ensure that they received the right rumours: word of their little trio of former victims huddled in the morgue beneath The Malykt’s temple, trapped and weak and helpless, ripe for the picking. Tasha’s presence could not hurt either, for a young lamaeni girl might seem a likelier target if Kovalev and the others had proved too difficult. Konrad set his serpents to this task, confident in their ability to spread the desired gossip among the spirits of the Darks.

  He made certain that Nanda was stationed at the other end of the street, in case of disaster; that Nuritov received only a general outline of the plan and none of its details, so that he could not helpfully show up at the wrong moment; and that Konrad’s own devotions to The Malykt should happen to keep him at the temple for many hours together. The temple never hosted many devotees when there were no funerals being held, and the Order obligingly closed it for the day in order to discourage unwanted visitors.

  So it was that Konrad spent most of a day in a cold, draughty, comfortless building, alone save for a group of undead strangers in the morgue below, and with nothing to do but wonder what it would be like to be possessed by a desperate killer. Searingly, appallingly, intolerably unpleasant.

  It was not one of his better days.

  He sat for a time, and when he grew too cold he got up and walked about instead, his senses on the alert for the approach either of Favin-as-Radinka or Lazan’s spirit.

  Company came, in the form of Eetapi and Ootapi.

  Master. We bring glad tidings! Favin comes! That was Ootapi, his voice somehow more unpleasant to listen to the more gleeful his mood.

  Eetapi added, He will be here any minute.

  Favin? Konrad replied. Is Lazan with him?

  He is alone, said Eetapi.

  Konrad sat, blinking and trying to process that news. That Favin would hear his serpents’ industriously-circulated rumours was of no surprise to him, and he had fully expected that the brothers would arrive together. Favin would certainly seek to assist Lazan. But what was he doing showing up alone? He had already got what he wanted. What interest could he possibly take in the other lamaeni now?