by Victor Milán
He continued his twist to the left, pulling the sword free to the side. Taking the hilt with both hands, he came around to face toward the place he had flung his friend and betrayer Rob.
* * *
Rob got his forearms down in time to take the force of landing on the cistern floor with them, not his face. He left skin on stone, though.
Even as he was falling he saw a man dressed all in black, who must have come up right behind him without his noticing, leaping back and to his left to avoid being knocked down. Another stood behind him.
There was no way sneaking up behind Rob was part of the plan to take Karyl into protective custody. I’ve been set up.
Though he was having trouble forcing air back into his lungs, and the sensations from his groin didn’t bear thinking about, the prospect of imminent murder focused his scattered wits wonderfully. No sooner had he barked his knees painfully on the floor than he got a booted foot beneath him and sprang forward and to his right.
The nearer man had his arming-sword and dagger still raised, as if still focused on his target—what else but Karyl’s back?—and disregarded the bollock-kicked bard who’d been pitched unceremoniously at his feet like so much offal. He had no chance to lower either blade before Rob hit him right above the knees and slammed him over backward in a tackle.
Rob heard the air boom out of the man’s lungs. He swarmed up him like a squirrel. He got his left forearm on the killer’s right biceps, pinning sword-arm to stone, and grabbed the knife-wrist with his other hand right before his opponent could launch a proper attempt to stab him in the side. He saw the lower half of the man’s face was covered in black cloth in the instant before he slammed his forehead hard into the masked nose.
He heard and felt cartilage break. The mask was instantly wet with snot or blood or both, and having neither on his face was to Rob’s taste. But he’d had both there before and hadn’t died, and that really was preoccupying him now—not dying.
He hurled his whole weight to his left. He kept his knees clamped about his stunned enemy’s waist, and used his left arm as a handle to yank him right over with him.
To Rob’s disappointment, the second would-be backstabber neither ran the man through nor slashed his back across. But he did stop dead, presumably looking for an opening to stab Rob past his comrade’s thrashing body.
Rob drew his legs up and kicked the man he’d tackled at the second assassin with both feet. It was neither a clean nor a graceful shot, nor did he manage, with all the strength fear lent his short legs, to loft him far.
But it had the desired effect. The second killer had recovered quickly enough to start an overhand cut at Rob with his arming-sword when his accomplice came flying and knocked his legs from beneath him. His sword and buckler clattered onto the stone as he caught himself only slightly more gracefully than Rob had a few racing heartbeats before.
Rob, meanwhile, had found his feet. He used the right one to deliver a mighty football kick to the second assailant’s masked face, snapping his head up hard.
He had hopes of snapping his neck as well. Instead, the man kept wits enough to fall back and then roll hard away from Rob and his prone-crumpled partner.
If he gets back up, he’ll have me, Rob knew. The killer hadn’t lost his grip on either his sword-hilt or his small round shield. Once he managed to launch a proper attack with those, Rob’s own ballad was at an end.
The corner of his eye snagged on a sliver of yellow light, shimmering on the floor. The man he’d tackled, head-butted, and flung about like a sack of grain had dropped his sword.
Rob stooped, snatched it, and then ran at the second assassin. The man in black sprang up as fast and fresh as if he’d only just commenced his daily exercise.
In time for Rob, clutching the arming-sword with both frantic hands, to punch its meter-long blade through his breastbone to the hilt. The man puked blood and collapsed.
Rob heard a scuffle from behind. He let go the sword and spun. The first man was swaying on his feet. As Rob came round to face him, he drew back the dagger in his left hand and lurched forward.
Rob kicked him heartily in the crotch. The man gasped and doubled over himself in a way Rob knew too well, from too-recent experience.
“You unfamilied bastard!” Rob yelled, and brought his right elbow down hard. He aimed for the nape of the neck but landed it on the shoulder blade just right of the spine instead. Given Rob’s fury and barrel-shaped upper body, it was enough to drop the killer flat on his face.
Rob stepped round and jumped on the black-clad back. He grabbed the dark-haired head in both hands, raised it up until he felt his victim’s neck bones creak, then slammed the masked face back down on the stone.
“Die, you fatty-fucker,” he wheezed, as he raised the head again.
With savage glee he began to pound his would-be murderer’s forehead against the cistern floor.
Chapter 42
Cofradía del Consuelo, La; Consolation, Kindred of—Nuevaropa’s most elite, effective, and exclusive company of assassins, allegedly an official Sect consecrated to Maia, Queen of the Creators. Most often acting alone, or in small groups, Kindred are known to go to remarkable lengths to reach their targets, whether by disguise, feats of stealth and daring comparable to those of the legendary ninja of Zipangu, or by infiltrating households, retinues, or other institutions months or even years in advance, diligently carrying out their ostensible duties while awaiting the order to strike. If they wish their involvement to be known, they leave a dagger with a wavy blade, which they call a Flame Knife, at the scene. They are known to refuse all commissions against the Imperial family. It is even rumored that sometimes they are used by the Grey Angels to perform covert acts of murder.
—A PRIMER TO PARADISE FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF YOUNG MINDS
“You can stop, now,” Rob heard Karyl say in an astonishingly mild voice. “Once you see what looks like clumps of uncooked dough there amid the red on the rock, your enemy’s not getting up again.”
Rob let the assassin’s head go. It fell forward with a sodden thump.
“I know that,” he said. “The mushy feel of his head when I slammed it to the stone should’ve told me. Ah, well; I wish I could say this was the first man I’d beaten to death against a floor.”
He stood up.
“So where are the oth—four? You killed four of them?”
“And you seem to have accounted for two. Well done.”
“Well, all the years I spent learning to stay alive when I got knocked to the tavern floor served me in good stead. It turns out that pub bullies trying to stamp your head concave with bloody great boots don’t differ greatly from masked bravos trying to stab at you with swords when you’re down. Who were they, anyway?” Rob asked as Karyl reached a hand down to him. Which surprised him, though hardly more than the way he pulled him straightaway back onto his feet as if he were a child’s rag doll.
“A kill team,” Karyl said. “Sent to murder us both.”
“They were sicarios? Actual professional murderers? I mean, I know, you—but why are we still alive?”
“Because they were assassins. They’re killers, not fighters.”
Rob wobbled on uncertain pins. He was uncomfortably aware of staring at Karyl with the wide-eyed incomprehension of a freshly hatched fatty.
“That strikes me as the sort of thing the advocates call a ‘distinction without a difference.’”
“You mentioned tavern bullies. They’re adept at hitting unsuspecting victims, but if their sudden blow or nosehorn bull rush fails—”
“They find themselves all at sea, facing a foe who’s able to hit back. Aye, I’ve met my share. And several other peoples’. Numerous. A tavern minstrel attracts a certain amount of criticism. I take your point.”
He learned, then, that there was an even scarier thought than that their attackers were sicarios, professional contract killers. Because he thought it.
“Were they Kindred of Consolation, do you thi
nk?”
“I’m not in with that Order, but I don’t think so. The Kindred’s style is far more covert—they prefer to use moles in place over the long term, or infiltration by small teams, or better, by individuals. This lot? I’ve seen better. They’re clearly accustomed to hunting in packs, like Horrors. Perhaps your friend the Dowager Duchess decided to go cheap.”
Rob’s breath stuck briefly sideways in his gullet. “How did you know it was her?”
“Later. If we get a ‘later.’”
“Well, it seems she’s no friend of mine.”
“That sort has no friends. Only conveniences. And her son.” Karyl knelt to clean his blade on a dead enemy’s black shirt before sheathing it.
“Somehow I don’t envy the poor lout. Though he’s doubtless in this to the lofty blue eyeballs, too.”
He eyed the mess leaking out of the head of the second murderer he’d killed. “Remind me never to drink the water here. You don’t think this was the lot of them, do you?”
“Not a chance,” Karyl said. “Since Margrethe chose to rent killers in bulk, she’s cunning enough to have rented more, in case we somehow got out of this tank alive.”
Rob grunted. As usual, his friend’s tactical assessment was immaculate.
He decided against salvaging a dirk, since he had no sheath for one and feared the blades were poisoned. After a moment’s consideration he took up an arming-sword and a buckler, the weapons he was liable to be least clumsy with. Parrying with the small steel round shield can’t be that much different from parrying with a beer mug, can it, now?
“I wouldn’t plan on staying,” Karyl said, rising. “You seem to have worn out your welcome as thoroughly as I.”
“Sound counsel,” Rob said. “Although it seems harsh, for I only came to the Palace tonight, and haven’t gotten to see much of it yet. What now?”
“We get out of here as fast as we can. Alive, by preference. Then out of the Palace, out of La Majestad, and far, far away. Margrethe strikes me as having much in common with a Grey Angel: once she comes for you, she’s not going to readily let you go. Is there another way out than the one I entered by?”
“There’s a second set of steps at the far end of the cistern. It’s purely for servants and the like; I came that way. Why they have a public entrance to a disused water storage tank is anybody’s guess.”
“I suspect the Imperial Heart has many unique features. Let’s go out the back way.”
“‘Let’s’? As in, me with you?”
“We’ve both been set up. We both have the same enemy. You fought by my side, like old times. Even though you were meant to be killed too, that buys you some grace”
Without another word, Karyl turned and started walking toward the second stairway. Rob hastened to follow, cursing every step of the short legs that meant he had to trot instead of stride.
* * *
“Aii!” Rob danced away, putting his back against the smooth stone wall, as a black-clad body tumbled down the stairwell, limbs flopping loosely as only dead limbs could. He managed to avoid the blood still fountaining from the severed neck, black in the low yellow light. I think.
“Way’s clear,” Karyl called down from the floor above. “For now. Come on.”
Stepping carefully to avoid the great wetly gleaming blood splashes on the stairs—Looks slick, and I don’t want to take a nasty tumble, and me just spared!—Rob obeyed. Only to find he had to clamber over a jumble of bodies in black to get into the corridor.
“Four?” he said. “Again? But that means we’ve killed a total of—”
He reckoned quickly in his mind—and then again on his fingers when his mind refused to accept its own sum.
“Ten? We killed ten of them? How many more can there be?”
“No way of knowing. But definitely more. These were probably set to guard the back way. I suspect the bulk of the team are securing the public exit and the ways that lead out of the Palace from it. So we’d best get as far as we can before they find out their quarry’s slipped the snare.”
“What if you’re wrong?”
“We’re likely to encounter more killers whichever way we go. So keep your guard up.”
Rob flourished his arming-sword and buckler. “I’m right behind you!”
“No. This is where we part.”
Rob’s mad elation at having fought for his life and won—which increased wildly when he learned their foes were professional murderers, rather than common or garden alley bashers—turned instantly to densely compacted shit and thudded to the bottom of his belly. The strength flowed out of his limbs and into the stone floor.
So that’s how it is, then, he thought. It’s cast aside you are, lad Rob. But what better could you expect? What you’ve earned of your friend is death.
He wasn’t sure that wouldn’t be the kinder way to treat him.
“How will you get out?” he asked leadenly.
“I can find my way from here. If nothing else I can ask servants.”
He started to turn away.
“When did you know?” Rob called, halting him. “Please. I have to know.”
“The moment your summons arrived—with no prior notice you were here, or even coming.”
“You’re telling me you walked knowingly into a trap?”
“I don’t know a better way to walk into a trap. I’d rather have my enemy strike at me at a time and place I know, in a way I can surmise in advance, than when I’m actually unawares. That gives me the advantage of knowing something the enemy does not: that his target is not an unsuspecting one.”
He put his back to Rob and started walking at his usual pace when he was going somewhere in a hurry—moving rapidly without seeming to do so.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Rob called after him. “Margrethe isn’t the only one here who bears you a grudge. There’s another with an even greater grievance against you: a great Grey fucking Angel.”
Karyl stopped once more and turned to face him fully.
“Surprised you, didn’t I?” Rob crowed. Mad as it was to taunt the deadliest man in the world—as what other mortal could cross blades with a Grey Angel and live?—Rob couldn’t stop himself from indulging. Then again, given Himself hasn’t killed me yet for betraying, a minor gloat’s unlikely to set him off. “It’s true what they say: there’s a first time for everything. And here’s another: there’s a bloody great Grey Angel in the Palace. Here.”
Karyl stared at him.
Rob had a strong sense that, despite having just saved his life, Karyl would kill him if he thought he was lying to him about that; it would trample his trust for the final time. Rob felt greater danger from the man he’d betrayed than he had at any time that evening.
Meaning he was in greater danger than when six assassins attacked him.
“It’s the Emp’s mysterious confessor,” he blurted. “Fray bloody Jerónimo, so called. I saw him with my own eyes, peeking through a hole in Felipe’s tent, the night of the Battle of Canterville.”
Karyl continued to stare a hole in Rob’s soul for a score of increasingly frantic heartbeats.
“Fuck,” Karyl said. “You didn’t think anyone else would find that bit of information useful?”
“Sure, and I thought every living soul there is would do. But who the fuck could I tell? No one would’ve believed noted scapegrace and dinosaur master Rob Korrigan, not even you. And not a soul more would believe Baron Rob of Nowhere’s Ass End, either. Plus, there’s the small matter that telling tales out of school about the man—or monster—who has the Emperor’s own ear seems a splendid bloody way for the recently elevated Rob to take an immediate fall—at the end of a much shorter rope.”
Karyl looked at him a moment, then nodded. “Right. A word of advice: beware the Palace guards, and especially the Duke’s Scarlet Tyrants. If they haven’t been sent to arrest us on trumped-up charges, they soon will be.”
“You think that witch Margrethe would dare?”
“I think t
here’s little she hasn’t dared already. This isn’t the beginning of her skein of plots but rather somewhere in the middle.”
He nodded, briskly but cordially enough given his nature. And then he was gone.
Though he knew his life depended on putting the Imperial Heart behind him as quickly as he could, Rob stared after his friend, his eyes slowly blurring with water, until Karyl vanished into another stairway.
Chapter 43
Nariz Cornuda, Nosehorn, One-horn.…—Centrosaurus apertus. Quadrupedal herbivore with a toothed beak and a single large nasal horn, 6 meters long, 1.8 meters tall, 3 tonnes. Nuevaropa’s most common Ceratopsian (hornface) dinosaur; predominant dray and meat-beast. Wild herds can be destructive and aggressive; popular (if extremely dangerous) to hunt.
—THE BOOK OF TRUE NAMES
Running for his life, with a speed he was surprised his short, bowed legs could manage, Rob burst into a room filled with heat, steam and stray smoke, bustle, and surprisingly bright illumination.
He raced between aisles of kitchen servants in canvas aprons assiduously chopping vegetables and wheels of cheese and disjointing scratcher carcasses at work tables interspersed with stout cooking ovens with elaborate systems of funnel catchments and conduits to draw the smoke into the chimney from an immense fireplace. Other cook staff, mostly naked and pouring sweat, rotated an entire nose-horn, complete with gaping beak, on a stout roasting spit inside it, while others ladled olive oil over it to keep its skin from burning. The savory smell from a giant pot bubbling on a brick oven stirred hunger in Rob’s belly, despite that belly being all in a ruction from the three sicarios following hot on his buskined heels.
The master cook, to judge by the traditional white mushroom hat stuck onto her big close-cropped head, her Little Nell–size body naked but for a loincloth and apron, never looked up from stirring her cauldron on its oven near the door with a meter-long wooden spoon as Rob raced by.
A tame vexer, streaked brown and cream in a pattern called chaparral, erected its black crest and screeched angrily at him from a chopping table as he passed.
