“Ladies.” Salvator Fabris stepped past them to face the three men in green still on their feet. Qhora turned to Mirari, who was holding her arm awkwardly, and Tycho who was struggling to help Philo to his feet. Just an arm’s length away several of the sword smiths stood motionless and stone-faced, hammers and swords in their hands as they waited to see whether they would have to defend themselves or their wares.
After checking the wound in Mirari’s upper arm, Qhora helped Philo up and discovered the old man had sprained or broken his ankle and could barely stand up through the pain of it.
We need to get away, we need shelter, and we need safety.
Qhora looked back down the street in time to see Salvator deftly slash tiny red lines in the necks of two of the green-clad fighters, leaving them to collapse in the dust, choking and clutching their throats. The last fighter spun and ducked into the crowd with the Italian about to stab him through the back.
“No!” she shouted. “We need to know who they are! Where they come from!”
Salvator glanced back at her and gave her a serious little nod as he sheathed his sword and hurried into the crowd in pursuit of the last man.
Qhora let the wheezing old Hellan lean on her shoulder. “We need to find somewhere a bit more private, gentlemen. Do you know this city at all?”
“I do.” Tycho kicked the head of one of the men on the ground. “There’s a small area they call the Hellan Quarter just a few streets from here. It’s where we slept last night. Follow me.”
The four of them had barely left the street of smiths when Qhora looked back over her shoulder. “What about Salvator? How will he find us?”
“Your tall Italian friend?” Tycho asked. “We can find him again later easily enough.”
Qhora nodded and hurried Philo down the road with Mirari close behind them.
It’s not a sword, but if Salvator can make that man talk, then we’ll know where these bastards sleep. And Lorenzo’s killer won’t be far away.
Chapter 13. Taziri
Her pocket watch said it was noon. From the heat inside the metal tube of the Halcyon ’s cabin, she was inclined to believe it. For the first hour as the heat had begun to build, she managed to convince herself that she could simply wait it out. She folded up the old tarp in the middle of the floor and sat very still with her jacket and shirt on the floor beside her. The air had filled with vapors stinking of oil, sweat, petrol, and what might have been a dead bird. Each breath was a little thicker than the last, each one a bit more of a struggle to choke down.
She ignored the first few trickles of sweat rolling down the sides of her face, but when she felt water running down the small of her back she opened her eyes and saw the sweat standing in thick beads all down her arms and when she turned her head a small shower of sweat fell from her face.
That’s bad.
Moving slowly, she pulled all of the emergency canteens together in front of her. Four small metal flasks wrapped in canvas, and one of them empty already. The water in the others tasted stale and dusty, after she got past the fact that they felt hotter than her skin.
That’s bad, too.
Taziri stood up and wrenched open the small hatch in the center of the ceiling. It popped free to reveal a pale blue sky with a lone wisp of white cloud. A bright yellow shaft of sunlight struck the floor, illuminating a column of dust in the cabin.
That’s not going to cool me off.
In the cockpit, she opened and angled the small side windows, hoping to create a cross-breeze through the narrow space, but no matter what she tried, she felt no movement of air. She reached up to push a few heavy curls of her dark hair from her face and her hand came away dripping with sweat.
I’m not going to last long at this rate.
She stood up and peered out the small window in the main hatch. All she saw was a strip of gravel and the edge of one of the old freight cars on the adjoining line. It sounded quiet enough outside. She opened the hatch and stepped down to the ground, and closed the hatch most of the way. Then she tip-toed around the front of the Halcyon and found a patch of shade beside her machine. The ground felt noticeably cooler in the shadow than in the light, so she sat down on a jagged carpet of gravel. A soft breeze ran over her sweaty skin and she shivered.
The sunlight glared off the pale gray gravel all around her, blazing into her eyes almost as brightly as the Espani snow-glare.
Espana. Snow.
She closed her eyes and thought back to the days and nights trudging up the frozen Espani highway with ice-crusted snow and frozen mud crunching beneath her boots. The wind had howled and moaned without end, hurling icy crystals and dry snow into her face every few moments where it stuck fast to her hair and eyelashes.
Shivering.
They had shivered the entire time, shaking and trembling with blue lips as they marched along behind the relentless bulk of Syfax Zidane. The major had barked orders at them every step of the way, especially at the passengers. Protect your eyes, hands tucked in your armpits, and don’t eat the snow. It would freeze them from the inside out, he’d said.
Taziri swallowed her dry throat and tried to imagine freezing from the inside out. It sounded heavenly.
Cold, cold, cold. Gooseflesh. Shivering. Wind.
A warm breeze ran through her hair, but she couldn’t muster a single goosepimple.
Crunching through the snow. Crunching…on gravel? Footsteps? Footsteps on the gravel! Someone’s here!
Taziri opened her eyes and the glare on the pale stones seared her vision. Squinting, she struggled up to her feet just as the little girl from yesterday stepped into view at the far end of the Halcyon. She had a clay pitcher in her hand. “Tishna?”
The pilot stood very still for a moment, listening. No one else was coming. She gestured for the girl to come closer, and when she offered the pitcher Taziri took it in shaking hands and gulped down the cool water as fast as she could, spilling a little down the sides of her face.
With half the pitcher’s contents in her belly, Taziri stopped drinking to wipe her face and smile at the girl, who smiled back. “Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank. You. Wait, is it mamnoon? Whatever, you get the idea.”
“Khahesh mikonam.” The girl giggled and let loose a soft babble of Aegyptian or Eranian or whatever she spoke.
Taziri heaved a contented sigh and glanced down at herself. Her shoulders, arms, and stomach were all bare, and only the stiff cotton stay around her chest covered her breasts.
And I’m still not wearing a shirt. That’s not a good idea in this country.
The girl tapped on the side of the Halcyon and said, “Basirat andarun?”
“What?” Taziri glanced at the machine. “You want to look inside again?”
She nodded.
Taziri shrugged. “Probably safer than standing around out here.” She led the girl back to the hatch and inside where she hoped the cabin might have cooled off a bit from the open windows and hatches. It hadn’t.
They sat down together on the old tarp on the floor and shared the rest of the water. The girl spent every moment staring all around her at the walls, the seats, and the controls. She even leaned down to run her fingers over the rivets in the floor.
“You like machines? Want to be an engineer one day?” Taziri said. “Well, keep up your mathematics and you too could have an exciting career in flying strange people to dangerous countries in the middle of the night.” She smiled at herself, but then her smile faded. “Do you go to school? Can you read?” She grabbed her little notebook of preflight checks and pointed at her crooked scrawl. “Can you read?”
The girl shook her head.
Damn. It’s one of those countries. She pointed to herself. “My name’s Taziri. Ta-zi-ri.”
The girl nodded. “Hasina.”
“Nice to meet you, Hasina.” Taziri waved to the cockpit. “Go ahead, take a look.”
Hasina leapt up with a beaming smile and jumped into the pilot’s seat. She gently touched
and caressed and petted the dials and buttons and switches and gauges.
Taziri sat on the floor behind her, watching. Poor thing.
Soon Hasina was babbling in Eranian again, asking questions about everything as she pointed from one console to another. Taziri stood up and leaned over her shoulder, naming each object in turn. “Throttle. Altimeter. Wind speed. Compass. Fuel. Oil. Temperature.”
She has no idea what I’m saying. She’s twice Menna’s age, but Menna can already read better than this girl ever will.
Thoughts of Menna and home took her back to Yuba puttering around the house, designing parks and fountains and gardens for his clients. Yuba in the kitchen. Yuba in the yard. Yuba, alive and well.
How can Qhora just walk around, fly across the world, and stalk some stranger from city to city with her husband not even buried, not even cold? I’d be in pieces. I’d be lying in bed, crying my eyes out, squeezing Menna until the poor little thing couldn’t breathe. I’d be useless.
But not her. She dealt with the police, went around the city looking for a way to chase down the assassin, even tracked me down, even agreed to work alongside Salvator Fabris, to Carthage, to Alexandria. She’s running. She’s fighting. She left her baby two thousand miles behind in the arms of a teenage boy.
I can’t imagine what’s going through her head.
Hasina leaned back, still grinning but no longer babbling and pointing. She smiled up at Taziri, and Taziri smiled back down at her.
“Listen, Hasina, you can’t come back here again.” Taziri tried to make meaningful gestures with her hands. “It’s dangerous. Someone might follow you. Follow? And find me. They could find me. Danger?” She sighed and picked up the empty water pitcher. “Look, thank you for the water. Thank you. But no more. Understand? No more. Don’t come back again. It’s dangerous. For you and for me, I’m guessing.” She pushed the pitcher into the girl’s hands.
Hasina frowned down at the pitcher and then up at Taziri.
The Mazigh woman withered a bit at the big sad eyes in the thin, drawn face. Then she glanced up at her little tool racks and netting and overhead compartments.
Something I don’t need, something that won’t get her into too much trouble…here.
“You can have this.” She held up the tiny compass. It was a bit dented and a bit rusty and a bit dirty and a bit faded, but it worked just fine. She turned it back and forth to let the girl see how the needle always swung back to north. “North. And that’s east, sunrise. And, well, you’ll figure out. Here.”
Hasina took the compass and held it cupped in both hands as though it might break at the slightest breath of air.
“You need to hide it.” Taziri took the compass and tried to slip it inside the girl’s sleeve, and then tried to poke around the front of her robe-like dress.
Hasina nodded emphatically and took the compass and magicked it away into some hidden pocket. “Nihani?”
“Right, nihani.” Taziri nodded. Whatever that means. “Big nihani. All right, you need to go, and remember, don’t come back. Please.” She gestured emphatically as many ways as she could invent to say no. “No come back here. Okay?”
The girl leapt up to hug Taziri, and the woman felt a horrible pit open up in her belly, as though she was sending this girl away to some terrible fate, some terrible life.
She’ll be fine. She will. It’s just different here, not worse. So what if she never goes to school? She’ll have friends, and a husband, and beautiful babies, and a life full of laughter and wonderful things. Probably.
Taziri extracted herself from the girl’s embrace and saw her safely out of the hatch and watched her scamper away across the rail yard. Then she sat down in the sweltering darkness of the cabin again on her dirty old tarp and noticed the little knotted laces of her stay were plastered to her belly with sweat. Her shirt was still lying on the floor.
I really should have put that back on at some point.
Chapter 14. Salvator
The Italian stood in front of the building, checking the address against the information he’d wrung from the green-clad thug. The man had been most cooperative with a rapier against his throat, and even more cooperative with a rapier between his legs. The man identified himself as a Son of Osiris, and a resident of the Temple of Osiris, and several other things that the Italian hadn’t quite understood with his imperfect grasp of the Eranian language, but the address was really all he wanted anyway.
Salvator had been fairly confident that the information was genuine, which was why he had dumped the man’s body in a barrel in an alley and gone in search of the building himself without going back for Qhora and the others. After all, the grieving widow and deformed mountain girl were hardly experts in intelligence, espionage, and assassination.
And that white mask and that damned bird following them about. My God, it’s like they wanted to be noticed!
But as he stood in the street considering the building in front of him, a flicker of doubt ran through the back of his mind.
The Sons of Osiris. Sounds like a cult to me. But if this is their temple, then they’re not as subtle as the average cultists.
Across the avenue and rising story upon story above the other structures to either side loomed the unearthly mass of the Temple of Osiris. Salvator counted five levels of stone-cut windows before the roof erupted into a carefully designed wooden mountain, ten more levels, each slightly smaller than the one below, and each with an elegantly curving roof like nothing he had ever seen before. He saw no buttresses, no gargoyles, no statuary, no decoration that he had come to expect on religious buildings like the cathedrals of Rome, Constantia, and Tartessos. This temple, this palace of ancient golden stone and red-stained wood, this monument to a bygone age in which legions of slaves died for decades to build impossible things, had no equal in the northern world.
Salvator studied the entrance, a wide stair of short but deep steps rising above the street to a landing where twenty men in green stood before a series of double-doors. Each of the men wore a sword and a single-shot pistol, and each of the men was resting his right hand on the butt of his gun. Salvator pouted thoughtfully.
This is going to be tricky.
A moment later, a group of men approached the front of the temple bearing several large crates. They climbed the steps near the right-most doors.
Aha! Deliveries. This just got easier.
The guards stopped the porters and opened each crate, rifled through them in detail while holding their drawn pistols by their sides. It took a full quarter hour to get the six crates inside.
Maybe not.
Salvator made a slow circuit of the building looking for other doors, for open windows, for raised walkways, and even for sewers that ran close to the foundation. There were none. And after an hour of walking up and down the street outside watching for other people coming out or going in, he arrived at a solution. He grimaced.
It took a little while to find the right alley, and but then only a moment to find the right barrel. With no one around to watch, he pulled the body out and removed the man’s green clothes. The corpse was a bit too short and a bit too heavy, but Salvator had years of experience contorting his body to the needs of the moment. With a bit of slumping and hunching, he made the clothes look appropriate. He hooked the Aegyptian’s short sword of common steel on his belt and carried his own rapier in his hand.
Back in front of the Temple of Osiris, his stolen clothes were not giving him much confidence, despite the scarf to hide his lower face. The smell of death, feces, and fish wafted up from his collar. Inspiration emerged from the stench. Doubled over and limping, he climbed the stairs along the left-hand side and just as he reached the row of guards, he slipped his hand up under his cloak and scarf and put his finger in his throat.
I swore I would never do this again.
Drenched in vomit, he stumbled into the first guard. The man swore, grabbed Salvator by the neck, and shoved him through the door being held open by a seco
nd guard.
Throwing me inside? How stupid are these people?
Hearing the door slam shut behind him, Salvator spat the last of his breakfast on the floor and straightened up to sound of multiple pistols being cocked.
Ah. They kill people inside where there are no witnesses. Rather smart, actually.
There was one man to his immediate left pointing a gun at Salvator’s head while three more men strode forward on the right with guns raised.
I hate guns.
Quick as lightning, Salvator slapped the nearest man’s hand forward so the gun pointed past his face at the other guards. The gun discharged, throwing a cloud of gun smoke in the Italian’s eyes. The bullet struck the first of the approaching men square in the chest.
One.
Salvator whirled around the startled shooter as the other two men opened fire and the Italian both heard and felt the two bullets slam into the body of the guard he was using as shield. The vibrations shook his backside as the guard gasped and fell to his knees.
Two.
He saw a small black door right in front of him. Salvator lurched forward just as his shield fell prone and he kicked in the narrow wooden door and raced into the dark room beyond. A bit of light from the hall followed him inside to reveal his surroundings.
Hm. The evil cultist coat check room.
Salvator hurled away his soiled scarf and cloak and drew his rapier as the narrow door crashed open again to reveal two men in green. They held swords, not pistols. The Italian smiled.
A moment later both guards lay dead in a neat pile in the corner with their throats cut and the blood pooling into a balled up woolen overcoat.
Three and four.
A quick glance outside showed no one else coming to investigate. The outer hall, a narrow space between the outer doors and the inner doors, was empty. Except for the two shooting victims, of course.
With time to breathe, Salvator stood in the coat room stripping off his ill-fitting disguise and piecing together something a bit more appropriate from his two new clothing donors and the assorted garments piled on the boxes, and in the chests, and on the racks all around him. The dust and cobwebs spoke silent volumes.
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