“You got it?” Julien asked. He grunted with the strain.
“Almost,” Verci said. The pole almost touched the latch, though it was a challenge keeping it straight through such a tiny hole. Verci jabbed, and missed.
“Come on!” Mila said. “I thought I heard bells.”
“Just what I need,” Verci muttered. “Julien!”
“Not opening!”
Verci glanced over—Julien was really pulling. Behind him, Kennith had a strange smile on his face. The man was so blasted happy that they couldn’t crack his carriage.
“Kennith!” Verci snapped.
Kennith seemed to realize what he was doing and sobered his expression. “Sorry.”
“All right, Julien, give it a little more,” he said. Julien strained. Verci lined up the pole again and gave a sharp jab. He tapped the latch. A sudden loud crack filled the air and the door popped open.
“Got it,” Julien said with a sheepish grin.
“Get that statue and load it up.” Verci pulled out his pole and collapsed it back down. Jumping off the carriage, he looked around the street nervously. Two blocks away he could see figures running toward them. “Hurry.”
Julien grabbed the large green statue. It really was a bizarre thing, a life-size jade figure of a man with four arms and a screaming face.
“That’s Acserian?” Mila asked.
“That’s what they say,” Verci said. Julien dropped it in Kennith’s small carriage. Kennith jumped into his driver’s seat.
“See you there,” Kennith said. He cracked his reins and was off.
“Go,” Verci told Julien. The big guy nodded and ran in a different direction.
“What happened to Asti?” Mila asked again.
“Go see if you can find out,” Verci said. He picked up one of the swords from the dead men. Mila nodded and ran down one alley.
The two running men were coming closer. Dressed in suits like these guards, so not constabs or marshals. Good. Verci wasn’t going to let either of them follow the rest. He looked back to Helene’s nest, hoping she was still there. Hoping she had his back. He gave her a wave and held up two fingers, pointing to the approaching men. With everyone else out of sight, all he had to do was discourage them and get away.
Easy as blackberry pie.
Asti’s head was split open, his brains pouring out of his skull. At least, that was how he felt. The pain was all he was aware of, unsure of anything else. He wasn’t thinking about where he was, what he had been doing, what he should be doing, or how long he had been sitting tied up with a splitting headache.
He was tied up. That realization dawned on him slowly. He struggled to remember how that might have happened. He struggled with the ropes that bound him. Finally he opened his eyes.
Long dark hair and wide eyes greeted him. “Mister Rynax?”
“Mila?” He looked around. A dark alley. Three other figures lying on the ground. Blood.
“Are you . . .” Mila started hesitantly. “Are you . . . you?”
“The blazes you mean, Mila?” he asked. “My head is screaming.”
She looked at him skeptically. “You were the one screaming a few minutes ago.”
He blinked at her, trying to focus his blurred vision. “Screaming what?”
“Just screaming. Well, more like . . . barking. And then you came at me.”
“I . . . I don’t know anything about that.”
“Well, I do.” Mila held up her arm, which was bleeding from a deep gash.
Asti took a deep breath, closing his eyes. The pain was pounding at him, but he pushed it back, forced himself not to feel. “Start at the beginning. What happened?”
“You weren’t in place for the job,” she said.
“The job!” he gasped. “Is it skunked?”
“No,” she said. “At least, I don’t think so. Verci didn’t have an easy time of it, but last I saw, he had gotten the carriage open and the statue out. He sent me to find you.”
“And you found me, how?” Asti was terrified of the answer.
“Back here in this alley. You were cutting up one of those men. And you were . . .” She trailed off, staring at the men lying on the ground.
“What?”
“Growling. Like a dog or something.”
Asti closed his eyes, trying to hold back tears. It was happening again. It was getting worse.
“And then I came after you.”
“I called to you, and you just . . . launched at me, knives in both hands. I barely got out of the way. You were like an animal, so I roped you up.”
Asti opened his eyes again, looking at her. He couldn’t believe what she just said. “You . . . you roped me up, when I was like that?”
“I wasn’t going to let you kill me, Mister Rynax,” she said, simple and matter-of-fact.
“That’s . . .” He was astounded. “That’s amazing, Mila.”
She stepped back, looking at him with harsh eyes. “Thanks.”
“Now we have to get out of here. Untie me.”
“How do I know you aren’t going to try to kill me again?”
“Because I’m not . . . not like I was before. Obviously.”
“How were you before?” She leaned in close to him. Her eyes unsure. Untrusting. Smart on her part, but not very helpful right now.
“Like you said. Crazed. Animalistic.”
She stepped back. “Why?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Asti said. He twisted his hands around, seeing what leverage he had. If she wasn’t going to untie him, he’d have to get loose himself.
“Like blazes it doesn’t matter,” she said.
“It won’t happen again, Mila. But we’ve got to get out of here before the constabs show up and find us with three dead bodies.”
“Two,” Mila said. “The swell there is just out cold.”
“He’s still alive?” Asti’s heart leaped, racing with excitement. “Mila, I’m serious as the grave. Untie me, tie up him, and we have to take him and get out of here.”
“Take the swell?” She went over and looked at Yenner. “We gonna hold him for ransom or something?”
“Information,” Asti said.
“What?” Mila looked like she was about to laugh at him. “What does this tosser know?”
Asti could feel his head swimming again, anger boiling up. He beat it back down, refusing to let it take him over. Not again. “That man knows who had the alley burned.”
Mila’s face changed. “Had it burned? On purpose?”
“And they paid him off to let it happen.”
Mila came back over to Asti, grabbing the rope and pulling him to his feet. “You knew? You kept it secret?” Her face was flush, tears in her eyes. “Why did you—”
“Because I didn’t know enough yet. I knew that Yenner there knew something, but he was gone. And then . . .”
“Then here he was,” Mila said coldly. She undid the knots binding Asti. “Here’s the deal. Whatever more you find out, I want to know. Whatever else you do, I’m in on it.”
“Deal,” Asti said.
“One more thing, Asti,” she said. “You’re going to tell me just what the blazes happened to you back there.”
The ropes fell off Asti. His head was still swimming and pulsing with pain. “It’s a long story.”
“We’ve got time,” she said. She picked up her rope and tied up Yenner’s hands. “You’ve still got to figure out where to take this guy.”
Asti grinned. “I know exactly the place.”
Chapter 13
ASTI THANKED WHATEVER SAINTS were looking out for him that the streets were relatively deserted and that Mila was able to find an abandoned wheelcart and tarp to steal. No one was looking too hard at them. Asti figured no one wanted to think about what a bleeding man a
nd a street doxy were doing in the middle of the night with a full wheelcart. Whatever it was, it was no good, and no one but a constab would want to stick their nose into it.
No constabs passed them as they made their way back into Seleth. Asti could hear some whistle calls in the distance—probably swarming around the wreck of the carriage job. But whatever fire that might bring down hadn’t found its way to this part of the neighborhood.
“Talk,” Mila said.
“Talk, right,” Asti said. “You know I was in the service. Intelligence.”
“A spy.”
“A spy, exactly. How much you know about a spy’s life, Mila?”
“Not much,” she said.
“Not much. Who do you think we do most of our spying against?”
“Saints, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Whoever we had that war with?”
“Exactly. The Poasians.”
“So you would spy on the Poasiers, all right. What does that have to do—”
“Poasians.”
“I don’t care.”
“You want me to tell you?” he snapped. He glanced down the street. Constab on horseback and a Yellowshield wagon were coming around the corner. Probably on their way to the carriage, but not in any big hurry. From what Mila said, Verci wouldn’t have left any of the guard alive to serve as witnesses. Probably all the sticks were doing now was cleaning up the mess.
He turned the wheelcart down a shadowy alley that would keep him and Mila out of sight. “There’s a lot of things in this world you’ve never had touch you, girl.”
“I’ve seen a lot of damage, Mister Rynax.” Proud and hard. He would have said the same thing when he was her age.
“I’m sure you have. That’s only a sliver of what is out there. Magic, for one.”
“Never met a real mage,” she said. “Only teasing fakers like Hexie Matlin.”
“Don’t sell Old Hexie short. But magic’s not the only thing out there. There’s also psionics.”
“Sigh-what?”
“Psionics, that’s what the bosses at Intelligence called it. People who can do things with their minds.” He tapped on his bleeding head. “Crazy stuff, I’ll tell you. Some of them can pull the thoughts right out of your head.”
“That’s impossible.” She started to crack a smile, but then it stopped, her face blanching. “Great saints. You’re serious about this?”
“Completely.”
“Whatever you’re thinking?” Her eyes grew wide. “How do you fight that?”
“There’s ways,” Asti said. “Ways to shut off part of your mind, protect yourself, bury yourself. Go where they can’t touch you.”
“Can you teach me?” she blurted out.
Asti stopped walking and stared at her. “Teach you? To . . .”
“Keep them out of my head!” She stalked off to the end of the alley, checking the street.
“Clear?” Asti asked.
“Clear enough,” she said as she returned. She still looked spooked. Asti couldn’t blame her. The first time he . . . that wasn’t something he’d ever forget. “Where are we going?”
“Back to Holver,” Asti said. “We’ll secure him, then you’ll go get the rest of the crew.”
“Leave you alone with him? No chance.”
“You want to stay while I get them?”
“I—let’s just get there.”
Asti pushed the wheelcart over to her. No one walked about in sight. They trundled out onto Rabbit Road.
Mila waited half a block before speaking up. “So you trained how to block your thoughts from these psionits?”
“Psionics. Yes. Most ways are only good to keep them out of your head for a few minutes, which might be all you need. Others are needed for a prolonged invasion.”
He pushed on silently for a bit.
“Is that what happened to you?”
“About a year ago. It was on Haptur, one of the Napolic Islands that the Poasians control. My partner and I were sent to investigate a Poasian compound.”
“What for?”
“Suspicions about them working on a mystical or magical weapon of some sort. It doesn’t matter.”
“Why doesn’t it?”
“Because . . . we didn’t find anything.”
“Doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything. Seems like it would matter,” Mila said testily.
“Not to me. Not anymore.” Mila glared at him while he ground his teeth, pushing the wheelcart toward Holver.
“Fine,” Mila finally burst out. “It doesn’t matter. None of it.”
“I was captured,” Asti said, the words almost impossible to push out his lips. “My partner, she . . .” Silence hung, he couldn’t say the rest.
“She was killed?” Mila offered.
“Betrayed me.”
“Oh.” Mila shuffled along the road, her eyes to the ground. Her next word was meek, tentative. “Why?”
“Money. Free passage. Kicks. Don’t know.”
“Were you and she . . . did you . . .” she stammered, looking awkwardly at the ground.
“Were we lovers?” He had been telling her everything already. No need to hold back here. “Yeah. Terrible idea.”
“Oh.”
“You want some advice, Mila? Avoid entanglements like that on any job. It only causes trouble.”
She looked at him funny. “So you . . . you really didn’t bring me in on this because you . . .”
“Saints, girl. No.” Hadn’t he been plain about this already?
Her whole face changed. Relaxed and relieved. “You really thought I could do the job.”
“Can we keep moving?” He pushed the cart down the road.
“So,” Mila said, strangely bright now. “You were captured, she betrayed you. What happened?”
“I ended up in a place called Levtha Prison. Possibly the most horrid place you can imagine. Napolic heat combined with Poasian ingenuity in the arts of torture. I was beaten, baked, torn, and cut.”
“Sounds horrible.” Her brightness had melted off.
“That was nothing,” Asti said.
Her face was worried, fearful. “Doesn’t sound like nothing.”
“You can learn to ignore what they do to your body. That wasn’t what broke me.”
“They broke you?”
“They broke me all right.” Asti felt his breath quickening, his heart racing. He had never said any of this out loud before. Not to Druth Intelligence, not to Verci. “They had several telepaths battering at me. I don’t even know how many. Pounding attack after attack on my defenses. They laid siege to my mind like my brain was Khol Taia.”
“Khol what?”
“Do you know nothing about history?” Asti snapped.
“I can barely read, Mister Rynax.”
“Hmm,” he grunted. “We need to do something about that.”
“What, put me in school?”
“Maybe,” he said. “All right, most of the war was fought throughout the Napolic Islands. Our ships outclassed the Poasians, but once they took an island, they could dig in like a tick. But we had one big victory in Khol Taia, a coastal city on the Poasian mainland. In 1158 hundreds of Druth ships crossed the ocean in a massive, coordinated attack.”
They reached the corner of Rabbit and Holver Alley. The charred skeleton of Rynax Gadgeterium still stood there, a near-useless husk of ash and wood. Asti went to the remains of the door. He tried the handle and snorted with laughter. It was locked.
She came up next to him. “You’re avoiding telling me the rest,” she said, her eyebrow raised. “About what happened to you, not some city.”
No use putting it off. “For seventeen days they pounded on me, dug into me. They broke me.” He felt hot tears pooling at the corners of his eyes. His voice choked as he continu
ed. “I put up wall upon wall inside my mind, burying the rest of me, the real core of myself, so far down they could never get to it. So far down . . .”
“So far down you lost yourself?” she asked. Her own eyes found his, filled with sorrow and sympathy.
“Rational thought, memory, identity . . . I buried it under the most savage, primitive, angry part of my brain. Rage was the only weapon I had left. The telepaths hit into that wave of pure, thoughtless fury, and my whole world became red.”
“So . . . how did you escape?”
“I have no idea.”
“What?”
“I was in the cell, being torn up by the telepaths, and . . . red. The next thing I knew, I was on a small boat in the Napolic Sea, covered in blood. Too much blood to be mine. Slowly I regained my wits and navigated my way back to Druth territory. But I could still feel it.”
“Feel what?”
Asti couldn’t get the words out of his throat.
“Asti.” Mila put a hand on his shoulder. “Feel what?”
“That red fury, that rage that I put up to protect myself. Do you understand what I’m telling you, Mila? Those bastards broke my mind, and I’m just holding it together. The rage, the beast they set free . . . it’s pushing inside me, all the time. Like a dog straining at a chain. I’m always holding on to that chain, keeping it from getting loose.”
“Blessed saints,” Mila said. “Is that . . . that what happened back there? You let go of the chain?”
“Back there, it was more like they knocked it out of my hand,” Asti said. He put on his best good-humored face. He was certain Mila wasn’t buying it. Turning away from her, he reached through the broken window and opened the door from the inside. “Let’s get him inside, and then you can tie him up real good.”
“Mister Ry—Asti . . . how can you . . .” Mila stared at him, her face full of confusion.
“You know damned well how, girl,” he told her. “You hold it together, you survive for those around you. Because you have to.” He picked up the handles of the cart and pushed it inside.
Yenner was profoundly unconscious. Asti took a small comfort in that. He wanted to get Yenner bound and secure, and it was much easier if he didn’t have to fight him anymore. Once he was in place, then Asti would wake him. He wanted to hear what the man had to say.
The Holver Alley Crew Page 16
