by O. J. Lowe
“And you’re just doing this out of the goodness of your heart?”
“Some who know me might say I don’t have a heart,” he replied with exaggerated nonchalance. “Oh, I think if I do help you, you might say you owe me, would you not?”
“Are you not interested in Moulton?”
“Only from a scientific point of view,” the wild-eyed man said. “Nothing that can’t keep. And like all interests, they’ll fade and die. The reward? Well, I’d consider you owing me to be worth turning off him.”
“I don’t understand,” I admitted, I hate doing that.
“Well, you’re not like me. My motives are not your motives.”
Cryptic bastard. I tried to brush it off, to focus on the task ahead. “So, how do we get through those wards without them blowing up in our faces?”
“Without? You speak far too much of caution. You and I, we’re a different breed. We should have died centuries ago, we’re the last of our people. I know what you are, just as I’m sure on some level, you know what I am.”
“And without caution, we would have died a long time ago.”
“Life is infinitely more fun when you partake a little risk, take a walk on the wild side. You know what your problem is, Armitage. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to feel the wind. You’ve been safe for too damn long; you’ve forgotten the taste of blood and fear and fire on your tongue.”
“If you think I’ve lived a safe life, you don’t know me.”
“Then prove me wrong,” he challenged.
I gave him a sardonic smirk, rose to my feet, cracked my knuckles. “Power of a defensive ward expands outwards, doesn’t it? Means that those inside don’t get hurt when it explodes. Place like this, it’s always strongest about the doors. You can’t force your way inside without the right talisman or it’ll give you the full force right in the face.”
“My, my, you do know your stuff.” The reply came out mocking but proud. “And?”
“The higher you go, the weaker they get. Something this explosive, it takes a lot of power to maintain, not even before you go into the creator concealing them.” This might sound technical, it’s really not. This isn’t the first place I’ve had to sneak into, but it’s definitely up there as one of the most heavily guarded. And magic, well, caution is the better part of valour after all, despite what this idiot said.
“But if you start climbing the wall, they might trigger regardless?”
“Well, yeah, it’d be—”
I didn’t get the chance to finish what I was saying, his hands shot out and grabbed me, yanked me forward from my feet. I staggered into his grasp with a squawk, one of his hands on my jacket, one hand on my ankle and suddenly I was airborne.
Don’t get me wrong, throughout my life, I’ve never been a stranger to flight. I just prefer doing it under my own steam. The Novisarium always had one rule regarding aviation. If you want to fly, you do it with your own wings. Planes, helicopters, zephyrs, even the occasional flying saucer, they’re in considerably short supply. They don’t want people in the air. Heavy fines, confiscation of vehicles, even some light prison sentences are all attached to the offence.
The warehouse wasn’t massive, not more than three storeys up, but it still hurt when I hit the edge of the roof chest first, I reached out, snatched at it, muscles screaming as I tried to yank myself over the edge. Hey, I might be getting on a bit in life, but I still got it. More importantly, the building hadn’t exploded. That’s a bonus in my book. I dragged my legs over onto the roof, saw the skylight up ahead and breathed a sigh of relief. That’d do me nice and easy. I glanced back down to the ground, the wild-eyed man gave me a thumbs up gesture, shrugged his shoulders as if he were saying, ‘you’re welcome.’ If nothing else, I felt like jumping down and punching him. It would have been nice, I know that much, even if he had done me a solid favour here.
Just because you know how a building’s defences work, it doesn’t mean you’re able to get past them. A skilled wizard might well have been able to nullify the wards, get through them. This was, in hindsight, the sort of task I might well have set Eric Steele on, he might have been able to brute force his way through them without dying. And as any good assassin knows, the trick is always being able to walk away afterwards. If you throw down your life in the process, the contract might get fulfilled, but if you’ve not got the chance to enjoy the reward, it might as well be pointless. The escape is a third of the issue.
Still I’d made it this far and survived. That boded well. I wondered what chance the skylight being magically warded against intruders. Maybe he’d have expected someone to come through, after all beings that could leap three storeys high weren’t exactly unheard of. How many of them were assassins though, how many would have a gripe with Moulton?
Screw it. I jumped to my feet, ran towards the skylight, jumped as I approached it and plunged through the glass. A wave of heat buffered at my face as I did, nothing more unbearable than a steaming hot shower, sweat bubbled across my skin, I exhaled sharply as I hit the ground amidst the falling shards of glass, the impact reverberating up my legs. It took a few moments before I could stand again, like a deer on the ice. I grinned to myself as I examined my surroundings. I’d gotten in, that was the main thing, though subtlety had been abandoned. I drew my Raptor, pointed it at the ground, both hands on the butt.
The warehouse around me, I’d already guessed it’d been abandoned, though for how long I hadn’t been able to say. Only scant furnishings remained, nothing useful, nothing that hinted at what it had been used for in the past. The skeletons of furniture and boxes remained, frames of wire and wood that would never serve a purpose again.
“You came.”
A shock of blond hair leaned over a balcony high above me, focused eyes fixating on me. I tried to ignore the pungent scent, the stink of shit and sweat. Moulton didn’t look good, his eyes wide, locked on me but I could tell he was doing it deliberately, he wanted nothing more than to start twitching them. His ears were a real mess, the photographs hadn’t emphasised just how much so that was the case. Around his neck, I caught a glimpse of the amulet they’d sent me to retrieve. Dead. That was the only way.
“I did,” I said. “Sorry about the mess.”
He giggled, a high-pitched sound of inanity, leaned even further forward. “Mess, mess, mess, we’re all a mess. We’re all just sliding through life, we leave our stains on the tapestry of reality. I take it you’re the one who sent me the package. Is nice, it’s appreciated. Figured you were on your way the moment the kid showed up. He was— You shouldn’t use a child like that. He didn’t deserve to be caught up between this.”
“Is he harmed?” I don’t know why I asked the question; I didn’t care. Part of me felt like I should though. He’d been a pawn; he’d been forced to do a job by a bastard of a father.
“He betrayed me,” Moulton said, his voice nonchalant. “We had a compact and he broke it.” He said it with such a sing-song grace I wanted to vomit, clenched my fists together around my gun. “I take it you’re here to kill me?”
“The Shining Council hired me to do just that,” I said. “Kill you, take your amulet.”
“The amulet,” he said with disgust. “That’s all they care about. If it wasn’t bonded to me, they’d probably accept it in exchange for me never coming back.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” I said. “High Hall is putting pressure on them.”
He spat angrily, a thick globule of saliva hitting the ground inches from me. Call me old fashioned, I’ll shoot a man in cold blood, but spitting on someone or at least trying to, is just disgusting. “Fucking High Hall. If they say jump, the council is going to bend over backwards to appease them. They’re all under the impression they matter, when if anything, the opposite is the only thing that’s true. High Hall calls the tune, nobody wants to fight the fairies, they think it’d be bad. They think the fae would win any war.” He dissolved into laughter; my fingers twitched around my gun.
I should shoot him now, while he was distracted, make sure the job was done. The longer I waited, the more chance he had to prep himself, the harder it would be. “They should have backed me, should have hailed me as a hero, instead they send you to try and kill me.”
“Garrett,” I said. “There’s going to be no sort of try about it.” He’d set me up for that, I realised, I raised the Raptor, pulled the trigger and the boom of the gunshot echoed through the warehouse, shockwaves reverberating up my arm. Moulton moved faster than I’d have thought possible, his hands up, an aura of black energy flashing into creation in front of him, deflecting the bullet. It hit the ground somewhere nearby, clattered into it with a tinny sound.
“That all you got?!” he asked.
I fired again and again, already he moved, leaped forward and did a handspring over the rail, tiny tendrils of black energy moving from his body to intercept, batting aside the bullets, he hit the ground ahead of me in a crouch, even as I fired my fourth and fifth shots, more tentacles erupted from his back, swiped them from the air and I gritted my teeth together in dismay. I had one bullet left, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over and hoping for a different result. It hadn’t worked the first five times; I wasn’t lunatic enough to think the sixth was any different.
I holstered the big handgun, drew the knives and covered the distance between the two of us in double quick time. It was on now.
Eleven.
The best sort of kill is always the one that you walk away from. Common sense, no? If possible, be as far away from the target as possible. Getting up close and personal carries its own set of risks, alternatively while we’d all like to sit in a chair a mile away with a sniper rifle, not everyone is capable of that. It’s why I’d always found Matthew Black so invaluable. He’d been able to do both. Death from a distance, death up close. If you’re close enough to them, there’s an equal chance they might be able to kill you. It becomes a lottery, only the lucky and the quick will survive. You might lose, might bleed out, it might not even be your fault. The other guy might simply be better.
Moulton’s nose had been broken recently, still slightly swollen and misshapen, as if it hadn’t yet had the chance to heal. I wondered who’d done it and why. Maybe he’d pissed off the wrong person. Actually, more than likely that was exactly what he’d done. Someone in fae, perhaps? They didn’t like to get their hands dirty, so I couldn’t say for sure.
My knives would have met his stomach had he not hurled a blast of black magic at me, shadow energy that sent cold shivers across me as I caught it on the blades, the enchantments dispelling it. Still, I had sensations of someone walking across my grave, my fingers going cold and numb. The knives felt alien, I almost dropped them. Almost. If I had, the next blast would have hurt. A lot. It took all my focus to make my body respond, my limbs as if they were carved from lead.
I’ve faced adversity before. It feels less of a curse when you know the alternative is death. Dying is easy, I should know, I’ve done it before. It’s the easiest thing in the world to simply give up living.
Not today. Not now. It wasn’t going to happen. I urged my legs to carry on, keep me moving forward. The more I worked them, the more I forced all my limbs into motion, the more feeling came back to them. It was only coldness after all. Couldn’t possibly be as cold as the grave. More and more blasts came my way, chilled me right to my soul and I hurled myself the last few feet against the complaints of my body, tackled Moulton to the ground, drove an elbow against his skull. The magic faded from him, he grunted, shook his head to try and clear his vision of the stars he was no doubt seeing. Wizards don’t like taking a punch, it’s hard to summon arcane forces with a sore head and double vision. An adage as old as time immemorial, whatever you do, make sure you throw the first damn punch.
I’d thrown the first, and the second and countless after that until my knuckles were sore and split from the impact, blood coating them. I didn’t know if it was mine or his. Somewhere amidst the chaos, I’d lost my knives, only had my hands. I don’t like hits like this, I prefer to be as subtle and refined as possible, sometimes it isn’t possible though. I’d had to come through his wards where they were the weakest, blown through like a grenade. Hands would have to do, I clamped them around his throats, squeezed hard and fresh pain shot through my knuckles as muscles tightened around his trachea, bones dug into tough cartilage.
I was going to do it, was going to damn well do it!
Something felt cold beneath my grip, his amulet shining, I didn’t have time to pull my hands away before the black armour raced across his body, twisted and shattered like something from a nightmare, Within an instant, his lower half was sealed in it, some of it charging up his front, some of it up his back, forming a helmet. As the two sections met about my neck, pain erupted up my arms, my eyes widened and suddenly I gripped him no more, howled as I stared at the stumps at the ends of my arms, thick gouts of blood erupting at them. If anything, that appeared to galvanise Moulton, he rose to his feet like a black statue of death, knocked me off him and manic laughter echoed through the slits in his helm.
“It appears you underestimated me; you overestimated your own abilities. Do you know the only thing worse than a handless assassin? A whore with no cunt!” He threw out a black-clad arm, grabbed me by the throat and yanked me up as if I were little more than a child, hurled me across the room with just a casual gesture, I hit the skeletal remains of an old couch and shattered into it, tried to extricate myself with little success. “You’re going to die, Armitage, the way you should have died long ago. A man without honour will always die alone!”
“Oh, shut up about fucking honour,” I muttered, though I wasn’t sure how clear the words were. My tongue felt three sizes too big, I’d bitten into it when I’d landed. “That’s a dog with fleas.”
Already, the plans were dying in my head. I had an ace in the hole I could use, eventually anyway. Right now, I had no chance. I needed to rile him up even further, get him so damn mad he couldn’t possibly think straight. An angry opponent was a careless opponent. I couldn’t even give him the finger.
“You’re not a fucking knight, I don’t even know why they called you that. You’re a council sponsored psychopath. You didn’t even serve them with honour, never mind anyone else.”
He pulled up short, studied me with a cocked head like an oversized bird, as if hearing my words, but trying to choose whether to pay them any heed or not. “You’re a fucking traitor, Moulton, that’s what you are. You betrayed the Shining Council, that’s why they sent me to try and kill you.”
“And how’s that working out for you?” he giggled. Not a small giggle either, an actual full-on giggle like a clown on laughing gas. He had one of my knives in his hand, threw it from one to the other in a desperate motion. “You couldn’t kill me. I’m the knight of shadows. I’m the one who nearly broke High Hall. Nearly killed their bitch of a queen. Nearly had my revenge!”
“Revenge?” I asked, struggling into a crouching position out of my wiry prison. “What did Queen Leanna ever do to you? Did she touch you in your crib? Were you a real fucking human once and then they swapped you?” My eyes went to his ears. “That why your ears look like expressionist art? You wanted to try and blend into this fucking city slightly more?” I blinked, a sudden realisation dawning on me. “Or maybe your mummy cheated on your daddy, huh? Maybe she got herself some nice strange. Fucked someone she shouldn’t, ended up with you. They do it with puppies, I guess, nock back their tail if it’s too long, guess that suits a mutt just like you!”
That got him, he was on me in a heartbeat, knife to my throat, hatred on his face. “You know nothing!” he hissed. “In another life, I could have been a prince. High Hall changed, spat it all out. All that time, all that service, it wasn’t enough. It was forgotten.” He calmed almost immediately, moved an idle hand to one of his ears below his helm, stepping back from me. “You know, sometimes I forget about these. When I’
m permitted to. They’re a memento, you know, a relic of a life that could have been but never was. I couldn’t betray the Shining Council; not like you think. I never was theirs, not truly. Not in the way they wanted me to be. I always had this spark inside me, threatening to catch fire. When he showed me the way to High Hall, I took the chance to act. You know what’s necessary for evil to flourish? Good men doing nothing. I did something and I don’t regret that in the slightest.”
“He?”
“None of it matters what we do. He’s here in the Novisarium, he’s going to take it, going to bring everyone under his heel. None of us can stand against him, he’s too powerful, him and his Valkyrie. He’s got information on everyone and anyone important, how do you think he got to me?” Moulton let out a resigned sigh, let his head droop and his shoulders rock. “It doesn’t matter at all, Armitage. Carry on, carry on as if nothing really matters. We’re all just men playing the game of gods and monsters and we know how that ends. Caught in the middle.”
The stumps where my hands had been once, didn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. Maybe I was in shock, the edges of my vision starting to fade, my skin cold. I’d had to have lost so much blood. It’s okay, I told myself. All wasn’t lost yet.
“I can’t leave you alive, Armitage,” he said. “You’re too much of a danger, I think you won’t stop coming for me. You’re going to want revenge. Men like us, we need it. I did once, it nearly broke me. It’s like there’s pieces inside me, little tiny pieces that used to be something whole and firm.” Another bitter laugh slipped from him, sounded distant and metallic from inside his helm. “Hell, I want to put myself back together, but I don’t know how. I think sometimes I’m going to rattle when I shake myself. She did this to me, you know. The false queen, the wicked bitch of the west. I faced her down, the one who caused me so much misery. I was mere inches from her, I’d faced her knight, I’d driven her armies away from her and I failed. I fucking failed. She didn’t even have to touch me, just looked at me and everything changed.”
