behind me had drawn my attention, their comrades had already circled around to my front. A quick glance was enough to let me know I wasn’t being jumped by a gang of street toughs braving the cold-beneath their thick black cloaks I caught flashes of bright cashmere. Each of them wore a half mask the same color as their capes, masquerade style, fashioned to cover the lower half of the face with that of a wild animal.
I hadn’t been paying much attention because of the snow, thinking that and the irregularity of my hours would be sufficient protection. Was the invitation fake, I wondered now, ginned up by the Blade to lure me out of hiding? It hadn’t looked like it, nor did it strain credulity to think of Mairi and her cool black eyes turning around and selling me off the moment her door had slammed shut.
I filed that in the growing stack of things I would think about if I survived the next five minutes and ducked into an alleyway, sprinting through the treacherous snow. Behind me I could hear them whooping, hounds running a quarry to ground. The buildings in the area were all garment factories in the new style, long rows of laborers at unforgiving machines, closed since last year’s trade war with Nestria. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a side entrance to one of them and threw my shoulder into it, smashing through whatever rotted lock had been holding it shut.
I entered a cavernous structure a good hundred yards across, broken windows offering enough light to navigate the huge sewing contraptions decaying in the interior. Against the back wall I saw a steep metal staircase and above it a pair of long-abandoned offices, and I sprinted up the steps. The gangway led toward a second stairwell and another locked door, the latter proving no greater impediment than its brother below.
I scrambled forward onto a flat roof, the wood warped and treacherous. The cityscape spread out ahead of me, a panorama of civic rot broken up by the huge industrial smokestack that crowned the factory. My subterfuge had gained me only a few seconds, and I drew my blade to deal with the one coming up behind me.
His mask was carved into a narrow beak, like a finch’s, and he was laughing, laughing and drawing his blade, a thin fencer’s epee that looked more like a child’s toy than the means to commit murder. He started to say something, but I didn’t have time for pleasantries and I closed quickly, hoping to put him down and continue my escape.
He was fast, and younger than me by a good ten years, but a lifetime of fencing was poor preparation for the business at hand. The powdery snow fouled up his footwork, and his style, honed in less lethal circumstances, bespoke the natural tendency toward offense one adopts when the worst a miscalculation promises is the loss of a match. I’d have him in a moment.
But I didn’t have a moment. I could hear his compatriots on the stairwell and I knew if I didn’t finish him quickly I’d learn how difficult breathing becomes with a foot of steel in your innards. After his next pass I feigned a stumble, dropping forward on one knee, hoping he’d take the bait.
The thought of tagging me proved irresistible, and he pushed forward for a killing stroke. I ducked lower, so low my face was nearly touching the roof, and his rapier passed over my shoulder harmlessly. Bracing my left arm against the frozen wood I surged upward, swiping with my trench blade and cleaving his arm at mid-joint. He shrieked and I spent a quick quarter second in astonishment at the high pitch of his voice before my follow-up severed his neck to the spine. Conscious of the men close behind, I sprinted over his corpse and made my way forward.
I climbed the cast-iron ladder ten feet to the top of the chimney. Reaching the summit I sprang to my feet and looked down at my pursuers, the thought occurring to me that if any of them had brought a crossbow I was as good as dead. None had. Two stood staring back at me, swords clutched tightly in their hands, while the third checked on his dead friend. I laughed, filled with the exhilaration that accompanies violence. “Blue blood spills like any other!” I shouted, my trench blade dripping ichor. “Come get me if you’ve got the stones!”
I took three quick steps and leaped into the air, bracing myself as I smashed through the glass panes of the adjacent building. I tumbled as I fell, awkwardly and not without injury. Stumbling to my feet I rushed into the room beyond and took up position in the black interior, hoping my pursuers were foolish enough to follow the way I had come.
A half minute went by, and then I heard a boyish yell and saw two of them hit the floor, their cloaks apparently not proving a critical impediment to the maneuver. The jump didn’t put either of my pursuers down for long. They charged after me, cognizant of the danger that hesitation posed.
I tossed a dagger at the first one through the door, aiming at his chest but throwing high, the blade burying itself in his throat-a rare dividend of incompetence. He dropped to the ground, his last few seconds painful. I wasted no time mourning his loss, and pressed on to the one behind him. Between the death of his comrade and the bad light, he didn’t last long. There was a moment of terror as I maneuvered him back toward the broken windows, and I put him down with a flurry of blows.
I stood at the edge and thought about going over, dropping the two stories and heading out into the night, but I wasn’t sure if my ankle could take another fall. And truth be told, I wanted the last one, wanted to see his face as he realized I’d done for the other two, wanted to put my hands on someone after days of running around in the dark.
So I sprinted down the second-floor landing, just in time to see him break through the front door. Somewhere along the line he had dropped his cowl, but he retained the jet-black muzzle that obscured his identity. He was larger than his comrades, and in place of the thin dueling blades they had sported, he held a long saber with a thick bronze guard.
I reached into my boot for my second throwing dagger. Gone-it must have fallen out at some point during the scuffle. I hefted the trench blade backhanded, the blunt side against my forearm. We’d do this old-fashioned. The two of us circled warily, getting a sense of each other, then he feigned a blow to my chest and I lost myself in the clash of steel on steel.
He was good, and his weapon was well suited to dealing with the thick edge of my own. The pain in my ankle wasn’t making things any easier, and I found myself struggling to maintain the pace. I needed to do something to alter the odds-when it comes to lethal engagements, three and one isn’t much of a record.
We locked swords and I forced myself against him, then spat a thick wad of phlegm into his face. He had sufficient wherewithal not to wipe it away, but I could see it rattled him.
I moved back a few steps. “Were those your friends I killed?”
He didn’t answer, closing the distance I’d put between us and making me uncomfortably aware of how little space there was to maneuver. I made a quick play for his head, but he deflected it without difficulty and launched a riposte that nearly took off my own. By the Firstborn, he was fast. I couldn’t keep this up much longer.
“I bet they were. School yard chums, I bet.”
We engaged again, and again I came off the worse for it, a cut across my left bicep, indicating his advantage in speed. I continued my provocation, doing my best to seem unconcerned by the wound. “Make sure you don’t forget the first one’s hand when you bury him, else he spends eternity a cripple.”
The smell of blood fired his temper and he came at me with a roar. I slipped my off hand into my pocket and gripped the spiked knuckles, barely parrying a wild, two-handed stroke that would have caved in my skull had it connected. While he was off balance I struck twice, landing a pair of hooks to his body, each blow leaving my fist wet with blood. One hand dropped to his side, and I gave him a firm shot across his jaw, the blow driving through his mask and into the flesh beneath. He screamed, the sound wheezing through shattered teeth and mutilated tissue, and I followed it up with a blow from my trench blade that sent a chunk of bone whistling from his chest. He screamed again and collapsed.
Their clothing and weapons were evidence enough, but if I needed more proof of Beaconfield’s involvement, I had it. With his face uncovered I recognized the man dying at my feet as the Blade’s second from earlier that morning.
I crouched beside him, drops of his blood falling off my weapon.
“Why is the Blade killing children?”
He shook his head and coughed out a response. “Fuck you.”
“Answer my questions and I’ll see you get bandaged up. Otherwise I gotta go at you ugly.”
“Bullshit.” The word was four syllables, broken by his labored panting. “I won’t die a punk.”
He was right of course-there was no way I could get him to a doctor before his body lost the spirit. Couldn’t cut him for the same reason-and anyway, I didn’t think I had it in me to torture someone just then.
“I can make it quick for you.”
It was a struggle for him to nod his head. “Do it.”
