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 second 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.
He took the guards’ belts of small knives and vials, but left their short blades and guns in favor of his own rapier. Longing for a mouthful of wine and a bit of garlic bread, Salvator stepped briskly out into the hall and grasped the handle of the left-most door leading to the inner chambers of the temple. The handle turned and the room beyond, which was actually another hallway, was empty.
I’m in.
Salvator strode down the corridor, his shoes tapping lightly on the bare stone floor. The narrow windows on his left were barred with iron and only let a few painfully thin blades of sunlight inside. The hall terminated at two doors and a spiraling iron stair that vanished up into a dusty haze and down into utter darkness.
