And now he had to find out who he'd killed.
He nerved himself and stumbled the distance the knife had flashed in a second and stared down at the corpse. He'd killed before, more times than he could count, mostly strangers in the wrong clothing who'd been trying to kill him. Sometimes men or women he'd known and loathed with a consuming passion, like Liam. Never anyone who had been a friend or ally.
Healing tissues blazed again as he knelt by the body, avoiding the really excessive splash of blood you get when you cut the carotid artery, and turned the face to the flickering light of oil lamps. Young, but all the Old Blood looked young for a century or more. Straw blond, dark eyes frozen wide with pain and the surprise that death was real.
Nobody he knew.
Brian grunted with the effort of jerking his knife out of bone. He wiped it on the loose uniform, another of those stupid purple Renaissance things the Pendragons seemed to affect for their secret inner circle. He felt the hardness under it, some kind of flak jacket of plates laminated with Kevlar fabric. Hand and eyes had read it right. He carved long strips of velvet from the outer sleeve and wrapped them as a pressure bandage around his forearm. He couldn't waste Power on healing minor problems. The major ones needed far more than he had.
The SMG did have a suppressor screwed to the muzzle. He studied the weapon for a moment. Standard Pendragon issue, which meant it had been keyed to the sentry's hand. Wouldn't do Brian any good until he found half an hour and some tools to bugger the mechanism, and the blood on it might serve as a beacon to any tracker. He left it where it lay.
Now to get the hell out of here. He groaned to his feet, fixed the pasture oak in his head, not taking chances, and forced the three steps necessary to move from one world to the next. Then he shook his head. The gloomy labyrinth and grotto still walled him in. Merlin again, with his layers upon layers of defense. The man must have been a certifiable paranoid.
So Brian would have to do it the hard way. He tested his body again, gently twisting, bending, swinging his right arm and grimacing at the effect that had on his left side. Those muscles tied into everything. Then he took a deep breath, nearly collapsed as that stabbed him in the gut, forced himself upright, and strolled up the corridor beyond the corpse, again doing his best to counterfeit the air of someone who belonged. In spite of all the blood staining his arm and side.
Flickering oil lamps glowed from niches in the walls, barely lighting the way, looking like they'd been put there by the Romans or by the Picts and Scots before them. Black soot shone with a greasy glaze on the walls, centuries of oil vapor condensed on the cold damp stone. The flagged stone floor had been worn smooth by millennia of feet. Just keep putting one bloody foot in front of the other. Sooner or later, this buggering ramp has to end. His rubbery legs told him otherwise, told him the climb stretched for miles.
He concentrated on the kukri in his hand, heavy, strong, calm. Deadly, like the men who carried its brothers. The touch raised shouts of "Ayo Gorkhali" in his ears, wars long ago and far away and a mental salute from the Gurkhas he'd led into battle. They marched indomitable across his memories, lending him strength and will from a cooling spring that had seemed endless. Like Maureen's strength and will.
The corridor spiraled up and outward, a long corkscrew widdershins in the climb, deasil on the descent, like a snail shell or the labyrinth itself.
And then a shape formed out of the gloom, a man, the back of a man standing at a formal "parade rest" and watching closed-circuit TV monitors mounted on the ceiling. Brian crept along doing his best imitation of a ghost. He could try to disable, or he could kill.
The second guard kept watching outward like a dutiful soldier because his mate was guarding his back. Brian lifted his knife, fire blazed through his wounded side, and breath hissed between his teeth. The sentry started to turn, weapon rising, and the kukri took his head off with a single stroke.
The head fell to one side, body still standing and pumping blood like a fountain for seconds afterward. Then it collapsed all in a heap. Brian almost followed it down; the effort of swinging his arm and the knife left him swaying. He stared down at the weapon, another Pendragon-issue submachine gun. Forget it. Then he knelt and checked the head, even though he wondered if he'd be able to get back up again. He had to find out . . . .
Her head. Dark gleaming hair cut short, startled eyes still moving and focusing. Her lips tried to form a word and failed. Claire. Bugger. His gut spasmed, a red hot iron, and he swallowed sour vomit.
It had to be Claire. His eyes blurred for a moment, and he felt his heartbeat stagger. Out of all the possible combinations and permutations of Pendragons, it had to be Claire standing between him and Maureen.
Not exactly a friend, not exactly a lover. You didn't really have friends or lovers inside the Pendragons. But Claire was someone he'd trusted more than once to guard his back. He remembered her long white body in bed, hard and angular and as big as most men's but emphatically female. She'd been bisexual, sometimes had it off with Dierdre. He wondered if she'd known who was on duty when she cut her prisoner loose.
