Bloodforged (16 page)

The barman went pale. ‘Nothing, Kino. Nothing. I promise you. He was alive when he left here. Ask anybody!’

Kino looked around the room, nodding. ‘And anyone follow him out? Or pick a fight with him while he was here?’

The barman shook his head. ‘No one. I swear to you. But I heard Grigo down at the Muzhik’s Toil saw something attack him, something that flew off into the night.’

Kino rolled his eyes. ‘Aye, we talked to Grigo. He sounded like he’d been drinking his own stock.’ With a sigh he crossed to the nearest table, then stepped up onto it and stamped his boot. ‘Hoy!’ he shouted, then turned towards the blind girl. ‘Stop yer wailing, girly. I’m talking.’

The singer faltered then fell silent as everyone in the room turned their attention on Kino.

‘You all know what happened last night. Well, my employer will pay good coin to know who did it. A whisper in my ear will get you a nice little purse.’ He nodded around. ‘Right, that’s it. You know where to find me. Play on, girly.’ He stepped down again, and the blind girl tentatively picked up where she had left off, while the room buzzed with whispers.

Kino shot a glare to the barman as he turned to go. ‘Same goes for you, Basilovich. Money in your pocket if you think of anything, but if you’re protecting somebody…’ He made a throat-cutting motion, then turned it into a salute and strutted for the back door.

This time the barman did drop a mug.

Ulrika hesitated, looking from one door to the other. Once again it wouldn’t do to follow her prey directly, but the lank-haired vampire might be waiting out front, and might try to keep her from following Kino. She shrugged and strode for it anyway, hand on the pommel of her rapier. Let him try. She’d send him back to his masters with his fangs stuffed down his throat.

But there was no dark figure waiting in the street. She looked up to the roofs and into the shadows but saw nothing. Had she been wrong? Had the black-haired youth been just a student after all? No time to worry about it now. She had prey to hunt. She hurried to the narrow passage she had taken the night before, then trotted down it to the alley that ran behind the Blue Jug.

Kino’s voice came to her as she stopped at the corner. ‘Somebody isn’t talking,’ he was saying. ‘Somebody knows something, and I’m going to find out who.’

‘What if it really was a vampire, Kino?’ asked another voice.

‘Have you ever heard of a vampire stealing purses?’ asked Kino. ‘It was some little gang trying to cover their tracks with butchery, you mark my words. Now, come on. Let’s try Madam Olneshkaya’s. She always hears everything.’

Ulrika shrank into the shadows and watched as Kino and his boys walked past and continued down the alley. After giving them a moment to get ahead, she slipped after them, silent as a cat. Her hunting instincts immediately pushed to the fore, and she had to restrain herself from loping ahead and tearing into them. Killing and feeding on the men would defeat her purpose. She was going to follow them back to their master.
Him
she would kill and feed on. The rest could be finished off later, at her leisure.

She glanced again at the roofs. Had she heard something just then? She saw nothing. It might have been a rat, or a pigeon fidgeting in its nest, but it probably wasn’t. The lupine vampire was likely following her, just as she was following Kino. She growled under her breath. She would be ready if he made his move.

After more than an hour spent going in and out of brothels, taverns, dog pits and kvas parlours, Kino and his men gave up their investigation and headed home. Ulrika was glad. Following them had been a strange mixture of boredom and anxiety – boredom because there was no challenge to it, and anxiety because she was certain she was being watched, possibly by more than one set of eyes, but she could never catch anyone spying on her. She almost wanted to turn and shout up to the rooftops, ‘I know you’re there! Come out and face me!’ but she couldn’t, or she might lose her link to Gaznayev.

Finally, Kino and his men approached a big dockside warehouse near where the River Lynsk flowed out of Praag through a gate in the city walls. A man in a heavy cloak waved them through the warehouse’s door, then went back to rubbing his hands and stamping his feet and staring off into the night.

Ulrika crouched in the shadow of a furniture workshop across the street, sizing the place up. It was brick, and two storeys high, with big double doors for wagons to pull into, and the smaller door Kino had just now entered. There were shuttered windows above that – offices most likely – but the bulk of the place was windowless. The roof however, had louvred gables along its length for ventilation. They looked very inviting.

She circled around to the river and approached the warehouse from that side. Two more big doors opened directly to two stubby docks, and there was another guard, huddled in the lee of an empty wagon, smoking a pipe. When his back was turned, Ulrika ducked between the warehouse and the one next to it, then quickly scaled the brick wall to the roof and padded along it to the first gable.

Listening at the louvres she could hear the faint murmur of distant voices, and smell the scents of men and sharp foreign spices. She pulled at the louvre’s frame, exerting her inhuman strength, and it squealed free. She paused, but no alarm was raised, so she poked her head in, then wrinkled her nose. The spice smell was overpowering.

The warehouse spread out below her, a vast dark space piled with barrels and crates and burlap sacks that her sensitive nose told her were full of pepper and cumin and coriander. At the far end, a crack of light showed under a closed door. She turned her head this way and that, looking for a way down. A network of rafters held up the roof, but the nearest was more than ten feet below her, and no wider than the length of her hand. Well, she could but try.

She wormed her way feet-first through the narrow window, getting her sword caught and scraping her hips on the splintered frame, but at last she dangled by her hands high above the dark floor, then looked down between her toes, sighting for the rafter. It was a little to the left. She swung back and forth until she had built up some momentum, then let go and dropped towards it.

She hit it perfectly, but with too much force. Her boots slipped and she had to scrabble ungracefully at a crossbeam to keep from falling onto the crates below. She listened again. Still no alarm.

With a sigh of relief she got to her feet and tiptoed across the rafters towards the lit door, but before she had crossed half the distance, something caught her ear and she paused, balanced like a tightrope walker. There were heart-fires and pulses to her right, where she hadn’t expected any, and, very faint, the sound of weeping.

Ulrika looked towards the sound. In the back corner of the warehouse a towering fortress of crates had been erected. It looked almost solid, but from her high vantage she could see it was hollow in the centre. She changed her trajectory, bounding at an angle across the rafters, then creeping more cautiously as she neared the crates and looked down into their hollow centre.

In the middle was a tall, roofless animal pen, and in it huddled a score of half-naked young girls, all refugees by the look of them. Ulrika wondered at first why they didn’t just climb over the top and escape, but a closer look gave her the answer. Some slept, some wept, some huddled together, shivering in the cold, but all were bruised and starved and miserable. None would have had the strength for such a feat.

A crimson rage welled up in Ulrika, and her claws dug into the beam she crouched upon – the tales of disappearing young women, the girl sacrificed in the abandoned cellar, and now these poor wretches. What cruel fate awaited them? Were they to become prostitutes? Would they be sold in some foreign port? Would they be slaves?

She snarled. They would be none of these things. They would be free – tonight. She turned and started picking her way across to the lit door again. She hadn’t needed any further motivation to kill Gaznayev. Her hunger and his criminality had been enough, but now his death would be more than just fulfilling her vow. This wasn’t common villainy. This wasn’t shaking down shopkeepers for protection money and robbing blind girls. This was barbarity, something the Chaos hordes would do, and she wouldn’t allow it to exist in her domain. She would go through these villains like a scythe through wheat until she reached Gaznayev, but with him, she would take her time – and when she was finished, he would give her the key to the cage.

Voices behind the door grew louder. Ulrika stopped. A latch clacked and the door swung open. Two toughs strode into the warehouse, one big and bull-necked, the other scrawny and hunched.

‘Wake those sluts,’ said Bull-neck as he crossed towards the first set of big doors. ‘The buyer’ll be here any minute.’

‘Aye, Lenk,’ said Scrawny, and started through the stacked barrels towards the fortress of crates.

Ulrika remained motionless as he walked beneath her and the big man pulled the bolts on the big doors and started to swing them open. The buyers were coming – the men who had paid the gangsters to collect the girls. Her mind churned. As much as she wanted to cut her bloody way to Gaznayev, he was only the middleman. Whatever horrors awaited the stolen girls, it was the men who were coming to get them who were behind it, and this might be Ulrika’s only chance to discover who they were. Gaznayev could wait. She could come back to him later.

She turned on the rafter and watched Scrawny step to the wall of crates and open a door cleverly disguised as two stacked boxes. He disappeared into a tunnel through them and Ulrika heard a loud metallic banging.

‘Wakey wakey, y’filthy whores!’ Scrawny cried. ‘On yer feet! Yer masters are coming soon!’

Ulrika padded back to the rafters above the crates and peered down at the cage. The man was circling it, rapping on the bars with the pommel of his dagger and leering at the girls inside as they cowered away from him.

‘If only they’d waited another day,’ he said. ‘I weren’t done sampling the merchandise.’ He shrugged. ‘Ah well. There’s more where you lot came from.’

With a final bang on the bars he strolled back through the tunnel in the wall and shut the door behind him while the girls in the cage got slowly to their feet and collected their meagre belongings. Ulrika crouched above them, pondering. How best to follow them to their new masters? Then she had it. She would join them. She would drop down into the cage and… No. That wouldn’t work – at least not dressed the way she was. But she could change that, if she was quick. All she needed was some way to carry her clothes with her.

She looked around. Stacked against the back wall of the warehouse was a pile of bulging burlap sacks. She skimmed across the rafters, then dropped down to them. They had a rich, spicy scent. She cut one open and out spilled a torrent of yellow turmeric. She upended the sack, dumping the powder out on top of the pile, then began stripping out of her cloak, doublet and boots and stuffing them in the sack.

Barefoot, with her breeches rolled up and hidden beneath the long billowing shirt she had stolen from Chesnekov, she hoped she would look the part of a kidnapped girl – perhaps if she kept her head down. But there was another problem. She doubted they would look twice if she carried the sack, but her rapier was another matter. She couldn’t fit it in the sack, and she couldn’t wear it.

The clatter of a horse and wagon came from outside. The buyers were here! She cursed. She would just have to hide the sword here and come back for it. She meant to come back for Gaznayev anyway. She would retrieve it then.

She leapt back up to the rafters, then ran across to the square of crates. At the big doors, Bull-neck and Scrawny were waving the wagon in as the driver backed the horses. Only seconds now. She laid her rapier along a beam, then dropped down to the crates with her sack. A few of the girls heard her and looked up. She waved them out of the way, then jumped down into the cage amongst them. There were a few shrieks and gasps, but most of the captives just stared dully at her with blank eyes, completely lost in their misery.

Ulrika looked around at the girls who had cried out, putting a finger to her lips, then did her best to mimic the lost ones, slumping her shoulders and hanging her head, her sack of clothes clutched forlornly to her chest. She wished she had some way to cover her hair, but there was no hope for it. If they noticed her, then she would kill them now, and find some way to hunt down the rest later.

The door in the crates opened, and Bull-neck and Scrawny led three cloaked and hooded men through the tunnel to the cage.

‘There you are, sirs,’ said Bull-neck, holding up a lantern. ‘The week’s catch. All as hale and hearty as you could wish.’

Ulrika raised her eyes just enough to peer at the three newcomers. She could not see their faces under their deep hoods. They were wearing thin black veils to hide their features. They were indeed, however, men. She could hear their hearts thudding in their chests.

The first of them took a leather purse from his sleeve and handed it to Bull-neck without a word, then gestured to Scrawny to open the cage. The little man gave a shiver as he turned, then unlocked the cage and swung open the door.

‘File out, sluts,’ he said, and banged on the cage with his key ring. ‘Come on. Move.’

The girls shuffled forwards fearfully, and Ulrika went with them, keeping her head as low as she could. Her spine tingled as she passed between the hooded men, sure they would see she was not like the others and single her out, but they didn’t seem to notice, and she followed the other captives through the tunnel in the wall of crates and out the other side.