City of Dreams and Nightmare (15 page)

“Built against the wall at Musicians Row is the wind park,” the man was saying. Hal had forgotten the fellow’s name and didn’t want to look stupid by asking again. Somewhere during the evening they’d separated from Hal’s crewmates and it was now just the two of them huddled over their ales. “This is one of the greatest wonders in all Thaiburley. Cunningly wrought tubes and vents draw air from beyond the wall and channel it through enormous horns and trumpets and flutes, built of wood and brass and cane in bewildering variety, each with its own specific pitch and tone. Still more wind is brought into play across curtains of bells and chimes. You never know what you’re going to find when you visit the wind park. One minute all will be mellow wafts of sound and subdued tinkling, like some fairy orchestra at play, the next a great booming cacophony will break out, as if the fairies have been supplanted by giants.

“But go there on a concert night and the true wonder of the place is revealed. When one of the great pieces by a master composer such as Waschnet or Siebler is being performed, then you hear the wind park in all its glory. You see, each opening to the walls is controlled by vents and stops, the flow of air through them can be blocked and regulated, enabling all this vast barrage of sound to be shaped and directed into something remarkable. That, my friend is a wonder that everyone should hear at least once before they die.”

Hal tried to picture the scene in his mind’s eye, imagining himself sitting there listening to such magnificent music. “Sounds amazing; wish I could see it,” was all he mumbled.

“Maybe you can some day.”

Hal’s attention snapped back to the man’s face, to find him grinning conspiratorially. “I’m sure we can sort something out, if you really want this so badly.”

Hal could hardly believe it and had to suppress a surge of hope. “Do you mean that?”

“I don’t see why not.” His new friend drained the last of his ale. “Come on, let’s find a real alehouse.”

The bargeman looked around, puzzled. The room was crowded, dimly lit, dingy but warm, and boasted perfectly acceptable ale. “This place seems all right to me.”

“It’s all right, granted,” the other replied, before tapping the side of his nose knowingly with a single finger, “but trust me, it’s not one of the best places.” The man stood up and shuffled a little unsteadily towards the door. “You can stay here if you want, of course.”

Stay here and let this fellow walk away after what he had just said so casually? Not a chance. “No, wait up, I’m coming.” Hal scrambled to his feet and hurried after his new friend.

He was already a little hazy as to where they were in relation to the barge. Not far from the docks, obviously, and close to the shantytown known as the Runs, but it was a real warren of alleyways and tight streets around here, so beyond that he was thoroughly lost. Yet his friend led the way confidently enough, so he happily followed.

“It’s breckin’ dark here,” he commented, as they moved out of reach of the nearest street lanterns.

“A short cut.”

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“Just a little somewhere I know, a little way inside the Runs; someplace where the ale is as bitter as the girls are sweet.”

“Sounds good to me.” What did he have to lose after all? The barge wasn’t due to leave until late the next day; plenty of time to sober up.

“You’ve had a taste of the girls here, I take it?”

“Oh, yes.” Hal couldn’t help but smile at recent memories. “There was this one last night. A real looker, with a mouth that could suck like a whirlpool swallowing a stick.”

His friend laughed appreciatively. “If she’s that good, I might have to look her up myself. Don’t suppose you can remember her name?”

Hal frowned. What was her name? He could picture the girl easily enough: young though not too young, long auburn hair matched by even longer legs, a pretty enough face, though a little narrower than his ideal, and a peach of a bottom that just cried out to be slapped. He remembered the paleness of her naked back and shoulders as she knelt on all fours on the bed in front of him, the warmth of the skin beneath his finger tips as he raked his nails down from shoulders to ribs while taking her from behind. She’d cried out at that and twisted around, telling him to stop, the bitch.

He ended up having to slap her face a few times just to keep her quiet, but she’d asked for it. All of this he could recall, but her name continued to elude him.

“Maria,” he said at length, trying the sound of it, but knew immediately it wasn’t right. “No, Marta.” That sounded better. “Yes, it was Marta, I’m sure.”

From nowhere, pain exploded in his stomach. It took a split second to register his drinking companion’s swift movement towards him which had preceded the pain. Instinctively, he brought his hands up to cover the hurt, feeling dampness and warmth, while the pain blossomed into agony. The strength seemed to have drained from his legs, which were suddenly unable to support him. His knees buckled and he slumped against a hard surface, a wall, which he commenced to slowly slide down.

Then a hand reached inside his tunic. He watched it emerge with his purse and other valuables before focusing on the face of his ”friend”, on eyes that were suddenly hard and bright and clear and focused.

“Martha,” a voice said coldly. “Her name is Martha.”

He felt a hand lifted, his ring removed. The face withdrew and the man turned away. Hal watched as the fellow sauntered off, a long shadow cast by the single flickering lantern. His vision seemed to be narrowing, as if shutters were slowly being drawn in from the sides. He continued to watch the man’s back as it receded and his life continued to flow out from between his fingers, until the shutters closed entirely.

Dewar strode away from the dying bargeman. He had gone for the belly strike deliberately. The resultant wound was painful as well as fatal, and lacked the immediacy of a cut throat or a stab to the heart. The man would die more slowly, which suited the assassin just fine. He wanted the brecker to suffer.

That morning, once he had returned with Martha to the shack she both worked from and lived in, the girl had gingerly removed her clothes. Only then did he appreciate the full extent of the beating she’d received. There were vivid bruises to her throat, shoulders, arms, hip, thigh, back and to the ribcage, just below her right breast. There were cuts to both arms and severe scratching to her stomach, shoulders and back, where fingernails had raked blood. She suffered his expert fingers tracing the line of each rib, barely flinching as his touch brought obvious pain and refusing to break down, though a tear trickled from the corner of one eye and he felt her tremble more than once, as if struggling for control.

“Nothing broken,” he concluded. “You were lucky.”

She snorted. “You call this luck? He beat the shit out of me and then stole every penny I ’ad – my jewellery, everything. Some luck.”

He doubted that. “You mean you hadn’t stashed some coin somewhere safe?”

“Of course. I wasn’t countin’ that.”

Silly him; naturally she wasn’t counting that. Despite the circumstances, he smiled, though it was a shallow, surface-skimming expression. Beneath it a familiar emotion stirred; one that he welcomed like an old friend: rage. Dewar’s rage was not of the scorching, incandescent variety, liable to flare magnificently and die away all too quickly. No, his formed rather an implacable, ice cold centre; cold enough to burn and very slow to disappear.

Martha was one of his people, one of those he depended on for information. True, he no longer lived in the City Below and his contact with the girl was sporadic at best these days, but how could he expect her to continue working for him and trusting him with secrets if he didn’t look out for her during those times he was here? What would others think if they heard that he had seen her like this and done nothing? Professional pride was at stake.

His intention in escorting her home had been to have sex, to prove a point and remind her who was in control here, but, having seen the extent of the injuries, he changed his mind and so indicated that she should get dressed again.

“On, off – make yer breckin’ mind up,” the girl muttered. Yet he could tell she was relieved, and doubted she would be entertaining many clients for a day or two.

He made sure she understood that his need for information was urgent and told her that he would visit her again that night, stressing his expectation that she have something for him by then. After giving her some coins, he then left to see to various matters, one of which involved a guardsman and a spill dragon, and another the tracking down of a bargeman by the name of Hal.

That at least had been straightforward enough. There were few barges docked at the time and Hal was not an especially common name. Dewar chose his moment carefully, approaching only once the man was already in his cups, perhaps not deeply into them as yet, but far enough. Separating him from his friends proved easier than the assassin had dared hope, after which events ran like clockwork. He deliberately led the man into a near-abandoned area of the slums, an alley so out of the way that not even the locals had bothered to give it a name. A single lantern burned at its entrance, but other than that, darkness ruled. There was little chance of the body being discovered before morning. If then.

Dewar shivered and wrapped his arms around himself, rubbing them as he walked. It rarely got cold in the City Below, not really, but a chill wind sometimes blew in off the Thair and at night, with the sun globes dormant, the temperature could occasionally drop to less than warm, particularly this close to the walls and the river.

Local wisdom insisted that it was unwise to venture out alone at night down here. There were denizens of the City Below that no sane person would want to meet, creatures that preyed on the vulnerable and the unwary. The lamplighters started their evening’s duty early and worked in pairs, while the razzers rarely ventured out at all after globes out. When they did it was with considerable reluctance and invariably in force. After dark, even the street-nicks went about their business in groups. Personally, Dewar had always enjoyed the under-City at night and felt the dangers to be exaggerated. Besides, half the inhabitants lived in poorly constructed hovels which were only one step away from being on the streets anyway.

Of course, there was always the possibility that somewhere along the line he himself had become part of the problem and one of the reasons people stayed indoors. The thought amused him.

Yet perhaps he was out of practice, or perhaps it was simply the feeling of general unrest that had seeped into his awareness via the myriad snippets of information and rumour that accumulated through the day, but he felt less assured than he normally would. A sense of wrongness gripped the City Below, permeating each nook and cranny, oozing into every brick of every building and even into the flimsy walls of the shanties. Something was definitely out of kilter here, and for the first time he could remember, Dewar no longer felt completely safe being out on the streets at night.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, an almost electric tingling ran through his body: a state of high alertness which had served him well in the past. He kept walking but one hand hovered close to the various weapons at his belt and his gaze swept the shadows, trying to penetrate their darkness.

There was the suggestion of movement in one and he froze. It was nothing overt, the merest hint of a black form shifting in the depths of an equally black pool, but so attuned were his senses that he didn’t doubt them for an instant. The only question concerned the degree of menace.

Dewar carefully removed his kairuken. An integral element of certain fighting disciplines in the far north, the kairuken was still virtually unknown in Thaiburley. Its business end was a razor-edged star-shaped disk, which was fired from a powerful spring-release catapult. Dewar considered it to be the best of both worlds – far more compact and easier to reload than a crossbow, it was also lethal over a considerably greater distance than any hand-thrown weapon.

One large, saucer-like eye stared out at him from the shadows as he raised the weapon. Small, whatever it was – and it certainly wasn’t a rat or a spill dragon. He still kept half an eye focused on the peripheries, wary in case this was a distraction to mask the approach of some other threat.

Then the thing moved. It flowed from the shadow and along the wall. Slender, stretching, and so swift that even fully alert Dewar was almost too slow. The brief glimpse the assassin caught suggested a cross between a long, thin monkey and a spider. Instinct took over and he fired as it moved, the silver disk flashing across the intervening space and striking the wall a fraction behind the sinuous form. Or had it? There was a jerk as if the thing had been hit and then the creature was gone. Difficult to be certain, but it looked as if something other than just the disk might have fallen to the ground.

Dewar sprinted over, to scour the floor in search of whatever had dropped. He found it almost immediately: a section of leg, no longer than his thumb, ending in a wickedly sharp clawed foot. Impossible to make out details in this dimness, but something felt wrong.

He retrieved his disk and, still clutching the severed section of limb, hurried towards more brightly lit environs.

Standing directly under a street lamp, he was able to see the thing more clearly. Fur, blood and wires, like something the dog master might come up with, but there had been nothing canine about this creature. Was the dog master branching out, or was somebody else moving in on his territory? And had the construct’s presence been pure coincidence, or had it been watching Dewar?

The assassin frowned. He preferred to be asking the questions rather than puzzling over them. The sooner he could finish here and get back to the Heights the better. This return to his former home grew more disconcerting by the hour.

At least he could be confident that the Kite Guard’s visit here was proving a frustrating one. Before waylaying the bargeman, he had met briefly with his new contact within the watch. Evidently Tylus had failed to gain the sort of support he might have hoped for and instead had been given the assistance of just a single officer, one of the newest and least competent in the department. The irony of that did not escape the assassin.