A Mantle Of Gold (The Kingfisher Histories Book 2)

by R. J. Louis

  “You sound like you’ve got a plan,” Mudge says. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Well, first things first I need you to make contact with Travil, he can help us get supplies, and he can get the word out.”

  “The word?” Lily asks.

  “Rishad wants payback, that’s fine. I want him to know The Kingfisher is back in Rezir, and I want him to know I’m on it. So, we spread the word, dragon gold will help get us noticed. I want Rishad staring at The Kingfisher, waiting for me to take one foot off the boat so that he can grab me without us taking off.”

  “And how are you going to sneak in to see him with him watching the ship?” Mudge asks.

  Thunder looks at the burly Builder, sizing him up. “Lily, you’ve still got your make-up kit, don’t you?”

  “Aye captain, spy’s best friend, that is,” Lily says with a bold grin.

  “Good,” Thunder replies. “We’re going to make him think that the captain is on board the ship, and then once we’ve pulled the wool over his eyes, I’ll punch him in the mouth.”

  “But—” Mudge interrupts.

  “Right, you lot get some rest. We’ve got a few hours until we dock back in Rezir and I want us ready to move as soon as we get in.”

  * * *

  A few hours later, Mudge stalks back down the street away from the shuttered shop. It evidently doesn’t take long for a place in Rezir to look abandoned. But the fact that the place hadn’t been noticeably robbed, with its broken windows and everything, meant people were watching. Powerful people. He would just have to hope he hadn’t been seen by them as he strolled past the shuttered trader. Just another stranger walking past. He hadn’t stopped, hadn’t even turned his head to look in the window. He kicks himself. Surely that had been a mistake. A normal person would have reacted. Nothing he can do now, except make it back to the ship. He looks again at the messily scrawled map, then pockets it, trusting his memory. Better to look like a local, and draw less attention to himself.

  It’s too late though.

  It doesn’t take Mudge long to realise someone is following him. The harder part is not giving away that he’s realised. He’s no expert in subterfuge, far from it, but he’s learning. The skin on the back of his neck prickles, and all he wants to do is look around. The footsteps behind him are quiet, but distinct, and he has to force himself not to tense up too much, while also unable to get the image of someone cracking him over the back of the head out of his mind.

  He ducks down a corner street as if he had always intended to go that way, and then slips quickly against the wall.

  A few moments later, a hard-looking woman steps into the corner, her eyes immediately alighting on him, a frown darkening her face. She’s a Singer, and is familiar to Mudge in a way that—

  “I almost didn’t recognise you under the bruises, but it is you... murderer,” Mercuria says. Her eyes are cold as frosted glass, her lips drawn into a bloodless smile.

  Mudge pauses, then his jaw drops as he recognises her. “...Mercy?” Before he can get another word out, the tip of her sword is at his throat.

  “I wouldn’t be expecting any mercy, not after you killed Shrew.”

  “I—What?” Mudge feels the skin at his neck prick as he gasps. “I didn’t kill Percy,” he says softly.

  “Don’t you say his name.” Her voice is ragged. “Don’t you dare.”

  “I—” Mudge swallows his words as the blade cuts against his throat.

  “I hoped I’d be the one to find you,” Mercuria says. “I left early... I gave up everything. They’ll be sending people out, The Kingfisher is going to be one sought after ship, but I wanted to find you, especially.”

  Mudge just glances from side to side, trying to see a way out. He can’t see one. “You have to listen to me,” he gasps out.

  “No, I don’t. He listened to you, and now he’s dead.”

  32 - Thunder: A History

  Wilhelm stumbles into The Angel’s Fall, blinking awake in the sudden light. It sparkles off a crystal chandelier shaped in a great star-burst. He realises he is being held under both arms by two people much stronger than he is.

  A few early gamblers look at him curiously. Their faces pinched and wrinkled, but mostly the floor is quiet. It’s too early in the morning for all but the worst addicts, and they aren’t exactly going to make a fuss as Wilhelm gets dragged through the open lower level of the casino and down a long flight of stairs.

  He’s finally thrown into a small, occupied cell. The other occupant is a man with a heavy goatee and rough, red bandages on his hands.

  “Travil?” Wilhelm asks. The Solarii looks at him with sad, dark eyes, and nods.

  “And you are?” he croaks.

  “Wilhelm, navigator of The Kingfisher. I work for Erin Thunder.”

  “Is she here?” Travil looks around, concern dotting his face. “She shouldn’t have come.”

  “No, she’s not here. They’ve left Rezir, I think.” Wilhelm pauses. “How long have you been down here?”

  “Not long,” Travil says uncomfortably. “I think. A day? Two days? He must be in a bad mood, I got knocked around a bit. Didn’t take long after Erin came by my shop. Then they took me in.”

  “That’s where they found me. I was looking for you.”

  “You got the note?”

  “The note?”

  “Rishad said he sent a note. To Erin.”

  “Oh, well, whatever it said, if it was an instruction to leave town, it worked.” Wilhelm pauses, then lifts himself creakily up to peruse the cell. “Strange though, Thunder isn’t usually one for giving in to those sorts of demands.”

  “I guess she’s grown up since last time she was here.”

  The cell is a simple square room carved out of the stone of the building. A far cry from the luxuries upstairs. Already a little tight for one person, he and Travil only have a few feet each to move around each other.

  “What’s the story there?” Wilhelm asks finally. “Since I guess we’re going to be here for a while.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you the short version, unless you’re hiding some water in that robe of yours. I can’t talk for too long.”

  Wilhelm pats himself awkwardly, then shrugs. “Sorry.”

  “No bother,” Travil coughs. “You should know. It might be important if you get out...” Then he begins to speak.

  * * *

  We worked security for a while. Everyone did it, in Rezir. The work wasn’t glamorous, the pay sucked, but at least it kept you out of the muck. And it got us close to the casinos. Eventually. Of course, before anyone with actual money hires you, you needed to prove your worth. We were worth it, at least we thought so. I had a good eye for business, decent enough people skills, and a habit of getting out of scrapes. Erin was the muscle, and Rishi was the paranoid bastard who always seemed to know when things were going to go wrong.

  It was a night like any other, Erin was working outside the bar, a kerchief pulled up around her nose to keep the stink out. She kept flipping me the bird when she noticed me looking, and I kept tapping my watch. Dean always kept her on longer than he should, and I can’t really blame him. Nobody better for cheap security than an augmented Builder. Still, it was late, and if trouble was brewing, it would have happened by now.

  “Rishad’s found us a new gig,” I said, ambling over.

  “Piss off while I’m working,” Erin responded, charming as ever.

  “You’re supposed to be finished by now. Come on, we’ve got a meeting.”

  She sighed, and turned back into the bar. It’s nearly empty, but for one skinny drunk making unrequited eyes at the barman. I watched her speak to him, collect a small pouch in payment, and then pick up the drunkard and carry him bodily out into the night.

  “I don’t care where you go bud. You can’t stay here, and Dean doesn’t want you back. You want my advice, go home, get some sleep.”

  The drunk sobbed, and stumbled off into the city.

  “So, what
have we got? Something better than waving muscles at drunks?”

  “Well, in a way. More like waving muscles at rich folk.”

  “How rich are we talking here?” Thunder asked with a grin.

  * * *

  “The Angel’s Fall is on the up-and-up,” Rishad said, a shadow of a smile on his face. “And we’re gonna ride its coat-tails to the stars.” He’s dressed in a fine suit, his pale skin almost glowing outside the edges of the dark cloth.

  “Do we need to dress so fancy?” Thunder asked pointedly. “I don’t know if I can pull off a dress.”

  “Not as well as I could,” I said with a smile “But I think Rishad here wants to impress our potential new employer.”

  “Girl’s got looks.” Rishad winked. “Feroux, goes by Fox. Solarii baroness of some sort or other. Gorgeous, cold, deadly, and filthy, stinkin’ rich.” His eyes glinted in the moonlight.

  “Well I hope you two will be very happy together, as long as the rest of us aren’t just going to be hanging on.”

  The building had promise, it was well situated in one of the upper towers in the central ward of Rezir, and while it had clearly seen better days, they weren’t that long ago. There was a scent of progress in the air, that better days were on the horizon again.

  It would be our home for the next year and a half. A year and a half spent working questionable jobs for Fox while she drags Angel’s Fall into the lime-light. A year and a half that ended with betrayal, theft, and murder. And that’s why Thunder isn’t welcome in this town any-more.

  * * *

  As The Angel rose, so did we, Rishad became Fox’s body-guard, and later on, her lover. Thankfully, he made sure that Thunder and I were well looked after, he didn’t just leave us in the lurch to get himself a warm bed at night. It wasn’t just watching the tables for us, we escorted the high money gamblers around, we were in charge of our own little crew of security, and on occasions, we got to take The Fall’s sky-ship out for a spin. Those were good times, I had money enough to dabble in whatever I liked, and Thunder fell in love with that ship. It wasn’t The Kingfisher then, it was The Golden Goose, Fox’s little in-joke.

  Rishad, meanwhile, fell in deep with Fox, or so it seemed. He had always been cold and cunning. I didn’t think he had a romantic bone in his body, and to be honest, I’m still pretty sure he doesn’t. I think what he saw in Fox was a reflection of himself... A better version of himself. Every bad vice he possessed, she exemplified, she was colder, crueler, cleverer than him, and she evidently saw in him a worthy apprentice. They were bad for each other in the way that passionate love always is. They brought out the best of their worst habits.

  Rishad started handling more than just sex and security for Fox, he became her second, he made changes, instituted plans to take out competition. Casinos on Rezir are in fierce competition, there are only so many whales out there to spend money, and luring them to spend big at your place is just as important as making the competition unappetising.

  They became partners. I’m no sap, and I think everyone deserves a shot at something good, if they can find it, and I guess they found each other.

  It couldn’t last though. They were both too shut off. It was like an unchecked fire in a wooden house. Burning hotter and hotter, and destined to flare out of control. Nobody could have really predicted how it would blow up, but anyone could see it was going to happen.

  Naturally, when Fox died, it blew up.

  She was strong, fit, and healthy. It was obvious enough to most people that her death wasn’t of natural causes. Most of the players in the game thought it was Rishad. I certainly did. After all, he stood to gain the most, taking a controlling stake in the hottest new casino. That’s how the game was played, after all. But to say he reacted poorly was an understatement.

  Rishad went mad. I thought it was projection, guilt, you know. But I was wrong. It was grief. The sheer extent of his pain, I was worried he’d burn the whole city down in some insane quest for revenge. He started questioning everyone, the staff, the guests, Thunder and I.

  The strange thing was, after the grief passed, he got worse. Instead of mourning Fox, he grew convinced that he had been the target of an assassination attempt, and this mysterious threat had, in failing to terminate him, got Fox by accident. He’d always been self-involved, but this was a new low. He became obsessed with his own security, he hired a private chef to avoid being poisoned, he stopped letting the servants into his private suite. He spent a tonne hiring new servants some for only a few hours, some for days, convinced each of them were being bought out by his enemies. He fell away from it all. The Angel’s Fall barely kept afloat, with Thunder and I running as much of the show as we could.

  As he drew in, he became more aggressive, more dangerous. I was closest to him, in that time, and did what I could to keep him alive, and keep him from murdering his personal chef. Chefs. Over-cooked steak apparently looks a lot like a particularly poisonous Flarian desert cactus. He went through chefs, servants, and security guards, he had coin enough to pay for silence, but those of us who worked in The Fall grew tense and frightened from his outbursts. His rages were legendary, drunken and vicious, and if I stepped between him and whichever servant or poor innocent civilian had irked him. Well... he beat me bloody on more than one occasion

  I woke one afternoon after a beating so bad I’d been unconscious for a day and a half. Thunder had nursed me back to waking, and she was livid. She confronted Rishad. I... I had hoped to avoid that, Rishad and I knew she was strong. We didn’t know much about her history, she was already part-machine then. She lived like the world had broken her down, and every day was a fight. She seemed to relish the fight too, knew it made her tougher. Stronger.

  I didn’t see the fight. But I heard it. I saw the aftermath. Rishad’s private suite was shattered, he looked like he’d been thrown forcibly through every item of furniture in the room. Some people might see a person like Thunder and expect her to not know her own strength. But she knew.

  She didn’t kill him. But it was a close run thing.

  By the time he’d crawled far enough to get help, she was gone. Rumour has it he left a smear of blood through his room and down the hall that he didn’t let anyone clean. It’s now a dried red carpet, a warning to those few people who can enter his inner sanctum.

  And Thunder took the sky-ship, and enough money to see it across the Shards. That was ten years ago. And now she’s back.

  33 - Faith

  Mudge feels Mercuria’s arm tense a split second before the knife drags across his throat. He slams his head back sharply in the moment when her arm moves, the tension in her arm dropping for just long enough, and feels her nose crunch against the back of his head. In that instant of shock, he leaps forward, twisting in the air so that the knife cuts across his shoulder instead of his neck. Mercuria curses behind him, her voice muddy through her broken nose, and Mudge turns.

  “I didn’t kill Percy, and I’m not going to kill you. Dante Flare shot him in the gut in the middle of Faerie Country, and for that, I broke his spine. His death is already avenged. Now you have to live with it, just like me.”

  “Why should I believe you?” Mercuria’s voice is hoarse, blood runs down her lips and over her chin.

  “Percy told me the same thing I’m telling you... to take a leap of faith.”

  She stands, quiet, numb. Two worlds war within her. Her jaw clenches and unclenches, and then, with a ragged, bloody shout, she lunges at Mudge. Her attack is fierce and desperate, and Mudge, though taller and broader, and an experienced wrestler, ducks back under the ferocity. Tears of rage run unnoticed down Mercy’s cheeks, mixing with the blood from her nose, turning her into a ghastly crimson-faced demon as she slashes at him.

  “A leap of faith!?” She hisses, her words punctuating wild swings that Mudge ducks back from, arms raised. “How dare you!”

  Mudge takes his chance as Mercy takes a second to wipe at her eyes, and he steps forward, hooking a leg behind her
and tripping her easily. She tumbles back, and Mudge strikes, kicking at her wrist, sending the knife clattering away, and Mudge lets himself relax, just a fraction.

  “Your stance is terrible, you need to channel the anger, not let it overpower you.”

  “Shut up!” Mercuria croaks, her fall knocking the air and the fight out of her.

  “I get the feeling there’s more going on here than just Percy, and I’m just the lucky guy who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Shrew was a good man, and I liked him, more than I think even I realised. Killing Dante didn’t bring him back, nor did it make me feel any better. Do you really think you killing me is going to help?”

  “You have no idea what you’ve done to me,” Mercy snaps, her eyes sharp as blades.

  “I haven’t done anything to you,” Mudge says exasperatedly. “In fact, counting this time now, I’d say I’ve been rather good.”

  “You’re a pirate! You’re all painted with the same bloody brush.”

  “I’m a pirate, sure. But I’m a good man too.” Mercy spits, a wad of bloody saliva. “Shrew said so,” Mudge says, colouring slightly. “And ridiculous though it might be, I believed him. I’m doing what I can to make the world a better place. The only way I know how.”

  “You’re a monster. You’re all monsters.”

  “I am not your enemy,” Mudge says, voice lined with frustration. “Tell me what happened. What poisoned you against me specifically?!”

  “You—” Mercuria’s words hitch in her throat, and she closes her eyes. Mudge waits, patient, wary. “No,” she says finally. “I won’t.”

  “Well, you better find someone you can talk to about this, or it’s going to tear you apart,” Mudge says flatly. “Not all pirates are the same, and if you need proof, come with me, see The Kingfisher for yourself.”