A Mantle Of Gold (The Kingfisher Histories Book 2)

by R. J. Louis

  “Go away,” Mercuria says, her voice thick with pent emotion. “Just go.”

  “And leave you here? Alone?” Mudge looks around at the seedy underbelly of the golden city.

  “I’ve been alone all my life,” Mercuria says through gritted teeth. She lifts herself up onto her elbows and glares at Mudge. “That’s what you’ve done to me. Now LEAVE!”

  Mudge shakes his head sadly, then turns away, leaving Mercuria to crawl slowly to her feet, her eyes hard. Thunder, cannon-fire, and a child’s cries echo in her mind, scalding her to action. But she has nowhere to go.

  Eventually, she pulls herself out of the alley, jostling her way through the crowd, stalking bloody-faced back to the dock.

  * * *

  “Travil’s gone.” The first words Mudge says back on deck send the officers crew into a sharp riot of whispers. Thunder steps up, grips Mudge’s arm and tears his shirt sleeve off, revealing a bloody gash across his shoulder.

  “I’ll kill Rishad for this.”

  “That wasn’t him.”

  “Course not, he doesn’t get his hands dirty, I meant—”

  “It wasn’t his goons, either.”

  “Well who was it?”

  “I tripped.”

  Thunder narrows her eyes at him, and Mudge grins. Patch lumbers over, the big man already grinning eagerly at the cut, needle and thread in one hand.

  “What have you done to yourself, Mister Mudge? Fall on a knife?”

  “He tripped,” Thunder says coldly. “Travil’s gone, you say?”

  “Yep. The place has been broken into, there are goons watching it. Pretty sure they didn’t notice me walk past.”

  “I told you to be natural,” Lily says with a grin. “I knew I should have gone. You’re about as subtle as a moose.”

  “What’s a moose?” Mudge asks curiously. Thunder taps her foot impatiently.

  “It’s a big furry bug, we feed them to the Web-Mothers on Dusk. It’s got six legs and great big googly eyes. Quite good meat though. And not subtle.”

  “I got that last part,” Mudge says. “Captain, I don’t know what we’re going to do without Travil.”

  “Lily. You get your wish. We’re a big crew. Take a team out to the streets. Get everything we need, and make sure the people know The Kingfisher is at the docks.”

  “As if they’re going to care,” Lily says with a wry smile.

  “They’ll care when you pay them with dragon’s gold. I want Rishad to know I’m in town. If he’s got goons watching Travil’s place, he’ll have people listening out. They just need to hear about The Kingfisher, and then all eyes will be on us.”

  “And that’s what we want?” Mudge asks, wincing as Patch stitches his bloody cut.

  “Yes. It’s classic misdirection. While you’re watching one hand... the other...”

  Lily grins, then runs a long-nailed finger across the bare skin of her neck. She winks at Rico, who looks sick.

  “Why so frightened kiddo, you get to baby-sit mama-bear, make sure the ship is ready to roll out if Rishad makes a move.”

  “It’s not that,” Rico says sadly. “It’s Wilhelm. He’s... hurting.”

  The light mood on deck evaporates. Thunder’s face goes a storm-cloud grey as she begins directing the crew. It’s early enough in the day that they can begin making arrangements, and without further ado, their plan is put into action.

  34 - The Belly of the Beast

  The dress is a fine white silk that seems to sing on Lily’s alabaster skin. It hugs her slender form, sitting low, just above her ankles, and revealing fine, heeled boots of doe-skin leather. She sinks into the memory of the rich person’s walk as if it is a second skin she saves for special occasions, which, in an odd way, it is. Make-up powders her face, enhancing her already pale notes, her hair has been professionally darkened, her lips rouged a vibrant, bloody crimson. A single gemstone pendant glitters on her neck like all the riches of a dragon’s hoard. Her eyes are smokier than a fine burnt down home, and her purse looks like it could buy an entire sky-ship’s worth of clean drinking water.

  Beside her, Jonas walks, his back ramrod straight, military man through and through. He’s the only other one with any way of presenting that believable snobbery they need to channel to get through the doors. He wears a jacket cut in the military style, but this one is made of the finest black velvet, over a white shirt so crisp you could cut circles of it into dinner plates. Lily toyed with the idea of sequins, but Jonas flat out refused. Shame. The anger would have brought out his eyes a bit, and really minimised the chance of the two of them being asked any questions. She will just have to hope his needlessly tight silk trousers make him angry enough.

  She blasts through the wide open doors of The Angel’s Fall like a snow-storm, all grace and glitter. She gives the clerk waiting at the small desk in the airy atrium her number three smile with teeth in. Threatening, but not actively dangerous. A woman has a smile for every occasion, her mother’s words. The bitch.

  Jonas sniffs liberally, and then winces. Just as he’d been told.

  “Are you sure you want to stay here, darling, I’m sure they have nicer places.”

  “Relax,” Lily affects a drawl almost as good as his. Jonas can’t fake an accent to save his life, but hopefully she still can. “They have the best games here, and I’m sure they have somewhere a bit more... established.” She lets the last word hang heavily in the air as she cranes her neck to the servant, a well-heeled Solarii boy of about sixteen, who stammers. Her neckline is perhaps a little low. She thinks about chiding him, layer on the discomfort, but he bows awkwardly.

  “Of course, Sir, Madam. The upstairs floors may be more to your liking. Will you be staying with us long?”

  “As long as the Widowgas keeps flowing,” Jonas says, smiling with too many teeth. “You have suites here, boy?”

  He is quite good at the brusque speech, Lily thinks, she’ll have to tell him to lean on that. Anything that stops people noticing how uncomfortable he seems in his clothes. Much better to be the angry noble nobody wants to spend a minute with than the Wolfpack soldier who looks like he doesn’t know the difference between a dessert spoon and a bouillon spoon.

  “Yessir. Of course sir. The topaz suite is free sir, madame, it features a delightful garden balcony, views of the stars, a private lounge—”

  “As long as it’s clean,” Lily says with a cold smirk. “It’ll do fine enough. Tell me, if we are to grace these halls with our gold, who should we speak to about high stakes games?”

  “Master Rishad is usually on the upper levels during the evening. He owns the whole building, and he enjoys gaming with his guests on occasion.”

  “Lovely, we’ll be on the lookout for him.”

  “I’ll notify him, he’ll be sure to want to welcome you personally.”

  Jonas and her share a small smile. “Lucky us,” they say in unison.

  “Now, let us see this suite, by the grace of the Gods I hope it won’t be up too many more stairs. Honestly darling the places you bring me to.” Lily sniffs, sharing a coy smile with the servant.

  They’re in the door now. Somewhere below, or perhaps even on this floor, Wilhelm is in pain. And somewhere up stairs is the man they have heard so much about. Deadly, paranoid, dangerous... And they are walking into his lair.

  Lily glances around, it was only the night before last that she had been walking into a dragon’s lair. She’d felt small then, and threatened. But somehow this, with all the fine clothes, the half-familiar grace of her younger years and Jonas by her side, his Windblade hidden in a garishly gaudy gold and ruby pommel and dress sheath... somehow this feels more dangerous than sneaking up on a dragon.

  35 - A Short Fall

  With Lily and Jonas entering the belly of the beast, Thunder’s next move is to get off the ship without anyone noticing. She feels naked without her duster and hat, disguising her is a fool’s errand unfortunately. There’s really no amount of costume and make-up that the
y can use on the ship that will hide the fact that she is a near seven-foot tall melding of machine and woman. Instead, she waits until Jonas and Lily are ensconced in The Angel’s Fall. Artemis uses his divinity to check in, and confirm the next steps of the plan with him. He smarts, being put to such simplistic use throughout such a dangerous plan, but their ability to communicate with the team inside the Fall is paramount.

  She’d hate to go to all this trouble only to find out Lily and Jonas had been stopped at the door and arrested.

  After Molly refills her store of Widowgas for the journey, she farewells Mudge and the rest of the crew as night falls around them. She wears clothing of simple dark cloth, strapped tight about her body, with a rope harness around her waist. She descends off the back of the ship, out of view of the docks, and as the rope spools out above her, slides slowly down the great wall of Rezir. The cool night air dries the sweat on her face as she abseils, her feet skidding along the smooth glass.

  Her eyes scan the city through the tinted glass, she can’t make out people from this distance. The Angel’s Fall is just one unidentifiable tower in a maze of towers from here. And it reassures her that if she can’t see Rishad, he won’t be able to see her. She sways to one side, letting herself slip between and beneath the hulls and pillars of a second dock, crouching close to the glass, her slippered feet silent. She is a shadow, nothing more. She wonders for a moment if this is what Lily feels like all the time.

  She glances down at her feet, and almost stumbles. A smear of blood stains the glass, running in a crimson blush down beside her. Looks like she isn’t the only one making use of this mad route down to the ground, though whoever left the stain was clearly less lucky than herself.

  Then her rope loses all tension, and suddenly she begins to pick up speed. She grips the rope tighter uselessly, but it’s evidently no longer attached to The Kingfisher up above, and now she’s falling at speed down the side of Rezir. She immediately drops to her knees, the friction stinging against her as she rolls, out of control, she slips forward, bracing her hands against the glass as she tumbles.

  Thunder grunts as the air is crushed from her body, she looks down, as the ground rushes up to meet her, and braces.

  She lands with a puff of indigo exhaust and a screech of her mechanical joints as she leaves a heavy divot in the sand.

  “So much for being a shadow,” she huffs, pulling herself to her feet and massaging at her aching knees.

  “Umm,” the voice squeaks in the darkness. “Miss Storm? They said to wait for you here... I wasn’t sure if—” the greasy boy looks up, then out at the desert. “Did you fall?”

  “Yes.” Thunder grunts. So, Lily had evidently not spared any effort in coming up with her pseudonym. “That’s me. Where are we going?”

  “The workshops just down this way. You’re a little bigger than the lady said,” he says, his eyes sizing her up. “But that’s no bother, the gold is good, and the rest we can make work.”

  Thunder bristles under the glance, but nods. This is her way in. All she has to do now is wait.

  * * *

  “What do you mean you dropped her?” Mudge roars.

  “It’s alright, Jamala followed her down—”

  “She what?!”

  “With the spy-glass, uh, Captain.” Arn looks at his hands, a red raw streak of rope burn cutting across his palms. “She’s heavier than she seems, Mister Mudge. I thought I had her, but then Henkel moved behind me and I startled and then when I stepped back I knocked into Miss Molly who was watching everything and then—” he shrugs. “I’m just saying, it’s okay. She made it down, the kid picked her up. Miss Storm has left the building.”

  “Oof, she’s going to hate that,” Mudge says. “Now, how do I look?” He pulls the captain’s hat a little tighter over his head, covering the dark hair beneath it. His naturally dark skin is lightened with a fine dusting of powder that highlights his cheekbones, his beard is completely shaved. His body fills out the captains heavy duster with cushions and metal rods, which give him an almost mechanical appearance. He takes a puff of a cigar nearly as expensive as his entire ensemble and struggles not to cough, before breathing out a light purple cloud of smoke.

  “Uh... Very captainly,” Arn says, swallowing a laugh. “How long do you plan on staying like this?”

  “As long as it takes.” Mudge says, twirling lightly and letting the duster flutter around his calves. “I think I look quite dashing, actually.”

  “Yeah, you need to be angrier.” Arn crosses his arms. “Go out on deck and let the weight of being a woman in a man’s world get you down a bit more before you try and convince anyone you’re Captain Thunder.”

  “What would you know about the weight of being a woman in a man’s world, Arn?” Mudge asks curiously.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know,” Arn replies, his voice shifting to a higher, feminine register. He grins, then puts a finger to his lips, and steps out of the cabin.

  36 - Bloodsport

  Wilhelm comes awake with a cough. His entire body stings. His hands burn, the stump where his finger had been that morning aches worse than it did when the man in the black hood cut it off. Travil is gone, Wilhelm’s not sure if he’s still alive. He stares up at a brutally bright lantern, his body trembling under the light, and shivers as a cold voice whispers out of the shadows.

  “Where is she, Mister Helm?” The voice sends a trickle of ice running down Wilhelm’s spine. Not least of all because he hasn’t gone by that name in years. Whoever this is, they’ve done their research.

  “W-w-water,” Wilhelm coughs. His throat seizing from the effort of producing words. He hasn’t had a drink since he fell off that ship and careened down the side of Rezir’s wall, landing face first in soft sand.

  There is a second of silence, and then his captor throws a glass of water at him. The iced water numbs his skin just a little, but not enough to ease the pain as the glass hits him in the chest.

  “Feel better?” Rishad’s voice is a knife in the darkness.

  “Loads,” Wilhelm croaks.

  “Tell me something useful, and you can have a drink,” Rishad says. “Tell me something else, and you can lose another finger. The choice is yours.”

  “So generous of you,” Wilhelm wheezes. “What do you want to know.”

  Knuckles crack in the shadows. “I told you... I want to know where Erin Thunder is.”

  “And I told you, I don’t know, so you’ll have to ask something else.”

  “Where do you think she is?”

  “On her ship, The Kingfis—” The fist drives all the air from Wilhelm’s lungs, and he sees stars. Rishad disappears back into shadow before Wilhelm can make him out.

  “That’s not her ship. You’re not listening to me, Wilhelm. Where would she go?”

  “She’s looking for me,” Wilhelm gasps.

  Rishad snorts. “She’s not looking very hard. I didn’t think she’d scare so easily. One angry letter and she scampers back out to the stars on my ship.”

  “What do you—” Wilhelm spits blood, it dribbles down his chin. “What do you want from me?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing really. I know you can’t reach her from in here. She probably doesn’t even know I’ve managed to snag you. So, all I ask of you is that you make this at least a little bit fun for me, and try to hold out as long as you can.”

  Wilhelm groans, then looks up. “There is something...”

  He can almost see Rishad cock his head in the darkness. “What?”

  “It’s...mnmnmnnmn,” Wilhelm mumbles.

  Rishad steps closer, his figure resolving in Wilhelm’s cloudy vision, and Wilhelm strikes, a burst of divine lightning rips out of him with a howl, and slams forward into Rishad.

  A mirror shatters, and Rishad’s icy voice laughs from behind Wilhelm. “You’ll do perfectly.”

  * * *

  “Madame Sariel,” Rishad’s voice is cool and crisp like the perfect winter’s day. Lily smiles at him, pro
ffering one dainty hand, her long nails sparkling artfully. This is the monster keeping Wilhelm in pain somewhere.

  “A pleasure,” she bats her lashes at him. “My husband and I were just discussing the beautiful suite.”

  “Oh? I do hope you’re comfortable there.” Rishad is pristine, his clothing well-made and excellently tailored. A simple band of warm gold wraps his wrist. He is bright, vibrant, clean-shaven, and deceptively short. There is something about the way he carries himself that makes her feel like he should tower, but he doesn’t. Captain Thunder would positively dwarf him, and even Jonas, short by Wolfpack standards, could look down on him. Could. But doesn’t, because, again... there is something about him. A casual grace. A wealth of confidence, most likely borne by a confidence of wealth.

  It speaks to something deep within her, and Lily finds herself oddly attracted to this man. The fact that he is, by all accounts, a monster, does nothing to dissuade that feeling. Like seeks out like, as they say.

  “More than comfortable,” she smiles, her teeth flashing in a dance as old as time. “Though Hellion dear is champing at the bit for some good sport.”

  “Oh? What does he favour?”

  “You know those Wolves, all the same. They don’t appreciate the finer things, he might last ten minutes enjoying a beautiful game of cards, but hours watching two brutes beat each other bloody. He has no taste for subtlety.” She glances at Jonas, who bristles.

  “Do you host many fights?” He asks. Silently, Lily applauds the way he almost salivates around the word. “I’ve seen a few casinos with lower levels dedicated to arena matches, but haven’t noted anything of the sort here.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. My casino, sadly, does not have the space for something like that. The lower levels are small, and reserved for maintenance and my staff. Besides,” his eyes glitter softly as he speaks, and he brushes a lock of soft blond hair behind his ear. “I find the whole concept quite distasteful. I do not begrudge a man his tastes, but blood and pain unnerve me. I could recommend you a few nearby places that do indulge in the sport you seek. And I can offer you a range of other games that may take your fancy. We do not limit ourselves to just dice and cards here. Darts, throwing knives, contests of strength... I will have someone give you the full tour, and perhaps Lady Sariel and I,” he glances at Lily, his perfectly shaped lips forming her fake name with ease. “Can enjoy ourselves over a game of Eights.”