Darkening Skies

by eden Hudson

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  THE WORLD’S BEST THIEF. A Holy Knight with a dark past. A quest for blood across the Revived Earth.

  Narcissist, sociopath, and shameless backstabber Jubal Van Zandt is the best damn thief in the history of the Revived Earth...and he won't shut up about it.

  But not everybody in the swampy, soggy, feudal future approves of Jubal's vocation. The Guild—the religious fanatics who helped rebuild civilization after the collapse—in particular are waiting for their opportunity to slip the noose around his neck.

  Which is why when the renowned Guild knight Carina Xiao—a.k.a. the Bloodslinger—contacts Jubal about an off-the-books job that violates Guild Law, he's too intrigued to say no. He is the best damn thief in the history of the Revived Earth, after all.

  Part bizarro ecopunk, part outworld thriller, part odd-couple roadtrip, Jubal Van Zandt & the Revenge of the Bloodslinger is a 150% futurepunk quest for blood and betrayal across the Revived Earth.

  Chapter 1

  I RODE INTO ARGAMERI under a dark curtain of acid rain and parked my Mangshan in a covered alley with a decent view of the dirty little bar where I was meeting the Bloodslinger. Lightning flashed, illuminating the cranes that hung over the City of Thieves like rusty crosses. Pretty fitting omen, considering I was about to talk to a named knight with a Guild record so shiny that she could’ve used it to light the way home for prodigal sons and daughters everywhere.

  I spent a few minutes making sure the Mangshan was positioned out of the way of drips coming through the holes in the alley’s awnings. The ’Shan had an acid rain protectant topcoat, but I hated to abuse it. The Mangshan was my baby, a custom-built cobalt and copper crotchrocket, and I treated it right.

  With the ’Shan properly protected from the elements, I left the alley and crossed a street that was already under three inches running water. The sewers in this dump were as lackadaisical about their jobs as this city’s populace.

  Under normal circumstances, you couldn’t have paid me to show my face in Argameri. The City of Thieves was a home for the mediocre—second-rate swindlers, underclass drug dealers, and breaker trash. Argameri was a whore uglier and older than her years, despised by everyone but herself, and by herself twice over. Her loyal citizens also happened to have a lifetime bounty on the head of one Jubal D. Van Zandt—dead or alive, but preferably dead—for selling the secret of her secret entrance to the Guild’s task force back when they began to crack down on theft and prostitution and all the other fun stuff out there. Apparently, Argameri’s citizens had a selective memory when it came to the name of the thief who had emptied the Guild’s closest armory and delivered those first-class weapons right into Argamerian hands at only twice the cost of the current surplus market, thereby giving them the ability to defend themselves from said surprise Guild attack well enough to eventually force a negotiation and an armistice.

  In spite of their spite, I wasn’t worried about being lynched. Man and mutie hadn’t made the cell that could hold me yet, and by the time they did, I would be halfway around the world, biting my thumb at them over my shoulder. It was just one of the many things that made me a winner.

  The inside of the bar smelled exactly like the outside of the bar looked—dank and dirty. My nose wrinkled in disgust. I don’t drink, ever, but if I did, I wouldn’t do it in a mudhole like this. The whole place was so poorly ventilated that you could barely hear the rain coming down outside. Might as well inject mildew straight into my veins and cut out the middleman.

  Several dirt-encrusted patrons and a barkeeper I strongly suspected of being a gill mutie watched me intentionally step over the soaked doormat, the better to drip on their filthy wood floor. I took off my ventilator and helmet, gave them a grin, and shook the acid rain at their jacket rack.

  Sir Carina Xiao, the Bloodslinger, sat in a high-backed booth by a window, watching me through the haze of wrackrath smoke. Even if I hadn’t checked her official and unofficial records out in depth before I agreed to meet with her, I would have recognized Carina immediately. She stuck out in Argameri like the proverbial dick in the hotdog bowl—straight back, self-assured movements, clear green eyes, and the dark, flawless skin that came only from the Guild’s genetic tampering. You could bet your life sentence that she was sporting hyperfocus, hyperoxygenation, hyperaural, and hypertactile upgrades—and that was just for starters.

  “Two-drink minimum,” the barkeep gurgled.

  “No thanks,” I said, shooting him a wink and a finger gun. “I don’t make it a habit to drink anything that comes standard with mouth-gonorrhea.”

  It was hard to tell from this distance and through the smoke, but I was pretty sure I saw Carina smirk at that.

  I wove through the bar’s haphazard floor plan, set my helmet and ventilator on the table, then slid into the booth across from Carina.

  For a split second, the handsome devil in the reflection of my helmet’s visor caught my eye. Hair perfect, face blemish-free, stubble under control, easygoing smile that touched my eyes, little scar across the inside of the left eyebrow to show that I had character and draw even more attention to my best feature slash distract from the little bit of slack I can never quite get out of my waistline. Ugly people won’t admit this, but life’s easier when you’re pretty.

  I tore my gaze away and pointed at the incensor of wrackrath in front of Carina. “You know that’s probably cut with enough mildew to shut down your respiratory system. And even if it’s not, there’s no way they had fresh grass on hand. It’s ten years old if it’s a day.”

  “You’re a lot prissier than I expected a thief to be,” Carina said.

  “Mildew is a very real health concern, Sir Xiao.”

  “Like mouth-gonorrhea?” Yeah, she was definitely fighting a smile.

  Lightning flashed outside our booth’s window and illuminated a sinewy pink mass of scar tissue where Carina’s left cheek and jaw should have been.

  “Holy balls!” I leaned forward to get a better look. “What happened to your face?”

  The almost-smile disappeared. “Are you really Jubal Van Zandt? Because I was under the impression that I would be dealing with a professional.”

  “Hey, I don’t set up meetings with you and then criticize the way you conduct them. I saw something that surprised me and I asked about it. Beats pretending like I don’t notice that half of your face is melted off.”

  “They’re acid scars,” she said.

  “Gross,” I said.

  That reaction didn’t seem to offend her as much as my alleged lack of professionalism.

  “Are you even going to ask me about the contract?” she asked.

  “Once we get the preliminaries out of the way.”

  “Which are?”

  “How the shit did that happen to your face?” I asked. “Additionally, what’s a good, God-fearing knight of the Guild doing hiring the best thief in the history of the Revived Earth? Specifically, a thief her superiors banned all Guild contact with.”

  Carina was quiet for so long that I thought she wasn’t going to answer either question. Then she ran her thumb over the burner of the incensor, wiping at a water stain. “I have to get into a place that can’t be accessed. You did a job last year, broke into The Hotel and got away untouched with Crangel’s Sledgehammer in tow. The place I’m going is locked u
p tighter.”

  “Hmm.” Tighter than an ultimate-security prison? Energy zinged and zanged up and down my arms and legs at the thought. I shifted from one side of my butt to the other, then shook my shoulders out. “Intriguing. Very intriguing indeed. Especially considering that Guild policy is to blast or smash their way into any place that won’t open its doors willingly.” I locked onto her bright green eyes. “A knight—a named knight from a Guild family older than Emden itself, no less—should be able to put in a work order for a couple thousand troops and shoot her way in, shouldn’t she?”

  Carina didn’t break eye contact or show any outward hesitation at what she was about to say. “This job is unsanctioned. It violates Guild law, and I want to keep it off the books.”

  “Boy, have you come to the right thief, sister.” I leaned in closer. “Which law are we breaking?”

  “Vengeance belongs to the Lord,” she said.

  Normally, I don’t ask for my clients’ life stories because I don’t care about their crazy stupid boring lives. Boring people love to tell you why they’re all hot and bothered to get their hands on this-and-such an object or into that-and-such a place. Interesting people, the really interesting ones, don’t want to tell you anything. You’ve got to pry them open like giant oysterlusks.

  “Who are we getting revenge on?” I asked.

  “Witches. Aguas brujahs, based in Soam now.”

  “Neat, a plane ride.” I sat forward and leaned my elbows on the table. “I’ll need to be flown first class, obviously. Make a note of it. What did these brujahs do?”

  “Murder.”

  “To whom?”

  “A Guild knight.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “My mentor, advisor, direct superior, and father.”

  “So, what you’re saying is you don’t have a boyfriend,” I said.

  Carina’s non-acid-scarred jaw ticked. “They used craft to seduce my father, poison his mind, then destroy him from the inside out.”

  “Smells like somebody didn’t want a step-mommy.” I did some calculations based on the Guild’s file on Carina. “What’s it been, like, twenty years since Mommy died in the crusades? That’s a long time to have Daddy all to yourself.”

  “This has nothing to do with jealousy.” Carina’s eyes flashed green fire. “I understand that no one wants to spend their life alone, and I wouldn’t have begrudged my father a helpmate. Not if she had come to him without ulterior motives.”

  “Probably would’ve gone a long way to alleviate your concerns if she’d been a Jesusfreak like you and your Guild buddies, too, huh?”

  “At first, she pretended to be.” Carina’s voice had almost softened when she said that. My ears perked up at the almost-sound of it.

  “She played on somebody’s sympathies,” I said.

  “She came to the Guild as a new follower, supposedly a convert from the Soam missionaries. My father had a past with the area, spoke her language. He wanted to help her grow in Christ.”

  “Not as much as she wanted to help him grow in his pants. She was smoking hot, wasn’t she?”

  Carina chose to ignore that remark. “We didn’t find out until much later that the aid group who’d been assigned to her village’s area was dead.”

  “So you’re assuming she killed your missionary buddies, too.”

  “The official causes of death were drowning,” Carina said. “But all of them? No one stayed on land while the rest of the group was swimming? One of the drowned aid workers was well known among friends for being unable to swim and terrified of deep water. But the Guild won’t prosecute foreign parties on circumstantial evidence.”

  “Pretty stupid,” I said as if I was on her side. “What about in the case of your father? Do you know that these brujahs killed him or are you just assuming they did because he drowned?”

  “His official cause of death was suicide,” Carina said. “But it was the brujah. She drove my father away from God, used him to spy on the Guild, and by the time he realized how far gone he was, there wasn’t any way to get back. Before he did any more damage, he ended it.”

  “I see. Took the ol’ noble gut-cutting way out. Bet that was a messy cleanup. So, where do I come in and what’s the plan as you see it?”

  “The brujahs returned to Soam, which is where they’re most powerful and best protected. I can’t even find their village without already knowing where it is. It’s under some kind of paradoxical magic lockdown.”

  “Sounds like one of the ancient epics.”

  She raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re familiar with the Potter legends?”

  “Look, I understand that your prejudices about thieves run deep—you set up a meeting in this nasty little mudhole in Argameri for fuck’s sake—but you’re not working with some run-of-the-river breaker whose biggest payday was that time he pawned three screens in one night.” I tapped my chest. “I’m Jubal fucking Van Zandt. I picked my first axolotl lock when I was six. I untied the Jordanian knot when I was nine. I am the only living being—human or mutie—to have gotten into and out of The Hotel without Crangel’s express permission, and I did it all without focus chems or magic. I’ve got a loft in Taern, a summer place overlooking the Crystal Lakes, and a standing penthouse reservation at every five-star in Emden. I’m not only literate, but I make it my business to know all the First Earth epics, legends, and lore. I am the best damned thief in the history of the Revived Earth, sister, and honestly, based on what I’ve seen from you so far, I’m starting to doubt whether you’re prepared to pay my fee.”

  A dressing-down like that is usually enough to embarrass a strong-willed client and give me the upper hand in negotiations. Carina just nodded.

  “Good,” she said. “Because I’m not interested in hiring some illiterate breaker trash who’ll slit my throat when his supply of ember dust runs out. I need the best, and believe it or not, I’m willing to pay for the best.”

  I clapped my hands together. “Then let’s get started. How did you hear about me?”

  “Guild files. Their records on you are full of suspicions, first-person accounts, and rumors. No arrests, no charges, and no incriminating evidence that you didn’t purposely leave behind for someone to find. I investigated Laars Gonzalez’s allegations that—”

  Carina broke off, pulling a well-worn knuckgun from inside her leather jacket and pointing it at the two big guys approaching our booth.

  “Don’t take another step,” she said. “Drop your weapons.”

  They stopped, but didn’t drop the rust-caked knife or the stunclub.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Looks like somebody recognized me. I’ll sign one autograph apiece, guys, but then I’ve really got to get back to work.”

  The bigger of the two, who looked like he dogfought for funsies on the weekends, growled, “The Guild has no jurisdiction here, knight. The man you’re associating with is a wanted fugitive in Argameri.”

  “That’s true,” I told Carina. “Dead or alive. The bounty’s huge.”

  She didn’t take her eyes off the bruisers as she asked me, “Why didn’t you say something when I suggested meeting here?”

  “Aw, come on, look at these guys! They couldn’t take a cucumber from a slime whore. Besides, I wanted to see what you’d do. Shoot ’em and let’s get back to business.”

  “What are you wanted for?” she asked.

  “For being better than them. They’re jealous that I sold them out before they could think of a way to do it to me.”

  The second guy, whose face was covered in fishhook tattoos, pointed his snapping and sparking stunclub at me. “Your betrayal cost hundreds of Argamerian lives!”

  “Really?” I said. “Because I heard it was thousands.”

  Apparently, Tattoo-Face wasn’t going to stand for me correcting him. He let out an ear-hair-curling scream and lunged at me. Dogfight guy went off at the same time, stabbing his knife at Carina.

  I didn’t stick around to find out what happened. I
’m a lover, not a fighter. I slipped under the table where I would be safe from any ricochets and blunt-force trauma. But not from dust wads. The little buggers clung to my pants, smearing their nasty coatings of skin cells and dried mucus so deep into the weave that I would never get the viruses out.

  “This city is disgusting.” I tried to slap and swipe my pants clean. “I hope all of your children die screaming.”

  On the other side of the table, the knuckgun went off. Tattoo-Face wailed, and the stunclub bounced to the floor and rolled away.

  Carina’s legs lunged out from under the table. A second later, she and Dogfight guy hit the floor, her with one fist clamped around his knife-hand. They rolled around like that, then Carina cocked back the knuckgun and jabbed Dogfight just under the sternum with the muzzle. The air woofed out of him, and she wrenched the knife away easily.

  Tattoo-Face’s legs took a step toward Carina, but she rolled up to her knees so that I could only see her back, and reached up toward him. Her knuckgun’s chain-driven saw clicked on, assaulting our eardrums with its air-vibrating whine.

  “I’m done!” Tattoo-Face yelled. “I’m done! I give!”

  “Drop it,” Carina said.

  The stunclub hit the floor and rolled away for a second time.

  I wriggled out from under the table so I could see better. Carina was holding the saw edge of her knuckgun’s handguard so close to Tattoo-Face’s crotch that an accidental twitch would vasectomize him.

  “Whatever you do, don’t sneeze,” I told him. Then I reached down and wiped a handful of the dust off my ruined pants and smeared it across the underside of his nose.

  Tattoo-Face opened his mouth to yell something undoubtedly derogatory at me, but immediately got a snout-full of dust. His eyes squeezed shut. His chest hitched.