by Rob May
Then she felt the inevitable pressure of a blade sliding across her exposed back. The toughness of her leather surprised the Dragonite, and Kal was able to elbow him in the face and turn to face him. But the one that she had sent down the stairs was back on his feet and coming back up at her. And the fourth cultist was hanging back looking for an opening. Kal was flustered. In desperation, she jumped up onto the banister and leaped across the gap of the stairwell, dropping down to the stairs two flights below.
She landed perfectly though, like a cat. Come on! she willed herself. Five down; three to go! As the three cultists bundled down the stairs after her, she took careful aim with one of her knives, and hurled it at the nearest enemy.
She missed. The knife bounced off the wall and fell down the stairwell.
Kal was about to turn tail and run when, unexpectedly, a door opened on the landing between her and the remaining three men. As they passed, Will Straightarrow stepped out calmly, still dressed in his short trousers and summer shirt. He grabbed one of the men by the neck and shoved a shortsword under the hem of his unsuspecting victim’s mail shirt and up into his ribcage. Will pulled out the sword as fast as he could and turned to face the other two. One of them took him on, while the other came for Kal.
This one was armoured too, in a rigid leather breastplate, but he was as slow as he was well-protected. Kal dodged his clumsy thrust, and wasted no time in slicing up with her knife, chopping the man’s arm off at the shoulder. Her blade then took his other arm off on its way down.
The cultist staggered back in shock, bumped up against the banister and toppled over backwards. His scream lasted three seconds before it was cut off with a loud smack.
Kal looked up at Straightarrow, who was standing over the bodies of his two opponents. He opened his mouth as if he was about to make some kind of inappropriate joke, then thought better of it.
‘You promised that you wouldn’t still be here when I arrived,’ Kal reminded the King of Thieves.
‘I was hiding under Redrake’s bed, waiting for a chance to escape,’ he said. ‘I was trying on the senator’s silk shirts when these guys turned up.’
‘Where is Redrake?’ Kal snapped.
Straightarrow shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Probably schmoozing at some party of Cassava’s where they’re all drinking dragon blood.’
‘No,’ Kal said. ‘He wasn’t at the triumph. He’s here somewhere.’ She remembered something that Greg had told her once. ‘He has a panic room at the top of the house!’ She pushed past Will and headed up to the top of the stairs: the final door had no handle, lock or visible hinges. Kal banged on it with her fist.
‘Raelo! Open up! It’s Kal!’
She thought she heard a faint groan from behind the door. Will Straightarrow had followed Kal up the stairs and was looking on with mild curiosity.
‘I can help you!’ Kal shouted to Raelo. ‘Whatever it is you’ve done, it’s not too late to give yourself up.’
A weak croaking voice answered: ‘No one can help me now,’
‘I can make sure that you get a quick painless execution!’ Kal promised brightly. Straightarrow laughed out loud, and Kal shot him a warning look.
But after a few seconds of silence, there was a click and the door swung inwards. Senator Raelo Redrake stumbled backwards away from the door and collapsed into a chair. His panic room was dark and bare; the only thing other than the chair was a wooden table that held a bottle and goblet of wine, and a wooden plate of what looked like chopped leaves.
Raelo looked stunned to see Kal. His head lolled in his chair and his breathing was fast and shallow.
‘Why did you kill Grey?’ Kal pressed him. ‘Was that your plan? Or the Dragonites?’
‘Grey?’ Raelo looked confused. ‘What … what are you talking about, Kal?’
‘You left Ben’s party just before Senator Grey was found dead. I guessed that you and the Dragonites would have something to do with it! You never did cut ties with them, did you? Now they want to set you up as consul and—’
‘No, Kal, no!’ Raelo insisted, almost choking as he spat the words out. ‘I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve shunned the Dragonites for over a year now … but they told me that I could never leave them. At first they tried to bribe me, promising me power and fame; I told them I was happy simply being wealthy. Then they threatened to hurt my family; I told them I had no family. So they promised me that I’d disappear … that I’d be tortured for years where no one would ever find me. I stupidly ignored their threats. I only left the party because Greatbear was more interested in talking to Ben’s girlfriend than me. I came … straight back … here …’
The senator had stopped breathing. Kal tried to shake him but his limbs were stiff. Will was looking suspiciously at the leaves on the table. He sniffed the wine.
‘Don’t drink it!’ Kal said.
‘I know,’ Will said. ‘It’s hemlock.’
Kal closed Raelo’s eyelids and, not knowing what else to do in a situation like this, kissed his bald head. He had died an innocent man; the Dragonites Kal had overheard had only been talking about what could have happened if Raelo had been elected consul.
‘Let’s go,’ she said to Will. ‘It wasn't Raelo or the Dragonites who killed Grey. This is a dead end.’
There was a noise from the ground floor. Will went out to the stairwell and looked down. ‘And we’re trapped in it,’ he said. ‘Dogwood and the Senate Guard are here.’
Kal swore and rushed down to Raelo’s bedroom. She flung open the window, but there was nowhere to go: the nearest building was a hundred yards away.
‘How much do you weigh?’ she asked the King of Thieves.
‘Huh?’ he said. ‘Do you mean with or without this pile of jewellery I found in the senator’s strongbox? Hey, don’t look at me like that. It’s not like he has any use for it anymore!’
Kal sighed. ‘Bring it,’ she said. ‘You can give it to me for getting you out of this situation. Consider it the first instalment of your repayment plan’ She slotted a cartridge of filament wire into the pistol crossbow and took careful aim across Raelo’s gardens. Footsteps were coming up the stairs. There was no way that Kal wanted to be on yet another of Dogwood’s lists. She gritted her teeth to try and steady her aim, and squeezed the trigger.
The bolt flew true, lodging firmly in a window frame of the opposite house. Kal uncoupled her end of the wire and secured it around the heavy post of Raelo’s bed. The crossbow itself now had freedom of movement along the wire like a makeshift pulley.
Kal and Will put one arm around each other’s waist, and held on to the crossbow with the other. Then, without stopping to think about it, they jumped out of the window.
They made it halfway across the distance before the wire snapped.
III.iv
Crab Corner
The good news was that there was a tree directly below them. The bad news was that it was a monkey puzzle tree, and as Kal smashed down through its crown, the tough, spiny branches thumped and smacked her body. It was like being beaten by a gang of thugs with staffs. Kal felt her cheek rip as the sharp leaves pulled at her flesh. Then another branch delivered a blow to the side of her head and knocked her senseless.
At least that meant she didn’t feel the pain of hitting the ground. When she came to, her left elbow was hurting bad, and stars were flashing in her field of vision. Kal managed to ascertain that she was lying behind a low wall, luckily hidden from the eyes of the squad of Senate Guard that stampeded past.
She remained as still and quiet as she could, despite the pain in her battered limbs, as Captain Dogwood came plodding along in the wake of his squad. ‘Chase that man down!’ he gasped. ‘He killed ... Senator Redrake ...’ Dogwood dropped his bulky body down on the wall just yards from Kal and tried to catch his breath. ‘I’ll just wait here,’ he puffed, to no one in particular.
Kal was in agony, but she didn’t dare make a move. No matter what she told Dogwood, she wouldn’t escape at
least one night in the guardhouse cells. She considered giving in to the temptation and passing out, and just hoping that Dogwood wouldn’t notice her, but then something happened that made her forget her pain: a man in a wide-brimmed hat appeared on the scene and sat down next to the Guard captain. Kal couldn’t see much more since both men had their backs to her, but she did see Dogwood get handed a heavy bag of money. What was this all about? Dogwood was supposedly loyal to Felix Firehand.
A minute later, both men got up without a word and went their separate ways. Kal waited as long as she could bear, then slowly got to her feet. She shook the stiffness out of her arms and legs, and tried to rub away the throbbing pain. Blood was dripping down from her cheek. Holding her hand against her wounded face, she limped off across the street and into the park.
* * *
Ben’s house wasn’t far, so Kal made her way there. She wasn’t supposed to visit him publicly, lest their association became too well-known, but right now Kal was distressed and desperate for a safe haven. What a sight she must have been, stumbling up the quiet streets of Amaranthium’s most exclusive neighbourhood, dripping blood on cobbles that, unlike downtown, never ran with sewage and manure. In fact, Ben had told her once that there was a full-time cobble-gardener whose only job was to make sure that no horse droppings ever disgraced the streets for longer than five minutes.
There were green banners covering many of the frontages of the homes of merchants and self-made new men and women—banners that proclaimed their support for Viola Witchwood. And there were gold banners for the aristocracy who supported one of their own—the letters below the portrait read simply FELIX, to distinguish this year’s candidate from the many other Firehands who held sway over the city. There was only one house with a red banner rooting for Ganzief Greatbear, but it was the biggest banner, and it flew from a specially constructed wooden scaffold that occupied the highest ground in the city.
Kal stopped to rest in the shadow of the banner. She was almost home and dry. Why did Ben have to have the longest drive as well as the biggest mansion? She took a deep breath and made one final push for the house. She could see Ben moving around through an open window on the ground floor, so she made for that and stuck her head inside—
—and jerked back just in time as a flashing blade fell from the top of the window frame and almost decapitated her. Ben spun around as the blade thudded into the windowsill, and Nim’s head popped out of the next window along. ‘Kal!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t go near the windows—I’ve been setting booby traps!’
* * *
Kal must have passed out again, because when she woke up she was lying across a leather couch in Ben’s study. Nim was sat at her feet, reading a book, and Ben and Zeb were at his desk, surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. The late afternoon streamed in through the (deadly) window, lending a gentle light to the quiet scene.
‘So you state here that you paid protection money every week,’ Ben was saying to Zeb, ‘to a crime lord called …’—he double-checked his notes—‘the Peacock!’ Ben sat back in his chair. ‘Can we contact this person?’
Zeb was lounging in the chair opposite, smoking a thick stogie. She blew a cloud of spicy smoke over the desk before giving her answer: ‘No. You don’t contact the Peacock, Benedict. The Peacock contacts you.’
Ben thumped his head theatrically down on the desk. ‘Come on, Zeb!’ he moaned. ‘We’re trying to prove that you didn’t rob your own customers. This Peacock might be able to vouch for you, or even know who this King of Thieves is.’
‘If I did know who the Peacock was,’ Zeb said, ‘I still couldn’t tell you. My life would be forfeit.’
Ben shook his head. ‘Why did I ever agree to take on this case?’ he complained. ‘It’s just a tangle of secrets and dead ends. I need a drink!’
‘Fine then!’ Zeb said. ‘Go back to your life of sleeping all day and drinking the all night. I’ll fight my own battles.’ She stood up.
‘Zeb, sit down.’ Ben said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Hey, it says here,’ Nim said, reading aloud from her book on Senate law, ‘that if you defeat another senator in court, then you assume his level of authority. Firehand’s been a senator fifteen years longer than you have, Ben, so that’ll be a pretty big leap in status for you if you win.’
‘Will you also take his place in the line-up of candidates for the consulate?’ Kal asked from the couch. Her cheek hurt as she spoke; she put a hand to it and found it had been bandaged up.
‘Oh, hey Mooney,’ Ben said, spinning around in his seat. ‘Nice of you to wake up finally and join us. But to answer your question: if I wanted to stand for consul, I wouldn’t have to wait for the chance to beat Firehand in court. Anyone can stand … well, anyone rich enough, and with enough backers in the Senate. But didn’t you see the big banner outside? I’m supporting Greatbear—the man of the common people!’
‘Yeah, I saw your banner,’ Kal groaned, getting up in to a sitting position. ‘You could probably have seen it from Refuge.’
Refuge was the village at the foot of the Starfinger Mountains where, years ago, she and Ben had lived a much simpler life.
Zeb came over to sit with Kal on the couch. ‘So what’s the story behind all these bruises, you poor thing?’
‘They were all for nothing,’ Kal said. ‘Raelo had been trying to shake off the Dragonites for months now, but they drove him to his death before I could save him. Senator Grey was killed by someone else. Oh, but your toys worked great, Nim … up to a point.’
Nim looked pleased, but Zeb was disappointed. Kal finding the killer was the only way she could escape trial. ‘So what now?’ she said. ‘Do I have any more outs?’
‘Just one,’ Kal told her, ‘but I’m not too thrilled about chasing it up.’
Ben looked up from his notes. ‘The secret door?’ he said.
Kal nodded. ‘Deep under the city, there’s an ancient locked door with the flaming fist symbol on it. Ben and I discovered it when we first came to Amaranthium. Unfortunately, we didn’t make a map. We were too busy running for our lives down there.’
Nim perked up. ‘I have some cool equipment for a subterranean tactical operation!’
‘A what?’ Zeb asked her.
‘A dungeon crawl!’
‘I’ll need some heavy explosives.’ Kal said thoughtfully. ‘And some help. In fact, I have someone in mind who owes me a favour. Would you believe that I ran into the King of Thieves today …’
Zeb gave a low growl. Ben looked at Kal sharply. ‘Kal, if you know who he is, we have to get the Senate Guard to bring him in.’
‘You don’t run the Senate Guard anymore, Ben,’ Kal reminded him. ‘If they arrest this man, then Firehand will probably make him disappear—put him in some deep, dark cell and lose the key—and there goes your star witness. But either way, he’s too clever to get caught anyway, and far too slippery to let anyone hang any crimes on him.’
‘So what are you saying, Kal?’ Zeb said. ‘You’re going to try and befriend this guy?’
‘Yeah,’ Kal said, attempting to stand. She couldn’t sit around all day waiting for her bruises to fade. ‘I’m thinking of setting the kind of trap where I am the bait.’
* * *
Crab Corner was in the Lower East Side of the city, as far away as possible from, the heights of Arcus Hill. Here, the narrow streets were dirty and crowded, but somehow Kal managed to get around quickly. Nobody minded if you put a hand on their shoulder and pushed them gently out of the way; nobody stared at you suspiciously if you ran anywhere. In fact, people who were trying their hardest to draw attention to themselves, such as the soothsayer on the corner of Meat Street and Silver Lane, were being ignored by most passers-by.
‘When the rains fall, the scourge of Amaranthium will rise!’ he bellowed in Kal’s face as she tried to shimmy past him.
She looked up at the clear blue sky. ‘Not today then!’ she said. ‘Hey, do you know where I might find Will Straightarrow?’
<
br /> ‘Young Will?’ the soothsayer said. ‘Of course! Keep going, turn left at the crab, walk past Whalo’s temple and a hundred yards further on you’ll find the Dead Dog tavern. Will will be there playing dice!’
‘Thanks,’ Kal said, flipping him a shilling and continuing on her way.
Crab Corner lay in the shadow of Amaranthium’s seawall, and was so named because a hundred years ago the district had been plagued by an invasion of giant crabs. The Senate had refused to offer any aid to the beleaguered locals, until a week later when they were forced to send the legions in. By that time, three hundred people had died and the rest of the city was threatened. It took two whole legions and some heavy siege equipment another week to drive back the creatures.
Kal turned left when she reached the plinth that displayed the ancient shell of one of the monsters: the carapace was six yards wide and bristled with jagged spines. The claws were big enough to grab a victim and tear them in two. Kal had heard terrible stories about how fast they scuttled, and how they were able to smash through the flimsy walls of the downtown buildings. At least the grim tale had a happy ending: the locals didn’t go hungry for months after the plague was put down.
Kal could see the Dead Dog up ahead, decorated by multiple bill posters with Ganzief Greatbear’s face on them. She had been to the tavern many times, and knew a lot of the patrons, but this Will Straightarrow seemed to have the aura of a local celebrity. He must have risen to fame in the year she was away in Balibu. He had taken on the mantle of the King of Thieves and started spreading his ill-gotten gains around Crab Corner. His confidence must be sky-high for him not to worry about Kal betraying him to either the Senate or to the city’s crime lords.