“Plus you’ve never killed anybody.”
“Oh, shut up.”
It is never wise to annoy an executive mercenary, which can be a problem because the executive mercenaries usually get to be executive mercenaries by having a volatile temper and a knack for killing things.
It is especially not wise to annoy an executive mercenary if she is bigger than you. This is why the small extra-private was sitting on top of Zelora Footcrusher’s wardrobe. He was hoping that this would constitute a subtle approach. Unfortunately for him, the fact that he was sitting on her wardrobe was about to annoy Zelora beyond all reason.
Some days, you just can’t win.
“What in the Underworld are you doing in my quarters?” she demanded as she came in and spied him. “And speaking of the Underworld, how would you like the package tour?” This was a threat. She was taking evening classes to polish up her style.
The quarters of the Hidden Army were unique in that they were both underground and portable. It is not always easy to move tunnels and caves with their contents intact, especially while keeping a non-existent profile, but the Hidden Army had been doing it for decades. Top executives who retired from the chain of command almost always went into the removalist business.
“Message,” squeaked the extra-private, trying not to sound nervous.
“What kind of message?” snapped Zelora.
“Special message.”
Her eyes narrowed. “And?”
“Special message,” repeated the little soldier. “For Zelora Footcrusher. Deputy leader,” he added helpfully.
“Were you planning to tell me what the message is?”
“Okay,” he said agreeably, and began to recite from memory. “Ship Dread Redhead sunk, all hands lost. After liberation from wreck, de gargoyle in possession of merchant Scrub Gorsespreader, known agent of V. Bigbeard Daggersharp. Gargoyle then passed on to Hucklebed de Messenger who delivered it to Kassa Daggersharp of Dreadnought, presumed daughter of de above, then living in Whet and Whistle Tavern and Grillhouse. Followed from there to slum hovel in Skids belonging to Daggar Profit-scoundrel, presumed brother of Profithood. Possible associations with Aragon Silversword, recently escaped from Imperial dungeon, presumed agent of Lady Emperor.” He took a deep breath.
Zelora opened her mouth, and then closed it again. “Who gave you this message?” she demanded.
“Camelot,” said the extra-private.
“Tell me why you’re talking about gargoyles. I hired Camelot to locate Braided Bones.”
“Same,” said the little soldier laconically.
Zelora frowned. “What is?”
“Gargoyle. Braided Bones.”
Zelora raised an eyebrow.
“Curse,” added the extra-private helpfully. “Can I go now?”
Draped in coppery silk and dripping with emeralds, the Lady Emperor hissed at Aragon Silversword. “You will show your Emperor due respect!”
“I was busy when you summoned me,“ said Aragon shortly. “How do you expect me to keep the Daggersharp woman’s trust if messengers from the palace keep dragging me away?”
“I heard you were found in a tavern, my lord,” sneered Reed Cooper. “Has Mistress Kassa not even entrusted you with her address yet?”
Aragon studied this stranger briefly, and then deliberately turned his back on him. “My lady Emperor, why am I being interrogated by a handmaiden?”
“Handmaiden?” spluttered Reed furiously.
“Cooper is a loyal servant, Silversword,” Lady Talle said smoothly. “You would do well to emulate him. He has brought me a great prize.” She snapped her fingers, and Reed drew the prime sword of Vicious Bigbeard Daggersharp. The eight rubies in the hilt chose that moment to glitter.
“Interesting,” said Aragon Silversword.
“That sword is the key to the location of the silver of the lost ship Splashdance,” Lady Talle announced.
“I know,” said Aragon absently. “Your lackey has done well. What do you need me to do?”
“What makes you think I need you at all?” purred Talle with a glitter in her eye.
“I’m not dead yet.”
She accepted the point. “The message on the sword is written in a language that I cannot decipher. I believe Kassa Daggersharp can. I have put her name on my proscription list. A silver talent will go to the one who hands her in to me alive, or as close to that state as happens to be necessary. Your familiarity with her might make you more able to capture her than anyone else.”
“I see,” said Aragon coolly. “Until you have the Splashdance silver, you cannot afford to pay the reward. So you need Kassa to be captured by someone who is already working for you.” He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realise that the Imperial coffers were quite so low. Are any of your jewels real, or are they just coloured glass?”
Lady Talle smiled without amusement. “Fetch me that girl. If her crew get in the way, kill them.”
“Her crew,” said Aragon scornfully. “A deadbeat and a pirate. They should not pose much of a problem.”
“A pirate?” interrupted Reed Cooper sharply.
“His name is Braided Bones, my Lady Emperor,” Aragon continued, refusing to directly address the newcomer.
“That’s impossible,” scoffed Cooper. “Braided Bones is dead. He was turned to stone two years ago, when he insulted some mermaid’s mother.”
A faint smile flickered across Aragon’s mouth. “He turns back into a human every full moon. Did your pirate king not tell you?”
Stunned by this information, Reed Cooper turned to Talle. “My Lady Emperor, if this is true then it changes everything. Bigbeard and Braided Bones shared secrets. He will know the code.”
“I thought Bigbeard shared all his secrets with you, son of his heart,” said Lady Talle with heavy irony.
“Evidently not,” said Aragon. He did not smile, but managed to convey a certain degree of concealed smugness.
Talle regarded him thoughtfully. “Are you quite sure that Mistress Daggersharp trusts you, Silversword?”
“Of course she trusts me,” Aragon replied, sincerity radiating from his voice. He had always been a confident liar.
5
Lordlings and Ladybirds
It was morning, and Daggar was nowhere to be found. The front door of the hovel was propped open with the gargoyle as a door-stop. Wrapped in her cloak and some blankets, Kassa braved the slightly snowy day. She did not travel far, pausing by the upturned water barrel and rapping smartly on the window.
An urchin popped his head out through a neat little trapdoor in the top, yawning loudly.
“Like to earn a hot meal?” Kassa suggested.
The boy’s eyes lit up. “Clean yer winders for yer, miss?”
“They’re not my windows. I don’t care who cleans them.”
“Scrubyer chimney?”
“I don’t have a chimney, thank you.”
“Washyer windscreen?”
“I don’t have a…” Kassa paused. “What’s a windscreen?”
“Dunno,” said the bright-eyed scruff. “Sound good though, dunnit? Watcha want me to do?”
“I need a thief.”
His voice became shrill. “I never dun it! Ask anyone, they says I dun it, they’s a liar.”
“Oh, stop panicking,” Kassa said crossly. “Are you going to help me or not?”
When Aragon Silversword dropped into the Palace kitchens to grab some breakfast, he was mildly surprised to find the Lady Emperor perched on one of the benches, licking her fingers as she finished off a delicate platter of tidbits. “You never cease to amaze me, Talle,” he said, pulling up a stool. “I would have expected you to have your breakfast dragged up the fourteen flights of stairs to your bed by a team of butlers, accompanied by a fifteen-piece orchestra and a fine selection of mummers to entertain you while you eat.”
Talle selected a honeyed walnut from her platter and popped it into her mouth. “I did that yesterday,” she shrugged pre
ttily. “It doesn’t pay to be staid in this profession.”
Aragon plucked a piece of sausage from the platter and chewed on it thoughtfully. “I don’t understand you,” he mused. “You are in a very precarious position until Dreadnought—not to mention the whole of Mocklore—accept you as Emperor. Why are you surrounding yourselves with traitors like Reed Cooper?”
“And you,” she said pointedly, picking the poppyseeds of a tiny cake.
“And me,” he agreed.
Lady Talle smiled distantly, her elegantly-nailed fingers picking the cake into individual crumbs. “I know where I stand with traitors, Silversword. I know how the mind of the traitor works. Men like you and Reed Cooper are predictable enough to make me feel comfortable, but dangerous enough to keep me on my toes.” She sighed suddenly and pushed the platter in Aragon’s direction, sliding to her feet with the grace of a peacock. “And now I simply must find someone to do my hair for me. The trouble with having so many servants is, I can never remember which ones do which tasks. I had a gardener mixing me cocktails yesterday.” She paused, a calculating expression glittering in her ice-blue eyes. “You will capture Kassa Daggersharp for me, won’t you?”
Aragon took a bite of seaweed confection. “It is in my best interest to do so, don’t you think?”
The Lady Emperor smiled, a surprisingly genuine smile which suffused her whole body with a rosy glow. “Oh yes,” she murmured. “I do.”
The urchin looked uneasily around the interior of Daggar’s hovel. “Bit cold here, innit?”
“You live in a barrel,” Kassa reminded him.
“But’s a warm barrel, yer know? Got any eats?”
Kassa waved a hand carelessly. “Look around. There might be something.”
The urchin discovered a crust of bread and started gnawing on it enthusiastically.
“There is a woman who has something belonging to me,” Kassa began. “I need someone unobtrusive to get into her residence and take it back.”
“What rezzydents?” asked the urchin.
“The Palace,” said Kassa crisply.
Still chewing, the boy’s eyes widened. “An’ this lady what’s got the thing would be…”
“The Lady Emperor.”
The urchin hurriedly stuffed the rest of the bread in his mouth. “Nice meetin’ yer miss. G’bye.”
Kassa snatched his sleeve as he made for the door. “Not so fast!”
Daggar burst into the room, eyes wild and waving a piece of parchment. “Chief, it’s horrible!” he announced. “All bloody. We’re going to be slaughtered in our beds!” He pulled up abruptly and peered intently at the boy Kassa was latched on to. “Who’s that?”
Kassa looked down at the boy. “Oh. Who are you?”
“Grffn,” said the boy, still chewing rapidly to finish the bread before she changed her mind and demanded it back.
“Griffin,” repeated Kassa more distinctly. “Daggar, this is Griffin.”
“Kassa, this is a proscription list,” said Daggar, waving the parchment at her. “And you are the star attraction.”
She snatched it from him, scanning the page quickly. “A silver talent as reward for my capture. Silver.”
“Silver,” agreed Daggar anxiously, hopping from foot to foot.
“I don’t know who this upstart bint thinks she is,” said Kassa slowly, “But she appears to be after my inheritance. Where would an emperor get a whole talent from? None of the Emperors since Timregis have had two beans to rub together.”
“A talent is how much silver a man can carry without falling over backwards,” Daggar reminded her impatiently. “That’s a healthy incentive. Unhealthy in our case. Let’s get going.”
“I need to think,” Kassa protested, her eyes glued to the parchment.
Daggar whipped the page away and cast it aside. His self-preservation skills had gone into overtime. “Thinking gets yerself killed, Chief. You need to run!”
Kassa considered her choices for half a second. “All right, we’ll run.” She grabbed the small sack which contained all her worldly possessions and shoved the gargoyle in, padding it well with her spare dress and embroidery threads.
“Where are we running to?” asked Daggar, scooping up his own worldly possessions (half a bottle of salt-whisky and a set of sharp knives) and tossing them into a pillowcase. The question was a mere formality, he knew that from was much more important than to when running away.
“Pick a forest, any forest,” said Kassa. “I was getting tired of city life anyway.”
“I wasn’t,” grumbled Daggar, but he knew better than to protest too much. If he didn’t come up with his quota for the Profithood by the next full moon, he was finished in Dreadnought anyway.
Kassa looked back at Griffin the urchin who was casually stealing what morsels he could find in the back of Daggar’s cupboards. “How would you like a hovel all of your own?”
“Oy!” protested Daggar.
The boy’s face broke into a smile which almost sliced his face in half. “Ya couldn’t pay me to live in a dump like this, miss,” he said cheerfully. “I’m comin’ wif you!”
“You’re bloody not,” said Kassa and Daggar in unison. It was the first time in a long while that they had agreed with each other.
Lord Rorey of Skullcap was just like the other Lordlings of the Mocklore Empire; mainly useless and horribly rich. He was a young man, but flabby from too much time indoors and not enough healthy food and exercise. He did get plenty of fresh sea air, although fresh was not necessarily the word to describe the fishy odour that wafted into his bedchamber whenever a servant opened the window in the mornings.
Skullcap was a seaport, walled off from everywhere by the treacherous range of mountains known, not unsurprisingly, as the Skullcaps. Every hazard known to anyone was located in those mountains and new ones were arriving every day, so most people came and went from the little seaport by boat.
“Hmm,” said Lordling Rorey as he examined the messages that people kept sending to his office. “Pirates, eh?”
“Dead pirates, Lord,” corrected his administrative assistant, a pretty girl who spent a lot of time painting her fingernails.
“Hmm,” said Lordling Rorey. “Best kind, wot? Still, better do something about it. Any treasure?”
“No, Lord,” said the administrative assistant, whose name was Dilys. “The wreck was empty except for basic supplies, a book of humorous hieroglyphs and a gargoyle which disappeared during the salvage.”
“Hmm,” said Lordling Rorey. “Still, better do something about it. Have the humorous hieroglyphs sent to my room. And get me my warlock. I have important matters to discuss with him. I’ll be on the croquet field.”
“I’ll send him up to the roof, Lord,” said Dilys efficiently. There was limited space in the busy little city and so the Lordling’s abode was basically a two-up two-down in the middle of the High Street. The croquet field was on the roof, as was the cherry fountain, the rose arbor, the gazebo and the poisonous labyrinth which was presently full of a troupe of mummers.
“Hmm,” said Lordling Rorey. “Yes, the roof. Of course the roof. Just send up my warlock, there’s a good fellow.”
The urchin scampered along, matching Kassa’s long-legged walk easily, his fringe bouncing in the cold wind. “Who are you lot, anyways?” he piped up.
“We’re pirates,” said Kassa shortly.
That stopped him, but only for a moment. “Where’s ya ship?”
“Foot-pirates,” she corrected. “Look, you can’t come with us. There are going to be untold dangers. Soldiers looking for us. Bandits. People trying to kill us!”
“Trolls,” contributed Daggar gloomily.
“Trolls!” agreed Kassa.
The urchin considered this. “Coo.”
Kassa sighed. Then she looked at his thin, pale arms. “Don’t you have a cloak?”
“I’m a n’urchin,” he said as if she was nuts. Kassa pulled a blanket out of her bag and handed it to him. Gri
ffin looked at it for a moment and then handed it back. “Like I said. I’m—an—urchin.”
And he ran ahead of her, barefoot, almost skipping on the thin layer of snow that covered the road out of Dreadnought.
Daggar just grunted, and pulled his scarf tighter.
From a distance, they looked like a close approximation of a family; nothing for anyone to take any particular notice of. Soon they would reach the multi-coloured forests of the Skullcaps where they could, if they chose, completely disappear.
At least, that was the plan.
Aragon’s disguise was impeccable. He resembled nothing more than a hardened pirate, a seedy dark man with bright green eyes and a heart of gold. He was unrecognisable to anyone who knew him, particularly since the disguise made him four inches shorter.
He was too late. Daggar’s hovel was deserted, and it was obvious they were not coming back. The proscription list lay on the floor, and Kassa’s name was emblazoned across the top of the parchment.
“Damn,” said Aragon Silversword with feeling. They were long gone. What was more, it would take him another three hours to rid himself of the stupid disguise.
If he was going to have any chance of finding them, he was going to have to think like Kassa Daggersharp. “If I were a madwoman on a rampage,” he mused to himself, “where would I go?”
“So whassat then?” asked the tireless urchin.
“It’s a tree,” said Kassa shortly.
“Cor, reely? They look diff’rent close up. Gaps between ’em n’evrything.”
“Have you never been outside the city?”
“Yah, once. Went on a n’urchin’s excursh’n to that bit of dirt outside t’ city wall. Dead neat it was. But nah trees.” He gestured up at another tree. “Wassat, then?”
“It’s another tree,” said Kassa. “You get a lot of them in forests.”
Mocklore Box Set (Mocklore Chronicles) Page 5