by K. T. Davies
The Best Laid Plans
‘The Chronicles of Breed’ Prequel Novella
K.T. Davies
Copyright © 2018 by K.T. Davies
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously
Published by Scimitar Media
Cover design by Scimitar Media
Contents
The Empire
Rublis Manor
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Dangerous To Know
Free Story
Author’s Note
About the Author
1
Cock,” Sweaty Stefan observed.
I squinted at the cloud. “That’s nothing like a cock. It’s a sausage, or a worm maybe.”
“Are ye blind? It’s obviously a cock.” The sellspell stretched out and put his reeking feet against the parapet that hid us from view.
Careful to keep my head down, in case any of the servants loitering by the gates happened to look back towards the house, I took the witch wood box Mother had given us out of my pack. “I have better eyesight than you, human and if your cock looks like that, I pity you.”
Sweaty cupped his nethers and grinned suggestively, displaying a worn set of false teeth that had been carved out of old bone and amber. He was a grubby pain in the arse, but he was one of the more reliable sorcerers Mother hired from time to time. I say more reliable. It had been a couple of hours since he’d used any pel and without his favorite drug, he was starting to twitch and sweat more profusely than usual. I prayed a silent prayer to the shadows that the job went as planned. I didn’t want to deal with a strung-out sorcerer while we were hiding on the roof of the mansion of an imperial senator.
He wiped his sheened face with the back of his hand, shuffled over to the parapet, and put his eye to a crack in the fancy stonework. “And there’s no need for your pity, lizard. It’s not what it looks like that matters, it’s what you do with it. You wouldn’t understand.”
“Lizard, eh? I’m half-thoasa, if you please, sirrah. And I have no desire to understand how you rut.”
The sorcerer snorted. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Something that looks like a wonky sausage, apparently.” I heard the drum of hoofbeats on the road and kicked the mage. “Riders.” My thoasan senses are more acute than those of most humans, and I could pick out the faint tattoo of hoofbeats that were still beyond the range of Sweaty’s hearing. I could also smell Mother’s scent clinging to the box. Her unmistakable, olfactory signature was suffused with the sweet iron tang of blood and the eldritch spice of sorcery. It lingered like a malevolent, ghostly presence reminding me not to fuck it up. I broke the seal. Stefan held out his hand. Scratched into his palm was an arcane sigil. The marks Mother had scribed with the demon fang were deep and crusted with dried blood. “She wasn’t in a good mood when she did this was she?” I said and opened the box. The breath of ancient tombs assailed my nostrils, and I would have sworn before the sternest beak that I could hear distant screams and growls.
“Is she ever in a good mood?” The mage swallowed, choked by the sudden remembrance of who he was talking to. “No offense. I mean…”
I folded my arms and composed the straightest of faces. “Do go on.”
“I know Mother is your actual mother and might I say the best leader of one of the finest guilds I’ve ever had the pleasure of working for, but she’s not one for smiling, is she?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to see her smile. You’ve done work for Pork Chop, haven’t you?”
The sellspell paled at the mention of Mother’s rival gang boss. “It was a long time ago, and even then, it was a small job, out of town—”
“No need to dissemble, Sweaty. I don’t give a shit, it’s just business, and if Mother gave a shit, she’d feed you to her dog rats. I just wondered what he’s like is all. I mean, I’ve seen him from a distance, and unlike Mother, the spider’s always smiling, like he knows something nobody else does.”
“It’s not deep insight, he just smokes a lot of pel. He lets his broodlings do most of the day-to-day grind while he sits there stewing in a warm, fuzzy haze. The lucky bastard.” The guards’ horses halted by the gate. “There are only four, a sergeant and three rankers,” Stefan whispered. “Looks like Senator Rublis isn’t as important as he thinks he is.”
“Are they local greenshanks or Imperials?” I poured the contents of the box into his spell-marked palm.
“You’re the warspawn, can’t you smell the difference?”
“You’re such a prick.”
“You sure you don’t mean sausage?”
I answered with a gesture that left no doubt as to what I meant. Sweaty grinned, closed his eyes and began mumbling an incantation over the pile of dust in his palm. While I waited for him to summon the homunculus I tasted the breeze. I already knew the servants by their odors, which to someone like me were as unique as their names were to them. There was ‘the nursing mother’ who smelled of stale milk and baby puke, ‘the drunk’ who supped mint leaf tonic to hide the smell of cheap brandy, and ‘the youthful self-abuser’ a stable lad who had slightly more on his hands than horse shit.
As for the guards, there was a strong smell of blade oil but happily, not a whiff of calthracite powder which meant that they weren’t armed with handcannons. Not that I was expecting a confrontation. If this job went as planned no one would know about it until we were long gone, but as Mother was fond of saying, “Never count your vipers before they hatch.” It also meant that, as we suspected, the senator wasn’t a big enough fish to warrant imperial aid in hunting down the dastardly curs who’d attempted to rob his country retreat.
Stefan looked up. “So, what do you smell?”
“There are three men, one woman. Obviously, they’re all human. The woman’s old, past her seasons. One of them oils their hair. One of them has a bad back or knee. Whichever it is they stink of langer gall. One of them likes fermented cheese, one smokes a pipe, and one unlucky cull has cancer.”
“You smelled all of that?”
“Of course,” I lied.
“You could tell me anything.”
The cloud shaped like a sausage dissipated. “Perish the thought. What’s keeping those greenshanks? Can you see what they’re doing?”
The sorcerer rolled his eyes and cozied up to the hole in the wall. “The sergeant with the oiled beard is talking to the big breasted wench by the gates. Her brat’s a lucky cove. I wouldn’t mind suckling on those big, leaky tits. The greenshanks are dismounting. The sergeant has a perky arse.”
“Keep your mind on the job, sorcerer.”
“I always do, dearie but it don’t hurt to admire the local talent now does it? The stable lad is holding the horses at the gate, so it doesn’t look like they’re planning on spending too long scouring the scene of the crime.”
“Good. Is that thing ready?”
“Almost.” The sorcerer put his back to the wall and breathed on the dust in his hand. The bloody sigil glowed, and the pile of coffin dust swirled in his palm. Animated by his magic and the magic in the sigil, the powder coalesced into the shape of a lizard made of shifting sand and the sorcerer’s breath. Sweaty raised his hand, and the homunculus scuttled through the hole in the parapet. I couldn’t see it, b
ut I could hear its tiny claws scraping on the stone as it worked its way down the wall to the window, where my rope dangled from the hook I’d embedded in the sill. Stefan let his head rest against the wall. His eyes were now shallow pits of swirling sand. Down below, the guards’ voices and iron-shod boots echoed in the marble atrium.
“Rublis is back,” Sweaty whispered, his senses now augmented by those of the homunculus confirmed what I’d heard a few seconds earlier. “The servants are talking to him.”
“Probably telling him that some dastardly curs have tried to rob him while he was enjoying a spot of hunting.”
Sweaty nodded. “Aye, probably. He don’t look happy that’s for sure. Well, I didn’t know that.” He sat up.
“What? What didn’t you know?” I asked and tapped him on the head to remind him to keep down.
“He’s got a bald spot. He must wear a hairpiece when he’s in Valen. Fancy that. Right, he’s riding to the door, jumping off his horse. He looks really fucking angry.”
I nodded. “That’s good. We want him off balance.”
We waited in silence for about half an hour while the Senator roundly berated his staff. After venting his spleen, he stormed into his study which was directly below us and right where we wanted him to be. A trickle of sand ran from the corner of Sweaty’s eye as he stifled a treacherous sneeze. His skin was dusty, and his lips were cracked as though he hadn’t had a drink in a month.
I couldn’t bear the wait, but I didn’t want to stick my head above the parapet, so I poked the sorcerer who started at my touch. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s taking his cloak off. Now he’s picking his nose. Urgh. That’s disgusting.”
“What?”
“He ate it.”
“That’s humans for you. Come on Sweaty, keep talking.”
“He’s pacing, scratching his arse. Aha. I knew it.”
“He’s gone for the safe?”
“No, he’s putting on a wig.”
“For fuck’s sake. Why hasn’t he gone to the safe? You’d think he’d want to check his most valuable possessions.” Patience was not a virtue I possessed. All the pieces were in place. All he had to do was show us where his fucking safe was, so I could rob it and go home.
“Hey, what if it isn’t in his study?”
“It has to be.” It bloody had to be. I couldn’t bear the thought that we’d done all this for nothing, or that I’d have to go back and tell Mother we’d failed. “That sellspell was very specific.” I remembered the day the pale-haired, black-eyed sorcerer had come to Mother, bartering her information for a bag of powdered dragon bone. She’d told her that Rublis mentioned that the safe was in the study, the room upon which he’d hired her to cast some wards. According to the sellspell he was a tight-fisted cuss and had told her that he didn’t want a glamour casting on the safe itself because it was well hidden. Mother had seemed satisfied and handed over the bag of powdered bone, but not before explaining in explicit detail what she would do to the sellspell if her information proved false or inaccurate. “Trust me, Stefan, it’s in the study.” Sweet Salvation, please let it be in the study.
“If you say so. I wouldn't trust Gizla Milkmane as far as I could throw her. Anyway, shh. I can hear footsteps.”
“I know, below us, I can hear them too.”
A door creaked open. “Ah. At last.” Someone said. My money was on it being the senator. “Did you find anything?”
“No, Senator, the thief is long gone.”
Sweaty Stefan and I grinned at each other as we crouched a few feet above their heads.
“Well, what are you going to do about it…?”
“Malpus, my lord. Sergeant Malpus.”
“Sergeant?”
“Aye, sir. Sergeant Regnal Malpus.” There was the sharp crack of a heel click.
“I don’t care what your fucking name is,” the senator snapped. “I don’t want to speak to some provincial greenshanks. Where’s your commanding officer? I need someone here with rank.”
“He had to go to Valen, sir on important Imperial Guard business. However, this woman says she was a witness to the failed robbery.”
“That’s right. I saw it, Senator,” said a woman in a trembling voice.
“Don’t just stand there sniveling. What did you see Decima? Come on girl, spit it out.” I had no love for any mark, but this Rublis fellow sounded like a prick of the highest order.
“Well, sir, I’d just told Nuni to prepare your bath because I know they didn’t have it ready for you when you got back yesterday and—”
“Sweet Salvation!” Rublis was growing angrier by the minute. “Get on with it woman. The thieving bastard will be halfway to Shen by now.”
“I was passing the study door when I heard the sound of something scraping against the window—”
“The windows aren’t warded?” Malpus jumped upon the possible clue like a dog on a rat.
“Of course they’re warded. Do you think me a country squire who must rely upon locks and bars? My wards are very specific, very expensive. They don’t go off at a tap from a nosy crow, they don’t go off if my staff or I open them.”
“I was just asking.” The greenshanks sounded deflated.
“Don’t. Go on Decima and hurry up. I want that bastard caught and skinned.”
Stefan leaned close to me. “They say lizard skin makes excellent scroll cases.”
“Whereas your ballbag will make a wonderful coin purse if you don’t stop calling me ‘lizard’.”
“I didn’t call you ‘lizard’, I merely commented on the quality of lizard skin.”
I gave him the side-eye.
Below, Decima blew her nose and continued. “I unlocked the door, and there it was, staring in at me.”
“What did it look like?” the sergeant asked.
“Its eyes were a sulfurous yellow, it had scales, wicked fangs, long, spiky hair, and huge claws. Oh, those eyes. I’ll never forget them.” She began to sob.
I held up my hands. As claws went, mine were quite modest.
Sweaty chuckled, shedding a fine mist of dust from his clouded eyes. “She’s had to sit down. The poor thing’s gone faint at the recollection of your ugly mug.”
“So, it was a warspawn?” The sergeant asked. “A thoasa maybe?”
“I don’t think so. It didn’t have a tail.”
“You sure? Only it sounds like a thoasa.” Malpus was growing impatient, and Rublis muttered in the background. There was the clink of glass, and the smell of brandy blossomed in the air.
Decima was not to be cowed. “I’ll never forget what that thing looked like so long as I live. It did not have a tail. It wasn’t a thoasa.”
“Right, got it, not a thoasa. No tail.” It sounded like he was taking notes. “How tall was this mystery creature? What, if anything, was it wearing?” Malpus couldn’t keep his bored contempt for the witness and her evidence from his voice, his ire no doubt exacerbated by Rublis’ disparaging comments about provincial greenshanks.
“It must have been seven feet tall, and it was mostly orange and pale peach.”
“Pale peach?” The sergeant echoed.
“Yes. Pale, sort of pinky peach.”
“Like skin color?”
“Like your skin color perhaps. I would say that I’m more olive than pink.”
“Olives are green but have it your way. What did it do when it saw you?”
“I shouted at it, told it to get off or else. It fell to the ground and ran across the gardens.”
“Which way did it go?”
“North, into the trees.”
In point of fact, I’d had to knock on the window until the deaf cull noticed me, whereupon she didn’t shout, she screamed. I then dropped to the ground and loped slowly across the garden so that she could see which way I’d gone and report it. I’d then raced through the trees, looped around behind the manor, and climbed onto the roof where Sweaty was waiting, quietly laughing as the housekeeper raised the
alarm. Unlike me, the sorcerer had it easy. He didn’t have to run or climb, he just cast an apportation spell and transported his carcass onto the roof.
“North, forest. Right then. We’ll go and take a look.” The sergeant sounded far from overjoyed at the prospect. I guessed that as soon as they were out of sight, they’d do what I would have done and head to the nearest inn for the afternoon. Senator Rublis had other ideas.
“Take a look?” The Senator’s tone was frosty.
“As in, we shall not rest until we find the thief, Senator.” The sergeant made more of an effort to sound enthusiastic, but it was too little too late.
“Damn right you won’t. I have the ear of Imperial Consul Soldus. You will take the road to Alselm through the forest. I’ll take my retinue east to Brogundel. You will meet me there in three hours. And if you know what’s good for you, Sergeant you will have apprehended the miscreant who tried to break into my home.”
“He’s pacing, hands behind his back.” Sweaty’s voice was a dry rasp now as the homunculus spell took its toll. “He must think he’s back in the Senate, orating.” The hand gesture Sweaty made had nothing to do with public speaking.
“This is why we need legislation.” The Senator continued. “Warspawn don’t belong in civilized society. Their place is on the battlefield, not roaming amongst decent people.”
“No indeed, Senator.” The sergeant’s words were followed by the ring of steel on steel that marked a chest-beating salute. It was followed by the sound of footsteps retreating into the belly of the manor.
“Stop crying, Decima,” Rublis commanded. “Tell Breck to saddle fresh horses. We’ll ride at once before the trail gets cold. I don’t trust those green-clad imbeciles to do anything more productive than get lost in the woods.”
He would find a trail, albeit one which was as cold as a week-old corpse having been laid by me on the way to the Senator’s retreat earlier that day. It would keep him and his retinue busy and out of the house long enough for us to get the job done. Of course, if he didn’t show us where his fucking safe was located the job might not get done at all.