Blackguards

by J. M. Martin

  Rose slipped past him, out into the dining room. Andreas followed. The noise of the guards at the outer door had grown louder.

  "If this is a test," Andreas said, as Rose knelt beside Beth, "did I pass?"

  "That depends," Rose said. "Did you learn anything?"

  Andreas looked down at the two women. Beth's eyes were closed, and her breathing was fast and shallow. Rose put two fingers to her throat, then gently pulled her hand away to examine the wound.

  "I learned not to be the first one through the door," Andreas muttered.

  "She may live," Rose said, straightening up. "If we can get her to a cutter soon."

  "So what now? It sounds like there's at least a dozen of them out in the hallway. We won't have a chance if we have to carry her."

  "Consider it another test. You're trapped in a room with a badly injured comrade and no escape route." Rose cocked her head. "What do you do?"

  Andreas stared at her for a moment, then crouched beside Beth. He wasn't sure if she was conscious or not, but either way he moved so fast she had no time to make a sound. His knife went in to the soft spot under her jaw in a single, smooth motion. Her legs kicked, weakly, and the breath went out of her with a sigh. Andreas withdrew his blade, wiped it on her shirtsleeve, and sheathed it again.

  He looked up at the Gray Rose, and she looked back at him, her expression unreadable. He wondered if, in that moment, he had finally surprised her. Then she was turning away, drawing a long, curved blade as the door broke open, and a moment later men were falling around her like wheat before the scythe.

  Manhunt

  Mark Smylie

  This story takes place in a thief-plagued city from the setting of The Barrow, my first novel. Its main character, Otalo Galluessi, does not appear in The Barrow until literally its very last page, with only a single line of dialogue; but as with so many seemingly minor characters that appear fleetingly in either the novel or the associated Artesia graphic novels, in my head he already had a bit of back story and the potential to play a broader role down the line. Indeed, I enjoyed exploring his role in the events spilling out from The Barrow so much that this story will now be included as a prologue to its sequel, Black Heart. I hope you enjoy it as well.

  ~

  Therapoli Magni,

  Capital of The Middle Kingdoms:

  The Old Quarter,

  Just Off the High Promenade,

  On the 21st of Emperium

  Three men moved swiftly and silently through the courtyard, dressed for night work. Black neck stocks had been pulled up to mask their faces, and broad-brimmed tricorn hats were pulled low over their eyes. Loose, dark half-coats covered the long daggers stashed about their persons. Otalo carried a short, heavy-bladed cut-and-thrust sword, still in its wooden scabbard, holding it propped over his shoulder as though it were a club; while Lodrigo, a big broad-shouldered man, carried an actual club, the head of its long wooden shaft wrapped in iron, the grip wrapped in leather. Casseyo had one hand resting on a heavy chopping falchion tucked in its scabbard under his coat, while the other hand carried an unlit lantern. According to the city’s law of arms, they could all be arrested for bearing weapons above their station, as only knights or the appointed members of the City Watch were allowed to carry anything larger than a dagger within the city walls. But as they were intent upon a long night of murder that was the least of their concerns.

  Otalo spotted the arched doorway that they were looking for and moved towards it, boots soft on the cobblestones. Lodrigo and Casseyo took up a position on each side of the door as his hand rested on the handle. Otalo held his breath, and his hand pushed on the door. Normally at this hour it would have been barred from the inside by the building’s porter, but pains had been taken to assure that it wouldn’t be. And thankfully it opened, albeit with a creak that sounded loud in the dark. He breathed out, and nodded to his companions. “Second floor, first apartment on the left, with the sign of a magpie drawn upon it,” he whispered. He was pretty sure they’d have remembered the location of their target, but it paid to make sure. The two men nodded, steeling themselves.

  “Right,” whispered Casseyo as he drew his falchion. “Let’s not tarry.”

  “Aye,” whispered Lodrigo. His eyes had a perpetually sleepy expression about them, as though he was only half-awake. “King’s Fortune smile on us. Time’s a-wasting when there’s someone needs killing.”

  Otalo grunted as he drew his sword and held it in his right hand, the wooden scabbard in his left. Always bring the right tool for the job.

  #

  Therapoli as a city—while not as decadent or unmannered as the great cities of Palatia Archaia to the north, or the Hemapoline League of Cities to the east, or even Avella, the Immortal City, capital of the Empire of Thessid-Gola to the south—could on most nights have claimed to have at least presented itself well to the adventurous traveler. Even into the dawn hours there would have been lights and revelers and the smell of roasting meat and fried fish by the Forum. In the streets of the Foreign Quarter, the Old Quarter, and the University Quarter, streetwalkers, hustlers, johns and dandies, the bored and the busy would all have been out and about, each on their own mission of desire or need. The night patrols of the City Watch would have passed by, calling out “All’s well!” to any that cared to hear them.

  On most nights.

  The command had come by whisper and rumor, filtering into the ears of the night patrols of the City Watch for the third evening in a row: the Guild says stay off the streets. And like the rats and cowards they were, most of his fellow Watchmen had exchanged glances with each other, and nodded silently, and stepped off the streets and into guardrooms and tavern halls and brothels, and shut the doors tight against the chill night air. And so for three nights in a row they’d left the city streets to the tender mercies of the very criminals they were charged with protecting them from, left them filled with tension and the whiff of fire and ash, the eerie silence punctured by distant shouts and screams. Most of those in the Old Quarter not forewarned by whisper and rumor as the Dusk Maiden rose and Night fell would still have felt it in the air, and locked their doors and the shutters to their windows, and cowered in the dark with candles and prayers and sharpened knives for company.

  And they’d pop their heads up the next morning and survey the damage done, and listen to tales of squads of thugs and assassins breaking down doors and dragging men and women screaming into the night, a growing roster of the missing—and presumed dead, for their bodies had simply vanished. Even during the day everyone had been walking careful, past the gutted ruins of the Sleight of Hand, once the Quarter’s most notorious brothel and now a shuttered, smoking wreck. A campaign of terror and murder and intimidation, operating right under the noses of the City Watch, indeed seemingly with the tacit approval of at least some of its commanders. An indictment of the corruption endemic to the Watch and to the city plainly visible for all to see, and yet most of his fellow Watchmen were content to shrug and drink their warm beer.

  But not him. Oh no. Not Conrad Theorodrum.

  “You’ve always been too proud for your own good, Conrad,” said Baldwin, cheerily hoisting a glass. “I mean, it’s too bad about the Sleight of Hand, I’ll miss that place, but I guess that’s what happens when you don’t pay your dues to the Guild.”

  “We are charged with keeping the High King’s peace,” Conrad said. “And now we stand here and do nothing?”

  World-weary Lars shook his head. “Look, compromise is how this all works. Otherwise, it’d be war between the Guild and the Watch.” Baldwin nodded heartily in agreement.

  “Compromise?” Conrad fumed. He looked around the bar of the Horn and Hound. Most of the other Watchmen avoided making eye contact. “Compromise? We’re told to look the other way while the Guild murders and steals in the night with impunity? That’s not compromise, that’s capitulation!”

  “Don’t mess it up for the rest of us, you asshole,” said Lars in a low growl. “Le
ave it alone.”

  “A pox take you all, gentlemen,” Conrad said in reply, and he stormed out of the Horn & Hound.

  He supposed he was proud, and what of it? He’d never be a knight, he’d been born into the wrong family for that, a minor line of Theodrum long separated from land or title; but like his father before him he had found the cause of service in the City Watch, and wore the colors of High King and city with the same pride as if they were a knight’s sigil. And who knew what luck and fortune might bring, should he distinguish himself at the right moment, in the right company, in the view of a Peer of the Realm? Knighthoods had been granted before for bravery and action in the field; he’d heard the stories, seen men ride by that it had happened to. He had a flash of guilt, and of anger, for this was as much a cause of his discontent as any more high-minded purpose. Sitting stuck behind a locked door while just outside murder was being allowed to happen meant that he was being robbed of the chance to display his worth: an injustice layered on injustice.

  Standing on the eerily deserted High Promenade by himself, however, and looking out onto the equally deserted High Plaza, he had to admit that suddenly he wasn’t sure if this was such a good idea.

  #

  The three men slipping into the ground floor of the tenement building off of Poor’s Square on the High Promenade were Amorans, and though dressed no differently than the Danians and Aurians who dominated Therapoli, they were part of an easily identifiable minority in the city: black and brown of skin in a sea of pale and tan, their black hair curled and kinky, with broad lips and strong noses. They were considered immigrants, though all three had been born in the city; Otalo was himself perhaps the closest to being a new arrival, as his parents had settled in Therapoli only a few years before he’d been born, but he spoke the Middle Tongue without a hint of accent. Casseyo’s family had been in the city for two centuries, and lighter-skinned Lodrigo’s father was a Danian, a sailor who’d fallen in love with an Amoran woman from an old merchant family on Old South Road and settled with her in the Foreign Quarter.

  As Amorans they often had to be careful about where in the city they went and when, as in some Quarters their kind was not welcome; but they were all right in the Old Quarter, particularly as they were Marked Men, known to be part of the crew of Guizo the Fat, a Prince of the Guild whose writ extended far and wide in the city’s underground. The Old Quarter belonged to Bad Mowbray and the Gilded Lady and their lieutenants and dependents, but they and Guizo were known allies and Guizo’s men were often welcome there; and on this night they walked its streets by express invitation. A dozen of his bravos were back on Downland Street helping Petterwin Grim’s men on a door-to-door, and a half-dozen more had helped Mowbray’s men kick in the door of a tenement a hundred paces away on the High Promenade, almost by the Aqueducts.

  Otalo was in the lead as they softly took the twisting stair up to the first floor, his eyes peering into the darkness above; there was a New Moon that night and no windows into the stairwell besides, so Casseyo had lit and hooded his lantern a few steps behind him. In some old tenements the stairs were made of stone or brick, but in this one they were wood, and he winced with every inadvertent creak. At each small landing he had to step over several sleeping bodies. Otalo scanned the sleepers quickly; it wouldn’t do to be taken by surprise, but they looked right, smelled right (which was to say, all wrong, even through the stock).

  He hit the first floor and spent a moment listening to the sounds from the halls stretching off on each side, before he turned onto the stairs twisting up to the inky darkness of the second floor. Several more sleeping drunks littered their path. He had almost reached the top of the steps when he paused. The last huddled body wrapped in a blanket was small, a child’s body. He caught the glint of an open eye in the hooded lantern light. The tip of his sword came to hover for a moment a few inches from that open eye, and then he raised the blade upright.

  “Are they still there?” he whispered through his stock.

  The child nodded, and closed its eyes.

  Otalo stepped onto the second and last landing. His eyes swept right and then left, but by the starlight from the open windows at each end of the hallways they were empty. Slowly Lodrigo and Casseyo joined him, Casseyo hanging back and looking behind them down the stairwells.

  Otalo and Lodrigo crept down the hallway to the left until they reached the first set of doors. Casseyo finally came after, his hooded lantern bringing the hint of light. Faintly visible on the door to their right was a small chalk drawing of a bird. Otalo and Lodrigo frowned. Lodrigo cocked his head and quizzically indicated the door with the drawing. Otalo raised his shoulders in a confused shrug. Second floor, first apartment on the left, with the sign of a magpie drawn upon it; the report had been clear. But then it should have been the door on their left, not their right.

  Otalo waved Casseyo closer, and as the lantern-bearer approached he stepped silently in front of the door on the left and inspected it closely. Despite the faint glimmers from the light he couldn’t see for shit in the dark, but he tucked the wooden scabbard under his right arm and ran the fingers of his now free left hand over the surface of the wood, and they came away with the faint feel of chalk on his skin. Someone switched the signs; but who and when? His face scrunched in anger, wondering about the sentinel on the stairs. He stepped back and pointed at the left door and then at himself. He pointed at Lodrigo, then to his own eyes, then to the door on the right. Casseyo and Lodrigo nodded, hefting their weapons and the lantern.

  He took a deep breath, shifting the wooden scabbard back into his left hand, happy at the feel of a weight in each grip.

  The heel of his boot landed square where the latch-lock of the door would normally be, and the force was enough to splinter wood and send the door swinging open into the utter darkness of the chamber beyond. He barely had time to congratulate himself on getting it on the first kick when he was through the door and almost impaled on a blade thrust from someone waiting in the dark. He parried just in time and drove the point into the wood of the floor, his movement carrying him forward as he riposted automatically, the movements ingrained in him by years of practice, and the tip of his sword found a soft body. Someone screamed, a man, he thought. He heard a crash behind him and shouts and the sound of metal on metal, and he had time to think we’ve walked into an ambush.

  There was almost no light, the lantern behind him was flickering and bouncing in all sorts of directions, but instinctually he suspected he was silhouetted in the doorway, and Otalo leapt forward, trying to get into the darkness, swinging the heavy blade furiously and blindly through the air around and in front of him, varying a figure-eight motion to fill every direction with whistling steel, waving the scabbard in his left hand more haphazardly to ward off any attacks. He struck something in front of him once with his sword, then twice, and it crumpled under the blows, the screaming man suddenly silent, then he caught something heavy and inanimate on his left that sent a shock up his arm—a wall? A post? Then a lot of empty air, then something nicked on his left, then again on his left, and then he connected with something softer on his right on the backswing as he drove forward, tripping over something on the floor.

  He turned his trip into a rightward lunge with his head down, hands and arms and sword and scabbard crossed over his face, crashing blindly into someone staggering, and they both went down, his feet entangled in some sort of cloth, a dress or a long trailing cloak. He bounced off a wall with his right shoulder on the way down, slamming into wattle and daub and feeling it crush and give. His hat was knocked off his head. He landed on top of whoever it was, the scabbard spinning away, his left hand finding purchase on their throat and jaw to lift his upper body up and give his right arm some swinging room, and he brought the heavy blade of his sword down on the top half of their head in a short, torquing arc, again and again as hard as he could, until the hard cracks had turned soft and squishy.

  The body under him was still twitching but he rolled
off it and against the wall, and forced himself up until he was in a crouch, his sword waving wildly and blindly in front of him, panting heavily through the stock. He was about to cry out to his comrades when light suddenly bloomed in the room, and Casseyo finally leapt through the doors, his lantern’s shutters opened in full. There was blood on Casseyo’s falchion and his doublet glistened wetly, but the blood didn’t seem to be his. Lodrigo, on the other hand, stumbled into the doorway, leaning against it and moaning in pain and anger. He was bleeding from his right thigh, his breeches slashed and ripped, and he clutched his right side with his left hand, while his right hand still held the iron-bound club; though somehow he’d managed to keep his hat on his head—more than Otalo or Casseyo could claim.

  “How many?” Otalo gasped.

  “Three,” Lodrigo said, his eyes scrunched. “All on the Path, now.”

  Casseyo moved forward, shining his lantern light before them. There was a dead man, heavy-set, in the middle of the room—the man who’d first attacked him, Otalo thought—and Otalo was crouched against the wall over the body of a woman, the upper half of her face and head largely crushed in by his blows. “Is it her?” Casseyo asked eagerly, bringing the light closer.

  Otalo crouched further, wiping the sweat from his eyes. “No,” he said with a grunt. “Can’t recognize her anymore, but her hair is dark, and naturally so, by the looks of it. She’s Danian, not Aurian.”

  “Shit, it ain’t even her? Was this a setup?” Lodrigo hissed. He pulled his neck stock down, revealing his round, fleshy face. “She was supposed to be alone, so who in the Six Hells are all these people?”

  “The lookout,” said Otalo with a sudden frown. “The little shit let us walk right into it.” His expression grew grim when he thought about what he’d do to the little imp if he ever saw it again. Corruption starts early in this part of town. He paused, his mind quickly replaying the melee, his eyes taking in the details of the room now that he could see. Something had been on my left. He started to push himself back onto his feet, pointing to an open doorway on their left through which a blood trail disappeared. “Quick! In there!”