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The Sea Peoples

Page 24

by S. M. Stirling


  Deor hissed some curse—literally an Anglo-Saxon one, since his odd little homeland used Old English for religion and emphasis—and bounded down the stairs after him calling on Woden under his breath, with the two women at his heels. There was a yell from the outside and an unmusical clanking sound she recognized with her skin and gut as much as her ears.

  Steel on steel, with intent to kill.

  The sound made her skin prickle, and her claws slide out—

  Wait a bit there, I have claws?

  —made her come even more alert, but it didn’t cause her any fear. Toa could be asleep under an oxcart after downing three jugs of Bundaberg’s best and still handle that shambolic looney called Vance without working up a sweat.

  Then they burst out into the darkness, lit by the eerie cones of electric light from the cast-iron standards, and she heard him curse. He had the shovel gripped as he would his spear, and he whirled it over his head and brought it down in a swiping blow that should have left Vance’s head hanging by a thread.

  Instead the man jerked aside. It didn’t look like the tigerish drilled-in agility of a trained fighter; it looked as if the lanky bank-clerk had stumbled. But Toa’s strike missed by a hair, and the momentum was so utterly unexpected—impossible enough to freeze her for an instant, watching—that it pulled him off balance. Vance’s swipe with the knife looked as pig-on-greased-tin awkward as his dodge had been. But Toa bellowed again as he leapt frantically to avoid it, and did—but again only by a hair, and a thin shallow line of blood showed on his ridged belly in a shape that showed he’d have been gutted except for the astonishing swiftness of which he was capable.

  Pip shot, a single flexing push with the left hand and pull back past her ear with the right. The ball-bearing was invisible with speed and darkness, though there was a whist of cloven air. They were only twenty feet away. At that distance she could punch the eye out of a rabbit—the vermin were a nuisance all over Townsville’s territories and children were encouraged to practice on them—from a galloping horse, much less planted on her feet. The three-ounce ball was a fraction of a second from smacking into the back of the mad clerk’s head. . . .

  And he lurched around. Her mind gibbered as she saw the ball miss; miss closely enough that it took a patch of skin from the lobe of one ear, so that blood ran down his neck, but not enough to do more than frighten him. He did look frightened, his bloodshot eyes blank and glazed, his mouth slack and showing all his wet-sheening teeth, but she didn’t think that he was frightened of her, or her comrades.

  Deor shouted and threw up his arms, chanting.

  Thora pulled a long knife out of her bag, holding it expertly with the thumb against the crosspiece, stabbing up under Vance’s nonexistent guard. Toa thrust with the spear/shovel and Pip drew and shot again, this time conservatively at the center of mass—that wouldn’t usually kill outright, but it would crack ribs or cause real damage.

  The razor-edged head of the shovel went between Vance’s arm and his torso, tearing nothing but his coat. It nearly hit Thora, who leapt back with a yell and a twist; that threw her blow off and the point of her knife simply ticked from a button on Vance’s waistcoat. The steel ball from Pip’s catapult struck the shovel-head with a keening bangggg sound and skittered off to break a window that tinkled broken glass into the street.

  And Thora was backing rapidly, staring incredulously at a slash across her left forearm that dripped red onto the sidewalk.

  And she began to fade.

  “Hold hard, oath-sister!” Deor barked, grabbing her shoulder.

  As he did Pip blinked and shook her head. Thora was there, but she looked . . .

  Transparent. As if there’s a bed behind her, and a room with white walls.

  And suddenly something else was there too, like a shadow on a screen. The shadow of a huge beast, roaring, its hump-necked ruff brisling. It drifted away, but Thora was solidly among them once more, swearing and winding a cloth strip around the cut on her forearm.

  “Anything I should worry about with this wound?” she said.

  Toa nodded; the slit in the skin of his belly was thin, but a trickle of blood was soaking the front of his laborer’s garments.

  “Not poison, but it’s a weapon made to sever,” Deor said quickly.

  “Too right!” Toa said. “Cut this denim stuff I’m wearing right and proper.”

  Deor gave a hard grin. “Made to cut links, and not only of the body.”

  Vance had used the moment to back away. Now he turned to dash for escape . . . and then swerved back into the door of the building he’d left.

  “Get him!” Deor called.

  People were beginning to turn and point, even though the fight had been mostly silent except for scuffles, clangs, curses and a little window-shattering. Pip was glad that the others hadn’t used the firearms their swords had translated into; she’d read that guns were loud, but until now she hadn’t quite realized how loud.

  Deor went in on Vance’s heels, and the others followed. It was probably only moments before a mob started to gather; Toa seemed to get hostile glances anyway. He thoughtfully kicked the door closed behind him, and Pip went into the hallway on Thora’s heels. That let her just see Vance wrench open the door to the armorer’s rooms and slip through, slamming it behind him with the click of a Yale-type lock.

  “Toa!” Pip called.

  She could have just broken the glass pane in the door, but that would mean putting her hand through to get at the Yale . . . and that with a murderous lunatic wielding a cursed and supernaturally sharp dagger on the other side. Pip’s menace-gauge said that Vance should have been easy meat for any of the three of them at any time. But whatever possessed the man—and she suspected that possession was uncomfortably close to literal truth right now—was a match for them all together.

  “Right,” he said.

  The shovel slammed out into the jamb of the door, and Toa used the leverage of the long handle, the shaft like a straw in his massive hand. There was a popping crunch, and the doorway bounced open with a speed that shattered the frosted-glass centerpiece anyway. A woman’s scream came from within in the same instant, and a discordant unmusical clang.

  Some peripheral part of her consciousness was aware of feet passing by outside in the building’s hallway. Whoever it was didn’t care that a young woman sounded as if she was being brutally murdered.

  Vance was doing his best to live up to that brutal murder definition. Constance Hawberk was falling back before him, screaming and giving every evidence of being a hysterical snowflake . . . except that she was keeping her face to the would-be murderer and holding up a piece of lobster-tail armor between her and the supernaturally keen edge of the knife with a quickness that was very creditable in someone who’d never done anything of the sort before. It clattered and clanged as the madman’s blurring slashes landed, leaving deep bright scratches through the black and gold enamel of the Renaissance-style cuirassier’s armor, and it could be only instants until the knife found flesh.

  Her father had a war-hammer in his hands, snatched up from one of the exhibition suits, and he swung it at Vance with desperate speed. Things seemed to twist, and somehow the shaft bounced off Vance’s shoulder.

  Deor made an odd gesture, as if throwing something at the lunatic. Thora touched her chest, where the Hammer hung from a cord around her neck, tucked beneath the dress. The single lamp in the room cast her outline behind her on the wall hung with pieces of armor, and the shadow was of a hump-backed bear.

  “Thor with me!” she shouted; and there was a roar in it, as of the great shadow that stood over her. “Tyr hold us! Ye Tyr, ye Odhinn!”

  Vance gave a slobbering, gobbling cry, and his hand jerked at Constance as if invisible cords were pulling it towards her heart. Deor was standing with hands upraised, murmuring, with sweat running down his face as if he struggled with a weight g
reater than mountains. Pip drew and loosed once more as the dagger went bang on the armor . . . and Constance went backward over one of the low benches that were scattered about the workroom.

  Vance threw himself forward in the full-body leap as if he were diving into water with the knife cocked back for an overarm stab, a move that few ever made in reality—whatever was driving him had finally managed to banish all thought of self-preservation. Constance screamed, which didn’t stop her trying to jerk the set of tassets back into position.

  Toa abandoned all efforts at his usual surgeon’s precision and simply swung his long shovel as if it were a giant flyswatter. Perhaps Thora’s prayer had worked, or perhaps whatever was puppeting Vance was so concentrated on its target that it ignored protecting its tool. Enough of the head of the shovel hit him to send him spinning and crashing into more of Hawberk’s stock-in-trade, falling with a clangor like scrap-iron . . . which of course was precisely what it was. Pip drew and shot three times, and at least one of them hit from the hoarse scream of bewildered pain, though another peened off Toa’s shovel.

  I don’t think he knows what he’s doing—bloody literally doesn’t know, Pip thought.

  She surprised herself by feeling a sort of remote flash of sympathy for the man; Philippa Balwyn-Abercrombie didn’t consider herself in the least squeamish or sentimental.

  “The knife!” Deor shouted. “Get the knife!”

  Pip drew again; hastily, and not all the way, but the ball thumped into Vance’s middle as he struggled up onto his knees, teeth showing and wet with blood. It thudded into his stomach, the impact a little muffled by wool jacket and vest and making him jackknife forward. Constance got a good look at him then, and screamed again: Pip couldn’t really blame her.

  Something or someone else was looking out through the mad accountant.

  Constance scrambled backward with feet and elbows, still clutching the scored and dinted tassets. Thora called on the Thunderer again and struck with the battle knife in her hand, one that Pip saw was graven with the Hammer, the steel clashing on the one in Vance’s hand and then the blades locking at the guard. Thora used her weight and position to push with all her strength; in the same instant Vance’s eyes darted towards Constance and her efforts to put some distance between her and the madman.

  Hawberk stepped between his daughter and the struggle on the floor, a bulldog grimness on his face and the war-hammer in his hands.

  Pip took a long breath, drawing it down into the bottom of her lungs, letting it out. Letting tension flow away as the slingshot came up, motion flowing into motion with a calm detachment that was also a focus like a spearpoint.

  Thack!

  The steel ball smashed into Vance’s forearm just below the wrist. His hand spasmed open uncontrollably. Deor jumped forward and stamped his foot down on the haft of the knife as it skittered across the battered hardwood floor.

  “The King!” Vance screamed. “Oh, the yellow tatters of the King! Dog-headed Uoht comes, and He stirs beneath the waves of Hali, and even death shall die!”

  Pip blanched at the sheer shrilling malice in the voice, and Thora seemed to be locked for a moment by a blow as real as it was invisible. Vance scrambled away on hands and knees, dodging Hawberk’s strong but clumsy blow with the war-hammer—which forced Thora to dodge as well, lest it land on her foot—and went across the floor like a huge awkward spider. Then he came halfway to his feet, diving out the door in a shambling lunge with his arms swinging like an ape’s, grunting gutturally.

  Silence fell. Deor reached out quickly and took a black-and-orange armored gauntlet, slid it onto his hand, and picked up the knife. He held it up before his face, studying the glyphs along the steel and grimacing slightly.

  Constance and her father were kneeling and holding each other desperately. Hawberk looked up at them as his callused hand stroked her hair.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”

  Then his eyes went wide as he placed them. “It’s . . . it’s Miss Balwyn-Abercrombie and her people, isn’t it?”

  Pip made herself smile—the expression sliding off her face was more like a snarl, and she was panting—and nodded.

  “Yes,” she said. “Glad to be of help to you and Miss Hawberk.”

  “But . . .”

  Hawberk was no fool; and he had a nobleman’s lifelong habits of self-possession. Dumb unthinking gratitude was not likely to hold him for long.

  “But why were you here when this man burst in? Who is he?”

  Pip opened her mouth without knowing what was going to come out; from the looks on the faces of the others, they didn’t either but were glad she was the one who was going to say something.

  “He’s under the influence of Mr. Wilde, your neighbor,” Pip said. “We believe he is part of . . . a cult, as it were . . . spreading the pernicious book known as The King in Yellow—sort of a group of spiritual, ah, anarchists. Known as the Esoteric Order of Dagon, among other titles.”

  Finally I get some use from Uncle Pete’s tastes in literature!

  “We?” Hawberk said sharply. “We believe?”

  “A Society of those dedicated to stamping out the madness which that book spreads,” Pip said. “Deor—”

  Deor held the knife up for Hawberk to examine. He did so with silent intensity, and after a moment recoiled.

  “I’ve seen symbols like that in Paris,” Hawberk said, wiping his brow. “Copied in manuscripts relating to the trial of Gilles de Rais.”

  Constance blanched visibly and stared at her father as he mentioned the notorious medieval mass-murderer and reputed Satanist.

  “And in a ruined temple in Gwalior, in India, amid a bas-relief depicting unspeakable rites,” Hawberk went on. “I knew Wilde was vicious and probably mad, but this—!”

  “We had reason to believe that Mr. Castaigne . . . Hildred Castaigne, that is . . . had fallen under the influence of Wilde and—from the letters I mentioned, please forgive me for being less than totally frank with you—had conceived a mad hatred of his cousin Louis Castaigne, and of Miss Hawberk and yourself. It seems we were correct. Apparently this man who attacked you, this Vance, was their tool—also a member of the cult, and a blackmail victim of Wilde as well. We do know that Wilde is a blackmailer on a huge scale.”

  Phew! Pip thought. Those Men with Swords and Things with Tentacles books of Uncle Pete’s are really coming in useful! After a moment: And maybe that’s because they’re at least partly true? Oh, bugger, I wish I hadn’t thought of that.

  Hawberk nodded. “What shall we do?” he said.

  “You and Miss Hawberk had best lock yourself in,” Pip said. “We’ll see to Mr. Wilde, and then no doubt the authorities will take an interest.”

  Constance began to speak, hesitated, and then said softly, with a tremor in her voice. “And Louis? Louis Castaigne?”

  “He’s entirely innocent,” Pip said firmly, in her best dulcet tones. “Innocent of everything but having a mad cousin, that is, Miss Hawberk.”

  Even streaked with tears and spatters of Vance’s blood, Constance’s face blossomed. Pip felt herself smiling as well, and then looked at Deor. The scop had an expression of profound sorrow in his eyes as he regarded the girl.

  Oh, sod it. This world is . . . not really a world, is it? These people are all part of a dream of darkness. Can we really change that? Even if we kept Vance from killing them, is something bad likely to happen to them anyway?

  “And now we’ll see about Mr. Wilde,” Deor said grimly. “If you don’t mind me borrowing this,” he added, moving the gauntleted hand. “I don’t care to touch this weapon directly.”

  “I don’t blame you, Mr. Godulfson,” Hawberk said grimly.

  The armorer’s brows went up as Deor turned and spoke to Thora in a different language. Pip didn’t recognize the rapid-fire sing-song syllables, but Thora put her k
nife away and pulled out the heavy automatic. She looked at it; then her face smoothed, as she obviously made herself not think about the strange archaic weapon. As she did so her fingers moved with the same automatic competence they would have shown with backsword or horse-archer’s bow or lance, ejecting the magazine and checking it, reinserting it with a snap, thumbing off the safety and racking the slide to chamber a round.

  And evidently I know enough to recognize what she’s doing, Pip thought, slightly bemused.

  She’d never bothered to learn much about firearms, except that the powders which had pushed slugs and shells out so fast didn’t burn explosively ever since the Blackout. Catapults and crossbows she understood intuitively, but apparently it had translated.

  Thora tucked the weapon into the belt over her shirtwaist, and checked that it was ready to her hand under the loose thigh-length jacket that completed the outfit. Pip made certain that she could get to her kukris quickly, and pulled a few more ball-bearings out into the palm of her hand.

  Constance Hawberk had been looking at them with growing puzzlement. “Thank . . . you again, all of you. And you, Miss Balwyn. I’ve never met anyone like you, but I’m glad I did.”

  “You’re very welcome. Just doing my bit,” Pip said, feeling a little guilty as they filed out into the corridor.

  “Now for Wilde,” Deor said as the door closed and locked behind them and something heavy was drawn up against it. “Vance isn’t important anymore—and Wilde is another step towards Prince John.”

  “Why couldn’t I hit the bastard?” Toa said plaintively.

  Deor shrugged with a wry smile. “Because we are in a story, my friend; a story about things that once happened. Happened in another place that no amount of physical travel could find, or inconceivably long ago, or both. And the . . . forgive me, I must use a term from my art . . . the narrative structure of this story had Vance using this—”

 

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