Ascendant: The Complete Edition

by Richard Denoncourt

  He returned to a crouch. There would be no climbing through the window without making a hell of a racket.

  He had an idea, but it was risky.

  Orrigut Farnsworth the Third, great-grandson to the legendary steel baron, Orrigut the First, millionaire purveyor of luxury scavenged goods from here to Old New York, shivered as a harsh gust of wind blew into the room. He took his hand away from the whore’s breasts and made a fist.

  “Oh, spiteful wrath,” he said, shaking it. “Go, apple pie. Close the window.”

  The whore lay still, frowning up at the ceiling as if deep in thought. She was so large and full. A thick set of neatly trimmed eyebrows gave her emerald-green eyes a startling quality of earthiness, like she was some sort of forest nymph these men had captured and bound into slavery.

  But Orrigut Farnsworth was not intimidated, as he imagined most men would be at this moment, perched above such beauty. He was a master merchant, one of the wealthiest men in all the Eastlands, protected by powerful men, including Roman, for a thousand miles in every direction. He liked to think of himself as the Harris Kole of the Eastlands; a ruler with a golden fist who could buy all the loyalty he needed.

  Except for this unresponsive whore, who now looked to be in a world of her own.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said go close the window.”

  And yet the woman lay there like a doll, staring up at nothing as if her brain had been frozen. It seemed possible too, in this cold.

  “Grrrr,” he said. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

  He didn’t like this at all. Shivering and hugging himself like the skinny, sickly boy he’d once been, Orrigut Farnsworth made his way toward the half-opened window. He would have to lean over the table and the golden (it wasn’t even real gold) silverware to shut it, which brought a simple fear to his mind: what if his undershorts were soiled again? Sometimes he left marks down there, brown ones that even his wife had trouble getting out. He didn’t want this two-bit whore to bear witness to any such thing.

  The woman was still staring up at the ceiling—except now she was moving her lips in what appeared to be a silent monologue, so he made his move. He yanked his underwear around his waist, twisted to get a good look, saw that everything was clean and dandy, and turned his attention back to the window.

  A face thrust itself out of the dark, eyes narrowed into sharp slits.

  “Go to sleep,” it said. “Now, old man.”

  Orrigut Farnsworth shuddered as something hot slid down the backs of his legs. His underwear would look a mess to the whore on the bed. He tried to shout for the guards but instead gave into the most overwhelming fatigue of his life before collapsing down to the carpet.

  Fran stared at Michael in shock.

  “You were the voice in my head,” she said, covering her breasts, watching him with startling green eyes, her hair a thick, auburn mane that gave her a somewhat wild look.

  “Yeah, that was me,” Michael said, dragging the old man next to the bed and trying to push him beneath it. His snoring was loud and ragged, like someone trying to blow frogs out of his sinus passages. Michael cringed as a foul smell hit his nose.

  “Relax,” Fran said, coming down off the high mattress to help. “You’re not the one who has to get him off every two weeks.”

  Together they managed to slide the man beneath the bed without getting their hands dirty.

  Michael rose, breathing out of his mouth to evade the offensive smell. He checked the door to make sure it was still shut, then closed his eyes and massaged his right temple, extending his telepathic sight to make sure the guards standing in the hallway hadn’t moved. He sensed they were bored, distracted; he could tell by the vibrations of their mental strings that neither one had been roused.

  “You’re a ment,” Fran said.

  “I prefer the term ‘telepath,’” Michael said, opening his eyes. “My name’s Michael Cairne, from Gulch, and I’m here to rescue you.”

  She smirked at him. “I’ll bet you’ve always wanted to say that to a girl. So, what’s your brilliant plan? This place is surrounded, but I’m sure you already know that.”

  Michael raised his eyebrows at her, as if about to issue a challenge. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “Trust me, cutie,” she said, pinching his chin as though he were a little boy. “Whatever it is, I’ve had to do worse.”

  A drunken man staggered down the hallway, his arm around a skinny prostitute. The hallway was empty except for a Legionnaire standing at the other end, his post overlooking a set of stairs leading down. The Legionnaire eyed the man and the woman with a frown.

  “Time’s up,” he said. “Get your ass down to the lobby.”

  The man had a thick beard and a dirty face. Probably a miner. He pulled a flask from his coat pocket and put it to his lips, then saw that the cap was still on.

  “Slap me silly,” he said, “I’m drunk.”

  He pulled his arm off the woman and tried to uncap the flask. His hips swayed and his torso tilted forward, and a moment later he dropped to the ground, making a loud thump against the floorboards. He sat there, blinking like an infant. The Legionnaire pulled out his sword and approached the man.

  “I’ve warned you before, man. How about I make this your last visit to the Palace?”

  The miner scrambled up off the floor, spilling liquor everywhere.

  “Ah, hell,” he said, almost falling over again.

  With the Legionnaire pushing him along, the man stumbled his way to the stairs. The woman helped him down. Despite the late hour, the second and first floors of The Emperor’s Palace were full of people smoking fancy cigarettes, talking in dark corners, and laughing too loudly. This floor was quiet, though. That was one of the rules; second and third floors, you got down to business, quick and clean, no loitering in the rooms or hallways.

  The Legionnaire made his way back to his post above the stairs. A sound from the other end of the hallway brought him to a state of full alertness. A door had creaked open, revealing a dark room.

  The door opened wider, and wider still, and all he saw was darkness. He crept toward it, sword ready at his side.

  “Hello?”

  Closer.

  He was about to kick the door open when a hand reached out of the darkness and pulled him in by his armor. The arm doing the pulling was not very strong, but the movement came with a sharp spiking sensation in his skull that caused his limbs to go soft. The sword slipped out of his hand.

  He was suddenly inside the room, swallowed by the darkness. He tried to cry out but his lungs wouldn’t work. The overhead bulb turned on, flooding the room with light. A boy stood over him—a boy with a shaved head and a silver earring in his left lobe. The boy was dressed all in black, every part of him except his head. Even his hands were covered with black gloves.

  The boy moved swiftly to the door, looked out into the hallway, and shut the door quietly. He picked up the sword and turned his attention to the Legionnaire, who blinked up at him in confusion.

  Die, you slaver piece of shit.

  The sword flashed, and by the time the Legionnaire dropped his gaze from the eyes of the boy, the front of his armor was already drenched in blood. His neck felt cold where the steel had kissed it.

  He wanted to say, Wait, my shift’s almost over, but all that came out was a blubbery hacking sound. His chest convulsed. A warm, metallic taste filled his mouth, and then, with the boy making shushing sounds in his ear, he lost consciousness and drifted…

  Ian stood over the dead Legionnaire.

  He tossed the sword aside and stepped back, surprised at how easy it had been to kill in cold blood. The dead man didn’t even look human with his armor and ridiculous hat. He looked like a man-sized doll, something you could purchase from a store to set up inside your whorehouse and turn on with the flip of a switch.

  He had flipped the man’s switch the other way, that was all.

  Now he just had to make his way into the room down the ha
ll and retrieve—what was her name?

  Oh, yeah. Sally Woodhouse. The bitch who had gone after his father more than the others, the one whose idea it had been to try and ruin what little family Ian had left.

  He remembered her from his boyhood, when at twelve years old, he’d fallen in love with her. Sally had been his father’s maid back then. That summer, Ian spent four days in his closet carving a hole in the wall so he could look into the bathroom, and for an hour each morning, he’d crouch inside that closet with his face pressed to the foul-smelling plaster (he could still smell it in memory, strong as ever) and he would watch the woman fill the tub with water heated on a wood stove against the wall before slipping off her robe to expose a white, well-rounded body, with nipples almost as orange as her hair. And every morning, as the robe slipped off her shoulders and her breasts spilled into the room, he would look at the patch of freckles above her belly and fantasize about counting them, one by one, his face resting on one of her thighs.

  Then, one day, his father entered the bathroom.

  It was inevitable; even at that age, Ian should have recognized the power dynamic at play. A woman that beautiful, working for a man like his father, whose wife had been dead for seven years…

  Ian had watched, gritting his teeth and crying, quietly cursing his father for stealing this one thing from his life. He had never seen a man rape a woman before, and the images were seared into his mind; his father’s hairy back moving as he took her against the wall, Sally screaming for help that never came, Ian watching all of it with no intention of making it stop.

  After the third time witnessing Sally being raped, he plugged the hole in the wall and never went back into that closet again. He tried to make himself forget, tried to tell himself that what his father had done was normal, just a part of life out in the Eastlands. Animals did that sort of thing all the time. Who was there to judge any of them?

  He wanted to laugh at the thought.

  Tonight the images came back to him, as vivid as they had been through that shameful hole in the wall. As he crept down the hallway, sensing the people in the rooms on either side of him humping away like beasts, he wanted to scream aloud for it to stop. He recalled the rumors of Michael Cairne having a telepathic episode and forcing those two FSD agents to kill themselves, along with an entire city block, and he wished he had that same power to cleanse this place of its filth.

  With that kind of power, he’d do away with this city entirely, whores, children, and all. He would turn Praetoria into a ghost town, and he would come back again and again, to make sure it stayed that way.

  Sally was in the last room to his right. He could sense her presence; for years he’d known the exact taste of her mind against the tongue of his own. It was like a perfume only she wore, Sally and no one else, and he could smell it radiating from the room. The smell of his childhood and all the sour fruit hanging from its branches.

  The door was locked. He kicked it open.

  And his eyes flew open in shock at what had been done to her.

  Chapter 8

  Dominic wore a hooded jacket to cover his face.

  He was outside, on Nero Street. He glanced up at Reggie but couldn’t see him perched on the roof. The man had his talents; he even had a way of keeping his mind alert but quiet, so no telepath could sniff him out without tremendous effort.

  Dominic’s radar was on full alert. He was being blocked; not a good thing. Back in the old days, blocking each other was something he and his fellow operatives had done for fun, for practice, to see how well they could break through each other’s walls. They called it “barging.” But Dominic was out of practice, and tonight’s enemy was well trained.

  He could sense in which direction the enemy lay, which was good enough. The closer he got, the easier it would be to pinpoint him. As long as he kept up his own block, the man shouldn’t see him coming. He searched the faces of the people around him for signs of intense concentration, keeping his hands in his coat pockets, the right one wrapped around the hilt of a hunting knife. A few jabs to the throat, and he would have this nuisance eliminated in no time.

  A shiver ran along his back. He was being watched, and the person doing the watching wanted him to know. He looked where his intuition was pointing him and saw a man standing at the mouth of an alleyway, dressed in a filthy brown coat. The man stepped back into the shadows and disappeared.

  Dominic took off in a sprint. It couldn’t be this easy; no way in hell. The man had probably set a trap for him in the alley. Dominic went anyway, his curiosity getting the better of him.

  The place was empty, and his hold on the man was gone.

  A decoy.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. He turned and looked up at the roof. “Reggie.”

  The next few minutes happened in a flurry of mad running and fumbling. His mind was being clouded. It was like someone had drugged him. He tried to counter the effect, but had trouble doing so while running and climbing. A knotted rope with a grappling hook that he and the boys had hidden (one of several) took him up the backside of the building and onto the roof, where he came upon a shadow wrestling with Reggie.

  “He’s up there,” a voice shouted from below.

  Roman’s men shouting at the rooftop. He’d been seen.

  He pulled the man off Reggie and looked at his face.

  “Dominic Scalazzo,” the man said. Dominic had no idea who he was.

  The man swiped at him with the butt end of a Desert Eagle, but Dominic was too quick, even with the mind-scrambling effect making his telepathy useless. This man was middle aged. Definitely not a specialist in hand to hand, though his telepathy was strong enough to blur Dominic’s vision.

  He could hear Roman’s men making a commotion down below.

  “Up there, he used a rope.”

  It was Reggie who managed to catch the enemy off-balance. He pulled him down and began to drive the butt end of his rifle into the man’s face. Dominic went to join him, but fell back as his mind shrieked with pain. The Desert Eagle went off. His eyes squeezed shut.

  When he opened them again, the man was gone. Reggie stood doubled over in pain.

  “Shit,” Dominic said. He looked at Reggie. “You hurt?”

  “The bastard shot me,” Reggie said, exposing a shiny spot beneath his armpit where blood was running down his suit.

  “How bad is it?”

  “A scratch. Bullet grazed me.”

  “You sure?” He was practically snarling at Reggie.

  “Take it easy. I’m fine.”

  “We have to abort and get the hell out of here.”

  The grappling hook shivered as someone climbed up the side of the building. Reggie pulled out a pistol and took aim. The slug hit the grapple dead on, detaching it from the edge of the roof and sending the man crashing back down to the alleyway.

  “Let’s go,” Dominic said. “Move it.”

  They ran and jumped onto the roof of the next building, Reggie almost falling short. They got on their bellies to avoid being seen. Dominic closed his eyes and started sending.

  Abort, Abort. Get the hell out!

  The Legionnaire’s eyelids drooped.

  His head tipped forward, snapped upright, then tipped again. It had been a long night, and he still had another hour on his shift. He thought again, for the hundredth time that night, about that whore he liked, the Spanish one with the weird name. He mentally counted all the coins he remembered stuffing into his pouch. Hopefully they would be enough to buy an hour in the sack with her, at least.

  A loud thump made his eyes spring open.

  The whores reclining on the couches before him were all staring wide-eyed at the door. The Legionnaire reacted swiftly; he pulled out his sword, crossed the room, flung the door open, and stepped into darkness.

  A figure moved around him in a blur of motion, so fast he didn’t even have time to blink. He heard the door slam shut behind him, followed by a hollow thump as something hard clubbed the back of his
skull. He fell to his knees, the sword slipping from his hand. How could he have been so stupid?

  He toppled onto the floor as the lights turned on.

  The bigger boy—he remembered this one being stone drunk before, though now he seemed as sober as a priest—brought his fist down into the Legionnaire’s jaw. The room began to darken, and before he lost consciousness, he saw the whore he liked standing before him, arms crossed like she was impatiently waiting.

  That bitch, he thought as he slipped away.

  “He’s out cold,” Peter said, holding the wooden post he and Eli had kicked off the bed, causing it to tilt with one corner sagging near the floor. Part of his face was swollen beneath his left eye, and there was a spot of blood on his lip where Eli’s fist had split it. Just another addition to his disguise, though Eli could have been a little gentler.

  “Strip him,” Rocio said. She got to work removing the man’s helmet.

  Two minutes later, Eli and Rocio entered the lounge area, holding up a very drunk-looking Peter. Eli was dressed in the Legionnaire’s armor, his arms discolored from the tattoos he had tried to wash off. With his sizable bulk, he didn’t look much different than any of the other guards. The whores saw what was happening and their eyes glazed over with boredom. Another drunken customer thinking he could rough up a guard and get away with it. Amazing what alcohol did to one’s courage. The scene was so common that not a single one noticed three people where before there had been four including the guard.

  Eli kept pushing the helmet back so it wouldn’t slip over his eyes. It reeked of the other man’s sweat.

  “Which way?” he whispered.

  “We’ll go out the back way,” Rocio said.

  Peter let out a low moan, his head dangling.

  Nice touch, Eli sent.

  Once they were in the corridor, which was only half full of leaning, smoking, chattering clients and their whores, Eli put on his best Legionnaire growl and started yelling for people to get out of the way.

  “Come on, git, move it. We got a rowdy one comin’ through, about to get his pellets squashed by my boot.”