by Ian Whates
Dewar was glad the Kite Guard had been dissuaded from accompanying him. The man seemed to assume they were now some sort of a team, which was a laughable concept, and Dewar certainly had no intention of setting foot in that guard station again. Not only did he feel distinctly uncomfortable in the place, but there was the added risk of being compromised by his own contact within the unit. Quite apart from which, Tylus's company had been wearing in the extreme and, having met the gormless Richardson, the assassin was finally able to understand how Tylus had managed to shine down here. The local guards had never exactly been the pride of the force but, if Richardson was anything to go by, standards had slipped even further while he was away; the Kite Guard must have seemed a genius in comparison to the average officer.
He had another reason to be grateful as well. When the dog master stipulated that one of his pets must be a part of any attack on the Maker, the assassin feared that he would be lumbered with the large beast that had led them to the madman's lair. While doubtless strong and formidable in its own right, that particular false-hound had hardly been unobtrusive, and stealth rather than strength was the quality Dewar was relying on to reach the Maker. To his great relief, however, it was the small wall-climbing hound which the dog master assigned to him as guide and observer.
As far as Dewar could determine, the nick he was sent here to find had either been killed trying to cross the City Below or, more likely, had been subverted by one of the Maker's devices, like every other nick around here. Assuming the latter, the boy was not about to do anything predictable until the Maker and his influence were removed. Only once the Maker was dead was there any chance that the lad would start behaving normally again and return to the Blue Claw headquarters, where Dewar would be waiting for him. So, the sooner the Maker was taken care of, the sooner he could complete this assignment and return to the Heights.
Unfortunately, reaching the Maker's den was proving trickier than anticipated. Dewar found himself moving through a city in turmoil. Evidently the Maker had abandoned any pretence of subtlety and gangs of armed street-nicks now roamed openly through the under-City, looking for trouble. He skirted around one pitched battle as a large force of guards took on a mob of nicks, and avoided several other minor skirmishes. The whole place had the feel of somewhere under siege, which he supposed in a sense it was. People were cowering in their homes and battening down the hatches, hoping that trouble would simply pass them by. The real question now was how long before the powers upstairs reacted to the situation? React they would, he felt certain, but would the Maker be able to achieve his goal, whatever it might be, before that happened?
At least the nicks seemed to be avoiding the temptation to torch anywhere. So far. Fire was never welcome in the closed environment of the City Below and the youths seemed to retain enough common sense to know how dangerous it could be. However, he wouldn't bet on that common sense lasting forever, especially if things turned against them.
The mini-hound was leading him out of areas he was familiar with but, even so, Dewar knew enough of the city's layout to realise they weren't going the most direct route. At one point, he stopped and crouched down, staring directly into the dog's eyes in the knowledge that it's master would see all that the dog did.
"I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt for now," the assassin said slowly, trusting the dog master would understand his meaning even if the dog didn't relay sound. "I'm going to assume we're avoiding certain areas for specific reasons, but if I ever discover you've been sending me the long way round just for your own perverse titillation, I'll crush your little hound beneath my foot and then come back to see you for a chat regarding the wisdom of wasting my time."
The dog stared back, giving no indication as to whether the assassin's message had been understood or not. Its unblinking mesh-built eyes put him in mind of some giant insect. He straightened up and the small hound turned and continued to patter along in front exactly as before, as if he had never spoken.
The dog finally led him to an unassuming door in an ordinary looking building; green paint peeling from wooden planks, held together by a cross-plank which housed the latch and lock mechanism. If this was the Maker's lair, Dewar was surprised on a number of fronts - the first being the lack of any challenge. Alarm bells started ringing in the assassin's head but nowhere else. After all, this was supposed to be the headquarters of the man currently intent on overthrowing the accepted order in the City Below; so where was his security?
The little dog simply trotted up to the door, with no apparent worries at all. Dewar hung back, taking in every detail. Close by the door, something glinted on the ground. There was broken glass there and an object that might have been a small piece of metal. The ground itself immediately beneath these scraps seemed a shade darker, as if stained by something. If as he suspected this was blood, then it had not been spilled all that recently. This was a large building - a warehouse of some sort perhaps? Yet there was no sign of any windows. Moving away from the door, he slipped around to the building's side and then to the back. Just the one window - high up and small, impossible to reach from the ground.
Eventually, satisfied that it represented the only way in without resorting to the roof, he returned to the front and the door to find the dog patiently sitting in the middle of the street, waiting for him.
Still with strong misgivings, convinced this was some sort of a trap, Dewar drew both his short, broad sword and his kairuken and prepared to enter. Which was when he spotted the device above the door, its limbs splayed out and blending perfectly with the stonework. Only when it opened that single large eye did it become visible. The assassin felt like smiling. Hardly the most formidable guardian, but at least it was something.
He wasn't the only one to spot the creature. The tiny dog sprang into action, charging across the road and straight up the wall. The Maker's creature was quick but so was the dog. There followed a breakneck race across the building's front, with the device fleeing from and dodging the scampering mutt. Eventually, the spider-like construct made a break for the roof but the dog was too fast, leaping upon it. Both tumbled to the ground. The dog sprang to its feet and, while the device struggled to untangle its long legs, brought its tail over its head and stabbed down into that single eye. The action reminded Dewar of a striking scorpion. The tail's barbed tip penetrated the eye and kept going. The device shook and thrashed its limbs for a second and then lay still.
That was enough for Dewar. He faced the door, raised his foot and kicked it just behind the latch area. Wood splintered and the door swung open. Dewar span to one side and pressed against the wall. When no arrows or other missiles came flying out, he slipped through, weapons ready, still hugging the wall, to crouch just inside the doorway.
The first thing that struck him was the smell. The place stank, like a distillation of the stench that assailed you when you first stepped into the City Below. Similar but much worse. Something had died in here.
Then he saw the smashed creatures. Something which might once have been part machine and part monkey, another which looked like a mechanical lizard and several others less easily identifiable. They lay scattered at intervals along a wide corridor. The assassin pictured in his mind what must have happened here. A fight, an attack upon this place, with the Maker's creatures, for such he assumed them to be, fighting a rearguard action, a desperate defence which saw them falling one by one.
There was a sound, a buzzing hum which bubbled just above the threshold of awareness and seemed to emanate from somewhere ahead.
He edged forward, still clutching his weapons, and examined the nearest felled construct, the monkey. The device had been well and truly trashed, but what he found most interesting was the thin layer of dust covering the wreckage. He straightened and strode down the corridor with greater purpose, retracing the path of the imagined battle. The smell grew stronger and the buzzing grew louder with every step. He didn't pause to examine any further wreckage, confident it would reveal nothing new. What lay in the
room at the far end of this hallway was all that mattered now.
He stepped into a space quite unlike the control room from which the dog master operated - there were no intrusive hanging cables and the room seemed less cramped as a result, despite the fact it was smaller. The mangled remains of various constructs littered the floor. There might have been no banks of screens but there was a large block of machinery with a desk beside it and a chair.
The sound and stench intensified further as he entered the room and the buzzing noise was finally explained. A black swarm of flies lifted into the air as if to greet him - a swirling cloud of insects which had been crawling over various organic scraps but which were concentrated around a slumped form stretched out on the floor: the source of the smell. A dead human body, and none too fresh either judging by its reek. Dewar had no doubt that this was the Maker, the man he had to come to kill. Somebody had obviously beaten him to it, and by some margin as well.
But if the Maker had been dead all this time...
Suddenly things fell into place. Dewar flung himself to one side, rolling through the dust, but he was barely fast enough. The small dog pounced, its clawed feet missing him by fractions. As he rolled again, the tail came smashing down, its barb striking the ground where his head had been an instant before.
Realising there was not enough time to get to his feet, Dewar pushed himself up into a sitting position, using the knuckles of his left hand, which still clasped the kairuken, to do so. The dog was quick. He had seen that for himself when it hunted down the device watching over the door, and he was given further proof now, as one of its feet, sharp enough to find purchase on a wall, pierced his supporting hand, skewering it to the kairuken. He cried out at the intense pain, but concentrated, knowing he had to react as quickly as the dog master's toy. The thing's tail was raised, ready to strike, and he had no idea what venom its sting might contain.
He brought his sword across, smashing into the device. Not a clean strike with the edge of the blade, but it was still enough to send the false-dog rolling away, freeing his hand in the process.
Dewar dropped his sword, snatched up the kairuken and, as the small dog struck a wall and so stopped rolling, fired. The razor-edged disc flew across the intervening space and struck the device, severing its over-sized head from the small body. The hound's body collapsed. Reclaiming his sword, Dewar got to his feet and walked across to the lifeless device - now the smallest pile of junk in the room. He picked up the dog's head and glared into the bulging mesh eyes.
"It was you all along, wasn't it, you bastard!" he said. There was no means of knowing whether the dog master was still receiving images through the severed head, but he continued to speak anyway. "You killed the Maker, took over the manufacture of these 'simple but effective' mechanisms yourself and then used them to carry this parasite of yours, all the while knowing that your deceased rival would take the blame. You all but told us as much when we were there, didn't you? Even taunting us by pointing out the discrepancy between the simple devices and the complex parasite, but we were too caught up in things to notice.
"Mark my words, dog master: you're a dead man. I'm coming for you, old friend."
It had been clever, having the dog kill one of the Maker's devices as they entered. Dewar could imagine the maniacal little man cackling away at that little subterfuge. He flung the false-canine's head to one side, stalked out of the room and walked with determined tread back down the corridor. As he neared the exit, the door swung violently open, and a figure stood there, framed by the daylight behind, so that he was forced to squint to make it out.
It was a girl, he realised; a black-clad, feral creature bearing twin short swords similar to his own, though not as broad in the blade. One of the infected nicks, he presumed, though her opening words to him, spoken as she slipped into the corridor, her movements as posed and graceful as a dancer, seemed to suggest otherwise.
"I hope you're ready, Maker, ready to pay for all you've done." The words were almost growled rather than spoken. "It's time for you to die."
SIXTEEN
Tom was dismayed when Kat announced she was leaving. "You're hurt," he pointed out. "At least wait until we get to the temple and let them see to your wound."
She glanced down at the cut in her side, from which blood still seeped. "This? This is nothing. I took far worse in the Pits."
"Yes, but-"
"Look, Tom, you don't need me anymore. I reckon the Blade can see you home safely enough from here, assuming there's still a home to go to, of course. The whole city's going to hell in a death cart, in case you hadn't noticed. And there's something I've got to do, something which won't wait."
He realised exactly what that meant: Rayul, and revenge. "I know, but..."
"See you, kid."
Before he knew what was happening, she leant forward and kissed him on the cheek, the corner of her mouth brushing the corner of his lips in the process, then she turned and was running, her side not seeming to restrict her at all.
He lifted a hand to where he could still feel the surprisingly cool touch of her lips on his face. He wanted desperately to follow but knew that if he was going to he should have gone immediately, that by hesitating those few seconds it was already too late. Kat was around a corner and out of sight. He would never be able to catch her. In desperation, he turned to the Blade, who had stood silently by and let her go.
"Shouldn't you have stopped her?" he asked.
One of the statuesque figures peered down at him. "No, we were sent to fetch you. The girl is irrelevant."
Not to him she wasn't. It was only then that Tom unfroze, running to the corner, to stand at the mouth of an otherwise deserted alley.
"Kat!" he yelled into the silence and the emptiness.
The Blade were beside him again. "We must go. There are people waiting."
What did Tom care who was waiting? Let them wait. Kat had gone, had left him. Nevertheless, he turned without a further word and went with the Blade, one of them in front and one behind as before, and he felt small and insignificant and, above all, entirely alone in the world.
"Sorry to disappoint you, kid, but I'm not the Maker."
The girl continued to eye him with malice and suspicion but at least she hadn't attacked yet. She moved like a trained fighter, and Dewar couldn't begin to imagine where someone as young as this had learned to do that. No ordinary street-nick, that much was certain.
"Someone's beaten you to it, beaten us both to it. That stench you can smell, that's the Maker, or what's left of him."
She didn't rise from her fighter's crouch, but reached out to touch a piece of nearby wreckage, wiping dust from her fingers afterwards even as he had.
"These?"
"His creations, destroyed in the attack, I'd imagine."
"Who?"
"The dog master." Why was he wasting time on this girl? Because she interested him, he realised. "He's the one who pointed me here when I knocked on his door and then had one of his creatures try to kill me when I found the Maker's body."
Her gaze flicked past him, down the corridor, taking in the other wrecked devices.
"Wait here!" and she slid past him.
He couldn't help but smile as he watched her jog down the hallway. She was slim but well-muscled - a lithe and wiry frame rather than merely slender - and she moved with a grace that was impossible not to admire: quite beautiful. Add to that her abundant confidence and the proficient way she handled her blades and the result was a highly intriguing individual.
She didn't go into the room, merely looked in from the doorway and then came back. "Not recent," she commented.
"No," he agreed, "a good few days ago."
"So this dog master..."
"Is behind everything and has seen to it that the Maker takes the blame," he finished for her.
She seemed to reach a decision and sheathed her knives. "Kat," she offered.
"Pleased to meet you, Kat, I'm-" As he spoke, he lunged, grabbing
both her arms and slamming them against the wall. As he held her there, pinned, he remembered Jezmina's ambush - the first one, which hadn't involved hitting him over the head - and on impulse he leant forward and kissed this enigmatic girl, clamping his lips to hers. Only for an instant, then he leapt back before she had a chance to react, to bite or to knee him.
Even as he landed, one of her knives appeared, its tip levelled at his chest, but his own was out just as quickly, levelled at hers.
They stood there at impasse, him grinning and her seething.
"Dewar," he finished. "And if you want to find the dog master, you're going to want me alive. I'm the man who can take you there."
With that, he very deliberately withdrew his blade and sheathed it. After a moment's hesitation, and with obvious lingering reluctance, she did the same. "If you try anything like that again you're a dead man, and I'll find the breckin' way myself."
He smiled. "Fair enough."
The palm of her hand struck him across the cheek, too quickly for him to react and too powerfully to be deemed a mere slap. His head was jerked sideways by the force and his cheek warmed instantly with tingling pain.
"That was just to prove that I meant it."
"I believe you," he said, gingerly rubbing his cheek.
"Now, are you gonna take me to this dog master or are we just going to stand here trying to score points off each other?"
"Follow me." He headed to the door and out into daylight, the girl directly behind him. At first he was on tenterhooks, conscious of her footfalls and wondering if she would seek any further retribution for the kiss, but the slap seemed to have satisfied her for now.
If he were ever going to team up with someone, he would take this girl over the Kite Guard any day. "Where did you learn to fight?"
"In the Pits."
He stopped and stared at her, tempted to ask if she meant it, but it was obvious from her face that she did. The Pits? And she was so young. No wonder she looked tough and competent. Normally, kids whose parents died, or who were thrown out because their families could no longer afford to keep them, ended up drifting into one of the street-nick gangs or into whoring, but there had been rumours that some found their way into the Pits. Anyone who fought in that place and was still around to talk about it would have to be able to handle themselves, but for a teenager, a mere kid, and a girl at that, to have emerged alive from the Pits was incredible.