Shadow Knight

by O. J. Lowe

  Nine.

  It’s a fact that so much of life consists of patterns we can’t quite comprehend, for to know them is to know the meaning of life itself, to understand the consummate questions fuelling the underlying fabric of the universe. That mystery is for gods and higher beings, a simple assassin like me doesn’t want to delve too deeply into it all. It’d give me a migraine for a start. Every now and then though, you see how it all fits together, how one life can impact on the others around them.

  Eric Steele was the final piece of my jigsaw, my five all-stars. For some reason, pyromancers are exceptionally common within the Shining Council, I have no idea why. Maybe something to do with temperament, maybe unconscious manipulation of magic. Even those who don’t have a lick of the stuff in them expect magic to behave in a certain way and thus, one of the key requisites of a wizard amongst those who know nothing about them, is that they should be able to summon fire.

  Don’t ask me. I’ve given up trying to understand people. They’re an enigma wrapped in a conundrum in my experience. They only say anything worth saying when it’s going to benefit them.

  Steele wasn’t possessed of the temperament you’d initially attach to a great assassin, but he became the last of my cadre, the five greats who would make the Red Claw unassailable. A short temper and as hot-headed as his flames didn’t sound like a great combination, but we soon worked that out of him. I’ve never been particularly flammable; it only took a few weeks to knock sense into him. His head might have been hard, but he got it eventually.

  Plus, having someone capable of causing an almighty mess when they hurl a fireball at a target is always handy. Sometimes, a statement needs to be made. Idly, I wondered how Steele was enjoying the Underworld, the prison in the Novisarium, he probably hated it with a burning passion. Idiot shouldn’t have let himself be taken alive; my other all-stars had the good grace to die. Maybe he’d escape one day. More likely he wouldn’t. The Underworld was supposedly inescapable, an entire district of the city surrounded by a mystical wall of energy. The only way out was to serve your sentence or have friends in high places, and unfortunately for Steele, I didn’t count where that last part was concerned.

  He’d make it through, though I wondered what sort of condition he’d be in when he got out. Not the best. Slightly damaged most likely. Prison changes people. I’ve never seen the inside of the Underworld, but I’ve seen mortal jails, back before we were all forced into the Novisarium. Not pleasant places. Never felt big enough. Cramped. Uncomfortable. Granted they were easier to escape from.

  I’d taken Steele from the Shining Council; they’d wanted rid of him. Something about him being unstable. I didn’t necessarily consider that a strike against him, after all we’re all insane in our own way. Just because his involved throwing fireballs at people, well that’s more an issue for others than him. I suppose if he wants to throw fireballs at people, he might as well get paid for it. It’s always important to have a job you can enjoy.

  Learning to read people has always been a key feature of the job as far as I’m concerned, to know how they’re going to act in a given situation. Part of me had already worked it out, it took a few minutes for the full picture to form in my head. Okay, so if Moulton was hunkered down somewhere, behind wards, he’d need to eat. He wouldn’t be able to head down to the store whenever he got hungry, I didn’t doubt he could discipline himself to the minimum possible amounts, but he still needed to keep his energy levels up, especially if he was hiding behind wards, wards that needed continuously replenishing.

  And of course, in Dead Town, not many places did stuff that weren’t variations on blood. Somehow, I doubted a bloody milkshake or blood pudding was going to be to his taste. So, he’d need sustenance, something fit for a human, not an overgrown leech. I stroked my chin, went back to the basics.

  By the count I carried out, there were three places within a ten-minute walk from the Church of Unholy Sun that served human food. More than that, only one of them did deliveries. Maybe as a theory, it wouldn’t pan out at all.

  Still, I found myself perusing the aisles, an eye on the guy behind the counter. From my guess, it’d been his kid out on the bicycle. He certainly didn’t look like the sort prone to bouts of parental affection, more the sort to lash out if he wasn’t happy. Big, beefy and bald, more hairs on his knuckles than on his head. Not at all the sort of person likely to give out information, stubborn to a point. Unless they’re working for me, I don’t like stubborn people. They always feel like they’ve got a point to prove.

  Cracking heads, while satisfying, it’s never the answer on its own. Only as a last resort. It can draw unwanted heat down on you. Harming civilians, it’s not something I approve of, not unless there’s no other option. And by that, I mean it’s a case of finding out what they need instead. Most like money, they’ll chase the almighty dollar. A guy like this, living in a vampire area and surviving, there had to be something more about him than met the eye. Shifter perhaps?

  I finished my glance of the shelves, moved across to the exit and didn’t look back as I walked out. Somehow, I didn’t think I was going to get any of the answers I sought from the man. On the other hand, it’s never the man at the top who has most of the answers, not in circumstances like this. The order might have come in by phone, chances were the guy behind the counter had never met Moulton face to face. On the other hand, though…

  I ducked in the alley next to the store, the kid stacking his bike up against it, chaining it to a hook on the wall, his face neutral. The chain might be a token gesture, but it’d be enough for the insurance company if it came down to it. Solid silver, it was, I recognised the metallic sheen. Maybe that’d deter most things in the Novisarium.

  “Hey, kid,” I said.

  He gave me a look back, not much of his father in him, some half-heritage, maybe east Asian or something, thick black hair. “I got no money.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I got plenty.” I opened my coat, took out my wallet and tossed him a ten-dollar bill. As long as it’s real, most otherworld currencies float around the Novisarium, they’ll be accepted. I even let him see my gun, just in case he had any ideas. Carrot and stick at the same time. “And I’m willing to share it out, you answer me a question or two.”

  “Okay.”

  “Twenty bucks for a minute of your time. Nothing seedy.” I dug into my pocket, found the picture of Moulton and showed it to him. “You ever see this guy?”

  He fixated on it, peered close at it for several seconds, his eyes growing wider by the moment, before he looked up at me and shook his head, like it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Call me suspicious, but I didn’t believe him in the slightest. Magical coercion maybe. If I was some sort of expert, I might be able to undo it, get him to point me in the right direction without harming him. I wasn’t. My expertise where magic is concerned has always bordered on a rudimentary understanding of the theories, I’ve not got a magical bone in my body that didn’t come from my heritage.

  “You know what liars get?” I asked, showing him my gun again. “I’ve got a package for him, it’s urgent. He didn’t leave an address.”

  “I can’t,” the kid said, looked whole-heartedly upset about it. “I can’t tell you, Mister. If I do, I’ll… I’ll—” He coughed and spluttered, like he wanted the words to come out but couldn’t physically force his tongue to do what he demanded of it.

  “Okay,” I said. Standard curse, I guessed. Maybe bestowing silence or something on him, stop him from spilling the beans. “If I gave you the parcel, and fifty bucks, would you deliver it to him? You’ve kept your vow of not telling anyone where he is, I get what I want. I promise I won’t follow you” Magic and loopholes. Every curse has one, if you know how to exploit it. I might not know much, but I do know that.

  The eyes flickered back and forth, first to me, then to his bike, then to the store. “If he says it’s okay.”

  “Leave your dad to me,” I said. “When I bring th
e package out, you just make sure it gets to him.”

  One part of being an assassin, is that if you’ve got someone, you can have the best toys. It’s like being James Bond, without the womanising. Some women are attracted to danger, but I’ve never been attracted to them. I like to keep my personal life and my job separate; I don’t need them colliding. A woman chasing me because she wants to feel alive is liable to get herself killed. Worse, she might get me killed and that bloody hurts. Still, I’d been outfitted by my armourer with a few mini-tracking devices for purposes like this. Sometimes, you couldn’t hit a target in public, you needed to follow them back to their home and do it in isolation. Get one of these puppies on the target and it’s no trouble locating them.

  I retreated into the store, grabbed a handful of supplies, some tape and a box, took it to the big guy at the counter, tried to ignore the way he stared at me through watery red eyes. He absolutely stank of sake, strangely enough, wondered how much of it he’d been quaffing through the shift.

  “I need your son to do me a favour,” I said. “He delivers to someone. I need him to mail this stuff for me to the gentleman with the scarred ears. I’m willing to pay for the time.”

  He said nothing, priced it up, hit several buttons on the till, I winced at the number appearing in front of me. Extortionate didn’t even start to cover it, I raised an eyebrow and caught the smirk on his face.

  “That the price of hiring, yeah?”

  A hundred bucks on top of my supplies. Plus, the fifty I’d agreed to pay the kid. Asshole. I stretched, fought the urge to yawn, pulled my wallet again and peeled off five twenties, slid them across the counter. “Don’t make me come back to complain about the customer service, yeah?” I gave him my most pleasant grin, started to box up the parcel, complete with tracking device in the bottom of it, taped it up and wrote Moulton’s name on it. If he tossed it in the nearest sewer, I’d be getting my money back, put it that way.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” I said, turned to leave before he piped up.

  “Don’t come back,” he said. “One-time thing, this. We value privacy high here.”

  “Everyone has a price though, don’t they?” I smiled. “Would you not say so?”

  “I’ll remember that if anyone asks about you,” he grunted.

  I showed him my gun. “I really wouldn’t, if I were you. It’d probably be better for you to develop temporary amnesia. It’d be better for your health long term.”

  He smirked. “You don’t scare me.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “Maybe not. I’ll take my chances though. I only want to get a parcel to him. You’ve just seen me pack it. It’s not about a matter of privacy, it’s about having his best interests at heart.”

  “Sure!” He didn’t sound like he believed me; such was the smirk in his voice. “Make sure my boy doesn’t get hurt.”

  “Nothing more than a regular night in the Novisarium might do,” I replied. “You have my word on that.”

  I was surprised to find that I meant it too, I didn’t want the kid to get hurt. Nobody should be harmed in what I do, but collateral damage is a messy thing, it hits all the best kinds of people in the worst kinds of ways. The kid took my parcel, he took my money and he set off on his bike. I’d meant what I’d said to him, I wasn’t going to follow him, not that I even could. He cycled like someone with a complete disregard for his own life, wove in and out of the modicum of traffic with a mania bordering on suicidal. Perhaps he really wanted to be done with his work for the day, perhaps he really didn’t want me following him.

  I didn’t need to. The tracker would show me wherever he went, I’d have Moulton in a matter of minutes of him getting it. I took out my phone, opened up the app and started walking, following the signal. The work would soon be over, we were nearly at a conclusion. This hadn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. The other assassins, were they out there? I didn’t know, I didn’t want to know. I just had to focus on getting to him first.

  The longer I walked, the closer the beeping got, the kid looked like he’d slowed down, come to a halt and I really hoped Moulton wasn’t hiding out in a high-rise, something with sixty odd rooms to search. That would suck, it’d give him a chance to run and I couldn’t see most being happy with me doing it. One or two I might be able to threaten into it, eventually I’d run into someone predisposed towards violence and there’d be a fight. The commotion, possible gunshots would be heard, and Moulton would run. Or worse, he’d stand his ground and try to fight.

  That would be worse, a fully trained wizard with magic armour would be a destructive opponent, if his armour was everything that they said it was, I’d need something special to get through it. I’d switched out my ammunition for spellbreaker bullets, they might give me the briefest of openings, I’d gone for blades capable of cutting down an offensive spell, should you be swift enough to use them correctly. Even if I was fast enough, it might well be too little.

  Ten.

  I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but never underestimate the value of planning, knowing what you face and using the proper equipment. You wouldn’t try and kill a vampire with lead, you wouldn’t try and use holy water on one of the fae. Using the right tools, it makes the job infinitely easier. Nobody in this world has ever set out to make a job harder than it ever needs to be. Fail to prepare, prepare to fail isn’t just an idle maxim, there’s very real truth in it.

  When I’d set the school up to turn my life into a legacy, I’d wanted to hire only the best to build equipment. Buying spellbreakers and the like, it’s expensive, so I hit on the idea of getting someone to forge them all in-house. Technomancers, they’ve started calling themselves in recent years, they’ve started considering it an actual branch of magic, using it in conjunction with technology to create something a bastard mix of the two. They’re few and far between in the Novisarium, I know one works for Levitt, Hugh Hephaestus, who I’d hoped to hire myself. He said he didn’t work for bad guys, maybe he doesn’t know Levitt as well as he thinks he does. Paul Levitt certainly isn’t a better man than me, we’re both capable of cold-blooded acts, I like to think we’re both capable of altruism.

  The one that got away. I’d met Levitt when he was young and angry, I’d honed a lot of his skills, he had the heritage and the gifts, he would certainly have made one hell of an assassin. Unlike Steele, he could be cold and calm, could assess a situation and make sure he made the choice. He understood that actions had consequences, that should you make the wrong one, it would inevitably be a fatal mistake you could not come back from. That’s the assassin’s creed, as far as I’m concerned. You’re nothing but an instrument, you’re easily replaced should you fail. A touch sobering, but as they say, memento mori. The moment you start to think you’re something more than mortal is inevitably the moment you’re pulled down into the dark despair of death.

  It might prompt the question then, knowing what he did about actions and consequences, why Levitt chose to walk away from me, from the life he could have had. I’d initial thought it was the Olympus bitch, that she’d led him astray, the longer I’d gone on, the more I no longer believed that to be the case. She didn’t have the nerve. Athena Olympus spoke a good game, she might be competent at what she did, but brave wasn’t a word I’d use to describe her. She didn’t have the spine to try luring someone away from me.

  Thinking of Levitt now wasn’t ideal. I owed him a great debt, one that would be paid in lead or steel, I wasn’t picky. I needed a clear head if I was to tackle Moulton in his home. I found myself staring at the doorway, following the beep of my signal. I’d followed it to an old warehouse, thankfully, decrepit with age, the sort of place that’d have been burned down anywhere else. Maybe vampires used it as a flophouse sometimes, I didn’t know. Most self-respect fangers wouldn’t be seen dead anywhere near it. I’ve always found them to be particularly faddy bastards, they don’t like what they don’t like, sometimes there isn’t even a reason. Simply being, is often enough fo
r your discerning bloodsucker.

  If I charged in, the full force of his wards might well hit me in the face, maybe even with explosive force. My magical inclinations lean towards the insufficient and yet even I could sense them, itchy heat bristling against my face.

  Normally, heat didn’t bother me. I’d been born amidst fire, after all. This was, well this was something else, something I didn’t fancy trying myself against. Cruel irony, I guessed. I had my man; he was sat behind enough magic to level the entire area and yet I couldn’t get to him.

  This was an interesting conundrum.

  Eventually I became aware of the presence behind me, the stink of swamp water and graveyards growing as someone sat next to me.

  “Did you find him on your own, or did you simply follow me?” I inquired.

  The man chuckled. “But of course. I dipped out a few times when you were wandering around aimlessly. Thought you’d lost him.”

  “I never lose a target,” I said, deadly serious. “If they get away from me, they deserve to live as a reward.”

  “Prideful,” he quipped. “That’s a good sin. The higher the self-praise, the greater the fall. Although—” He sniffed at me, a gesture that made me want to slap him across the nose as a display of my ire— “Perhaps the fall wouldn’t kill you.”

  “You sense that?” I asked.

  “The magic. Tough break, right? It’s like cocaine cut with glass.”

  “I’m astounded you know what that feels like.”

  “Painful,” he mused, “I’d imagine anyway. Perhaps you might like to know the way past them.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. I’ve never been a big believer about the milk of human kindness. If something sounds too good to be true, if it appears someone’s doing you a favour, then always beware. There’s going to be a price, there’s going to be something they want more. Especially this chap. Everything about him didn’t just scream ulterior motive, it practically caterwauled it.