by Sean M Locke
Another four-round burst crackled from somewhere close by.
“Damn his eyes!” Maria clutched my wrist with one powerful hand and looked over my head, trying to find Kasper. “With every bullet he tarnishes my family name. Kaeri, we must stop him.”
“All right, all right. We’ll go get it. Do you want your sword first? It’s heavy as debt, and I don’t want to carry it anymore.” I meant it all to sound a little mean, but the heat just wasn’t in my voice.
“You have it? But how?” Her eyes locked on the sword at my hip. “Oh, but never mind. Yes, give it to me, please.”
She raised her arms a little, and I got the idea that I was supposed to belt it around her like I was her valet. It was stupidly crazy to stand up so tall in the middle of a firefight and play dress-up. A stray bullet could punch through the thin plywood of the booth and do for us both. All this, and we were going to charge Kasper and his death machine to take it away from him.
“Hell,” I said, and fitted the belt around her hips.
The day was full of crazy already; what was one more thing if it would make this girl happy?
* * *
Say what you like about Kasper Lange, but he knew how to count beans when he wanted to. Take that carbine: He could have sprayed every bullet he had in three seconds flat, plus a minute or so in the middle to switch magazines. He was playing it smart, though, and only throwing three or four rounds out at a time. The short bursts were probably saving his life, if he was using the bad lead. Or maybe he was having problems with the gun jamming up every few rounds. Didn’t matter much—the gun was bound to fail. Any second now.
The smoke was clearing, but that wasn’t an improvement. It was bad when imaginary gunmen lurked in the smoke, waiting for their chance to kill me. It was worse seeing what happened when fools with guns shot blindly into the dark. I wanted to make my eyes go out of focus so I wouldn’t see the affiliat and soldaten of both families spilled out and tumbled throughout the plaza, but some things you couldn’t help but see. Some things you couldn’t help but hear. Men hardly older than boys held their guts in their hands and cried out for their mothers. Women tough as nails on other days moaned and cried and tried to hold together shattered limbs.
The Lange affiliat who got gut-stabbed maybe ten minutes ago stood leaning against the rifle now, his hands curled around the barrel like he was protecting something precious. Half a meter of sword bayonet stuck out of his back, glistening in the uncertain sodium light. His feet were tangled up with the Rademaker soldat who still held the rifle, the only thing keeping him mostly upright. The Rademaker lay in a sticky dark pool of his own, a meat cleaver stuck in the left side of his neck, right in the big vein under his ear. If their still-open eyes could see anything at all, they’d be staring right into each other’s faces. The two men and the rifle made an unlikely triangle of death. They stood like a monument to the mayhem I’d engineered tonight.
Maria let me lead her through the mess of discarded weapons and pools of gore. “Great gods, Kaeri, absent gods. Can we not aid any of these people? How can such a thing happen?”
I gripped her hand tight and walked faster. The last thing I wanted to tell her was that I’d made this happen. That I’d engineered all this, all to get her out. To get her safe. But even if she got out of this alive, she would never be safe. Even if Josef and Henriette never bothered her again, she would never be safe from seeing what I created on her behalf. She would always see the carnage of Pinwheel Plaza every time she closed her eyes.
We skirted around another small clot of three or four bodies jumbled together, but I stopped when Maria did. She pulled me over to them, and the second-to-last thing I wanted was to look at any of them too close. She crouched next to one big man amidst the still bodies of several others, all lying as if tossed there by an angry giant.
“This man is important, isn’t he?” Maria asked, her fingers pressed against his neck. “He bears a resemblance to Kasper.”
She didn’t need to bother checking his pulse. Hendrik lay there dead and couldn’t get any deader. I couldn’t see that hand cannon of his anywhere around. His face was placid, like he was sleeping, and I couldn’t help but wonder if a man like this deserved to rest in peace. He had three cigarette-thin holes in him: two in the left side of his chest, one in his forehead. Very neat and tidy, as these things went. Someone had placed a single black rose with a short stem in the hole in his head.
“Yeah. Yeah, he was. And now we got bigger problems than we did.”
“Our problems can get worse?”
I nodded. “Kasper is in charge of Lange now, and he’ll be almighty mad about seeing his pa go down like he did.” I flicked a rose petal with my fingernail. “He’d have seen Vedette Sforza do Hendrik in; he’d have seen her leave this calling card. There won’t be any talking him into giving us that gun.”
“Then we will use force.”
I nodded. I was reluctant before, but there was nothing for it now. One way or another we had to get that damned thing away from Kasper.
Another chattering four-round burst from the repeater made us turn our heads. Kasper’s shouts were plain now, and he wasn’t saying anything nice. I could hear Vedette Sforza calling out commands to her soldiers, too, urging them onward, calling for them to push here, to flank there. From the sounds of it, not too many of them were very excited about rushing into Kasper’s fire. We could see man-shaped figures moving around in the clearing smoke.
“Get low and follow me,” I told Maria. “He doesn’t need to see us to hit us, but he will see us soon enough.”
* * *
We kept moving toward the shouting and shooting and came across another set of legs attached to a prone body. One of the legs had a dark stain on the calf. The body shifted under its own power and inched forward; the guy was lying behind an overturned root beer barrel and peering over it. I looked back to Maria and pointed at my eyes; she nodded and aimed her pistol at whoever it was.
“Oi,” I said.
The guy stiffened and then relaxed. He didn’t turn around. “Well, you have the drop on me. Is that you, Kaeri?”
“Felix?”
“In the pierced and bruised flesh.” He did look over his shoulder at me then and nodded, his pale brow sweating. “I’m glad you’re alive, both of you.”
We crouched next to Felix, but three people were two too many to hide behind a barrel. From this vantage, we could see Kasper standing behind a corn dog cart some five meters in front of us and a little to the left. The lights of the gazebo behind him cast him in foggy relief, and his shadow was much bigger than it had any right to be.
He held the smoking repeater carbine in one hand and his father’s pistol in the other. He shouted defiance at the Rademakers, daring them to come and get him, telling them grand lies about how every other Lange man had a reciprocating repeater, and if they valued their skins, they’d turn on Vedette Sforza and tear her to pieces. Ludo wasn’t anywhere, and if there were other Lange soldiers floating around, I couldn’t see them.
To our right stood a plywood kiosk that sold candy and funny hats, and behind it were some person-shaped figures I couldn’t make out too good. I thought I caught a flash of Vedette’s pale blonde hair, but it was hard to say. The smoke was rapidly clearing, and the rain had slacked off to a little drizzle; another minute or two and everyone would be able to see everyone else just fine, which wouldn’t help us at all. The Rademakers ducked and cursed when Kasper let loose another four-round burst in their direction. The flash from his carbine was the brightest thing around.
Somewhere not too far off, another pair of Pino’s pom-bombs went off. The dark horse of the whole night was still alive, and wasn’t that a riot?
“Well, Felix,” I said, “this is a rotten predicament.”
“Tell me about it.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“Plan?” he muttered with a disgusted chuckle. “I hoped you had one. I planned on waiting for the cavalry to
show up.”
“Think they will?”
“Of course. Wolfgang wouldn’t have engineered all this without getting some backup squared away.”
I laughed as I fished the two pom-bombs out of the carpetbag and looked around for anything else useful, but there wasn’t anything. “Wolfgang didn’t set this up.”
“What?” Felix said, his eyes wide and afraid.
“Never mind. Look, someone’s getting brave.”
From the kiosk, three people rushed the corn dog cart, quiet as they could be but panting all the same. Kasper must have seen them, because he fired again, and that was when things went damned wrong. The gun chattered to life, and two of them went down in a pinwheel of flailing limbs. The third one stopped and cowered in place, which would have been the worst thing to do if Kasper’s gun had kept working.
It didn’t.
There was an odd little flash in front of Kasper’s face, and the sudden pinging of hot metal. He screamed, but not in defiance, and fell down behind the corn dog cart.
I slapped Maria and Felix on the shoulders. “You two, cover me. I’m getting that gun.”
Maria said something like “No, don’t,” but I was already gone. I had to believe they’d start shooting and throwing bombs when they needed to.
I spared a look at the Rademaker who didn’t catch a bullet, and he saw me running for Kasper. The look on his face changed abruptly from pants-shitting terror to confusion, but then I couldn’t see him anymore. I gave him even odds that he’d wise up and come after me, but I couldn’t let that stop me.
I skidded to a halt behind the cart. The gun was in three pieces—stock, magazine, and the rest of it, burst open like a stamped steel flower. Cartridges had sprung loose from the drum and lay scattered at my feet. Kasper was curled up on his side, bloodied hands covering his face, and he was moaning something terrible. That was all I needed to see of him; he was out of the game for now.
Gunfire started up behind me; Maria was trading shots with the Rademakers behind the souvenir kiosk. I didn’t know how much ammunition she had, but I knew it couldn’t be a lot. One of the two pom-bombs I left for Felix went off, needling my ears with pain. I had to work fast.
Most of the gazebo players had finally had run off. The ones who hadn’t lay dead or dying. One violin player had made it to the corn dog stand before falling. Bile rose in my throat as I took her instrument case and dumped the violin out of it. I tried to not look too hard at her. It was one thing to have gangsters’ blood on my hands, but this girl didn’t have anything to do with Lange or Rademaker or aker or reciprocating repeater carbines.
Wrong place, wrong time, and it was all my fault.
If I was a decent sort of person, I’d stop and bear witness, so I’d always remember what I’d done. But I told myself that I needed to hurry. Get the gun and get back to Maria. I collected the broken carbine and shoved it in the case with as many cartridges as I could pick up.
When I heard Vedette shouting at someone to get the gun, I knew it could only be because Maria had run out of ammunition or would soon. I peeked over the corn dog cart and saw the third Rademaker soldat finally start creeping forward again. I couldn’t see muzzle flashes from Maria’s gun anymore. Hendrik’s gun caught my eye, the monster revolver with the shotgun barrel slung under the regular one; I took it and shot blindly over the cart. If that bullet hit anyone, it was an accident, but it did its job and made that man lie flat again. Return fire from the Rademaker kiosk spanged and sparked against the cart and whizzed over my head.
The booming report of Hendrik’s pistol caught Felix’s and Maria’s attention. They both looked as desperate and miserable as I felt. Maria waggled her pistol at me, and I could see the slide was locked back, empty. I grinned at her, pulled something from my sleeve, and waggled it in response. Maria tilted her head in confusion, but Felix saw what I intended to do. He grinned back at me and chucked the last pom-bomb at the kiosk.
It went off, sending the remaining Rademakers scurrying for cover or screaming and clutching at shrapnel wounds. I crouched behind the corn dog cart and got to work. In those precious few seconds, I used the slingshot end of my baton and flung cartridge after cartridge toward Maria and her overturned barrel. I knew it was probably the bad ammo that spilled out of Kasper’s drum magazine, but a handful of bad rounds were probably better than nothing.
The first cartridge skipped against Felix’s shoulder and landed neatly in Maria’s lap, but I didn’t spend any time admiring the shot. Two more were on the way before that first one landed. I got maybe six shells out her way before someone clobbered me on the back of the head.
Stars erupted in my vision, and I spun and fell on my back, but I could see well enough to loose the seventh cartridge. The figure that loomed over me clutched his face and said some bad words, giving me time enough to scrabble unsteadily to my feet. I pointed the baton in his general direction, but he’d gotten Hendrik’s pistol somehow and had it aimed right at my chest. I had just enough time to feel my guts drop through my trousers when a shot went off, extremely loud and very close.
Hendrik’s gun jerked in the nameless mook’s hand, but not in the right direction at all. The elbow of his gun hand disappeared in a mist of red and white; the gun and most of his forearm fell to the ground. We both stared at the jagged shard of bone for a moment that might have been a year. He staggered and turned his head to the gazebo, his jaw slack and his eyes wide. A scream bubbled out of his throat and got punctuated by a second gunshot. His head snapped backward like he got hit with a cricket bat, and he fell like a sack of turnips.
My head turned real slow toward the gazebo, too, but I already knew who had saved my life. I wanted it to be Wolfgang in the worst kind of way, showing up with the cavalry to save all of our asses. But no amount of wishing was going to make that so.
Chapter 18
Josef Cantabile was casually reloading his antique hunting pistol with the over-and-under barrels. He didn’t bother to look at me.
Little Sister Henriette walked next to him, chin pinned to her chest, her teeth showing, her eyes locked on me. Her fists were balled up at her sides. One held a gun. She didn’t point it at me, but she didn’t need to. “Josef, may I kill her now?”
I could barely hear it over the ringing in my ears, but what I heard made me wish I hadn’t.
Josef blew a bit of dust off the second cartridge and inspected it before sliding it home. “That really would be for the best.”
Just like that, regretful, like he was deciding which maid or footman to sack.
A nasty grin lit up Henriette’s face, and she raised her pistol. I held up my free hand, knowing exactly how likely that was to stop a bullet. Her grin faltered, and the barrel twitched before she fired. The meanest hornet in the world ripped the air an inch from my left ear. A split second later, another shot rang out behind me, and something plucked at the fabric of my jacket by my hip.
Henriette did a queer thing with her body in that instant, something a dancer might do, and bent her body in a graceful and sinuous way. Behind her, Josef did the same, picking up one of his feet and moving it just so. A splash pocked the earth where Josef’s foot once stood. It might have been some mud from his shoe, or it might have been a bullet.
This was impossible. Nobody moved like that. The stories people told of duels between nobles had to be exaggerated. And yet there they were—Josef and Henriette, somehow anticipating where a shot might be coming from and bending their bodies away from danger.
There could be only one person standing behind me, and I wanted so badly to look at her. But I’d be damned if I took my eyes off the people who were trying to kill me.
“Maria,” I called out, my eyes locked on Henriette’s. “Easy, all right? This isn’t a comfortable spot to stand right now.”
“Sister,” Maria called, “you will not harm one hair on this woman’s head. I forbid it, and I will not be responsible for my actions if you do it.”
“You f
orbid it!” Incredulity bubbled from Henriette’s lips. “You cannot forbid what my brother has sanctioned. Besides, do you know what she did to me?”
“I’m . . . I’m sure she has good reasons for doing what she does. But she is my friend, and you will not hurt her.” Maria’s words were like that first sip of cold gin on a hot day, cooling a parched throat and easing a troubled mind. I smiled in spite of myself and hardly noticed the horrified look on Henriette’s face.
“You are joking. You must be.” Henriette’s outraged glare settled on me now, and her pistol did, too. “I knew you traded me to get my sister, but I couldn’t guess why. Is this the reason? Because you and she are lovers?”
“Well, lovers might be a strong word.” I couldn’t bear to see what Maria looked like, what a dawning sense of betrayal must look like on her face, so I kept my eyes on Henriette. “Look, I know you’re sore at me for selling you to Rademaker. And yeah, it’s because I wanted to get Maria out. Okay? I’d be sore at me, too. But think it through.
“You shoot me, okay, and maybe I deserve that. Maria will probably shoot you for that, and I don’t think she’ll wait for a proper, official duel and everything.” I had no way of knowing if that was true, but so long as Henriette believed it, that was all I needed. “Now Josef, what’s he gonna do? He’s standing there, cool as a cucumber, but you can bet your sweet ass that he’s not gonna like that, and he’ll probably shoot Maria.
“That’s all bad enough, but do you see that pack of Rademakers lurking back there? Do you see Vedette Sforza, the cute and vicious little blonde who wanted you in the first place? They’re hanging back right now because there’s three nobles with guns, and they know how you can fight.”
A fraction of my mind wondered if Felix was all right, if they’d killed him or if he’d somehow run away on his bum leg. I hoped so—someone deserved to get out of this alive.