Soldier of Fortune (2nd ed)

by Kathleen McClure

  “You are being sure?” the woman asked Quinn.

  “Very,” Quinn said, firmly.

  All three looked then at Ronan and Rey.

  It was, to Nahmin, very like watching a panto at the Circus.

  “We’ll join you tomorrow,” Ronan said, with a measure of tolerance Nahmin felt due more to the painkillers the man was taking than any innate patience.

  “You see? Everything is honey in the comb, here,” Nahmin said with a smile, gesturing towards the door with his left hand.

  To both Nahmin and Quinn’s relief, the triplets finally accepted the dismissal.

  Still, Nahmin’s blade remained low and ready, and not until the Ohmdahls were well on their way through the rumpled pallets, pillows and screens, did he turn his attention back to Quinn. “Now, if you don’t mind, the carriage is waiting.”

  “Wait.” Rey held up a hand. “I was promised retribution.”

  “Is that what we’re calling it these days?” Quinn asked, then grunted as Ronan’s good fist buried itself in his gut.

  “So I’ve been informed,” Nahmin said to Rey, not bothering to hide his distaste. “But perhaps you can restrain yourself until we move to someplace less odiferous?”

  Mia, who’d remained as close to frozen as she’d ever been, waited until the sounds of footsteps faded to a safe distance before daring to peek through the heavy curtains.

  The angle wasn’t good, but she could see Gideon, his hands bound behind him, being escorted in the direction of the Wolstonecroft door between a man and a woman who had to be the twins.

  Coming up behind was the little man she’d first spied close to eight hours and half a lifetime ago, following Gideon. This time the chameleon of a poisoner was dressed in the black and white togs of a high-end servant.

  Just as he was about to round the corner, the ponce/ninja/butler turned in Mia’s direction and, even though she knew he couldn’t possibly see her through the sliver of space between the curtains, she watched him once again raise his index finger and shake it back and forth in warning, exactly as he had when she’d spied him outside the Elysium, earlier that night.

  He held the position for a beat, then turned away and continued on after Gideon and the others, leaving Mia, for the second time in the same night, discovering there were people way scarier than Ellison.

  The first had been Gideon himself, on spying John Pitte.

  Elvis was apparently worried as well, because for the first time since she’d laid eyes on the draco, he’d not moved so much as a talon while she cowered behind the curtain.

  Either he was as afraid as she, or Gideon had trained him exceedingly well. Either way, Elvis had remained with her, allowing his person to go into what looked to be some pretty deep fertilizer.

  “But we’re not gonna leave ‘im in it, are we?” she asked the draco, still perched on her shoulder.

  Elvis apparently knew she was addressing him, because his neck snaked around so they were eye to eye, and his head shook back and forth, back and forth, in what appeared to be both echo and denial of Nahmin’s forbidding finger.

  Moments later, Mia and Elvis were outside.

  Wolstonecroft street was empty, but for the echo of a carriage and four rattling over the cobbles that made up most of the streets in this district.

  “If you can find ‘im, I’ll keep up,” Mia said to Elvis.

  Again the draco proved himself keener than any birds Mia had ever seen as, rumbling low in his throat, he launched himself from her shoulder, taking flight above the rickety housetops, and flying in the same direction as the receding clomp of hooves.

  “Wicked,” Mia judged, then took herself after the draco by routes used only by the dodgers of Fagin Ellison.

  It didn’t occur to her, at the time, that it was Fagin Ellison who’d first mapped out those routes.

  25

  As soon as Ronan shoved him out of the hukka den, Gideon saw why Nahmin had complained of the street’s size.

  Like most of the streets in this neighborhood, Wolstonecroft was less a road, and more a glorified bridle path. For all that, the butler had managed to maneuver a coach and four large enough to hold Jessup Rand’s ego into the narrow byway, with a half-a-hand’s width to spare.

  Gideon wondered if Rand was inside that carriage now, waiting, but before the thought could become a question, a sack was yanked over his head from behind.

  The sack was burlap, and smelled of oats, so Gideon assumed it was a feedbag appropriated from the carriage itself.

  Thus blinded, he was guided (none too gently) into the carriage interior, which felt as spacious within as it had appeared without.

  The burlap which currently rendered him blind, also muffled his hearing, but he did catch the essence of well-tended leather through the oat-y bag, a sense confirmed by his hands pressing against the back of the sprung leather bench onto which he’d been pushed.

  Weaving through the burlap, oats, and leather was also the merest hint of something else—something female, and spicy, and cunning—and somehow familiar.

  Not that he had time to trace the origins of that familiarity.

  No more than he had time to address whomever was seated on the opposite bench, an unseen presence as palpable as the twins on either side of him.

  Gideon suspected it probably was Rand and, if he was right, he also suspected this would be a very short, very final, trip.

  And then the carriage began to move, and the first fist drove into his kidney and, much to Gideon’s disappointment, the journey—its route punctuated by the steady and expert application of fists, boots, and Ronan’s shock-stick, to various parts of his anatomy—was not short.

  Not that Gideon was unfamiliar with pain.

  His years as both a soldier and a convict had been filled with explorations in the many and varied ways men and women could do damage to one another, but always before he’d been able to see what was coming at him, and at least mentally prepare.

  Here, inside a moving carriage, deprived of his vision, his hands and most of his hearing, Gideon had no sense of himself in space, and no idea from whence the next attack would come.

  The only time he’d experienced anything close to this level of helplessness, had been a brief stint in the hands of a Midasian interrogator, when a mission had gone swarm and left Gideon in enemy hands.

  Rolling on the carriage floor from another prod of the shock-stick, he remembered that interrogator.

  He remembered, in particular, how satisfying it had been to snap the man’s neck, once Gideon’s company broke through the lines (against orders) to retrieve him.

  As a fist (Boot? Large handbag?) knocked his head sideways to rap against something hard and roundish (A knee?), he recalled that Walsie had been the first through the door of that small, dark chamber in Midas.

  But this wasn’t then, he reminded himself, spitting blood.

  Walsie wasn’t coming because Walsie was dead, murdered by a lie.

  A lie told by the man who was even now seated in this carriage, silently watching Gideon being beaten to a pulp.

  Over the rush of internal static accompanying another application of the shock stick, he thought he heard a word, and that word might have been “enough” and perhaps this was so, as the attacks ceased as suddenly as they’d begun.

  In the quiet that followed, he curled on the rumbling floor, where the odor of his own blood soured the leather and perfume trace he’d noted earlier.

  His mind, eager to grasp at anything other than where the next shock would strike, danced over those scents, and what they meant in the vocabulary of his experience.

  Leather—that was easy. Leather was war—boots shined to gleaming for inspection, and the scabbard of his sword; the strap of a rifle; the commander’s saddle; that interrogator’s whip—and the interior of this very fine carriage, he thought, sliding closer to the present.

  “Suede,” Dani said, drawing him back, back to the past… to when she was his… her long finge
rs cool against the broken skin over his cheekbone. “Blue suede shoes.”

  “You never wore blue suede shoes,” he told her.

  “No,” she agreed, leaning close to brush her lips over his as she added, “I never wore perfume, either.”

  Which was when he remembered.

  Perfume.

  Spicy.

  Cunning.

  Under the hood, Gideon’s eyes popped open.

  The carriage had ceased moving and he felt the rush of chill air which said a door had opened, and hands were already hauling him up and shoving him forward, to stumble over the carriage steps and down, down, down onto the cold, damp, smooth of a paved drive.

  He hit hard, then deliberately rolled sideways and to his knees before any more hands could get a grip. “Celia,” he said her name, forcing a voice thick with blood past the muffling burlap. “Why didn’t you just tell me it was you?”

  There was a pause—longer for Gideon, unseeing—and then a laugh filtered through the sack, followed by the smoke from the high end cigarette.

  “Because,” Celia said, exhaling a silver plume that echoed the color of her fur coat, “you have a history of refusing my invitations. Nahmin.” She glanced at the butler, climbing down from the driver’s seat. “See to the horses, and then see that the general continues to remain undisturbed.” She looked at the twins. “Bring him. And, Gideon…” She paused, looked back over her shoulder. “Try not to bleed on the carpet.”

  26

  “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Mia prompted herself as she slid through the gap in the row house’s fence, and darted through someone’s handkerchief-sized garden.

  It should have been simple, following a low-flying draco that was following a carriage, but neither Elvis nor the carriage had to climb over, under, or through the people, traffic, fences, and various other obstacles that made up a city.

  And even as she did her best to keep up with Elvis (with the help of a few unpaid tram and rickshaw hitches), she wondered if the draco really was flying after Gideon, or if he was simply on his way to the nearest fishmonger for an early breakfast?

  But then she glanced up to see Elvis circling back—as if to confirm she was, in fact, following—before striking off once more towards the city center, where the rich and powerful of the city dwelt (and far, far, from any fish stalls).

  She ducked her head low, and sidled under a gap in the next fence, which brought her to Carroll Square, across the street from the Elysium Hotel’s agri-center and wind farm.

  It was also, though the keepers didn’t know, a convenient hide for dodgers working the Shakespeare Circus, just a block away. And in addition to providing sanctuary to dodgers on the run, the wind farm in the middle of the park provided an excellent hide for Mia’s books.

  She thought of the novel Captain Pitte had given her, its edges digging into her ribs as she ran, but there wasn’t time for a detour.

  Apparently Elvis felt the same for, even as her eyes tracked towards the grove of energy-producing trees, a high, keening call drew her attention skywards, where the draco urged her onwards.

  “I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” she muttered, picking up speed so that, when she reached the gap in the agri-center’s boundary hedge, she fair dove through the opening.

  And came up short against the bulk that was Ellison.

  “Figgered you might make a stop ‘ere abouts,” the fagin said, grabbing her arm. “Though I expected you a mite sooner, and wif a draco under your tunic.”

  Saying this, he patted down her tunic but found only the book.

  “Typical,” he said, tossing Pitte’s favorite Earth author into a patch of winter grains. “I always knew you was trouble,” he told her with a vicious shake, “but trouble can be beat outta a dodger. Disloyalty though, well, I can’t let that take root, now, can I?“

  “Let go o’ me,” she cried, trying to peel Ellison’s white-knuckled fingers from around her bicep. “Let go or… or I’ll lose it!”

  “Lose it?” Ellison ignored the young dodger’s struggles and hauled her up high enough she got a face full of whiskey-tinged breath when he asked, “Lose what?”

  At which point a shrieking draco came diving down at Ellison, his extended talons raking, and causing the fagin to drop Mia in order to cover his bald head as the screaming, flapping draco continued to torment him.

  “That,” Mia said, springing to her feet and literally diving over the cowering Ellison.

  As soon as she was well away, Elvis gave one last, remonstrative shriek, and then swooped up and into the night.

  Running like she’d never run before, Mia gave up on the dodger routes and kept to the main roads where, even at this hour, Ellison would be less likely to make an untoward move.

  She only hoped, in coming to her aid, Elvis hadn’t lost the carriage.

  As it happened, Mia needn’t have worried about Ellison following. Thoroughly traumatized by the unexpected attack, the fagin remained where he was, hunched over between the winter wheat and the dead remains of tomato plants for many minutes, until he was convinced the demon with wings wasn’t going to come at him again.

  Eventually, when no further claws came tearing at his exposed flesh, he slowly lowered one arm to find that, yes, he was alone.

  Or rather, mostly alone.

  Just on the far side of the tomato patch, a man of stocky build, wearing the keeper colors of saffron and crimson, and carrying a hoe with the same assurance a soldier carries his sword, was standing. “Might one ask,” the keeper began, his basso voice deceptively pleasant, “what in the comb you’d be doing in my wheat in the wee hours?”

  “I…” Ellison’s eyes darted wildly to the sky, and then around him, and then to the sky again. “Didn’t you see it?”

  The keeper’s eyes widened and he hefted the hoe suggestively. “See what?”

  As he spoke, two other keepers, a woman of middle years, and a youth, came racing up to join their fellow.

  “We telephed the precinct. Again,” the youth said. “They’ll be sending someone along, quick as they can.”

  “They also said it may be awhile.” The woman turned her disapproving eyes on Ellison. “They say it’s a busy night.”

  “That’s fine, that is,” the first keeper said. “It’ll give our friend here time to settle, and explain himself in proper fashion.” He focused on the cowering, bleeding Ellison. “Won’t it?”

  “It… I… Yes,” Ellison replied at last, still hunching in on himself. For though he was a large man, and strong, most of his confrontations were with people under the age of fourteen.

  When it came to facing off with adults, Ellison generally found cowardice to be the better part of valor.

  Or, cowardice and bald-faced lies.

  Lies produced for the keepers, and reiterated on the arrival of the coppers.

  Lies in which he claimed himself a victim of thieves who set upon him as he stepped out of his favorite tavern. Afraid for his life, he’d run roughshod through streets and private yards alike, until he’d finally gone to ground in the agri-center.

  The scratches? Received when wrestling through a wire fence, two—or was it four?—streets back.

  “And can you identify these thieves?” the uniformed officer inquired.

  She was a young one, and Ellison marked her as new to the job, the way her supervisor watched over her.

  “Of course,” Ellison said, accepting a mug of tea from young Keeper Bren, while DS Hama and the two older keepers looked on, visibly unimpressed. “Well, two of ‘em, any road. One’s a kid. One o’ them dodgers as works the streets of a night. You know the type,” he added, glancing Hama’s way.

  “And the other?” Officer Prudawe prompted, her tongue poking from between her teeth as she transcribed his statement into her spanking new notebook, oblivious of the mug Bren set at her side.

  “Tall feller, and skinny with it,” Ellison replied promptly. “Hair’s sorta brownish-grey, not much to look at, oh, and he wea
rs an Infantry long-coat.”

  At which point the last mug, which Bren had been about to hand to DS Hama, tipped wildly, sloshing its contents over the floor.

  Hama looked at his tea, spreading across the tile, then up at the flushing youth. “Something you’d care to share, Keeper Bren?”

  Which was how DS Hama, who with his young trainee had already taken a report on the Elysium’s composter, a case of vandalism Kit’s Diner, a stolen (or mis-parked) Edsel Comet, and a near riot in the streets along Marlboro, first learned the name of Gideon Quinn.

  27

  He did his best not to bleed on the carpet, but by the time he’d been prodded through the foyer, up the stairs, and down the long hall of the top flight town mansion, Gideon was fairly certain some house drone was going to be scrubbing a few spots off the stairs, come the suns rise.

  At the end of the second floor’s long hall, he was pulled to a stop by Ronan in front of the last door on the right.

  Rey kept her weapon live and trained on Gideon, while Celia opened the door and entered the room, where she crushed out her cigarette in a standing tray that looked like it had been carved from a mammoth tusk. She then stepped out of her shoes before proceeding to move about the room, lighting a series of table lamps as she went.

  As pockets of illumination grew to fill the space, Gideon saw he’d been brought to a bedroom. But as Ronan pushed him inside, he realized this chamber was far more sophisticated than anything so simple as a bedroom.

  This place was a boudoir, something Gideon had believed only existed in the penny dreadfuls.

  From the flocked wall coverings, to the heavy velvet curtains, to the carved wardrobe, to the mantle crowded with antiquities (up to and including what looked to be a genuine Earth-made Dr. Pepper bottle), and crammed with bits of furniture so fanciful he couldn’t imagine them capable of supporting a man’s weight, the room was an ode to excess.