The Man-Butcher Prize

by Charles X Cross

  ‘I know.’

  It felt as if a little string had been noosed around his heart and she had given it the lightest tug. The fact that she had volunteered to be his sponsor did little to assuage the guilt of accepting the offer. He swallowed the feeling; something he had excelled at throughout his murderous career. Only now was he beginning to feel full.

  ‘I’m going to keep you alive,’ he asserted, though it sounded more like an admission that she would probably die.

  He stopped on a corner and leant out from the boardwalk, taking stock of the vicinity. There were possibly twenty other teams within range to start a small war once the bell tolled, and it was all so perfectly positioned under the shadow of a spectator tower. He wondered if the other entrants had flocked to this spot in particular to kick things off with some blood.

  Afraid Vesta might crumble under the mounting pressure, William laid a hand on her forearm and presented the facts as softly as he could. ‘We won’t get to the market in time. Going through the backstreets will take longer, but we might not cross paths with anyone else. It’s our best chance.’

  They’d be less likely to stumble into any cultists too. Vesta’s red faced brother wanted publicity for his cult as much as he wanted to take her head. William had to hope that would keep any Lambs near towers and bleachers; well away from him until he was ready for them.

  ‘I don’t like it out here anyway.’ She scowled across the score of assassins; some took positions in buildings, others stood out in the open, just waiting for the bell to toll. ‘We’re too exposed.’

  They slipped down a narrow passage.

  Outside of the main roads, Blackbile was a stinking maze of crooked buildings, alleyways, and slums. William tried to keep them on a course parallel with the larger thoroughfare, but lost his sense of direction rapidly. He couldn’t even tell how far away the main road was. He had hoped to pinpoint the sound of the spectator towers that ran the length of it, but all the cheering added to a melange of sound that hung over the town. Their meandering route would be hard to track, but it didn’t stop him imagining Red-face surprising them from every shadow. He kept it to himself, Vesta didn’t need that weighing on her too.

  Using the weak sunlight, filtered through sulphurous skies, they turned in the direction most likely to be east, where the buildings became a little better kept. Perhaps further removed from the sweeping destruction that came with the prize every two years. There wouldn’t be much glory here to salve his reputation, but with a lack of glory came a wealth of safety.

  Large wooden buildings – broken up into small apartments for let – bordered narrow roads, and though shanties had sprung up in any gap wide enough, they were no longer the main thrust of the architecture. There was less human waste but more ash, and it seemed most of the people in this particular district had vacated for the prize’s duration. There would be a few kitchen knives inside and maybe some owners would have left a gun or two. Blackbile residents likely owned more firearms than could be reasonably carried out of the town on a whim.

  No sooner than he had thought about pillaging the apartments, Vesta was on her knees picking a lock. She might have seen his gaze linger a little longer than usual on a doorway, or perhaps had taken the initiative all on her own. The unknown ability surprised him, but he didn’t comment on it, too nervous of drawing attention should anyone pass.

  He pressed his back to the apartment wall and pulled out his pistol to cover her; just in case. He couldn’t shoot anyone just yet, but the bell could toll any time.

  The alley remained empty, and Vesta worked quickly. With a click, the door swung inwards. From the collection of mail boxes and scrawled names in the cramped foyer, there were easily twenty apartments in the building. The place would take time to search; but would also make them harder to find.

  With a final cursory glance into the alley, William closed the door. The catch remained open. He closed the door again, hoping for some click in the mechanism and for the bolt to slide out. No amount of shaking would budge it.

  ‘A pin jammed,’ Vesta mumbled guiltily.

  He nodded and tried his best not to show too much disappointment.

  A skeletal pot plant did a reasonable job of holding the door shut. It wasn’t exactly heavy, a stiff breeze might knock it over, but it was the best thing he could find in the circumstances.

  The ground floor consisted predominantly of common rooms, and the remains of a leaflet distribution centre. There was still a selection of prize flyers scattered about every surface advertising “Mayhem and murder” or “Death and destruction”. He had seen similar posters in nearly every bar and pasted at most street corners in imperial towns. For more local fans, the competition was celebrated like a summer fête with fliers boasting “a family friendly massacre”.

  It seemed there had also been a pre-fight variety show at Melting Moments, featuring the voluptuous Delia in tantalising Vitulan dress. He presumed the whole thing to be some saucy mockery of Emperor D’elia, which was probably why such details had been absent on posters sent to the imperial cities.

  ‘Will, there’s nothing in there,’ Vesta hissed, waving him back to the foyer and stairs. He was inclined to agree; they padded quietly to the first floor.

  There had been an attempt to make this particular tenement quite handsome when it was built; the iron railings that girded the stairs had floral insets every third spindle, and the lighter curls of iron might have once been painted. Blackbile degraded things quickly however, and though it was plain maintenance was done on the building, the caretaker was fighting a losing battle. Most of the landing windows had been boarded up, paper was peeling from the walls, and something oozed through a crack in the ceiling.

  With a calming breath, William let his pistol precede them upstairs; the hammer was cocked, his finger curled around the trigger. He didn’t have much faith in it, but it didn’t hurt to look the part. Vesta was close, he could feel the heat of her at his back, and the hitch of her breath every time a floorboard creaked.

  As he gained the first floor landing, the chapel bell tolled distantly. Ten chimes that shingled his spine and stood all his hairs on end. The air around them turned stale and tense. The hour was up. Then the first claps of gunpowder started, most distant, but some unnervingly close.

  ‘We should split up to search the apartments; quickly.’ Vesta looked frantic.

  At first, William was reluctant. Partly because he thought she might run and get herself killed. Then she swallowed nervously, and he spotted her hand tight on a small knife. He wondered if she’d found it while he was distracted downstairs, or if it was another of her little surprises. When she met his gaze, her eyes were steely.

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ he agreed and kicked in the door to the first apartment; there was no time to dawdle now. He left Vesta to search and moved on to the next door. ‘Search under beds, in wardrobes-’

  ‘Look for loose floorboards and holes in the walls. I know.’ She offered a brief smile as she sloped through the door.

  ‘We need more guns, and any powder and shot you can find.’

  The second apartment – a three room abode, deserted by the occupant – wasn’t locked. The kitchen yielded a cheese knife and quarter-cut of festive fruit cake; nothing of much use. The living room supplied only an arm chair, a long-cold stove and small table. He took his search to the bedroom.

  There was a commotion in the street outside, but before he had time to react, an explosion burst the apartment windows in a shower of sparkling dust. He threw himself to the floor, readying his pistol to shoot at anyone who might surprise him. Shards of glass settled on him like a blanket, covering every surface with sharp beads and glittering fragments. It smelled like sulphur, but that might have been the fresh Blackbile air spilling in.

  He heard Vesta shout, heard feet hammering on floor boards. For a moment, he thought the cultists had tracked them down so easily, then she came running into the room. She was fine; had just come to check he
was alright, and that he’d not been turned to paste by the explosion.

  ‘Are you alive? Are you ok?’ Vesta asked, but he couldn’t quite make out the words.

  ‘What?’ he yelled, ears whining.

  Guns fired in the street outside. There were shouts, a gurgling scream as someone was hit. William’s senses faded back to him, leaving only a persistent ring in his ears. He pushed himself up. ‘We need to keep looking!’

  Motivated by the proximity of the fighting just outside, Vesta tipped the mattress off the bed with a scatter of raunchy postcards. Then she turned out the wardrobe.

  William dusted himself down, shook glass from his shirt, and checked his pistol. Through the reducing hum in his ears, he heard what he had been dreading. Downstairs, the front door clattered open; someone had heard them from the street. Perhaps it was the cultists.

  He cursed and crept to the apartment door, straining to listen. The echo of a gun being cocked focused his hearing. Heavy boots stamped up the stairs.

  ‘Vesta, you need to hide,’ William tried to whisper.

  She dashed behind the bedroom door.

  The footsteps moved quicker. Only one set, just an assassin. He would need to focus on protecting Vesta before he could think about attacking.

  ‘You, on the stairs!’ William called out. ‘Is your sponsor still alive?’

  ‘Yes.’ The man was just out of view. ‘So you can’t kill me.’

  How the hell was he going to stop this man if he couldn’t kill him? Come to think of it, William couldn’t be killed either. He emerged into the hallway, just as his assailant crested the stairs. He aimed his matchlock. ‘My sponsor is still alive too.’

  ‘You?’ The privateer rolled his eyes, tossed his curly black hair, and took a step forward. ‘Are you stalking me?’

  William eyed the privateer’s weapons. He had a black-iron flintlock, and a boarding cutlass in his off hand; worse, despite his arrogance, he was experienced in their use.

  ‘Where is your peach of a sponsor?’ The privateer advanced slowly. His petulant grimace became a grotesque leer.

  William couldn’t lose Vesta at this early stage, but to kill the privateer, he’d have to kill Lamebrain, and he didn’t want that either. So William took a step back, as if Vesta was hiding in an apartment further down the corridor.

  ‘You’ll have to get past me first; I’m not going to let you, so you might as well turn back now.’ He retreated further.

  ‘Oh, back there?’ The privateer glanced only briefly into the first apartment, and continued to the second door. The cutlass scraped the wall menacingly. He pointed through the door with his flintlock. ‘Not in here then?’

  William flinched. That was enough to give the privateer the indication he needed. With a triumphant yell, he raised his pistol, and barged into the room. There was a thud and a flintlock fired.

  William hurtled after the assassin. He grabbed hold of the doorframe and swung himself inside at full momentum. He collided with Vesta and stumbled over the fallen privateer, their legs stomping around one another in a losing battle to stay upright. They toppled to the floor.

  ‘What are you doing?’ William shoved himself up. ‘You can’t kill him.’

  ‘Hush.’ She pointed to the large stone ashtray beside the sprawled privateer, still breathing softly. ‘I didn’t kill him.’

  He looked at her wide eyed; impressed. He hadn’t envisioned Vesta doing much, other than hiding and relying on his protection, but there was definitely more to her than had first appeared. Already, she was stripping the privateer of his equipment: the curved sword and his flintlock, along with two handfuls of paper cartridges from his bandolier.

  Vesta swished the cutlass in the air, then seemed to disregard it as a nuisance and tossed it out the window. She hitched her skirts over her knee and stowed her knife in a garter sheath. William blinked and looked away; it didn’t seem right to watch her close the miniature fastenings. Instead, he focused on the privateer for fear he would wake.

  ‘You can load on the go.’ William decided to let Vesta keep the better of the two pistols. His would be far too awkward for her, it was far too awkward for him too, but at least he could make his shots count.

  He stepped out of the apartment door, not wanting to linger. Any number of people could have heard the gunshot and be heading this way.

  ‘Fissshhhyy!’ Lamebrain screamed joyously. He was creeping up the staircase, his one eye fixed on William. Saliva trailed from his mouth, spread into a manic grin, and sporting only a quarter portion of teeth. He wielded a fat bladed knife aptly designed for taking the heads off fish.

  ‘Gut an’ shale!’ The slave giggled, appearing to think this competition nothing more than idle fun. He set off at a lumbering dash, cackling and slobbering.

  As a reaction, William raised his matchlock and fired. Smoke puffed out, the bullet flew wide; definitely not his fault. The slave surged closer, delighted by the game of life and death. He raised his cleaver. There was no time to reload; there was no time for Vesta to even draw her knife.

  ‘Run!’ William grabbed Vesta by the wrist, accidentally knocked a collection of cartridges from her hand, and hurtled for the far end of the corridor.

  He had hoped that there would be another way out, tenements like these usually had secondary stairs or a service entrance. Yet, step by step, what he’d hoped to be a doorway, was in fact just a window. Quite a large window, left open to air out a vomit stain on the rug below.

  Gripping Vesta’s wrist tighter, he forced himself faster. She shrieked when she understood his plan, but didn’t stop running. He prayed there was a balcony outside, or a fire escape, or at least a vaulted roof. Even a one storey fall was more conducive to survival than facing a knife-toting-maniac with an unloaded pistol – he would still rather avoid a drop. They reached the end of the corridor and leapt through the opening.

  The time in the air was relatively brief, but managed to turn his stomach three revolutions nonetheless. The ground slapped him. Vesta landed better, catching herself like a cat on all fours in the mud. William’s face squelched into a pool of muck and his body curled over him like a scorpion’s tail. It seemed like the momentum would carry his spine all the way over itself and snap it, but he sprang back before too much damage was done. His body collapsed flat into an oily puddle.

  He pulled his head from the mud with a rat-squeal gasp at the immediate, but mercifully fleeting, needle of pain. Gritting his teeth, he rolled onto his back, ready for the half-brained halfwit to follow them out of the window into the street. Desperately he spluttered ashy-sludge from his mouth and tried to catch his breath while reloading. He trained the matchlock for the window. Lamebrain didn’t appear.

  ‘William!’ Vesta hissed and slapped him quite forcibly on the shoulder. ‘William, look!’

  He squirmed onto one knee. Apparently, their trek through the back roads had led them in a damned circle. The apartments they had searched bordered the main thoroughfare, and the window spat them out exactly where they didn’t want to be.

  ‘I’m going kill your kiddie.’ Ottilie, the mad bomber, was stood in the street screaming at a tall slim building on the far side. ‘Genevieve! Come out and fight me like a woman!’

  William spotted that a window on the top floor was open; perhaps Genevieve had been up there moments before, aiming her rifle into the street. He imagined that if she was, she would be hurriedly vacating the premises via the rear entrance. Having to fight that great rhinoceros of a woman wasn’t an appealing prospect.

  ‘We’re going to kill your little one,’ echoed Ottilie’s sponsor; the Scold that had mocked William in the street. Shorter than average, red haired, with crooked glasses that William had stomped into the mud. ‘And then we’re going to kill you.’

  ‘This’ll teach you to enter your own child in the prize!’ Ottilie took a projectile proffered by her sponsor and loaded it into her pipe launcher. ‘You give all women guilders a bad name. They say we’re cold,
and I’m not having that. I’m going to put a stop to it, and you, and your wee child. Fire!’

  The sponsor raised a linstock primed with a smouldering match cord; William had seen a similar pole used by the Imperial Bombardiers to light their cannons. The man wafted it a little to encourage its flame then poked the lit end through a small hole in the rear of Ottilie’s cylinder. A volatile shriek clawed across eardrums as the obnoxious projectile blasted from the launcher. It drew a trail of smoke between Ottilie and her target, then exploded against the wooden frontage in cascades of red and green light. The whole building crumpled inwards at the first floor. The top of the façade tipped forwards and fell, sticking into the mud like a blade in flesh.

  ‘Pretty.’ The sponsor took another projectile from a pull-along cart and handed it to Ottilie. ‘I like that one; green, I like green.’

  ‘And the fire,’ Ottilie muttered.

  ‘Aye, and the fire,’ the sponsor agreed. ‘That’s good too.’

  ‘Are you alive in there?’ Ottilie took a step forwards and shouted at the ruinous wood. If Genevieve had been in there, she wouldn’t be answering any time soon.

  William looked across at Vesta. Her eyes were wide, her arms and legs caked in mud, she had a graze on her arm – must have clipped the window frame. He took her hand to gain her attention, and she peeled her gaze from the menacing Scolds. He sank low into the mud to keep out of sight, gesticulated several times, tried to get his plan across, and pointed in the direction he hoped was north. Even if his hand signals didn’t mean much, Vesta got the message. They had to leave, quickly and quietly.

  1668

  ‘Right… Welcome all, to the inaugural…’ The mayor cleared his throat to gain the attention of the crowd and started again. ‘To our first ever Man-Butcher Prize!’

  The five hundred rag-tag spectators cheered with brutish gusto. Significant pride swelled in Terrowin’s chest; he had built this. It had taken an excruciating six months to properly organise and promote the event. There had been bleachers to build, and posters to paint, and all other manner of things to do. Granted, he hadn’t actually lifted a finger to do any of those tasks, but he had come up with the initial idea, so it was all his own doing nonetheless. Now, the day had finally come, and in ten sluggish minutes the competition would be underway.