‘Just lay low, stay quiet, and do as you’re told,’ William snarled as they reached the back door of a small hotel. Vesta wrenched it open, slamming it against the crumbling render as she followed him into the tap room.
He turned a cold shoulder to her fury; there was far more at stake than her feelings.
Rapidly scouting the room, he was glad to find it as empty as the flop-house. The bar staff had even abandoned half-eaten breakfast plates and glasses on otherwise uniform tables and chairs. There were posters fixed on several purpose-built notice boards advertising the Man-Butcher Prize, amongst smaller internal memos and one enterprising request for human teeth; good money paid.
The far wall was dominated by a gilt-framed painting. The Blackbile town hall was instantly recognisable, officious against a volcanic backdrop, with the main square stuffed with spectators, mangled corpses, and a winner’s podium. William took a closer look at the proud figure holding a golden trophy, noting the tan skin, piercing blue eyes, and ruffled locks of lustrous black hair. It was heavily romanticised – almost good enough to be an original DuVale – but there was no mistaking Ojo Azul.
If William ever wanted to be immortalised on canvas, and copied in the hundreds by counterfeit criminals, then hiding in the hotel bar was not an option. He’d taken at least one of the cultists out of the running, and hopefully the brutish brothers were dead, but a few potential kills were not enough to get himself whitelisted. He was a good assassin, but depressingly inferior to the likes of Genevieve and way out of his depth in this competition.
Flinching against a stray shot outside, he forced his gaze to Ojo’s eyes, depicted in the most vibrant blots of blue oil paint he had ever seen. William had been trained by a winner. More importantly, this competition was a contract now. There was no room for error and no more time for self-pity.
He strode away from the painting, passing between neat rows of tables until he could peer through blue velvet drapes to the carnage beyond. He could see at least eight bodies sprawled in the road, both twins and three cultists among them. Two men were engaged hand to hand, one whirling barbed rice-flails, the other meeting the onslaught with a stave that moved so quickly William could barely see it. A man screamed as he was thrown through a window. The sun winked from a rooftop, half a dozen shots rang out, and another body tumbled into the street.
William swallowed. One wrong move would see them dead.
They needed a distraction, or a lull in the fighting. He and Vesta could burst out, guns blazing, and run for it. The problem: there were only two of them, and a whole host of assassins outside. Even as he watched, the stave-wielder’s jaw was smashed out with the rice-flail, a cart of barrels were unloaded onto a middle-aged woman, and the frontage of an artisan bakery was engulfed in flame.
‘Help!’ a rasping screech could be heard across the road. ‘A hundred gold pieces to whoever pulls me out of this pit!’
Still upturned in the sludge, with Barbie twitching in rigor just beside him, was Doctor Barber and his wheelchair. The withered cripple struggled and grunted as he tried to rock the chair, his chicken-foot hand twitching ineffectually.
A shop advertising piano tuning and top quality garrotting wares, exploded outwards with a hail of ivory keys and tuneless twangs. Ottilie was nearby, and from the cavalier way she loaded and loosed a volley of blazing explosives, they didn’t seem to be in particularly short supply.
‘Damnit, someone help me!’ Barber shuffled more dramatically, but only succeeded in sinking further into the mud.
William threw himself sideways as a trio of bullets peppered his window. Glass smashed and the velvet drapes were pocked with holes.
Vesta grabbed his shoulder. In a flash, his pistol was drawn and pressed under her bosom. He felt her still, recognising his raw anger; with one squeeze of the trigger, hot lead would tear through her heart, and her plans for vengeance would die with her.
‘If you hadn’t shot that sponsor, we wouldn’t even be in this mess!’ he bellowed. ‘We’re trapped in a warzone you created!’
Her dark eyes glistened, moist with unshed tears. She was afraid, but even as William glared at her, that fear became hurt. For a moment, he wasn’t looking at a woman with a shady past, but the girl she used to be.
‘I couldn’t watch him suffer.’ She sniffed. ‘He was a sponsor, like me. He deserved a quick death, not that beating those thugs were metering out.’
William dropped his aim, and dragged her into a tight embrace. He shouldn’t have made her his sponsor; he shouldn’t have accepted her contract. She had been on the tipping point between the last chance for a normal life and… this.
‘I’m sorry for…’ He couldn’t quite bring himself to divulge it all. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘We’re a team.’ Vesta’s throat was tight. ‘We can get through this.’
‘How touching.’ The privateer’s oily drawl broke them apart. He had a gun trained on them – William’s matchlock – the hexagonal barrel perhaps accurate enough at such close quarters. Smouldering match cord glowed ominously in the shadows, wisps of sulphurous smoke curling around him in a sinister haze. ‘Put your gun down. My sponsor – who you seem to like so much – is still alive, so you can’t kill me.’
William fired. He’d had all he could countenance of the infuriating man. In retrospect, it was an ill-advised move, a gamble that could have seen either one of them dead, but it bought them a modicum of time. The bullet clipped the privateer’s shoulder and sent him scuttling into the back room.
‘Wait!’ He grabbed Vesta’s wrist to halt her following shot. ‘He’s got no powder, we took it all, remember?’
‘Lamebrain, get in here!’ the privateer yelled from his cover; they could hear him fumbling around crates and barrels.
Prompting Vesta, they ducked behind a table, out of sight. He reloaded quickly, eyes darting between all the entry points; he would be ready for when the mad slave revealed himself.
‘Gods above!’ Vesta breathed a warning, and pointed.
A pall of eerie silence smothered the street; expectant and fearful. Then Doctor Barber resumed his pleas, “help” echoing from every building. The hotel drapes were stirred by the breeze, revealing the colossal beast beyond. In the centre of the road, broad legs braced while she loaded her next rocket, was Ottilie.
‘You can’t hide!’ The huge woman cackled, yellowed eyes bulging from their sockets; the projectile locked into position. ‘I’ll drag your body from the rubble!’
Vesta made ready, but William shook his head and whispered, ‘She’s hunting someone else.’
He wasn’t sure if Ottilie’s sponsor still lived, and asking politely would only draw her attention to their combustible position. Luckily for them, the big woman sneered at something – or someone – out of view, and set off at a march.
People shouted in the street, guns joined the commotion, and boots pounded on the boardwalk. There was another explosion. In the aftermath William could still hear the doctor vehemently pleading for rescue.
‘Your brother and his Lambs probably fled into the buildings like we did.’ William crawled behind a table closer to the window, trying to make more sense of the fighting outside. ‘We need to get as far as we can from here.’
He adjusted his footing and stood up, back against the wall, pistol close to his chest. He trained his senses away from the privateer – who was still rustling around in the back room – and the unfolding events outside. Gradually, Ottilie was herding the fight up the street, though was only a short distance from the hotel herself.
‘We should make a run for it, head into the alley behind.’ William touched Vesta’s shoulder, urging her to stand.
‘Not with her still out there.’
‘We could make it…’ William stopped mid-sentence, startled by a loping figure gambolling across the street towards the stranded wheelchair. There was no mistaking the half-headed man. Lamebrain grinned wide as a spaniel, his tongue darting about gurning lips.
/> ‘Helping. Help-p. Hel-ping,’ Lamebrain sang as he wrestled Doctor Barber from the muck. ‘Hell-ping Dodder Barrr.’
‘Lamebrain!’ the privateer screeched from the back room, equal parts horror and frustration that his slave was misbehaving.
Not only did Lamebrain hear the command to heel – cradling the frail and sludgy form of the doctor in sinewy arms – but so did the rest of the street. Like a well-trained hunting dog, the slave raised his head, grinned and loped straight back to his master with his prize.
Ottilie grunted as she stamped around to face her new target; William and Vesta had no chance to stop him before he bounded through the hotel door.
‘Run!’ William dragged Vesta back the way they had come; Lamebrain followed, giggling. They kicked aside chairs, toppled tables, made temporary allies by their common enemy as they escaped the hotel for the courtyard behind.
The moment was shattered in vibrant purple glitter, blackened wood, and roof slates. William and Vesta were thrown by the explosion. Barber and Lamebrain tumbled with them. The whole building burst outwards then plummeted, burying the privateer under a weight of rubble. Smoke billowed out. Fires caught and spread. Ears rang and eyes wept and throats choked.
William groaned. He wanted nothing more than to lay in his heap on the ground, conscious of every bruised and jangled nerve in his body, but the proximity of death was a good motivator. He flopped onto his hands and knees, covered in dry plaster dust, which was grittier and even more irritating to the skin than the constant coating of filth and ash. He snatched his flintlock up, finding its gleaming barrel easily in the debris. Forced into a dead-end, he knew surrender was not an option.
He stood, showering grey dust and glass shards, and glared across the smouldering ruins. Ottilie cackled on the other side, her mad eyes finding his through the haze of destruction.
‘Another.’ She held out her hand for a rocket. Her sponsor was behind, obscured by her girth.
The rules were clear; the sponsor had to die first. Beside the well, Vesta was just stirring from the blast, still alive and hopefully unhurt. A single rocket from the mad-bomber in such close confines however, would see them both as dead as the privateer. An idea occurred to him; it was a long shot.
‘You can’t kill us,’ he yelled. ‘There’s an assassin under this rubble, killed by your bomb before his sponsor; you’re disqualified.’
Ottilie sneered, asserting again to her sponsor, ‘rocket.’
William cursed, was there nobody except him playing by the rules? The sponsor poked around Ottilie’s broad thigh for a heartbeat, depositing a fresh charge in her huge hand. William held his breath and fired, aiming not for the sponsor, but for the rocket itself.
A burst of orange and yellow engulfed the pair of bombers entirely. The flames spread out and licked at the sponsor’s cart of explosives. A glorious rainbow of light erupted. Deafening screeches added to the cacophony. Every projectile Ottilie had was spent. She was knocked away by the second blast, charred and made less by the loss of her arm. It seemed her girthy frame was enough to save her from being split into a thousand little nuggets like her sponsor, but she was defeated nonetheless. Still breathing, but unconscious, blood seeped from her stump. Death was inevitable.
‘You did it.’ Vesta clapped William on the back. ‘Now kill him.’
She grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around. A cartridge was pushed into his hand and she pointed at Lamebrain. ‘Then we can get away, find somewhere safe. Can’t have him hunting us.’
William loaded his flintlock, advanced across the yard with Vesta behind him. She was right. The sooner the privateer’s sponsor was dead, the safer they would be.
Lamebrain was near the flop-house steps, huddled beside Doctor Barber, his single eye looking up; dumb and trusting as a faithful hound. The half-wit had ever been a thing of terror, a nightmare that plagued William’s sleep as a youth. As he levelled the pistol and took aim, he knew there was little room for compassion – and if there was, it was surely a mercy to send the half-headed slave to the next world. William had to be the cold killer that this competition required if he hoped to win. He took his pistol in both hands to steady it.
‘Wait!’ Doctor Barber slumped across Lamebrain’s chest. ‘I need him. He’s one of mine. Look at that head stitching! You don’t think anyone other than the great Doctor Barber could do that, do you?’
William shrugged.
‘I’ve already lost Barbie, I can’t lose another. Not so meaninglessly.’ He raised one finger on his chicken’s foot. ‘And I’ve bowed out of the competition, I need someone to take me back to the square.’
‘He does make a fair point.’ William lowered his pistol with a subdued sigh. Pity moved him, for the plight of the slave and all he had endured. ‘We can’t take away the doctor’s only chance at survival.’
If anyone challenged his decision, William would simply say that Doctor Barber was on the prize committee. Surely aiding such a valuable member of The Assassins’ Guild would entitle an automatic reinstatement to the whitelist, at the very least a good mention.
‘Yes we can.’ Vesta grabbed William’s arm, pressing her fingers into his knife wound to try and direct his unwilling limb.
‘No!’ He discharged the pistol into the ground.
Fresh blood seeped through his bandage, hot and wet. Vesta looked at her fingers, spotted red, and humbly met William’s gaze. He knew she didn’t understand exactly why he couldn’t kill Lamebrain, but at least she was sorry about trying.
‘This way!’ a man shouted in the street. ‘They must be here somewhere.’
Any pent up resentment William and Vesta shared was washed away with the realisation that they were still pursued by her brother and his cult. He nodded at her, confirming their silent agreement to escape without further bloodshed, at least in the immediate.
‘Good luck, doctor.’ William set his sights on a distant clock tower; that was as good a thing to head towards as any. He wouldn’t let himself get turned around in the back roads again, that was for sure. He grabbed Vesta’s hand and set off running.
1668
‘Is that it?’ Aldreda bellowed from the centre of the courtyard, her arms spread wide. Clamped in one fist was a woman’s scrawny throat; purple faced, body dangling lifeless below. In her other hand was an old pistol, dull and caked in filth. ‘Have I won already?’
Terrowin could hear Aldreda as clearly as if she were next to them, even through the thick hardwood of the town hall doors. He knelt at the keyhole, watching the Man-Butcher-imposter flail her grim prize around like a rag-doll. The rolling pin was secured tightly in her belt, bloody and unmistakeable.
‘Well?’ Beechworth hissed from the cover of the brick door frame. ‘What’s happening?’
‘Get your own keyhole,’ Terrowin growled, knowing full well the lord would claim that gentleman didn’t do anything as sordid as peek through keyholes. Though, it was more likely he didn’t want to get his face blown off with a stray shot. ‘She’s in the centre.’
Terrowin scrambled up, and they braced their backs on each side of the door frame, waiting to burst outside with a hail of fire.
‘Ready?’ Beechworth swung his rifle from his shoulder, pressing the stock against his body.
Terrowin broke open his flintlock to check that the loaded cartridge hadn’t absconded while he wasn’t looking. He let go a long, soft breath to steady his nerves.
‘Mayor Perrin!’ Aldreda screamed. ‘Get your arse out here and declare me the winner!’
The crowd cheered and whooped for her, assuming that she had won. Terrowin’s grip tightened on his pistol; their adulation needed to stop, and quickly. He spat out a single word, ‘ready.’
‘On three then.’ Beechworth inhaled steadily. ‘One…’
‘I am the Man-Butcher!’ Aldreda’s bellow echoed from every bleacher and building still standing. ‘The best assassin there ever was!’
Terrowin couldn’t take it anymore
and thrust the door wide open with a well-placed boot. Aldreda whirled exuberantly; no doubt she was disappointed Terrowin wasn’t the mayor. Recognition drained her mood into a sour sneer of disdain.
She raised her pistol, but he was faster. Two bullets fired in gusts of smoke and an echoing clap that silenced the crowd. All that Terrowin could be sure of in the immediate was that her bullet hadn’t found him.
Beechworth was a heartbeat behind him, firing from his hip at the brutish woman as he hurried to keep pace with Terrowin. The two men collided with their respective pillars and sank to their haunches to reload at roughly the same time. Terrowin rapidly searched in his pockets for another cartridge, entirely unaware of Beechworth's furious eyes focused on him.
‘I said “on three”. Not two or four. You’ll get us both killed if you carry on like that!’ Beechworth packed his next shot into his rifle and armed it. ‘What say you?’
The pointed tone startled Terrowin; the provocation that had caused the lord’s face to redden and his pencil moustache to twitch, entirely unknown. In this sort of situation, it was always better to apologise, even if he didn’t know what for. ‘Sorry?’
Now loaded, Terrowin leant out to take another shot, but Aldreda was nowhere in sight. He furrowed his brow and leant out a little further. The square was strewn with corpses, body parts and indeterminate human sludge, though no sign of the imposter. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. He sidled out of his cover completely and readied his pistol, hoping to lure her out with his vulnerability; she didn’t appear. Maybe she had been killed by his shot and now blended perfectly with the sprawl of corpses for the virtue of being one.
‘Sorry? You’re sorry? I could be dead right now. If you can’t work as part of a team then…’ Beechworth trailed off as he became aware of exactly how long Terrowin had been squatting outside of cover. ‘Is she dead?’
The Man-Butcher Prize Page 23