Deathmaker

  Tolemek supposed it wouldn’t mean anything to her if he said that he was starting to find even her grim expressions attractive. Maybe it was just the fact that her bruises were healing nicely, and her face had taken on a more normal shape, but he doubted it. He almost grinned at the memory of that cabin boy explaining how she had tricked him into dropping his trousers and holding an innocuous flask of liquid over his head until he had figured out a way to escape, something he might not have been inspired to do if not for the smoke wafting past the porthole.

  Ah, but what was he to do about these inconvenient feelings? Nothing. Whether or not he had stopped considering her the enemy, he knew she still considered him one. And rightfully so. Attraction or not, he wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity of using her to get to Zirkander, especially if Zirkander had a witch ally who knew something about soulblades. To finally have a real lead on a quest that had occupied all of his free time for the last three years... he couldn’t pass up that opportunity.

  “Am I looking inscrutable?” Ahn asked. “Or is that the look you wear when you’ve forgotten the way to your secret hiding spot, and you’re trying to remember it?”

  “I was—” Tolemek stopped and listened as no fewer than ten men strode down the nearby street, their weapon-laden belts jangling. He drew Ahn into the deep shadows of an alcove. “I was merely waiting for the fog to deepen so we could move on with less risk of discovery.”

  “Huh, that’s interesting.” She peered into his eyes.

  “What?”

  “Seems like I’ve been around you for long enough now that I can tell when you’re lying.”

  Tolemek avoided her eyes, looking at the cheap veneer on the wall on the other side of the alley instead. “All right, I was scrutinizing you.”

  “So long as you weren’t contemplating unique and effective torments as revenge for me stealing some of your goo and making a mess with it.”

  “No.” He gave her a curious look. “I didn’t get a chance to see much of the damage, but from the report I heard, you could have done much more.”

  This time, she avoided his eyes. “I just wanted to escape, not annoy your captain so much that he’d devote the rest of his life to hunting me down.”

  It was silly, but he wished she’d said he was the one she didn’t want to annoy. Tolemek thunked his head against the wall and reminded himself that feelings would only distract him here.

  “I’m not sure he’ll appreciate your solicitude,” he said, “but I do. Come, the fog has thickened. We ought to be able to reach the spot I have in mind without being noticed.”

  “What is this stuff made from anyway?” Ahn waved at the soupy air as she followed him into a space between two buildings that was too narrow to be considered an alley.

  “My special proprietary blend.”

  “In other words, you’re not sharing your secret?”

  “Not until you renounce your Iskandian citizenship and agree to become my loyal lab assistant.”

  Ahn snorted. “Sure. I’ll send in the paperwork tomorrow.”

  Tolemek stepped out from between the two buildings, only to halt and squeeze back into the crack. Pirates carrying guns and lanterns were striding down the street that he and Ahn needed to run down to reach the next alley. It was only twenty meters away, but a party was coming from the opposite direction as well.

  “Check between those buildings,” someone called, not from either of the groups in the street but from the block they had left.

  “These search parties are getting a little too organized for my tastes,” Tolemek muttered.

  “We can handle it.” The click of a gun being cocked reached his ear.

  “Let me take care of it. These are... Ahn, I can’t be seen with you if you’re going to run around shooting everyone on the station. These are my people, my allies.”

  “Yeah? I saw some of them looting one of the shops earlier. Loyalty seems fleeting here.”

  “Some of them are closer allies than others.” Tolemek lifted a hand to forestall further arguments—or derisive commentary on the pirates—since the parties had made their way closer. They were going to cross paths right in front of his position. He lowered his voice to a murmur and added, “Don’t shoot unless it’s an emergency. And watch the route behind you.”

  “Understood.”

  Tolemek remained still, hoping the fog and the shadows might hide him. Maybe the men would simply walk past without noticing.

  “Who’s that there?” One of the pirates lifted a lantern in Tolemek’s direction.

  He leaned his shoulder against the corner to block the view of Ahn. “Deathmaker.” He made his voice as chill and forbidding as he could manage. Meanwhile, he slipped a hand into a pouch at his belt. Though he hadn’t stopped by his cabin since the meeting, he always kept a few vials and contraptions with him. The pirates might be the only people in the world he could claim as allies, but that didn’t mean he trusted all of them.

  The men exchanged glances with each other.

  “You seen the Wolf Squadron girl?”

  “They say she came in on your ship,” someone in the back of the group added. “With you.”

  “She escaped our ship, yes. I don’t know anything about it. I was called out here to fix the fog. It’s thicker than porridge.” Indeed, it wafted down the streets, curling about the legs of the pirates. Tolemek might be able to roll something out there without them noticing. The other group was approaching, so he decided to wait. Maybe he could hit both parties at once.

  “Yeah, getting worse by the minute. What happened?”

  “One of the fliers hit the control panel and damaged it,” Tolemek said.

  A tap came at his shoulder. “The ones behind us are looking up the alleys,” Ahn whispered.

  “Strange that the Iskandians found us through it,” one of the men said.

  Tolemek slid a leather-wrapped sphere out of his pouch.

  “They say there’s a witch working for Zirkander now,” the man went on. “Maybe she helped him find us.”

  Huh. Word from that meeting had gotten out quickly.

  “What?” Ahn whispered.

  One of the pirates squinted at Tolemek. “There’s not someone behind you in that crack, is there?”

  “No.” Tolemek pointed toward the roof of the building across the street. “Think I saw someone move up there though. Anyone got a reason to spy on you boys?”

  Not all of them looked—more than one man squinted at Tolemek—but he didn’t care. He armed his sphere and bent slightly, to roll it toward the center of the groups without letting it make noise.

  He slipped a hand behind him to push at Ahn. They would need to back out of the range of the odor that would soon be disseminated. But she had already moved. He glanced back, afraid she had left for some reason. She was in the center of the narrow alley, down on one knee, fog whispering past her shoulders as she aimed a pistol toward the opposite end.

  “What is that smell?” one of the men in front demanded.

  “The fog,” Tolemek said. “I’d best see to the repairs.” He backed into the alley, wrinkling his nose as he caught a whiff of his concoction, a faint rose-petal scent not quite masking the more sinister chemical odor beneath it. He would have to work on that, so long as he didn’t pass out from inhaling his own knock-out gas first.

  He squeezed through the alley toward Ahn, his shoulders brushing the walls, and knelt behind her.

  “You shouldn’t need to fire,” he whispered. “The search parties I was talking to will be unconscious shortly, and we can go that way.”

  In the deepening gloom, he could barely see her, but he thought she nodded. Another half hour and night would fall, making it easier to move about, but he hoped they had reached the spot he sought before then. Every moment they were out in the open, they risked being caught—or shot.

  Soft thumps came from the street behind him.

  “That should be it,” he whispered and started to back in that d
irection.

  A clank-clunk-thump sounded, something bouncing off the wall and into their alley. Tolemek grabbed Ahn’s shoulder, images of grenades bursting in his mind, but not before she got two shots off. One of them seemed to strike the item, for the clanks sounded, going in the other direction. Tolemek had scarcely seen anything. He pulled Ahn toward the street.

  A flash of light and a boom came from the object—it was farther away than he would have expected. Shouts of surprise—and pain—arose from that direction. Ahn must have shot the grenade itself, knocking it back toward the men who had thrown it. Tolemek could barely see in the shadows and fog and couldn’t imagine how she had made the shot.

  Ahn, less constricted by the narrow walls, spun and pushed at him—as if he hadn’t been trying to pull her in that direction all along. “Time to go. That won’t stop them for long.”

  Tolemek jogged into the street where he had rolled out the sphere. Even more fog had gathered, but not enough to hide the lanterns lying on the pavement, lanterns that had been in men’s hands before. He ran past the slumbering figures, leading Ahn up the street, across it, and into a new alley.

  “You should have stored those leather balls somewhere obvious, so I could find them in your cabin,” Ahn said. “I wouldn’t have had to burn holes in the engine. Could have just knocked out everyone on the deck to escape.”

  “Yes... In the future, I’ll make sure to organize and label my lab for the convenience of prisoners.”

  “Maybe add a map and some diagrams too.”

  Tolemek found himself grinning despite the circumstances—and the fact that he was going to have a difficult time walking about on the Roaming Curse outpost again without getting shot, assuming he made it off this time without getting shot. He took a final turn, then stopped before a brick wall at the end of an alley. Shouts echoed in the streets behind them, calls for reinforcements. So much for sneaking over to this end of the outpost without being noticed.

  “You’d think they would have repairs to worry about,” he muttered.

  Ahn tapped the brick wall. “Dead end?”

  “No.” The fog obscured the ground, so Tolemek tapped around with his boot until he located a spot that clanged instead of thudding. He knelt and found a grate.

  “Sewers? I wouldn’t have thought this place had anything intricate beneath the platform.”

  “It doesn’t. These grates just funnel rainwater off the streets and into the sea below. But they also lead somewhere else.” Not surprisingly, the grate was locked.

  “Want me to open that?” Ahn asked.

  “Your opening method leaves a lot of destroyed evidence behind to mark a person’s passing.”

  Shouts came from a nearby street.

  “Is that a no?” Ahn bounced on her toes, one of the six-shooters in hand again as she watched the path behind them.

  “Correct.” Tolemek pulled out a vial, uncapped it, and carefully poured a couple of drops of gray liquid into the lock hole. “We’re not going far once we crawl down here, so I don’t want anyone noticing that someone passed through.”

  “With all this fog, you can’t even see the grate itself.”

  “True, but it’s possible someone will turn that down at some point. I’m not the only one on the station who knows how to push a lever.”

  “You should have booby-trapped it then,” Ahn said.

  “That would have been needlessly destructive.”

  She glanced back at him, giving a pointed look toward the grate. He didn’t think she could see the hint of smoke rising from the lock, but she might be able to smell the melting mechanism.

  “And possibly a good idea,” he admitted. “Suggest it earlier next time.”

  “Next time? Are you planning on escaping from a lot more angry mobs with me?”

  “Judging by what I’ve come to know about you in the last twenty-four hours, it seems inevitable. If we continue to spend time together, that is.” Tolemek tried the grate. The locking mechanism had disintegrated, and he opened it with ease. “My lady. Your duct awaits.”

  Chapter 9

  Cas peered into the dark vertical drop below the open grate. From what she could make out, the walls were dark and slimy, and the lighter gray at the bottom suggested an opening about fifteen feet down. An opening that couldn’t lead to anything except a drop of thousands of feet, followed by a plunge into the ocean filled with sharks. Not that the sharks would truly matter. At the speed one would hit the water, it would be like landing on cement. “I think you should go first.”

  “I need to close the grate behind us.”

  “I can do that.”

  “You’re too short. The shaft leading to the side is nearly seven feet down.”

  “What shaft?” Ahn asked. “All I see is a well with a long drop at the bottom of it.”

  “There’s another grate across the bottom, but I can lower you down, so you can crawl into the access shaft before landing on that grate.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  “I’ve studied the blueprint.”

  “Oh, that’s all manner of comforting.”

  Weapons jangled in the street closest to their dead-end alley. Tolemek threw an exasperated look in that direction, then whispered, “Fine, you’ll have to crawl down me then.”

  Without hesitation, he slipped into the hole, lowering his body until only his hands remained, gripping the sides of the rectangular opening. For a moment, they didn’t move. Was he patting around with his feet for that side passage?

  Cas crouched in the fog beside the opening, ready to shoot whoever came into their alley. She heard scuffling. At least two men. They paused to have a whispered conversation. She caught snatches of it.

  “...they go this way?”

  “Don’t know... don’t really want to find them. You see all those men down? The Deathmaker is with her.”

  “Solid gold coins on her head though.”

  “It’s his head I’m worried about.”

  A pat at Cas’s foot nearly made her jump up.

  “Now,” Tolemek whispered. “Climb down me.”

  Though Cas wasn’t convinced relying on vague memories of blueprints was a good idea, she put the pistol in her mouth and lowered herself into the hole. It was a tight fit with Tolemek there, standing on some ledge, and he hadn’t been joking: she had to use him for handholds. The slick, algae-coated wall on the other side didn’t offer much to grip. Questioning whether there truly was a protective grate below, she grabbed him harder than he might have had in mind, wrapping her legs around his, as if she was sliding down a tree.

  “Interesting place to store a gun,” he remarked as their heads drew level. He probably couldn’t see it in the dark shaft, but when she clunked him in the eye with the handgrip, he must have figured it out.

  “I like the taste of metal,” she grumbled, the words probably not intelligible with the barrel in her mouth.

  “I didn’t understand that,” Tolemek verified, reaching up to pull the grate closed behind them. “I’ll do you a favor and not imagine it was something lewd or innuendo-filled.”

  “Thanks. You’re a gentleman.” She lowered herself, hands gripping his shoulders, and reached down with a leg, patting around to try and find the ledge. Ah, there.

  The horizontal shaft was larger than she had imagined, perhaps three and a half feet high. Once her boots were planted on the bottom, she swung in, landing in a crouch. It was another rectangular space, the sides still slimed with algae, a nice dense growth. It reminded her of the gunk in the ruins below Dragon Spit. She wondered if that meant the transportable pirate outpost spent a lot of time hiding in tropical climates. Once she was done picking the gunk out from beneath her fingernails, she would write down the intel for her commanders.

  On hands and knees, she crawled in a few feet so Tolemek would have room to climb in behind her. An oddly strong draft skimmed past her cheeks, and the rumble of machinery came from somewhere ahead, the whum-whum-whums remindi
ng her of the propellers on a flier. She stuck her pistol into her holster and decided to wait for him before crawling farther. For all she knew, this was some underground labyrinth with plenty of spots where one could fall into the ocean below.

  A light touch on her shoulder told her Tolemek had joined her. She couldn’t see much. She scooted to the side to let him pass. This space wasn’t much wider than the last, and it took some maneuvering and much brushing of shoulders and hips before he could crawl into the lead.

  “You sure this hiding spot of yours is a good idea?” Cas whispered. “If we end up trapped, and they figure out where we are...” She frowned at the image of being stuck in a dead-end duct with pirates at the entrance, peppering them with bullets.

  “It’s a maze down here, and there are other ways out. If they figure out we’re down here, there are only a couple of people on the station who will know it well enough to find their way around, and they’re techs, not fighters.”

  “Hm.” Cas’s new mental imagery involved her and Tolemek getting lost in said maze, running out of food and water, and dying without the need for any shooting.

  He reached back and patted her on the shoulder. “I have a good memory. It’s all in my mind. We won’t go far, either. Just ahead, there’s a spot where we can stand up and climb onto a ledge. Then our legs won’t be visible if someone does figure out we went through that grate and decides to come down for a look.”

  He was moving off as he spoke, and Cas had little choice but to follow him. The lush carpet of algae squished beneath her fingers. “How long did you say we have to stay down here?”

  “A few hours. We’re meeting the captain at midnight.”

  “Oh, good. I’m sure he’ll be excited to see me again.” Nothing like rejoining the ship one had sabotaged.

  “Perhaps not exactly the word I’d use, but he was distraught to learn you had left us.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  She caught up with Tolemek, or rather his legs. Another shaft opened up from their crawl space, this one heading upward at an angle. His legs soon rose out of reach. She crawled after him, running into him again shortly, as soon as the bottom of the duct leveled out. He seemed to be standing. When she tried to do the same, she clunked her head on the some edge or corner above her.