Dangerous Games (21 page)

He’d been banged and slammed in a dozen places, but he was still alive and fighting, growing angrier every moment. As he scrambled to his feet, he thought about how he and Knucklebones were hunted, and how Ox, Mother, and Lothar had died, because a spoiled brat had connived to repay an injury, and the city guards had colluded with him. All the corruption of the empire was conspiring to kill Sunbright, and the few decent people he knew, so the corrupt might be sated with revenge. If he got the chance, he’d kill a dozen for every one of his companions who’d died. And Hurodon would suffer the most, in gruesome ways only a barbarian could invent—and have the guts to apply.

But for now he held his anger, using it to fuel his fight rather than being blinded by it. First, he should untangle himself.

Two whips were coiled around his wrists. The loose one he left in place, concentrating on the woman who had managed to hold on all this time. The whip went straight up into the sky like an inverted fishing line. She stood directly above him, still hanging on to the whip, yanking to keep him off-balance, and shouting to her comrades to shoot. Two of the assassins, a man and a woman, were nocking their crossbows while the one who’d lost hold of his whip ran for an intervening wall.

Good enough, thought Sunbright with glee. He could strike back.

Bracing a knee against a bookshelf, he grabbed the thin, black whip and hauled with all his might.

The woman shrieked with surprise as she was jerked off her feet. She’d stupidly passed the handle’s loop over her wrist and now she was following it upward. Her free hand grabbed for purchase as she sailed past a nearby bookshelf, but the gravity of Sunbright’s floor caught her.

She plummeted straight down and landed on her head and shoulder with a sickening crack. As she crumpled, the barbarian added a vicious, finishing stomp to her bent neck.

Above, someone called out that he was ready—a crossbowman.

Stooping, tearing the whips from his arms, Sunbright grabbed the woman’s body and lifted her to his shoulder. A crossbow quarrel thumped into her chest. The other shooter, now poised overhead, took aim while Sunbright grunted and pitched the dead woman.

It was the reverse of before. Now the woman traveled upward, flopping like a doll, until the opposite gravity snagged her. Like a sack of grain she landed atop the crossbowman, who bleated and tried to jump aside. But he’d been standing between two tall sets of shelves, as Sunbright had noted. The dead woman tangled the living man, and the barbarian was already running, wondering where Knucklebones had got to.

He charged across the floor, which was much like the other ones except for a threadbare carpet, and reached a spiral staircase that was enclosed on all sides, probably so climbers wouldn’t get dizzy and topple off. The inside of the staircase was dark, for the glowlights had drifted away as they began to fade. He briefly considered hiding here, but rejected the idea. He had to keep moving so his enemies couldn’t regroup and surround him. Knucklebones had that part right.

He stumbled over something filling the stairway. His knees thumped onto flesh. His hand landed on a cloth soaked with warm blood. He knew it wasn’t Knucklebones, who wore all leather, so it had to be an assassin spiked by her elven blade. That made two dead. But where was she?

He exited the top of the winding stairs and found himself near a corner, the juncture of three “floors.” Off to his right was a door out to the main corridor, but whether it would be upside down or right side up he couldn’t guess. Inside this building, nothing made sense, as if a mad builder had impressed his will onto wood and stone. It further frustrated his desire to get away, but he knew not where.

Motion flickered at the corner of his eye. An assassin with his crossbow pointed upward, cocked and ready, skulked along the left-hand wall. It was the man who’d lost his whip. He’d obviously recovered the crossbow from the assassin whom Sunbright had thrown the woman onto. From the upper right came another attacker, one who’d drawn a wavy bladed knife. They obviously hoped to box him in, distract him long enough for one or the other to strike.

Sunbright struck first.

He snatched Dorlas’s warhammer from his belt and flung it at the crossbowman. He waited only long enough to hear it thump flesh, then whirled right and charged the knife wielder.

The assassin was evidently not accustomed to his prey running at him and froze for just a second. Stabbing people in the back hadn’t prepared him to defend against a screaming barbarian with a menacing, hooked sword. The assassin swiveled his hips, made to jump aside, but moved too slowly.

Harvester of Blood split the assassin’s guts and rocketed out his back. Sunbright jerked his head aside so as not to run onto the wavy blade, but the man, mouth open, vomiting blood, had dropped his knife. It was his last act.

Still charging, Sunbright spun the dead man around and used the body as a shield. Harvester still protruded from the dead assassin’s back when the second crossbowman—a woman, actually—leveled her crossbow at him and shot. The magic bolt ricocheted off the floor, actually bending like a fishing pole before seeking flesh. But it only lodged in the rear of the dead assassin.

Sunbright charged back. He hoisted Harvester’s pommel to his chest and the keen blade sliced free of the dead man’s bowels. The barbarian kept running, letting the sword trail behind him, then employing its weight to sling up and over his shoulder.

The woman had fumbled her reloading, unnerved by the target’s mad, fast defense. Now she turned and ran, so Sunbright saw only a fluttering cape in the dying light of a glowlight sinking up ahead. It was enough. Howling, he slammed Harvester overhand and smashed it down on her shoulder, splitting her back to expose white ribs, and knocking her sprawling. Sunbright charged so fast he over ran her and had to hop her writhing body. It didn’t writhe long, for he grabbed Harvester’s pommel in two hands and slammed it point down into her kidneys to cleave guts and liver. If she didn’t die immediately, she would before the hour was out.

Panting, the warrior backed into the shadows, scanning, counting, and thinking. Five dead, no, six with the one Knucklebones had spiked. Where was the last? One was laying in the staircase: the blonde leader? Would she have deserted her flunkies as their mission went to pot? Would Hurodon be nearby? And where was Knucklebones?

Straining to hear over his sobbing breath and pounding heart, he scuttled backward on flat feet to keep moving. As he crabwalked, he trailed a hand and found the warhammer he’d flung. That was no mere weapon, but came with a debt to pay.

His rump thumped a wall. Holding his breath, he listened. After a space of silence he heard a scuffling, then a sharp cry from the other side of a doorway.

Trying to run fast but remain quiet, Sunbright raced for the door. A glimpse outside made him blink, for the corridor was upside down to the floor. He had no idea how to make the transition from one floor to another. Must he jump up again? Or crawl around the edge? How did the students who worked here manage? The doorway and threshold themselves were wide, and as he sprinted through, he felt the familiar and sickening jar to his guts as the room flipped. But he was through and standing on the sandy, worn boards of the hallway. Evidently the door was charged with an inversion spell that snapped one upright. He gulped bile and carried on toward the sounds of distress.

Knucklebones and the blonde assassin chief grappled in a corner of the hallway. There wasn’t much light, only a rectangle of moonglow or the fading luminescence of a gasglobe at one end of the hall. They couldn’t have been at it long, for Knucklebones’s knife was unbloodied. The Bonebreaker held a sai in one hand, the elongated horns of its hilt holding the elven blade at bay. With her free hand the blonde stabbed stiff fingers for Knucklebones’s eye. The thief dodged her head, fast as a snake, while she clung to the assassin’s cape and tried to tangle her arm. From behind both came a screaming and pleading to stop, but Sunbright couldn’t see from whom.

“Knucklebones!” shouted the barbarian as he ran, sword held in two hands. “Duck!”

The thief heard and obeyed, letting go of the cape and jerking her blade from the prongs of the sai. The blonde saw the danger and tried to drop and scrunch behind Knucklebones herself, but the thief flicked her dagger upright, and the assassin flinched back.

Sunbright’s sword slammed her across the midriff, cutting her to the spine.

The warrior heaved the heavy trunk off his blade and the assassin crumpled in two halves. Blood had exploded out, fanning over Sunbright’s arms and Knucklebones’s back as she skittered away. But Sunbright noticed none of it, for he’d seen, in what he now knew to be moonlight, who cowered in the window niche.

Hurodon. The spoiled brat who’d instigated all this.

Hands outthrust, the fop had only time to wail, “Don’t! I can pay!”

“Aye, that you can!”

Sunbright caught him by the shirt front and yanked him upright. Slamming the young man against the wall, he dropped Harvester to tear the dandy’s coin-heavy purse off his belt.

“You’ll pay!” the barbarian roared. “Live by the purse, die by the purse!”

With one hand he grabbed the fop’s chin, digging iron fingers into his cheeks. Hurodon opened his mouth to scream, and Sunbright rammed the velvet purse into his mouth. He choked and gagged, but the barbarian drove the purse farther in with a heavy fist that also broke teeth. Without a single glance, Sunbright hurled the brat out the window, arms and legs flailing like a doll. A thud and a tearing noise came from below, then nothing.

Knucklebones peered out the window while wiping blood off her face. Hurodon hung, impaled like a bale of hay, across the upright spears of a wrought iron fence.

“That was stupid,” she mumbled, spitting blood off her lips. “That purse could’ve—”

“Some things,” Sunbright cut her off, “you can’t buy.”

Grabbing their weapons, Knucklebones led them out of the building and onto the street. They conversed in whispers as they slid down more alleys, always tending downhill.

“How’d you kill that assassin in the stairwell?”

“Traction to mount the inside wall. Smokepuff to distract him.”

“Those are cantras?”

“Yes,” she snorted in disgust. “Children learn them in the cradle.”

He kept close behind her in the black alleys. “Don’t run away from me again. We have to stick together, to protect one another.”

“Don’t tell me what to do, groundhog, or how to fight!” she hissed. “Your noble barbarian tactics don’t work in the city, country mouse!”

That remark panged Sunbright, for Greenwillow had often called him that. “If we separate we’ll be run down and killed.”

“If we stick together we all die, you idiot! Only a fool stays to fight. You wouldn’t last two days without help.”

“I know,” he said contritely. “That’s why I don’t want to separate from you.”

“Why?” she asked, flicking him a sidelong glance. “What’s it to you?”

“I—you remind me of someone.”

“Pandem’s Pardon!” she sniped, then spat, “Now I remind him of someone! Who, your mother? Forget what you learned down on the dirt. There are no hero’s legends here, no last stands for honor and glory. It’s run and hide and steal and don’t die!”

Angrily she trotted ahead, and Sunbright was hard put to keep up. He gasped to himself, “Perhaps this is no legend, but there’s something noble in you, little Knucklebones.…”

Soon Knucklebones led Sunbright onto a low bridge where she scanned in both directions, then vaulted over the edge. They landed in shallow water with a gravelly bottom. Sunbright had seen such streams before and had assumed that someone somewhere set up a magical pump to collect water and let it trickle downhill through the city. There was no end to the enchantments here, but he wondered that the archwizards believed they could exploit magic endlessly.

Under the bridge was a culvert. A grate jammed with trash was welded across it, or so it looked until Knucklebones pronounced “Wash-ti!” and sprung the fake welds loose with a cantra. Passing within the culvert, she signaled that Sunbright should muscle the heavy grate back in place, but suddenly froze him with a firm hand. Advancing, she knelt and sniffed along the walls above the water trickle, then ordered them back out.

“There’s a wet dog smell. Dogs don’t run wild down below … we poison them.” She paused, sniffing again, then continued, “It must be guard dogs. That’s why we haven’t seen any city guards in the streets. They’re all down below.”

“What?” Sunbright asked. He was amazed she could know so much from the slightest clues. “Will the children be safe?”

“Aye. Sleeping Gunn uses a warren of false lofts between warehouses at the docks….”

She chewed her lip, thinking.

“Hurodon’s bribery can’t affect the whole constabulary, can it?” Sunbright asked. “He couldn’t have bought them all!”

“I don’t know … they’ve done this in the past, used everything they have in one or two days to sweep the sewers and tunnels. The city council orders it, though they’re beholden to Karsus….”

She backed from the culvert, ankle deep in cold water, with bare feet. For the first time, Sunbright saw her tremble with fatigue and hunger as her nose tracked back and forth. Clearly, she was stumped.

He started to say, “Perhaps it’s time we—”

Dogs barked, not far off. Two of them in tandem. Men and women shouted. Knucklebones stiffened, her single eye bright, and began to pick along the stream to hide their scent. Sunbright went too, but he saw that the stream soon ducked under a street, an underpass too low to crawl through. At least for him. Knucklebones could probably squirm through a mouse hole.

At the barrier, Knucklebones hopped nimbly up to street level. But the dogs’ baying was louder, and now they saw activity, for a yellow glow from the east heralded dawn. As Sunbright gaped, the street globes began to fade.

“We could return to Castle Karsus,” he suggested, “hide in Candlemas’s room.”

“Not by day. Perhaps the docks.”

She started downhill again, but Sunbright snagged her thin arm. Tired, she didn’t shrug him off.