Sky Pirates Page 5

  Valerius turned to the door and murmured a spell. It clicked as the spell shut it tight. He walked over to Sentius, spoke a word and the man came awake. He tried to rise up but Ulrik held him in place.

  “You’ll never get out of here alive,” he said.

  Valerius gave a short barking laugh. “Worry about yourself, crabmeat.” He produced a flask from inside his jacket and forced some of its contents down the gangster’s throat. The man’s eyes went blank. His mouth fell open, drool emerged.

  “Hypnotic serum,” he said. “You’ll answer my questions truthfully or you will die painfully. Do you understand?”

  “I understand?”

  “Where did you get the black blade you gave to Lem?”

  “One of my boys got it from Jahan.”

  “Where can I find this Jahan?”

  “Sharnal. He’s from there and headed back.” Sharnal was a city to the North West, closely allied with Typhon.

  “Did he sell any others?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And where did he get it?”

  “Said he had a source. Said there would be more soon.”

  “You believe him?”

  “He promises. He delivers.”

  “Why was a guy from Sharnal selling a blade here?”

  “It was hot there. Somebody was looking for it.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “No- but whoever he was, Jahan was scared as shit of him.”

  “Know anything about these blades being used by the Sky Pirates?”

  “I’ve heard stories- black ships, black blades, the trading Houses losing a lot of cargo.”

  Valerius talked on, circling the same questions, getting no better answers. Eventually Sentius slumped forward. He was dead.

  “The potion kills them in the end,” said Valerius. He sounded almost sad.

  “Better that than have him tell on us,” said Rhea.

  “You two would have made good pirates,” said Ulrik.

  “Never said we weren’t,” said Valerius, back in character.

  “What about this lot?” said Ulrik, gesturing at the gangster’s associates with his blade.

  “Leave them, they won’t be coming round for a while.”

  “They know who we are.”

  “No they don’t, and I’ve had enough killing for this night,” said Valerius.

  He paused and looked down at the dead gangster, then he seemed to withdraw in on himself and become Vaz again. He tipped the corpse over with his boot, took a blade from one of the lieutenants, and stabbed Sentius through the heart with it, then put the bloody blade back in its owner’s hands.

  “Nothing like sewing a little confusion,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I found out what I came for.”

  The spell holding the doorway let it open for them, and would keep it closed until a wizard was brought. No one challenged them on their way out but Ulrik knew it was only a matter of time before their handiwork was discovered and their enemies would come in pursuit. He prayed they would be long gone by then.

  Chapter Six

  As they approached the pick-up site, the hairs on the back of Ulrik’s neck prickled. He held up a hand in warning. Rhea and Valerius froze.

  “What is it?” Valerius asked.

  “I thought I heard something,” he said, before realising that was not true. The problem was that he could hear nothing. No ulsio squeaked. No nightbat moved through the ruins. There were none of the noises he should have heard in such a place as this on such a night.

  Overhead, the running lights of an airboat were visible. “There’s our ship. Right on time,” said Valerius. There was a worried undercurrent in his voice.

  “Ulrik’s right,” said Rhea. “Something’s not right here.”

  Ulrik cocked his head to one side and really listened. His hearing was better now than it had ever been in the past. He could catch the voices of revellers in the distance but still there was that suspicious all-encompassing quiet in the building.

  Rhea gestured that she was going ahead, and padded into the darkness, vanishing into the shadows. Ulrik would have gone with her but he knew his job was to stay with Valerius. His life depended on the wizard’s survival.

  The moments stretched and he half-expected to hear the sounds of screaming and violence but nothing came. The airship now hovered above the roof. Its running light blinked in the agreed signal.

  “Maybe I should go in after her and take a look,” said Ulrik.

  “She can take care of herself in the dark,” said Valerius. “It’s what she’s good at.”

  A few moments later the cat-girl appeared from the darkened entranceway.

  “Assassins,” she said. “A dozen of them. There’s a silence spell on the top floor. No one would hear any sounds of violence.”

  “And it would be very difficult for me to speak a vocable,” said Valerius. “Someone has planned this well.”

  “Who would know we were here?” Ulrik asked. “You never told anybody where we were going.”

  “Our pilot knew. He might have been corrupted or tortured.”

  “But people thought we were going to the opera.”

  Valerius shrugged. “My uncle’s court is riddled with spies. We could have been followed when we left.”

  Ulrik dismissed the thought as a problem for later. “What are we going to do now? How many men are there in the building?”

  “A dozen, heavily armed, and at least one of them is a wizard.” Rhea was very sure of herself.

  “A fair assumption given the use of magic. Perhaps we could capture one and find out who he is working for,” Valerius said.

  “Are you mad? Why fight when we don’t have to?” Ulrik asked. “We can just walk away from here.”

  “Hark to the brave Pit Fighter,” said Valerius. His tone needled Ulrik, as no doubt it was intended to.

  “I’ve been in enough fights to know that four to one odds against a well prepared foe are not ones you face when you have a choice.”

  “He’s right,” said Rhea. “There’s no sense in fighting just for the sake of fighting.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” said Valerius. “I was just considering the options.”

  “We should get out of here,” said Ulrik.

  “If we don’t show up, they will try and intercept us elsewhere.”

  “How will they know how to find us?”

  “We need to get back to the Karnak Tower.”

  “We go back to the city and we hire a gondola.”

  Valerius shook himself from his thoughts. “You are right. My thoughts are too much on killing. I am tired of being hunted. I have a longing to be the hunter.”

  “Your time will come,” said Rhea.

  “I’m starting to wonder about that.”

  Figures tumbled out of the darkness, falling in slow motion, their weight partially neutralised by lift harnesses. It seemed their enemies had found them. One of the assassins pointed a pistol-crossbow at Valerius. Ulrik activated his amulet and threw himself in front of Valerius. The charm’s warding spell repelled the crossbow’s poisoned bolt.

  “They got tired of waiting,” said Rhea. There were blades in her hand. She stood on the balls of her feet, ready to fight.

  Valerius raised his hands and spoke in words of fire. Lines of light lashed out from his hands, dazzlingly. Brilliant auras limned the attackers as their protective amulets functioned but they stumbled, dazzled by the flare of light, temporarily blinded for a couple of seconds.

  Ulrik activated his alchemical gland and time slowed for him.

  He stepped forward and struck at the nearest attacker. The elemental blade flared bright in his hand. It sliced through the man’s flesh as his protective wards overloaded. He found two more stumbling targets and struck again. He felt stronger and faster than he ever had done, and he realised that Valerius was right about the demonic implant.

  Two of the assassins recovered from the flash. Ulrik engaged t
he first. Within a couple of strokes he had found his way through the man’s defences and buried his blade in his heart. The second leapt at him, sword bared. Ulrik twisted, and straight-armed him to a halt. A sweep of his blade decapitated his assailant.

  Two more of the assassins were down, Rhea’s blades buried in their backs. A couple more had Valerius pressed back against the wall defending himself frantically with his blade. Ulrik stepped forward and stabbed one through the back. His next stroke killed the second. He turned to look around and saw Rhea, standing over another corpse. None of their enemies were left alive.

  “That was invigorating,” said Valerius, his breath coming in gasps.

  “You think it’s safe to take the airboat?” Ulrik asked.

  “It won’t be safe to get on it,” said the wizard,” But I say we take it anyway. You know how to fly one?”

  “Since I was twelve years old.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  Valerius and Ulrik raced up the stairs. Rhea moved ahead of them. Ulrik adjusted his eyes so that he could see deeper into the darkness but he could detect no threat.

  There was a sense of strangeness when they entered the zone of silence. He could hear nothing and he turned to speak to Valerius and saw that though the wizard’s lips were moving, no sound was coming out. There was a spell at work here and quite a powerful one. He doubted that he would have noticed anything from outside had it not been for the enhanced keenness of his senses since the operation that Valerius had performed.

  They emerged onto the roof and saw a few more armed men were waiting for them. They looked up in shock when they saw who it was. Ulrik did not give them any chance to use their weapons. He rushed upon them and struck one man down, then kicked another off the roof. The pilot was trying to get the airship aloft and if given another few moments he might actually have managed to get away. Already the craft was starting to rise. Its impellors turned lazily and then blurred up to speed.

  Ulrik leapt and landed within the airship. It bobbed up and down under his weight. He reached forward and grabbed the pilot, putting his blade to the man’s throat. He looked around and saw that there was still a struggle on the roof as Valerius and Rhea fought against more assailants. He had no time to subdue the man in front of him so he lifted him one-handed and pushed him from the airboat. The man fell, hitting his head on the hard stones of the rooftop and lay there in a pool of blood.

  Ulrik leapt back down into the swirling melee, leaving the unmanned airboat to slowly float back down in its own time. He tore through his opponents like a red whirlwind and within moments cleared the rooftop of enemies.

  After the fight was over, he stood on the rooftop, panting loudly and feeling drained of strength. It was bad, but it was not as bad as it usually was after he had used his adrenaline implants. Something had definitely changed. He had fought better than he ever had in the past and he was less tired afterwards. He could see more clearly, hear better and respond quicker. He knew that it was not an illusion. Good as he was with a sword, in the past he could never have overcome so many men so quickly with a blade, not even one as potent as this.

  “What have you done to me?” He asked Valerius.

  “I knew you were a good choice for the process,” the wizard replied. “I have never seen anybody take to a treatment so well.”

  “Instead of admiring your handiwork, master,” said Rhea, “perhaps you should interrogate some of these men.”

  “If Ulrik has left any alive for me to talk to, I’ll do just that.”

  The men were simply hired killers. Their orders had come down through the street hierarchy of the Black Crab. They had not come from Sentius but from one of his lieutenants who had not been present at the massacre they had perpetrated earlier. Ulrik herded the dazed survivors onto the airship. He suspected that killing them might have been a mercy since they now had an appointment with the torturers in the Karnak Tower.

  “What are we going to do now?” Ulrik asked.

  Valerius threw a warning glance at the captured men tied up in the back of the gondola. “We’ll discuss that back in the tower.”

  Ulrik nodded and gave his full attention to steering the airboat. It felt good to be in charge of a flying ship once again, even one as small as this. He looked forward to having the deck of something bigger beneath his feet.

  “It’s been a very busy night,” said Valerius, glancing around the inside of his chamber. He had transformed himself back and was once again the urbane wizard Ulrik had first met. He opened the curtains to look down on the glittering nightscape of Typhon, while a House slave filled a goblet with some amber distillate. Small wreaths of smoke emerged as she poured. Rhea nestled herself against Valerius, all the while keeping her gaze fixed unblinkingly on Ulrik.

  “We’ve killed a lot of people,” said Ulrik. He moved over and looked out the window, thinking of all the power being expended to make the city glow like that. In the distance a winged angel as tall as a house fought with a fire-wreathed demon. He wondered what it was— an advertisement, the diversion of some bored wizard, a religious display of some sort. He could only guess.

  “I take no satisfaction in it. Those deaths were necessary,” Valerius said.

  Ulrik turned around. Both the wizard and the cat-girl were looking at him. The slave girl knelt in front of them, her arms outstretched in a position of submission. “It’s astonishing how many deaths you find necessary,” he said.

  “I imagine you thought the same way back in your career as a sky pirate. Or were you one of those romantic souls who never actually killed anybody as you went about your crimes?”

  There was nothing Ulrik could say to that so he changed the subject. “What are you going to do now?”

  “At the moment we have only one lead and that’s the black blade. We’re going to need to follow up on that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the pirates are armed with such weapons and they are getting them from somewhere. We need to find out where. We need to trace the weapons back to their source. Somebody somewhere knows something.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a very long shot?”

  “Not quite as long as you might think. There are a very limited number of people who can make such pacts with demons.”

  “So you think that there is a magician behind the new wave of piracy?”

  “Let’s just say that I think one is intimately involved in it.”

  “You are investigating piracy and you employ me, a former pirate. Why do I think that was not a coincidence?”

  “Because you are not a stupid man. It’s one reason you are in my service.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “Tomorrow a liner leaves for Sharnal. We shall be on it. Make sure you have your gear packed. We leave at dawn.” The wizard’s tone told him he was dismissed. As he made for the door to his chamber, he saw Valerius and Rhea heading towards the bedchamber. The slave girl went with them.

  Ulrik walked through the streets of Hydra. His family were with him, pushing through the throngs of the pirate city.

  All around them rose the remains of an ancient civilisation. Old palaces teemed with new beggars. Groups of laughing pirates clustered around the bases of stone titans with age eroded faces. Vendors sold skewered ulsio in the shadow of ruins that had been built by the richest merchants in the world.

  Anna and the boys had not aged a bit since he had last seen them although he himself looked and felt much older. There was something wrong here but he did not want to know what. He was just happy to see them again despite the small blotches on their faces and hands.

  The boys asked him questions about where he had been. He told them he had been in Typhon and he had served a wizard, and they started asking him what wizards were like. He could not exactly explain and, bored, they ran away, even as he shouted for them to come back. They vanished into the street which had somehow become a desert. He shouted for them to come back but they did not. All that he could hear
was their voices fading, calling childishly, thin and distant as the cold wasteland wind.

  He ran after them but could not find them. Instead he found Anna. The blotches were bigger, the size of bruises, and weeping sores covered her body although she seemed unaware of them. He had paid doctors most of his fortune to try and find a cure.

  She sat by a fountain in the Street of Seven Ships, crying. He went over to her and told her not to cry, and she looked up and asked him who he was. He spoke his name and she shook her head and looked vague, as if he were someone she had heard of, or had once known long ago and was struggling to place.

  “It’s Ulrik,” he shouted. “Ulrik. I love you. I never told you that enough when you were alive.”

  “Am I dead then?” she asked, coughing.

  Ulrik nodded. “The plague.”

  She looked shocked as if he was a madman and to distract her, he asked, “Have you seen the boys?”

  “They ran away from me.” The confession of it filled him with guilt. Her gaze demanded to know how he could have been so negligent.

  “I must go. I need to find them. You can’t come. They will only run away from you.” It had become dark. Not dark in the normal sense. The sky was pitch-black and there were no stars. Even as he looked it began to change colour, become full of swirling colours, like oil reflecting light on water. Anna had become Rhea.

  “Where’s Anna?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “My wife.” It came to him that somehow Rhea knew where Anna was. He was not sure how he knew this but he did. He caught her by the wrists and pulled her to her feet, and shouted, “Tell me where Anna is.”

  “I don’t know. Your claws are hurting me.”