Bloodmoon (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 2) (32 page)

When he had slammed and locked it, he turned to Fever. The little man was standing right where he had left him, in the middle of the corridor, nervous and fidgety.

‘My Lord,’ Fever began.

‘Your hand,’ Dizali interrupted. ‘Show it to me.’

Fever wrinkled his brow, confused.

‘Extend your hand, Rowanstone!’ Dizali snapped, making him flinch. Fever held out a hand, steady as a rock despite his nervousness.

There was a flash of glass as the makeshift knife slid from Dizali’s pocket and found its new home, deep between the bones of Fever’s hand. The torturer made no sound, he simply squirmed, mouth frozen into a silent scream of pain. Dizali left the knife in his hand and adjusted his greatcoat before walking away.

‘That would have been in your neck, if I had been Witchazel. Think on that, Mr Rowanstone. You have one week to find me the deeds,’ he hollered down the corridor. He left Fever to grunt and wheeze with pain as the torturer stared, wide-eyed at this new addition to his body, dripping blood on the stone floor.

*

The weather that evening was of a similar ilk as the day’s. The rain persisted, only now the breeze had returned as a gale. It howled under the carriage’s axles and through its wheels. The raindrops whipped the window, trying to drench whatever dryness was inside.

Dizali was ignoring it. He was busy with a small sheet of paper, eyeing each line carefully for a second time, making sure he had not missed anything.

Lordship, the search continues. I have his trail, heading east. I’m a week behind, no more, and catching up fast. I have also found a girl who claims to be a Serped maid, escaped the night of the fire. There’s something suspicious about her. I have taken her in for the walk and will find out what she knows. Could be useful. I will have more news by the next town. How goes our cause?

G

Ever the one for brevity, is Gavisham
, he said to himself.

Dizali despised being held at the mercy of others’ competence, or in a certain torturer’s case, incompetence. It was a battle of wills now, as his pieces went about their business, and Dizali had never liked waiting. Tonight, at least, he would take matters into his own hands.

There came a smart knocking at the carriage’s door and Dizali shuffled to open it. It was his head lordsguard, Captain Rolick, a swarthy man in a uniform a shade too small for him, just so the muscle could show. The greying hair on his head was parted down the centre, slick to his skull with rain. He had a pitted face, scars of a younger life spent enduring the pox, and quick, dark eyes. He was no Gavisham, of course, but there was no other lordsguard in the city that could beat Rolick with a sword or to draw a pistol.

‘We’ve arrived, Prime Lord Dizali,’ Rolick said, in his thick northern accent. Even after the years spent in the city it refused to die away. ‘There was some trouble, but nought we couldn’t take care of.’

‘And quietly too, I note.’

‘As a mouse, Milord,’ Rolick stepped away from the door and gestured towards the mighty inner gates of the Harker Sheer estate, black and shining in the rain and lantern light. Dizali grabbed his umbrella and stepped out into the night.

A half-dozen lordsguards stood around the carriage. They were silent behind their cloth masks while the eyes that gazed back at him were impassive and hard. Rolick had brought the right men for the job, it seemed. The sort that saw nothing, heard nothing, and said nothing.

Here and there, lying in the mud and gravel between them, bodies were slumped and curled. A few still had long knives protruding from their backs. Others were busy dying.

‘I want these disposed of. In the river, not here.’

‘As you command, Milord,’ Rolick nodded, clicking his fingers at a few of his men. They went to work silently, hauling the dead and dying towards the second carriage, painted black. Dizali did not care to watch them load it. He stepped up to the gates, where heavy locks and chains had been draped around the bars.

‘And these?’ Dizali asked, looking back at Rolick.

‘We have a hulker for that, Milord,’ the captain replied, snapping his fingers again.

Dizali stood back as a deep scraping emanated from the second carriage. Something stepped out of it, on the far side. Dizali could see the suspension of the carriage lifting upwards. After a few thudding footfalls, a tall shape loomed out of the rain. The lordsguards lifted their lanterns to light its way.

The hulker was huge, as they always were. There was something about the bear shade that truly brought the beast out in a person. This one was a woman, Dizali could see that in the eyes that stared out from her hood and from the shape of her chest. Rarely seen, but not uncommon. Her long black hair and grey robe hid the rest.

Dizali gauged her at almost seven foot as she trudged past him, making the gravel crunch and the ground shudder. She was the tallest he had ever seen. Some hulkers grow upwards, some grow outwards, some do both. She was of the third kind. The cloth of her robe strained to keep all of her in. It strained at the seams of the arms, skin-tight where the muscle bulged. Dizali wondered where Gavisham had found this one.

Amidst grunts and animal-like snuffling, the hulker grabbed at each of the chains and prised their links apart with her hands. The magick was fierce in this one. The metal bent like warm wax, splitting apart, link by link. All the while the hulker growled and grumbled at her task.

She was smart too: breaking the links not the locks. Any good thief will tell you that the lock is always the strongest point. What surrounds it, wood, hinges, chains, is never made as strong.

It only took a minute or two of pure, brute strength to crack the gates. Dizali and Rolick were soon striding across the wet lawns, making a beeline for the front doors of the great manor.

‘You are to wait outside,’ Dizali instructed. ‘I will need two hours, no less.’

‘Yes, Milord.’

Dizali jabbed a finger at the varnished door of Harker Sheer. ‘The door, if you please, Rolick.’

‘With pleasure, Milord.’ Once more his fingers clicked and the hulker came marching forward. There was a clang as the door-handles were ripped clean off and dropped. The woman looked up as if waiting further instruction. Her tiny green eyes looked odd and alone in her monstrous face, with her jaws and cheekbones swollen with the magick of her shade. Dizali nodded to the door again and her fist splintered the wood around the lock. There was another clang as the mechanism fell out of the door.

‘Thank you, Madam,’ Dizali motioned for her to step aside. The door creaked as it opened, scraping against the splinters on the marble floor. The smell of dust wafted over him. Dizali stared into the gloom and waited for his eyes to adjust to the familiar edges and shapes: the mighty staircase, a waterfall of mahogany and thick red carpet, leading to the upper floors; the ornate bookcases and tables; the scores of paintings lining the walls; the coat of arms of the Hark family, outlined in black marble at the centre of the atrium.

‘A lantern,’ Dizali hissed and one was passed through the door, illuminating his memory. The Prime Lord moved deeper into the manor.

Room by room he searched, rifling through drawers and desks, not caring to creep. Why should a thief creep when no master is due to return, after all? Harker Sheer was enormous, and so he kept to the main rooms: Karrigan’s chambers, his boy’s chambers, the room where they had held their meetings, and of course, Karrigan’s studies and libraries. Dizali did not look for anything in particular, just anything at all that could sully the late Prime Lord’s name. It was slow progress, rummaging through a lifetime of letters, notebooks, and correspondence. Almost an hour passed, and still his search had proved fruitless. Karrigan, at least on the paper he had so-far found, was spotless. Dizali was beginning to grow angry. He did not relish the thought of returning home with his hands emptier than a beggar’s.

He stood in the centre of Karrigan’s fourth and final study, in the south wing of the manor, where the desk faced a wall of glass that looked out into the gardens of Harker Sheer. Dizali stared around at the half-open cupboards and yawning drawers. He breathed slowly and calmly, trying to place himself in Karrigan’s shoes.

‘Where would that fool put something he did not want found?’ Dizali whispered to himself. The darkness had no answers for him, only his tired, churning mind.

Karrigan was Lord of the Empire, second only to the queen
.

‘So who in their right mind would dare to pry into his business?’

Not his servants, not the other lords, they would never escape his gaze
.

‘His son. His blasted son.’

Children were forever eavesdropping and poking their noses into business that did not concern them.

‘How do you hide something from a child?’ Dizali turned around as he muttered. He had prised open all the drawers that had been locked with a fire-poker. Even they held no secrets.

Up high
.

Dizali held the lantern high and stared at the highest bookcases, at the chandelier that hung from an ornate whorl in the ceiling, and at the shelves that lingered near the plaster, with barely enough room to sport their trophies and curios.

Dizali went back to the last room he had rummaged through, a library, and retrieved a dusty ladder that had been propped up against one of the bookcases. He wedged it against the wall and climbed so he could run his hands across the shelves. Glass smashed and metal clanged as he knocked Karrigan’s ornaments to the marble floor. Dizali did not care.

The shelves held nothing for him. Neither did the first bookcase. But the second made Dizali smile, one his rare smiles, usually saved for when he was alone at his desk or staring out of his window. His fingers wrapped around the bundle of paper and dragged it from its hiding place, wedged between the ceiling and the back of the bookcase, far from the curiosity of any thirteen year-old or plucky servant. Dizali retrieved his lantern and held the wedge of paper up to its dwindling light. They were letters, bound together with a thick, red ribbon. The ribbon had been tied and untied many times. That was plain to see from the way it had begun to fray. Dizali’s thumb rasped over the edges of the letters, glimpsing handwriting. He prised one of the letters from the ribbon and held it close to the lantern. No wax seal, just a printed mark, one he recognised instantly.

‘Lincoln,’ Dizali breathed. He stared at it for several moments, making sure he was not mistaken. Then he smiled broadly, and slid the letters into his greatcoat.

Accidents work in mysterious, but occasionally marvellous ways. As he moved the ladder beneath the chandelier, the tip of it knocked the glass and dislodged a ring of ornate crystals. Dizali ducked it as it fell, letting it smash into a thousand fragments on the marble. The floor sparkled hypnotically, like a summer sea. All except for one piece: a long key, intricately and cleverly worked, and worn with use. Dizali snatched it up from the floor. It looked to be several hundred years old, of black iron, and crafted to look like part of the chandelier.
Karrigan is full of secrets today
.

Dizali was in good spirits when he returned to his lordsguards. They were soaked, but none of them had the temerity to shiver. The Prime Lord stared at each of them in turn.

‘It appears,’ he announced, that smile lingering on his face, ‘that vagabonds and thieves have taken up residence in the late Prime Lord Hark’s estate. They have made rather a mess of the place.’

Captain Rolick stepped forward. ‘What a shame, Milord.’

‘Indeed,’ Dizali replied. They understood each other completely. ‘Keep what you can carry and no more. We don’t want the Benches in complete uproar, now do we?’

‘No, Milord.’ Rolick flashed a grin before clicking his fingers at the other guards. They filed into Harker Sheer.

‘And if you find any deeds, Rolick, bring them to me.’

‘Yes, Milord.’

Satisfied, Dizali took his leave, pacing across the wet, squelching lawn and back to his carriage. The sound of bangs and smashing followed at his coattails.

OF PRACTICE AND PINE TREES

8th July, 1867

T
he air crackled like a firework.

‘Merion …’ Lurker warned him, yet again.

‘Trust me, I can do this,’ Merion spat out between pursed lips and gritted teeth.

The magick pounded his head like a warhammer.

‘Yeah, an’ you said that the last four times.’

‘Lurker,’ Merion hissed, and the prospector fell silent.

The light was blinding. He had to squint to focus on the leather canteen sitting atop the tall log.

He let the magick collapse and surge into his fingers as he held them straight out. He pointed, tensed his entire body as hard as he could, and let it go. Merion felt the magick pour from his body, like a hurricane ripping through him. He held it steady, just on the edge, forever feeling his mental fingers creeping towards the precipice of constraint.

The canteen shattered into a hundred hissing fragments. Lightning danced through the cascading water, flying back and forth between the droplets a dozen times before it spattered on the dusty earth of the circus ring in the big tent. It was just the three of them: Merion, Lurker, and Shan Dolmer. She was queen of the shades today, lecturing him more completely than either his aunt or current company had yet managed to—or dared to. Merion had followed her every word, listened completely. He saw this fountain of knowledge for what it was and plunged his head into its pool. He had not had this amount of fun since … well. Ever.