Bloodrush (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 1) (36 page)

It took him some time before he could get to his feet again. And before he did so, he took out one of his knives, and ran a finger along the blade. Three drops of lavender blood painted the dust before the hand was closed and the wound smothered with magick.

His business concluded, Rhin set off, one hand on his sword and the other on a knife, each ready to go to work. But the rat was long gone, and that
caelk
Finrig nowhere to be seen.
Tonight
, was all he could think on the long, lonely walk home.

*

The house was dead. Lilain was nowhere to be seen. Lurker had gone. Only the soft, laboured snoring of a boy in the front room. Rhin tiptoed through the kitchen and across the hall, and after jumping for the door-handle, he slipped into the room without a sound. A mouse would have been embarrassed.

Merion was drowning in a nightmare. His eyes roved madly beneath their lids. Great beads of sweat were busy making their way down to his chin. His clammy fingers grasped at the rumpled sheets. Rhin shook his head and climbed up to stand on the boy’s chest.

Merion awoke with a cough and a start. Faeries might be small, but they are peculiarly heavy for their size. Armour and swords did not help matters.

‘So,’ Rhin mused. ‘You’re alive then.’

Once he had regained his breath, Merion eyed him suspiciously. Rhin was paler than usual, and his knees were caked in dirt. He smelled vaguely of dog. ‘Have you also come to tell me how much of a fool I am? Because I’m growing tired of it,’ he snapped, his voice still as hoarse as a rusty gate on an icy winter’s morning.

Rhin narrowed his eyes. ‘As long as you’re in agreement, I’ll hold my tongue.’

Merion rubbed his sweaty cheeks. ‘Where were you?’

Rhin looked away and then began to climb down on to the floor. ‘Exploring.’

‘That’s too dangerous, Rhin.’

The look the faerie threw Merion was chilling. ‘Don’t you dare lecture me on what is dangerous and what is not.’

Merion sighed, but said no more. He left Rhin to crawl under the bed and into his makeshift bedroom. But instead of lying down, or silencing his rumbling stomach with a stolen biscuit, he sat with his knees drawn into his chest, and stared wide-eyed at the door. He did not speak and nor did he move. He just kept thinking the same word over and over again.
Tonight. Tonight. Tonight.

*

No matter how hard Rhin prayed for the sun to linger a little while longer in the sky, no god nor daemon nor spirit heard him. His pleas fell on deaf ears, and the sun fell as it always did. The night was now a bruised purple. A sickle moon was peering over the hills in the north. It was a wicked moon, and beneath it, Fell Falls sparkled with candles and lanterns. There was a feast of some sort tonight. Somebody important in the work-camp was having a birthday, or so said the whispers of the uninvited. Hired out the
Bettermost
, and the
Thirty Dead Men
, right across from each other. Lady Caboose has brought most of her girls too. It would be a wild night for Fell Falls.

Rhin couldn’t give two shits for Lady Caboose and her girls, nor for birthdays and important men. That’s what he told himself, over and over again, listing all the things he had no particular defecatory urges for. The Wit was mentioned more than a few times, as was that damn Queen of his, and all his Black Fingers. Not to mention the accursed ship that brought them here.

He had been safe, and that was the sour heart of it all. He was supposed to be forgotten here. Lost. In all the ways a runaway should be.
Uncontactable
. And yet here he was, sat cross-legged under an old bed and busy sweating, on the cusp of meeting up with the enemies he thought he had left four and a half thousand miles behind him.

How?
He asked himself for the hundredth time that day. How had they found him? How had they gotten here? Like rats aboard a merchant ship they had brought plague and pestilence. Though in Rhin’s case, plague and pestilence came in the form of thirteen black knives between the ribs. If there was anything Rhin hated in this world, it was the prospect of dying. It just simply did not fit with his plans.

When the sickle moon finally summoned the fortitude to cast its pitiful light across the desert, and when that milk-light slipped like a burglar into the room and trickled across the floor towards his feet, Rhin knew it was time. The moon, even a wicked one, never lied.

Merion was still busy snoring, but peacefully this time. He was beginning to heal, thank the Roots. Rhin stepped out into the moonlight and let his wings crackle. His swords were sharp, his knives deadlier than a fistful of razors, and his magick was running strong. If only his heart would calm itself, and stop trying to burst out of his neck,
that would have been great
, Rhin thought.

‘Fuck this,’ he hissed at the darkness and the sleeping boy. He knew he had to go. He had to know what the Wit wanted.

Rhin steeled himself and crept out the door and along the hallway. Lilain was asleep with her head on the kitchen table, a big old book resting open under a numb hand. There was a candle, but it was almost done with life. Rhin’s skin melded with the darkness and bent it to its will. He crept unseen past the woman and out the back door.

The night was dark and deathly still yet full of whooping and hollering. Even on the outskirts, it was loud. Everybody was in town, trying to squeeze their way into the revelry. Any excuse to have a party is a good excuse, when you live at the ragged, bloody edge of the world. Rhin was glad of parties and excuses. The roads were empty. He found himself striding bravely down the middle of the Runnels, wearing such confidence as a shield against what awaited him, whatever it was to be.

The barn was a few miles east of the town’s outskirts. There was a good and open stretch of desert between Fell Falls and the barn. It lurked alone in the distant darkness, like the big ugly child at a party, the one too grumpy to join in with the games.

Big and ugly: that did the barn justice. Rhin’s keen eyes roved over its rough angles as he jogged through the scrub and sand. It was a simple square block rising up out of the dust, its only company a curving spur of railroad that reached out from the main line. Its flat panels were bleached white by the sun. Its roof was also clad in wooden shingles, and sported a pair of flagpoles. Their flags hung limp in the night air, but Rhin spied a glimpse of a silver spinning-top in their green folds.

Rhin began to look for a door, or a crack in the wooden panels. Whatever was inside was important; the thick padlocks and chains across the big doors said as much. On the southwest side of the barn he found his way in: a cracked panel that made an archway into the darkness. Rhin stepped into it, and held his breath. No shouts. No arrows. No blades. All was still in the giant barn.

Grotesque shapes squatted in the darkness, pierced here and there by shafts of moonlight, sneaking through the cracks. The machines were monsters of iron and cog and wire. Some were covered in huge dust-cloths, others had been left to taste the air. Rhin spied their greasy chains and riveted skin in the light. Their smith-twisted spars of iron looked like fingers and claws, and their pistons like ribs, or the carapace of some great, mechanical beetle. The smell of all that metal and oil stung his nose. There was something else too, an earthy smell, like that of old blood.

Rhin moved on, wincing as he peered behind every pole, leg and scaffold. His eyes were keener than most, and yet the barn appeared to be empty. No shivers in the darkness. No ripples in the air. Even faerie skin can struggle to fool faerie eyes.

But the Wit had no desire to hide. He stood right out in the open, in a circle of machinery at the far end of the barn. His hands were clasped in front of him, and his trademark black hood was up, but did not obscure his face. His long white hair flowed around his neck and down his chest. He was deliberately standing in a shaft of milky moonlight, so Rhin could see him all the more.

He means business then
, thought Rhin, peering from between two cogs.
He means to talk
. Talking was good. Talking meant time.

Once Rhin had swallowed whatever emotion was trying to choke him, he stepped out into the darkness and strode boldly towards his summoner. He had almost forgotten how tall the faerie was, in the months since he had seen him last. Rumour suggested he had a bit of dwarf in him, thanks to some debauched ancestor, long ago. That being said, he still stood half a head taller than Rhin. In the world of the Fae, that was a sizeable difference.

‘Rhin Rehn’ar, we meet again,’ Finrig spoke loud and clear, a smile on his lips.

Rhin took a stand at the edge of the circle, several feet from The Wit. ‘Finrig Everwit. As unpleasant a surprise as last time.’

Finrig’s face cracked into a broader smile, one chillingly devoid of humour. ‘Did you miss us?’

Rhin cut straight to the point. ‘Why have you followed me here, to the edge of the world?’ he demanded. ‘I told you before, I don’t have whatever it is the queen wants. I just want to be left alone.’

Finrig scratched his nose. ‘Ah, but now I know what you stole. Something very precious indeed. And that makes it serious,’ he replied. ‘Serious money for us, that is.’

There came a sniggering from the shadows. One by one, a dozen faeries in black hoods stepped out into the light, each with either a grin or a grimace on their lips. Swords, axes, spears, knives—these faeries bristled with sharp implements. The White Wit and his Black Fingers, every last one of them.

Rhin crossed his arms. ‘Like I already said, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Finrig looked at his crew ‘You hear that, boys? That’s the sound of a guilty Fae spewing horse shit from his mouth.’ The Fingers chuckled again.

Rhin wondered at his chances. He was a killer, sure, but a killer in the presence of other killers, and each of the Fae around him looked very used to the sight of blood on their blades. He wondered how many throats they’d slit, how many heads they’d caved in, how many babies they’d stolen and thrown into the darkness. He weighed that up against his own murderous wrongdoings, and found himself wanting.

Rhin put a hand on his sword. ‘Make your point or draw your sword, or I walk away. I haven’t got all night,’ he said.

‘Somewhere to be?’ hissed one of the Fingers. Kawn, Rhin recognised him from decades before, from guard-duty on the walls of Hafenfol, in the Mole Haunts. Rhin flashed what he hoped was a deadly smile. To his dismay, Kawn just sneered. He had a few more scars since last Rhin saw him.

‘Where’s the Hoard, Rehn’ar?’ asked the Wit.

Rhin shook his head firmly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about!’ he snapped.

Finrig stepped forward. ‘Tell you what, Rehn’ar, you tell us where you stashed it, or we’ll cut that boy of yours into little ribbons, so the dogs don’t choke on him,’ he growled.

Rhin’s sword barely made it halfway out of its scabbard before a dozen knives and axe-blades were at his neck. These faeries were fast. Kawn waggled a needle-point dagger uncomfortably close to Rhin’s right eyeball. ‘Tell us where it is,’ he growled, in a voice almost as thick as the sludge between his ears.

Rhin smirked back at him, trying very hard not to move his throat too much. ‘Let’s say I do have the Hoard. If you kill me, you’ll never find it. How do you think the Queen is going to pay for your troubles if you come back to her with only my body to offer, and no Hoard?’

Finrig laughed, as if he were conversing with a halfwit. ‘She’s the queen. The Hoard is not her only stash of gold.’

Rhin narrowed his eyes. ‘Really? Do you think so? Why then is she so keen to get it back, I wonder?’ he retorted.

Finrig nudged his Fingers aside with his elbows. ‘Where is it, Rehn’ar, you thief?’ he spat in his face.

Rhin spoke through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve been wrongly accused.’

‘Kawn,’ Finrig spoke, as calm as a pebble, ‘Take three of the Fingers, three big lads, and fetch that Hark boy. Kill his aunt if she has any objections.’

‘Aye, Wit,’ Kawn grinned. He stuck his needle dagger back in its sheath and pointed at three faeries, all of them thickset and muscled. Rhin bit the inside of his lip.