Casino Infernale (31 page)

The first blow probably killed him. I hit him six more times, as hard as I could, just to be sure.

I killed him. Not because he might have revealed who I really was and put an end to my mission. Not because he was a professional killer who needed killing; not because the world would be a better place without him. No. I killed him because he hurt me so badly, and because he would have killed me.

The crowd was going wild at the unexpected victory. Jumping up and down, clutching at each other, screaming and shouting like they’d never stop. I could barely see them, and the sound seemed to be coming from a long way away. I didn’t care. I was looking at Nigel, lying dead before me on the cold earth floor. A small, broken, pathetic thing. I leaned over, and spat blood on his face. And then I turned away and limped slowly back to the iron ladder. It took me a long while to climb back up, with only one working arm.

Molly and Frankie were waiting for me at the top. Molly looked at the mess the Dancing Fool had made of my face, and swallowed hard. She and Frankie helped me over the edge of the Pit, and then held me up between them as they half-led, half-carried me away. I tried not to cry out, but every movement hurt so much. Molly put my good arm over her shoulders, so she could carry more of my weight. Her face was white with shock, and her eyes were full of rage. Wherever she looked, people fell back to give her more room.

“Hell of a fight, Shaman!” said Frankie. “Hard core!”

“Shut up,” said Molly.

People came forward to congratulate me from every side, and Molly drove them back with hard looks and harsh language. Frankie left us for a while to collect the winnings from his side bets. He came back laughing.

“You wouldn’t believe how much money we’ve made, betting on you!” he said happily. “No one thought you stood a chance!”

“Shut up,” said Molly.

“Is that it?” I said. “Have I done enough to get through to the next level?”

“Hell, yes!” said Frankie. “Major prestige! Dangerous prestige! But I have to say . . . you look like crap. Just saying, but . . . maybe you should quit now? While you’re still ahead?”

“No,” I said.

“Let’s get you back to our room,” said Molly. “Once we’re out of the null zone, I can work my healing magics on you.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said, or thought I said. After a while, I managed a small smile. Blood leaked from the corners of my mouth.

“What?” said Molly.

“Those were just the Introductory Games,” I said. “Can’t wait to see what the next level’s like. . . .”

Robbery with Attitude

I
don’t remember how they got me to the elevators. I remember drifting in and out, sudden flashes of pain, of people and places, and Molly yelling at Frankie to support more of my weight. I remember the taste of blood in my mouth, and light that hurt my one working eye, and voices that seemed to come from far, far away. I was broken. I knew that, but I couldn’t seem to care.

I remember being in the elevator, and Molly crying out with relief as the null lifted and her magics returned. She quickly cast a levitation spell on me so I could hang in mid-air, unsupported. It felt like being carried on the backs of angels. Molly leaned tiredly against the wall of the elevator, getting her strength back. The front of her dress was covered in blood. My blood. Frankie stood at the back of the lift, sulking because Molly had yelled at him. I looked down, and saw blood dripping steadily off me, to form a widening pool beneath my floating feet.

The elevator doors finally opened onto our floor, and Molly quickly floated me out of the elevator and down the corridor to our suite. I settled into the embrace of the levitation spell, like snuggling into bed. It felt good, peaceful, distant . . . far less painful than being hauled around. Any sudden movement meant fresh pain, sudden spikes that jolted me out of my protective daze, waking me up. I didn’t want to wake up. Molly opened the door to our suite and sent me floating in with a wave of her hand. I caught a glimpse of Frankie looking quickly up and down the corridor, to see if anyone was watching, and then he hurried in and locked the door behind him.

Molly lowered me onto the bed as carefully as she could, but I still cried out despite myself. Even the soft and supportive mattress was enough to put pressure on my broken body, and set all my wounds crying out again. Molly sank down onto a chair by the bed. She looked exhausted, and bad as I felt there was still enough of me left to worry about her. A simple levitation spell shouldn’t have taken that much out of her. Frankie dithered at the foot of the bed, hardly able to look at me, as though what he saw disturbed him.

“Should I ring for the hotel doctor?” he said. “I really think I should ring for a doctor. I mean, look at the state he’s in!”

“No doctor,” said Molly. “I can see how bad he is. I’m not blind! But I wouldn’t trust any doctor this hotel might provide. We can’t have anyone knowing how bad he is, and there’s always the chance the doctor might be able to tell who and what he really is. . . . You’d better be right about the surveillance bugs in this place, Frankie, because I am getting really tired of having to talk in circles. Anyway, we don’t need a doctor. I can heal him. As soon as I get my second wind. There’s something wrong here. . . . I think there’s a low-level null working everywhere in this hotel, hidden under the surface. Just enough to make every kind of magic an effort, and slow the players down. Give the Casino an advantage. . . .”

“You can sense that?” Frankie said dubiously.

“I can feel the extra effort involved,” said Molly.

“Can you still heal him?”

“I once brought him back from the shores of death,” said Molly. “This is just damage . . . I can fix damage. Go outside, Frankie, you’re a distraction. Guard the door, warn me if anyone’s coming, and don’t let anyone in unless I tell you otherwise.”

Frankie nodded quickly, and left.

“I thought he’d never go,” I said.

Molly levered herself up out of her chair and leaned over me, her face close to mine. “Hush, sweetie. I didn’t realise you were awake or I’d have put you under with a sleep spell.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t. I’m afraid to sleep. Afraid to let go, in case I don’t wake up again. This is bad, Molly. Really bad. I can feel . . . broken things, grinding together inside me.”

“That little bastard really did a job on you,” said Molly. “Who was he? It looked like he knew you, and you knew him.”

“An old friend,” I said. “And an old enemy. That’s the spy game for you, mostly.”

“I know, sweetie. Now shut the hell up so I can work on you.”

“Yes, doctor,” I said.

“We can play doctors and nurses later,” said Molly, trying to smile. “When you’re all better.”

“Can I be the doctor, for a change?”

“If you’re good.”

She kissed me briefly on the forehead, and then stood back, facing the bed. She frowned intently, her whole face a mask of concentration. She didn’t wave her hands around or chant incantations; most of that stuff is strictly for the rubes. She just gathered her strength, and drew energy from the hidden worlds so she could do what she needed to do. And just like that my body became transparent wherever she looked, so she could See inside me, and See how bad the damage was. The spell must have leaked at the edges, because I could See what she was Seeing.

My left arm was badly broken, in three places, splinters of shattered bone piercing the torn skin. Ribs were broken and shattered, all down one side. Some of them had pierced the lung. I could See great areas of internal bleeding, moving inside me like slow dark tides. Molly looked at my head. I couldn’t See what she Saw, but it must have been really bad, judging by the look on her face. It was actually something of a relief, to know I had good reason to feel this bad.

I was breathing as shallowly as I could, because even the smallest movement hurt so badly I had to fight to keep from crying out, when Molly finished her scan and shut off the spell. She sat down in her chair again. She was crying, silently. Great fat tears, rolling down her cheeks. I wanted to reach out a hand to her, but I couldn’t.

“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t, love, please.”

“Dear God, you’re a mess,” said Molly, sniffing back her tears so she could try to sound professional again. “I can’t believe how much damage you took in that fight. I can’t believe you hung on that long, to take him down.”

“Growing up with my family,” I said, “you learn to take punishment and keep going. I had to kill him, Molly.”

“Hush. . . .”

“I had no choice! He had to die, because he knew who I was, knew me from before. He would have told everyone if I’d let him live.”

“You had no choice,” said Molly. “He would have killed you. And if you hadn’t killed him, I would have. For what he did to you.”

“Can you fix me?” I said. “If there is a null operating here . . .”

“Low level,” said Molly. “I spit on their null. It’ll just make the job that little bit more difficult, that’s all. Means I’ll have to do it the hard way. And I’ll have to put a screen over us, to block out the bugs. Can’t have anyone watching this. Now shut the hell up and let me concentrate.”

“Yes, dear,” I said.

She spoke Words of Power over me, and I could feel her presence growing in the room, eclipsing everything else. I could feel her, as closely as I felt myself. Her mind, her soul, reaching out to me. Linking herself to me. And then she healed me, by taking my injuries into herself. She lay down on the bed beside me, taking my hand in hers, and one by one she took every broken thing inside me . . . and made them hers. I heard the bones in her left arm break, three times, but she never made a sound. My arm was immediately whole again, and I felt the magic course through her, as her bones healed in a moment. She stirred and stiffened on the bed beside me, sweat running off her face as she concentrated, taking my hurts and making them her own, so she could mend them inside herself. Because an injury shared is an injury halved, or at least weakened, and easier to deal with. My pain disappeared as she embraced it, and then rejected it. And she never cried out once. I knew what she was feeling because I’d felt it first, and I could only marvel at her strength.

And her love, that she would put herself through such hell, for me.

It took the best part of an hour to take on all my hurts and damage and put it right. I held her hand as tightly as I could. It was all I could do, all the support I could give her. In the end we lay on the bed together, side by side, still holding hands, staring up at the ceiling, breathing hard with the effort of everything we’d been through. Just . . . luxuriating in the peace and comfort that comes with not hurting any more. I was whole again. I could feel it.

“Well,” Molly said finally, “there went all the extra years of life I won at the roulette wheel. Just burned right through them to power the healing.”

“You’re going to hold that over me for the rest of our lives, aren’t you?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” said Molly. “You’d better believe it. You even miss one birthday and you are a dead man. God, I feel tired.”

“You feel tired?” I said. “I feel like I’ve been to hell and back.”

Molly laughed briefly. “I’ve done that, and it wasn’t as bad.”

We turned and cuddled up against each other. I held her to me, and we lay together on the bed for a long time. Trying to give each other strength, and support.

•   •   •

Eventually, we both sat up and stretched slowly. My joints creaked loudly, but everything seemed to have settled back into place. We rolled off the bed and got to our feet. My side of the bedclothes was soaked in blood. I looked down at my clothes, and there was more there, too. I looked at Molly. Her clothes were stained with blood from where she’d touched me. Molly stripped the sheets off the bed, while I headed for the bathroom. I pulled off my stained clothes as I went, dropping them to the floor. I didn’t want anything to do with them again. I turned on the lights in the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. In the harsh unforgiving light, I looked hard and grim and maybe ten years older. I got in the shower, and hunched under the steaming hot water for as long as I could bear it, before I started soaping the dried blood off my unbroken skin. After a while, Molly got in and joined me.

I’ll say this—Molly’s breasts have never been cleaner than when she showers with me. They positively glisten.

Afterwards, we got dressed in the clothes we’d arrived in. I think we’d both had enough of dressing to the Casino’s standards. Now that we’d seen what the Casino was really like, we just wanted to look like ourselves. We stood together before the full-length mirror and looked ourselves over. We looked . . . pale, but determined. I put an arm across Molly’s bare shoulders, and she slipped an arm round my waist. We both looked like we’d been through the mill, but it would still have been a brave or foolish man who would have gone up against the people I was seeing in the reflection.

“Do you still want to go on with this?” said Molly. “Are the games, and the mission, really worth all this? No one in your family can expect you to put yourself through such punishment. . . .”

“They don’t,” I said. “I do. We’re stopping a war, and saving untold lives. Doing the right thing. It’s always been important to me that now and again I take on a mission with no . . . ambiguities.”

“Doesn’t have to be us,” said Molly. “Doesn’t have to be you. Let somebody else do it, for once. Sir Parsifal would be only too happy to step in and take over.”

“He’d only screw it up,” I said. “He’s honourable. He wouldn’t stand a chance against the kind of tricks they pull here. They’d take him to the cleaners.”

“Then call in someone else from your family!”

“They’re not here, and I am,” I said. “By the time I could bring them up to speed, it would be too late. We can do this, Molly.”

She smiled, and leaned her head on my shoulder. “You always were too ready to take the weight of the world on your shoulders.”

“Someone has to,” I said.

“But what he did to you . . .”

“Just makes me that much more determined to give some of it back,” I said. I wasn’t sure whether I was trying to convince her, or myself. I was strong and sound in body again, but I did wonder . . . whether some important part of me might still be broken. Whether my nerve . . . was everything it should be. Whether I might hesitate in the crunch. I couldn’t have that. So, if the horse throws you, punch it in the head and get right back in the saddle again. And if the world hurts you, take the fight to the world.

“Come on,” I said cheerfully. “Let’s get this show back on the road. Lots to do, and lots of bad people to do it to. Call Frankie back in here.”

Molly laughed, kissed me quickly, and went to the door, while I peered into the mirror and gave myself a stern look. Drood is as Drood does.

Frankie hurried in the moment Molly opened the door, and looked quickly around for me. He seemed openly shocked and taken aback to find me standing easily before him. He looked me up and down, then looked at Molly, and finally settled for a baffled shrug.

“You look better!” he said brightly to me. “Quite amazingly better . . . Just as well, you’ll need to be strong, and I mean in tip-top shape, to go far in the Middle Games. You are ready to dive back into the Games?”

“Hell, yeah,” said Molly. “Are the Games ready for us?”

Frankie winced. “Confidence is good, attitude is better, but overconfidence will get us all killed. In slow and lingering ways. They don’t deal in money in the Middle Games; they deal in souls. You’ve proved yourselves worthy opponents in the Introductory Games, and that buys you entrance. You’ve earned major prestige and enough money that they’ll take you seriously . . . and when they see how you’ve bounced back from the beating you took in the Pit, that will definitely help to impress all the right people, but . . . these are the Middle Games. Only Major Players, now. From this point on, it’s all about how many souls you can bring to the table. And unfortunately, all you have to wager with is Molly’s much-mortgaged soul. You lose that, on the wrong bet, and it’s Games over.”