Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (20 page)

Chapter 22

Alys

Vanishing in a blur of speed he attacked them with greater ferocity than he’d displayed so far. Alys stepped in, a flurry of defensive blocks and dodges keeping the big man at bay. Joey back-pedaled and began loosing arrows, carefully timed and placed to avoid the blur Alys had also become to match Somna’s speed and take the man’s legs out from under him. Somna somehow managed to keep Alys on the defensive, keeping her between himself and a clean shot for Joey, and simultaneously place his feet millimetres from each of Joey’s arrows.

Alys blocked and parried and dodged his inhumanly powerful attacks, working hard to find the split-second she needed to offer a counter-attack of her own. They exchanged a flurry of perhaps fifty blows and blocks, parries and ripostes, spinning away from each other to put some distance between them.

Re-engaging immediately, Alys used Somna’s own mass to twist him around by delivering a powerful back kick to his chest as she leapt past him. Pain lanced up and along her leg. Kicking him was like kicking a wall, his heavily muscled frame like an armour covering him.

As Alys continued, her momentum taking her clear of the big killer, Joey sent a wave of arrows at Somna with a speed he’d never accessed previously. Somna weaved, ducked and swatted aside the projectiles. Leaping through the air in a devastating display of flexibility and agility at odds with his stature, Somna by-passed Alys, sending her crashing to the cobbled street with a kick to the head that snapped out cobra-like, taking her by surprise. Somna’s run continued, and leaping again he crashed down onto Joey’s right thigh.

Alys heard the femur snap. Joey tried to stand anyway, his bow flashing through the air, acting as a club. Somna caught the attack easily and twisted Joey’s arm up and back, delivering a powerful front kick to Joey’s ribcage. The wet snap sickened Alys. Collapsing in sweaty agony, Joey pulled his blade and stabbed it into Somna’s right boot.

The killer howled and lifted Joey by the neck with both hands, throwing him twenty feet to skid along the burned cobbles, unconscious.

Alys moved so quickly at him the air screamed with her passing. Exchanging another series of blows, Alys was caught by a sledgehammer of a right cross to her chest and skidded on her backside, coming to a halt at James’s feet.

Rising once more, she took a fraction of a second to assess Somna.

He was hurt, but not badly. The two blows that she’d landed had done little real damage. The pain from his foot injury was being masked by a tide of adrenaline and righteous anger. He wasn’t tiring and had the strength of madness to add to his own physicality. He moved like a ballet dancer and struck like a bull.

I can’t beat him alone.
The thought struck her as she moved to attack him once again, with her Sai flashing faster than the eye could follow.
This could be a problem.

After another relentless, energy-sapping exchange Alys failed to intercept a vicious side-kick and felt her breath knocked from her as his boot connected. Once again on her back, she spat a mouthful of blood onto the cobbles and prepared herself for her final assault.

Each five of her moves had cost him only one or two moves of his own. She relied on speed, skill, stamina and flawless technique. He employed impossible strength, and whilst his own speed was a hair less than hers, his experience gave him the edge. Whilst he was preserving his reserves of strength, she’d been exhausting hers just keeping him at bay. Her successful attacks had been too few and ineffective when they did connect. He was a mountain of muscle-plated rock.

Nearing the end of her reserves of stamina, Alys found herself in unfamiliar territory. Like her mother, months before in the pits of The Gardens, she was facing a superior opponent: one more skilled, stronger and more experienced than she. She was being taught a lesson in fighting by a brutal killer. She was being systematically broken apart, defeated. She would die here today – of this Alys had no doubt – but she would make the price of her defeat as heavy as she possibly could. This monster would not walk away intact.

She had one last opening. It would cost Alys her life, but, if successful, would paralyse her opponent.

Somna stood over her as she lay there on her stomach, enjoying her exhaustion, savouring the life he was about to take.

“You people. You think that you can live in my city? That you deserve to live? My god has judged you, so how dare you resist his will?”

Somna rotated his blade, the large one, holding it in a stabbing grip.

Good
, Alys thought.
That’ll work

Plunging at her, Somna noticed her movement too late. He was in full momentum, unstoppable by his own volition. She had stabbed upwards, her sharpened Sai aimed at his crotch, destined to slip through the soft pelvic gap and sever his spinal cord. Neither could or would stop their attack.

Alys forced her arm upwards despite the screaming muscles in her arms and passed through… nothing. Somna wasn’t there.

How had he avoided her? How had she not felt his own blade entering her back, piercing her heart from behind?

With iron will Alys Shephard prised her head from the wonderfully cool cobbles upon which it rested.

Somna was on his back. An arrow sticking out from his right shoulder had spun him around, diverting his body from her blade and his blade from hers.

Some of Somna’s men, maybe twenty, had gathered in front of him, defending their master.

Joey?

Alys rolled her eyes and shook a modicum of clarity into her senses. Joey still lay, broken and half-conscious on the Esplanade. The Exalted still battled The Ringed. Somna was rising. She looked at the arrow which he had begun pulling from the heavily-muscled shoulder. She didn’t recognise the projectile as one of Joey’s.

Then who?

The answer came in a hiss of distorted air beside her. James, Jennifer, a drowsy Joey and Alys, they all looked up, one at a time, staring. Along the Castle Esplanade was a one-eyed, wild madman with ginger hair swinging a golf club at the monster in black. They all cursed his name. Bracha.

Beside him a blur of movement passed man after man, leaving a streak of blood as mist in its passing. It was not truly a blur, it was a person, but moved so quickly that whoever it was appeared to melt in and out of the shadows.

 
Bracha whooped in joy. The blur did likewise. Alys recognised the voice in the battle cry instantly.

Steph!

Five months ago…

Chapter 23

Steph

Slipping through the young forest, Steph slalomed silently around the trunks of the native elder, ash, oak and hawthorn. In their winter nakedness, the trees offered less cover than they might in spring, but the density of the woods, the myriad and number of trunks and interlocked branches, concealed her well enough.

Her progress had slowed significantly since leaving the city, then the suburbs and entering the woods. Primarily because she knew that she was nearing Bracha’s last known location, but also because she knew when and how to move amongst the trees and foliage without broadcasting her presence. Her Aunt Jennifer had taught her to wait for the wind – which was ubiquitous in an Edinburgh winter – to move the foliage and slip lightly on the balls of her feet in time with the motion to mask the sound of her own movement. She’d become very skilled at this, but then she’d worked hard enough to master the technique.

Stepping lightly between patches of twigs or other obstacles, Steph took a convoluted route through the woods towards Craigmillar Castle Road, but a silent one. Steph had already visited the site near the Royal Infirmary her cousin had described where she and Joey had slipped under the fence line.

Discovering a trail of dried and browning blood several days old leading from the fence onto the cycle path Alys had described, Steph gambled on the direction the injured Bracha had taken and took a parallel route along the main road and up towards and into Hawskhill Wood. In the trees she’d found more evidence of an injured man’s passing. The trail was erratic. False trails led off and ended. He’d found the strength to double back on himself, clearly fearful of Somna’s tribe. Steph had spent more than sixteen hours carefully picking through the woods, guesstimating Bracha’s route and destination.

According to her cousin’s account from four nights previously, Bracha was in no fit state to be hunting anyone. That he’d travelled so far was a miracle, and a mark of the strength of insanity.

 
Alys had described him with both hands broken, ribs and jaw also broken, sporting a smiley-face glass marble in the cavity of his missing right eye. But Bracha was still an extremely dangerous man: Steph knew this better than most. She guessed that his injuries, whilst limiting his physical threat, would make him more alert, more desperate and much more dangerous whilst he holed up to heal. In truth, she was counting on it.

Subconsciously, she adjusted her eye-patch as she thought of the man who’d emptied the socket. Thoughts of home scorched at her conscience. Guilt accompanied her through the woods. Her mother and Alys would be devastated at the thought of her alone out in the city. That hurt Steph but not enough to turn her back.
 
Aunt Jennifer would not be concerned. She knew exactly what Steph was capable of now. When she thought of her behaviour, her naivety during her first encounter with the man she now sought, Steph shuddered at how incredibly innocent, how insanely stupid she’d been.

Her past-self had treated life, even
this
life in
this
city, as a game, an adventure to throw herself into headfirst. That outlook wasn’t entirely her own fault. Her mother had allowed her to begin survival and combat classes with the other kids. Aged five she learned the necessary woodcraft and foraging skills all of The Gardens’ girls were taught to prepare them for life outside their community’s fences, should they choose to leave, or become a Ranger, like Alys. She’d learned the basics of combat before quitting at six years old.

Stephanie had been a poor student, always distracted, forever delivering the bare minimum, just enough to satisfy her tutors. Her mother, Fiona, in frequently asserting that Steph would never need the skills being imparted to her, had made these lessons seem worthless.
Go play, enjoy your childhood
was her mother’s credo. Fiona had simply refused to allow her to attend her Aunt Jennifer’s combat classes.

Bracha had stripped Steph of her childish frivolity and plucked her carefree innocence from her soul as surely as he’d plucked the eye from her head.

Since returning to The Gardens, Steph had allowed little joy in her life. She’d demanded entry to advanced combat classes and, under her aunt’s instruction, had punished every last ounce of puppy fat from her teenaged body with a brutal training regime. Steph had crammed years of instruction into a handful of months of almost round-the-clock, dogged punishment of her body. Even Aunt Jennifer had looked tired on a few occasions after a session. Steph had learned to use her pain and hate to fuel these torturous sessions. She didn’t hate Bracha: he was a monster, a shark swimming through the detritus of the old world, killing because it was all he knew, all he wanted. No, Steph hated who she’d been – the imbecile who’d walked willingly and blindly into the arms of a madman.

This image of herself was what motivated her. Using her self-loathing and the tugging ache still present in her eye cavity, she ate the pain – emotional and physical – and powered her daily punishment with it, ridding herself of every scrap of who she’d been, physically and mentally. She’d told Joey,
“I won’t ever be a victim again.”
And she wouldn’t. Never again. She would turn fifteen years old in the coming February and had no intention of reaching that milestone without first finding the man called Bracha.

Carefully picking her way to the treeline, Steph was considering leaving the safety of the forest when she heard a piercing screech coming from the roadway just beyond the trees. Soon after a chorus of piercing screams began to echo around the woods. Instinctively, thanks to hundreds of hours of instruction at Jennifer’s hands, Steph took herself low to the ground before the first shriek had ended and began crab-crawling, butt low to the ground, hands and feet alternating, to pad her way silently towards the roadside.

As she neared the edge of the cover the woods provided, the shrieking became lower and more playful in tone. Placing her body behind the wide trunk of an old oak tree, back against the trunk, Steph stole a quick glance at the road.

Nothing.

Despite the absence of any visible life, the rabble of noise, whilst at a lower level, continued. Rising to somewhere between a crouch and standing, Steph reached around to her pack and pulled out her bow components. With smooth, quick, practiced hands, she silently assembled the takedown recurve bow she’d made from black PVC pipe. Testing the tension, she slid an arrow in. Conscious of tiring her arm, she didn’t draw. Carefully stepping onto the road, she pulled back on the arrow and put the exact amount of tension into the string to be prepared but not fully engaged.

One final step onto the road brought her fully out into the open. From a low position, Steph looked out to where the shrieking had originated and laughed quietly, releasing her draw.

In the centre of the moss-covered tarmac, around forty brown capuchin monkeys were enjoying a chestnut supper. A pile of discarded outer hulls from the nuts lay alongside them, and dozens more unopened chestnuts, fallen from the overhanging branches of the trees lining the road, were being guarded by a larger male, who’d clearly argued for the right to monitor the feast and won. The big male watched her suspiciously with his peripheral vision as he ate and occasionally screamed at his brethren when they tried their luck in taking an extra share.

Steph sat cross-legged at the edge of the road and watched the little monkeys squabble and eat for around twenty minutes. She didn’t relax, not exactly, but allowed herself to enjoy the moment. They were simple little creatures, but they understood what family and danger and survival were about. Clearly they’d thrived in the woods of south Edinburgh having, she guessed, escaped from the zoo after the plague hit.

Eventually the little troop of capuchins began to trickle away, disappearing into Hawskhill Wood, several of them with armfuls of chestnuts, perhaps for family members. Steph felt a little sad as she watched them leave.

As the last monkey’s back disappeared into the growing darkness of the trees, Steph heard an altogether more human sound nearby.

Retreating smoothly into the treeline, Steph peered through a gap in a holly bush, trying to locate the owner of the hacking cough she’d heard. Coldly moving her eye along the road, she caught a shadow moving a hundred feet to her left. The outline of a man melted out as a shadow onto the tarmac. Made long and spindly by the low-hung, setting winter sun, the slip of shadow looked gangly and monstrous and broken.

The shadow slid out across the road, followed by a man. In hooded top and with pained footsteps,
he
hobbled out, crone-like, into the road and stooped with a groan to scoop up a handful of chestnuts left behind by the capuchins. She heard a stream of quite descriptively impressive curses issued in that clipped, deliberate accent of
his.

Bracha
.

She hissed the name in her mind, feeling powerful in her concealment. She decided to play with the monster. It wasn’t a clever choice to make, but she needed to take something from him.

Watching him move, Steph confirmed that he was painfully restricted. His arms were stiff and claw-like at the hands. His face, what she could see of it, was swollen and puffy. His legs were the only part of him that still looked dangerous but the power, the strength, had been lessened, probably because of his restricted breathing due to his broken ribs. Stephanie allowed a bitter grin to pull at the corners of her mouth and permitted a sliver of pride to swell in her. Pride at what her cousin and Joey had done to the monster. But it wasn’t enough.

She felt more powerful, less vulnerable, but this man had shown her how insignificant, how piteous she’d been and he was, as a result, her only hope of redressing the balance. This broken creature was her only route to feeling something other than disgusted at who she’d been.

Even Alys hadn’t taken this man on alone. She’d said so. She and Joey, the dream team. Steph felt a bitterness that wasn’t warranted and she didn’t really hold in her heart when she thought of how invincible the pair seemed together.

Except to this man.

Confirming that Bracha was still laboriously collecting the only sustenance within his reach, Steph armed her bow once more and slipped from the treeline, out of his line of sight. Swooping silently around in an arc, she came up behind the monster.

Ten feet from him, she pulled tension silently and strongly into her bow and aimed at the back of his hood. Steph began counting to ten.

C’mon, Killer. Turn around.

She needed him to look at her. If he truly was the nightmare come to reality she needed him to be, he’d turn towards her.

After a few moments of staring at his back, Steph decided to loose her arrow. As though sensing the shift in her thoughts, Bracha’s back suddenly straightened. He grunted at the pain the movement brought. Slowly his head turned, followed by his body in an exaggeratedly slow movement.

They stood feet apart, taking in the drastic alteration to each other’s appearance. Bracha’s one good eye scanning her, whilst hers moved over him.

He was truly broken. Each of his fingers, closed loosely around a small clutch of chestnuts, was crooked and angled in unnatural positions. His face was the colour of an aubergine and his jaw was strapped tightly closed by a strip of dirty canvas that looped from the top of his head to under his chin. He couldn’t stand entirely straight and his breath seemed like something being emitted from a furnace. The smiley-face glass eye shone brightly from his blood-covered face, as did his remaining eye.

He did not speak. He didn’t grunt or move towards her. He didn’t raise his hands or take a single step. What he did was stand stock-still and force as much joviality into his face and eye as he could manage through the fog of pain he laboured under.

The bastard was delighted to see her.

Steph put an arrow into the moss between his feet. His eye lit up brighter still, clearly impressed with the change in her.