Exiles in Arms: Night of the Necrotech (25 page)

CHAPTER IX

T
he darkest corner in the Ten Kings was a miserable little rat hole where the room made a sudden sharp angle to accommodate the building next door. The ceiling was lower by about two feet, forcing anyone trying to navigate this part of the establishment to bend himself nearly in half, unless he was a dwarf or a gobber. Brandle Wester, never a man to pass up even the most remote chance for profit, had squeezed a table and pair of chairs into the truncated corner against the off chance that a dwarf down on his luck or a gobber who’d taken a head-dive from the rigging might decide to patronize his tavern. Typically, the corner remained empty.

It was therefore something of a surprise to Brandle when a customer secreted himself at the table under the lowered roof. Not a gobber or dwarf, but a full-grown human. The keeper restrained the curiosity this circumstance provoked, however. One thing a man in his profession quickly learned was discretion. So long as the customer continued to pay for gunshot rum, Brandle was more than happy to let him play hermit in the dingy little corner.

Rutger tapped his foot impatiently as he sat at the dilapidated table, swilling the pungent mix of black powder and alcohol that Brandle passed off as rum. It was vile-tasting stuff with a burn that made his throat feel raw, not to mention a rotten-egg smell that would turn a farrow sick. He didn’t want anything stronger, though, not when he still had so much to do to find Taryn.

He’d spent most of the day scouring every dive and gambling den he could find, searching out anybody he could call friend or acquaintance, anyone who either owed him a favor or might be willing to sell him information. He’d even been so bold as to try to strong-arm his way into Lorca’s headquarters, but the watch dragged him off.

He still didn’t believe the claims of Lorca’s gangsters that their boss wasn’t around. It had taken Lieutenant Trask’s observation that if he let himself get killed by syndicate thugs he’d never find Taryn to quiet Rutger down. When the watch turned him loose, Trask promised to contact him with whatever information they could turn up. He’d agreed to send word that evening to the Ten Kings.

From his shadowy corner, Rutger stared across the miserable little tavern with its grubby appointments and grubbier clientele. He looked over to the table he had been sharing with Taryn when Marko crept back into their lives with another of his slippery schemes. She’d wanted nothing to do with the thief and even less to do with whatever plan the treacherous weasel had been brewing in his twisted brain. If not for Rutger himself, Taryn would never have become entangled in the chain of events that had led to her death.

Rutger took another pull from the chipped clay cup, hissing in pain as the rum burned its way to his belly. All his fault, from the very start. Why had they been desperate enough to even listen to Marko? Because Rex had gone berserk and torn up an entire street. Why had the warjack gone crazy? Because Rutger thought he could keep the ’jack’s cortex intact and unfazed even after the machine had been in the service of Ariztid Olt, because he didn’t want to lose the experience and initiative of a veteran cortex. After the machine had wreaked havoc, the wanted posters started. There again Rutger’s presence made things worse. The watch’s reward was small enough that it would attract only desperate and inexperienced hunters. But because of who Rutger was, because of his past, one of the deadliest bounty killers in Caen was on their trail. Kalder would have had no interest at all if not for the chance to exact retribution on him.

That was why Taryn had agreed, despite her loathing and distrust of Marko. She’d seen the fear in Rutger’s eyes when he heard Kalder was looking for him. She knew the only way to help her friend was to make enough money to bribe the watch into rescinding the bounty and thereby stripping Kalder of his hunting license.

It had been Rutger’s worry, his fight, not hers. That made it all the more painful for him to appreciate that he’d gotten Taryn into the events that followed. The Scrapyard, Vulger’s mansion, and that final, terrible fight over the channel.

She’d appreciated the dangers of facing the Nightmare Empire better than he did, probably from the start. He was too principled to face reality with the severity it demanded. How many times had Taryn scolded him for bestowing their last half galleon on some poor beggar? How many times had she scolded him for what she called “charity work” simply because he sympathized with the aims and ambitions of an employer? And he would quip that perhaps he was naive, but he still clung to a faith in the powers of good over those of darkness. He told her that evil, no matter how strong, must ever be opposed with courage and determination.

Rutger smashed his fist against the table, clenching his teeth in impotent rage. Where was Trask? Every minute he wasted, Taryn was in the clutches of those fiends! The image of her plummeting to the channel blazed through his mind. And then that still more hideous memory of the octopus-like monster swooping down, catching her up in its metal coils.

He could see those tentacles wrapping about Taryn, tightening and tightening, crushing the breath from her, squeezing the life from her as it flitted across the sky.

Rutger was looking down into his cup when the bat-wing doors of the Ten Kings swung open and a new customer walked into the tavern. He heard someone speak his name and glanced toward the bar to see who was asking Brandle about him.

It took only a heartbeat for the shock to overwhelm the depression, guilt, and anxiety filling Rutger’s head. The mercenary nearly fell back in his chair as he found himself looking upon a man whose face he’d never be able to forget. A man who was supposed to be dead. The bounty killer Kalder.

Rutger’s hand dropped to the hand cannon holstered at his side, fingers tightening about the grip. He listened as Kalder interrogated Brandle, trying to drag his whereabouts out of the keeper. Brandle, to his credit, was refusing to squeal on one of his patrons, though the man squirmed uncomfortably when Kalder said he’d been watching the Ten Kings and waiting for Rutger to come out. The bounty hunter emphasized his statement by glancing about the tavern.

“I don’t see a back door,” Kalder said, his gloved hand tightening about the front of Brandle’s apron, pulling the keeper halfway over the bar. “So I have to ask myself how he got out of here. Maybe there’s a secret door. Maybe we should look for it together.” The bounty hunter slammed Brandle’s head against the counter, then frowned at the dented wood. “Hmmm, not there,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to look someplace else.”

The fear Rutger had always held for this notorious hunter twisted itself into raw hate. If not for the threat of Kalder looking for him, they’d never have gone to the Scrapyard and become enmeshed in the struggle against Cryx. Taryn had said Kalder had been killed there. Rutger didn’t know how he’d survived, but he intended to fix that problem.

“Try looking over here,” Rutger said. His boot kicked one of the chairs out from his shadowy corner.

Kalder spun around, dragging Brandle over the bar and holding the keeper’s body between himself and the corner. The lowered ceiling forced him to duck down to see Rutger. The bounty hunter flinched when he saw the hand cannon aimed at him.

“I only came to talk, Shaw.”

“Pick your last words with care then,” Rutger said.

Kalder smiled coldly. “I was told you’re looking for someone. I can help you find her.”

Rutger’s face pulled back into a hateful sneer. Taryn had been right again. Trask or somebody in Parvolo’s command was feeding information to the bounty hunter. The rat had told Kalder he’d be at the Ten Kings and why. The loathsomeness of such a cruel deception made his blood boil.

“That’s a low trick, even for bounty-hunting scum,” Rutger said. He was watching for even the slightest chance to fire at Kalder without hitting Brandle too. So far, the bounty hunter had been careful with his human shield, but there was always a chance he’d slip.

Kalder’s eyes darted from side to side, taking in the Ten Kings’ other patrons. Accustomed to strife and violence, few of them had bothered to leave the tavern when trouble broke out. Several were even eying the bottles behind the bar, obviously wondering how much longer Brandle would be detained.

“You should hear me out, Shaw,” Kalder said. “Or are you more comfortable believing Taryn’s dead?” The words were like oil poured on the tiny ember of disbelief still burning inside Rutger. They filled his mind with a new horror, a new despair more awful than what he already felt. Taryn in the clutches of the Nightmare Empire, her body and soul polluted by their obscene necromancy and technology. Taryn, rising from death to serve Cryx as one of their undead abominations.

Still, he couldn’t forget that this was Kalder, a human vulture who would stoop to anything to claim his blood money. Even in the depths of his despair, could Rutger pin his hopes on a bounty hunter?

“Sit down and talk,” said Rutger. He nodded his chin to the chair his kick had sent flying. “There’s your chair.”

“I’d prefer somewhere more discreet.” Kalder shook his head, but there was a cunning smile on his face. “Put the hand cannon away, Shaw.” The bounty hunter shoved Brandle to one side. “I don’t want to shoot you, and you don’t want to shoot me.

“Not if you want to see the woman again.”

Rutger followed the bounty hunter into an abandoned fish shop a few miles from the Ten Kings. The shop had been prosperous enough until it found itself in the middle of a turf war between High Captain Kilbride and his rival, Riordan. After the third time the proprietor was coerced into paying protection to a different gang and then had his shop vandalized by their counterparts, he no longer had the funds to eke out a living on Captain’s Isle. His neighbors said the poor fellow had gone to live among his suppliers on Crabbeggar Island.

The shop was in shambles; any salvageable furnishings had been looted months ago. What was left were a few piles of splintered wood that once might have been crates and a few strings of dried eel too tough for even the rats to gnaw on. As he stepped into the shop, Rutger brushed aside one of the hanging strands of desiccated eel, disturbing a cloud of flies.

He knew Kalder could be leading him into a trap. Rutger wasn’t so naive as to trust the bounty hunter. With a man of Kalder’s stripe, no treachery was off the table so long as it brought him closer to his blood money. At the same time, Rutger didn’t care overmuch what happened to him now. Not with Taryn gone. Let Kalder march him into a trap: he would meet it and survive or he would fall. But he would make sure the bounty hunter came with him on the dark journey to Urcaen.

The moan of creaking wood echoed loudly through the abandoned shop. Rutger didn’t turn at the sound but instead pointed his hand cannon squarely at the bounty killer’s belly.

“A cat,” Kalder said, pointing toward the source of the sound. Rutger kept his eyes and the barrel of his gun trained on him. Kalder grimaced. “Is that necessary?”

“Yes,” Rutger said. He didn’t need to explain further. Kalder could read in Rutger’s eyes that it would take only the slightest provocation to make him fire.

“Listen to me,” Kalder said, carefully keeping his own hands well away from his pistols. “This isn’t necessary. I need you just as much as you need me.”

“So you keep saying.” Kalder’s hints that Taryn might be alive had set the mercenary wondering. He’d thought about how the Cryxian machines typically functioned when they weren’t operating under the orders of a guiding intelligence. The things would kill anything around them. The strange iron lich hadn’t done that. It had swooped in, caught Taryn, and flown away. The more Rutger thought about that, the more he believed the thing had been operating on instructions Azaam shouted to it before her plunge into the channel. Perhaps she had been controlling the creature after all.

Keeping his gun trained on the bounty hunter, Rutger waved his other hand at the room around them. “You wanted privacy, Kalder, you’ve got it. Say your piece and make it good.”

Kalder seated himself on the remains of a lobster cage and stared up at Rutger. “I know what you’re thinking, Shaw. I’m trying to trick you, trying to get that bounty on your head. I’m not, I assure you. I haven’t been interested in you at all. I’m after your friend. I have been from the start.”

Rutger wasn’t sure what he’d expected to hear, but this wasn’t it. His eyes went wide with surprise.

Kalder laughed. “She didn’t tell you, did she? A vindictive harpy back in Llael is offering a fat little bounty for Taryn di la Rovissi.” He shook his head in disgust. “I caught her in the Scrapyard, but I waited around to finish you off after your fight. I know how sentimental you get and didn’t want to be looking over my shoulder all the way back.