Promise of Blood (57 page)

A group of men looked at each other and walked toward Adamat from the bar. The type looked contagious: whip-lean, sickly-looking men wearing aprons over white shirts. Adamat addressed the one in front.

“Hello, Teef.”

The man was in the process of drawing a razor from his pocket when he locked eyes on Adamat’s face. His eyes went wide. He fumbled his razor, nearly dropping it. Adamat’s cane flicked out, catching Teef on the wrist. The razor went flying.

His comrades didn’t recognize Adamat. Their razors came out true, and pasty-white hands lunged toward Adamat, blades held out front. Adamat flinched.

The three men around Teef all had the same reaction at the crack of gunpowder. Their razors fell from their hands. Surprise crossed their faces, then pain as they clutched at bleeding wrists. Three bullets had gone clean through three wrists without a pistol being drawn. Adamat dealt Teef a glancing blow on the cheek with the tip of his cane, then held it at the Barber’s neck. He looked over his shoulder. SouSmith stood just inside the door, eyes closed as he leaned heavily against the wall. Sabon stood silently to the side, eyes traveling around the inside of the barbershop as if he were casually perusing a store. Only the cloud of powder rising from him indicated what he’d done.

“What the pit?” Teef said, his voice cracking. “What are you doing? Cut them down!” He glanced at his comrades, and his mouth fell open. “What happened…?” His mouth worked like a fish out of the water. He stared at Sabon, and realization spread on his face. Adamat pressed the tip of his cane against Teef’s throat.

“Cut them down, eh?” Adamat said. “That what you told Coel and the other two you sent to kill me last night?”

“I swear it wasn’t personal, Adamat.” Teef held his hands out in front of him, glancing nervously at the space between Sabon and Adamat. His eyes stopped over Adamat’s shoulder. “Oh shit.”

“They didn’t tell you SouSmith was my bodyguard, did they?” Adamat said. He smiled at the panic in Teef’s eyes. “He put one of your men’s head through a brick wall. It’ll take me hours to scrub the blood out of my front hall. Now, who hired you, Teef?”

“I swear, I didn’t want to, but—”

“It was a lot of money, I know. Must have been a king’s ransom. Tell me, how many times did I let you walk, back before you ran the Black Street Barbers? When you were just a stupid kid with talent with a blade and a whole run of bad luck? I don’t appreciate favors being paid back like that, Teef.” He pressed harder on Teef’s throat, and shook his head slightly when Teef tried to step back. The Barber quaked.

“Where the pit are they?” he screamed suddenly. “Help!”

Adamat gave Teef a long-suffering sigh. “Five squads of Tamas’s best soldiers are rounding up your boys, Teef. Razors are a pretty thing in a close fight, but not against seasoned riflemen with bayonets fixed.” Gunshots went off outside the building as if to punctuate Adamat’s words. There was a scramble of feet on the floor above them, then the thud of a body hitting the floor.

Teef clenched his fists, but kept them out in front of him. “We’d give you a run,” he said, lip curling, “if all our boys were here, we’d give you a pit-damned run.”

“Sure you would,” Adamat said. “Who hired you to kill me?”

Teef’s jaw clicked shut.

Adamat took a deep breath. He didn’t have time for this right now.

Adamat felt himself pushed gently aside. He lowered his cane as SouSmith stepped up to Teef. The boxer was at least a head taller than Teef, and twice as wide. Adamat bit his tongue. SouSmith was covered in a cold sweat, and he clenched his teeth in pain. He reached out and took one of Teef’s hands.

“I’ll break this one first,” SouSmith rumbled.

“Ricard,” Teef said. The name came out like a startled curse word.

“Not good enough,” Adamat said.

He heard a snap as SouSmith bent Teef’s finger back far enough to touch his wrist. Teef screamed in agony. One of the other Barbers stood up and reached out for Teef, only to receive SouSmith’s boot on his chest. He was kicked halfway across the floor. Adamat put out a hand, steadying SouSmith when he stumbled. SouSmith regained his balance and twisted Teef’s wrist.

The Barber sank to the floor screaming. Adamat tapped SouSmith on the shoulder with his cane. The boxer stepped back.

“Who hired you?” Adamat said.

“The Proprietor!” Teef squealed through a string of curses. “He came in here looking for your head!”

“At least make your lies plausible.” Adamat flicked his cane against Teef’s wrist. He felt a pang of pity as Teef screamed again, but forced it down. Teef’s blades came to Adamat’s home, where his wife and children slept, and tried to kill him. His family would have been killed in their beds, every one of them, if they had been there. Adamat knew how the Barbers worked. They were as cold and ruthless as Lord Vetas. Adamat raised his cane to bring it down hard.

“A priest.”

Adamat stopped. “A priest? Come now.”

“It was a priest,” Teef said. He sucked in shaky breaths, chest heaving as he talked, tears running down his face. “He came in here yesterday morning. He was crying the whole time, kept asking Kresimir for forgiveness.”

“What did he look like?” Adamat asked.

“A priest. White robes and sandals. Blond hair. A little taller than you. A mole on his right cheek. He wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

Siemone. Adamat felt his mouth go dry.

“How much?”

“Five hundred thousand krana.”

Adamat nearly dropped his cane. “What? For me?”

Teef wheezed a laugh. “Two jobs. Fifteen thousand for you.”

“And the rest?” Adamat looked around. He’d trusted it to good fortune that there’d been only a few of the Barbers around. He realized now why there weren’t more: They were at a job. The thought made his skin crawl. That made at least forty Barbers unaccounted for, maybe more.

Sabon stepped forward and dragged Teef to his feet by the front of his shirt. “Is it Tamas?” Sabon said. He shook the Barber. “You double-crossing swine! Is it?”

“By the pit, no!” Teef said. “There’s not that kind of money in the world.”

“Who is it, then?”

“A chef,” Teef said. “Some big fat man in charge of the feast. My employer wanted him cut down in public. We don’t normally do that, but for the amount he offered…” Teef trailed off.

Sabon dropped him. Teef tried to catch himself, called out in pain. Sabon gave him a look of disgust. “You’ve made a terrible mistake,” he said. He glanced at Adamat. “Take them to Sabletooth. I have to go.”

Sabon was gone without another word, and Adamat saw that it was now just he, SouSmith, and the four Barbers. He exchanged a glance with SouSmith. The boxer shrugged. Adamat lifted Teef’s chin with the tip of his cane. “What’s so important about a chef?” he asked. Mihali, he recalled the chef’s name. Had the arch-diocel remembered the beating Mihali gave him in Tamas’s presence? It was a lot of money for revenge.

Teef shook his head. Adamat moved his cane threateningly. Teef’s head shake was more emphatic. “I don’t know, Kresimir damn you! It was just a job.”

“And you have no idea where the money came from?” Charlemund. Siemone wouldn’t do dirty work for anyone else. Charlemund had been trying to frame Ricard all along.

Teef hesitated just a second too long.

“I suggest you remain ignorant,” Adamat said. “Or your fate will be worse than it already is.” Tamas would destroy Teef. Adamat almost pitied the Barber. Almost. He stepped away from Teef as a troop of soldiers entered the room. “Get them to Sabletooth,” Adamat said. “All of them. I have to go to find the field marshal.”

“It’ll take hours to get across the city with the festival on,” SouSmith shouted after him.

Adamat barely heard as he ran out of the building. He needed to tell Tamas about Charlemund before it was too late.

Chapter 35

Taniel’s chest heaved, his legs ached. A few short hours of rest just before dawn was all they’d taken in the last two days. Only his powder trance let him keep the pace, but he always found himself outdistancing his companions. Two of the Watchers had collapsed from exhaustion. They left them where they were and continued on. Those men would find their own way back down the mountain.

The going was easier than Taniel’s last ascent. Some snow had melted, the rest had been cleared by the Mountainwatch. There’d been some travel between the Mountainwatch and Novi’s Perch for resupply since winter. Campfires and old horse droppings remained from resupply caravans sent to the monastery.

Those didn’t concern Taniel. What concerned him was the more recent passage. They’d yet to catch sight of the Kez, but they’d found two camps. There was scat and tracks enough for at least a hundred men and pack animals to boot. That many men shouldn’t have been able to sneak past the Mountainwatch, yet somehow they had.

They found the third camp midday. It was tucked away off the main trail, down by a waterfall that was still half-frozen despite summer being almost upon them. Taniel checked the ashes of a cook fire. They were still warm.

He took stock of the camp. It brought back memories of camps not so unlike this in faraway Fatrasta when he and the natives tracked Kez patrols and lay ambushes for them. Only that hadn’t been in the high mountains, and those patrols weren’t filled with Privileged. And Wardens.

His chest went cold as he kicked something with his toe. He picked it up, flipped it around in his hand. It was a metal ball just about the size of a man’s fist. An air reservoir from a Warden’s air rifle.

“How far behind them?” Bo asked when the rest of the group had caught up to Taniel. Bo looked less well each day. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes underlined by black bags. Their punishing pace had done him ill.

“Hours,” Taniel said. He tossed Bo the air reservoir. “I should have expected this.”

“Where there are Kez Privileged, there are Wardens,” Bo said.

He dropped the metal sphere, only to have Ka-poel swoop in and pluck it from the ground. She examined it closely and tucked it into her rucksack.

“We’re gaining on them,” Taniel said.

“Close to the top, too,” Bo replied. “We’re not far from Novi’s Perch.”

“Everyone rested?” Taniel asked Fesnik. The young Watcher staggered to the waterfall to refill his canteen.

Fesnik groaned. “Pit, no. We supposed to be able to fight after a climb like this?”

“Fight and win,” Taniel said. He nudged Fesnik with his toe.

“Right, right,” Fesnik said. He climbed to his feet. “Come on,” he called to the others. “We’re moving again.”

Taniel watched them head back to the main trail. These were hard men, Mountainwatchers. Yet none had his advantage with the powder, and even he felt sapped from the climb. What good would they do against Julene and the other Privileged? How could they possibly win a fight?

Taniel fell in beside Ka-poel on the trail. She held a blank-faced wax figurine, pushing and shaping the wax with her fingers.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

She tucked the doll under one arm. Expecting an explanation of hand signs, Taniel leaned closer. She punched him in the shoulder.

“Ow.”

She shooed him away with one hand and returned to her project. He fell back beside Bo.

Bo looked troubled.

“You seem cheery,” Taniel said. Bo’s expression didn’t change. The sarcasm seemed lost on him.

“We might be too late,” Bo said.

“We’re making better time than I expected.”

“We have to be there during the solstice.”

“Don’t worry,” Taniel said. “We will.” Taniel spotted smoke in the sky. He grabbed Bo’s shoulder and pointed.

“Is that the mountain?” Taniel said. He couldn’t remember being able to see the smoking crater from here on his last journey up.

Bo paled. “No,” he said. “Too close. That’s Novi’s Perch.”

Word spread and they redoubled their efforts. They reached the Perch within an hour.

The wall of the monastery that effectively ended this portion of the trail had been smashed in. It looked like a giant had stepped up to the side of the mountain and simply slapped it with the flat of his hand. Some of the old rock remained where it met the mountain. The rest had fallen away into the abyss and was invisible against the stone of the gulch far, far below. The monastery was exposed like the side of a dollhouse, hallways and stairs bare to the elements.

The ruins lay like a smoking animal carcass, splintered timbers jutting out from the rubble like broken ribs. In some places the rock itself had melted away. The invisible fist that had destroyed a great part of the monastery had also destroyed a chunk of the cliff, and the hallway that led from one end of the monastery to the other was now divided by a fissure twenty paces across.

“We can go back, and head down one of the halls,” Fesnik said. “There’s a warren inside the mountain—that’s where the rest of the monastery is. Shouldn’t take but a few minutes.” His voice was quiet, almost reverent. He gazed about with a look of sadness. Taniel realized that the Watchers must have known these monks.

They found the hallways just as Fesnik had said. Once they were inside the mountain, the smoke got worse. They could barely breathe as they made their way through the crisscross of hallways. Rina’s dogs whined despite her rebukes. Taniel paused by one wall, noting a splatter of blood. An odd chip had been made in the stone. He ran his fingers over it. From a bullet, for certain.