Queen of faces, p.20
Queen of Faces, page 20
‘What’s your plan, grey girl?’ I muttered. ‘Sit here and fidget?’ We needed information, and the grey girl was no interrogator.
‘Shh,’ said Gage. ‘I have a play.’ She reached into her pocket and pulled out the pillbox of Kraken’s Bone, the drug Carriwitch had given us, the poison that had killed her friend. Gage removed a single pill and broke it in half. I blinked, and it vanished.
Rutger Boote stood up. ‘Going to the pisser.’ He laughed. ‘Don’t start dancing without me.’ He stumbled towards the lavatory, scratching his black sphinx tattoos.
‘Make sure Boote stays occupied there,’ muttered Gage.
Discreetly, I slid away from the table and followed the drunk Black Arrow into the men’s toilets. He staggered into a stall, and I entered the one next to him, shutting the door behind me.
Silently, I unfolded my sword and placed the tip against the wooden partition. I lifted it, listening to the sound of Rutger Boote’s breaths, lining it up with his neck.
Then I placed my off hand on the pommel, and shoved the blade through the wall.
The neighbouring stall went quiet. I yanked the paper out, and a thump echoed from beside me. With a quick spell, I wiped the blood off my paper. With another, I yanked Boote’s jacket over his head, dragging him on to the toilet and wrapping the fabric round his neck wound. This way, it wouldn’t drip on to the floor.
It would take hours for people to find his body.
I’d say that counts as occupied.
When I strode back into the smoke-filled club, Gage was sitting in Jasper Isley’s booth, smiling and chatting. Isley wobbled back and forth, slurring his words. Gage spiked his drink. Drugging his cocktail with a mild dose of Kraken’s Bone.
As I approached the booth, the grey girl’s face morphed, transforming into Rutger Boote, the Black Arrow I’d just killed. Illusions.
Isley coughed. ‘Nima Qasemi? The traitor?’
‘The traitor.’ Gage spoke with the dead man’s voice. ‘The defector. The one who freed Korin Nameless. Killed one of ours with a pool cue.’ And two cops.
‘You’re after the bounty, aren’t you?’ Isley smiled. ‘You’re not the only one.’
Commonplace has a price on their heads. It was hardly surprising. Korin and Qasemi had defected from the group, and terrorists weren’t exactly known for their mercy. ‘Go to the fighting pit. Third and Wurther. Do what you want, but you don’t stand a chance.’
Gage laughed with the dead man’s voice. She stood, paid our bill, and led me out of the club, back into the rain. For good measure, she grabbed Jasper Isley’s cattle prod on the way out, unhooking the sheath from his belt.
‘Not bad, grey girl,’ I said. If Gage had found our targets this easily, she might really have a chance at tracking down the Black Wraith. The girl was living up to her potential, with her sharp focus and work ethic. My mother would have loved her.
My throat twinged, and I swallowed. The plan was still the same. I would use Gage to hunt down Khaiovhe, and then both would die. My father would be avenged, and so would Samuel. With those two corpses, I could go home.
A look passed over Gage’s face. ‘What’d you do with the Black Arrow in the loo?’
‘What do you think?’
Gage stared at me through the rain. ‘He wasn’t the target.’
‘He killed innocents.’
‘And you killed him in cold blood.’
‘Would you rather he shot at you first?’ I looked down at her. ‘Only a fool spares a helpless enemy, grey girl.’
Training or no, the girl’s naivety still clung to her like a tick. At this rate, she’d die anyway, with or without my sword.
We took the tram to Lowtown. After a few minutes of walking, we approached a squat brick building, smoke rising from its tiny windows, raindrops pattering on its tin roof. The sounds of cheering rang from inside, and the muffled roars of pain.
We entered a tight, dim amphitheatre, raised over a sandy pit in the middle.
Humdrums filled the stands, shaking fistfuls of cash and shouting numbers at bookies. Bartenders poured shots and fried chips in bacon grease, filling the air with pungent smoke. I stifled my nausea. Gage was lucky her nose didn’t work. She pulled her blue jacket tighter, concealing her prod and dagger.
I slid off my raincoat, revealing my tight black vest. I ran my fingers through my hair, combed it with magic, and flicked the excess water on to a wall. Gage stared at me, her lips parting. Then she jerked her gaze away.
I rolled my eyes.
In the pit, a young Shenti man darted forward, a long knife glinting in his hand. At the last second, he ducked and sliced his opponent’s thigh. The crowd cheered.
His enemy staggered backwards, clutching his leg. A muscular Kshatran boy.
This was a fighting pit. An illegal arena for blood sport. This was what passed for entertainment in Lowtown. Though to be fair, I’d been dragged to the opera once, and this was much less excruciating.
Instead of a knife, the Kshatran swung a baseball bat, clumsy and slow. The Shenti man danced around his attacks, looking almost bored as he cut his enemy twice more. A mirror of the war, when Shenten’s legions had rolled over the sands of Kshatra. But in all fairness, they’d rolled over Caimor too, until the Babel Curse.
Poor fool. The Kshatran would bleed like a prize calf, and the crowd would keep on cheering. A place this seedy would never sponsor replacement bodies.
At the far end of the stands, a pack of gamblers surrounded a tall Kshatran teenager who was wearing a bright purple flapper dress. A flush spread over her brown skin, and her black hair was oiled into waves. She exuded a casual beauty, with big eyes, full brows and heart-shaped lips. An earring resembling a cherry dangled from her left lobe, and seven empty shot glasses sat on her table.
It was our first target. Nima Qasemi. Commonplace defector, mage killer. A rabid, unpredictable hit man. Korin Nameless, the bombmaker, was nowhere to be seen.
‘Twenty to one on the Shenti!’ a man bellowed at her.
‘Twenty to one, yes!’ The girl hunched over with her legs spread. Her bright red lips slurped down a shot. ‘My countrymen are strong and hardy!’
‘Fifteen to one!’ Another gambler, eager to exploit the foreign drunk.
In the pit, the Kshatran man swung his bat down like an axe. His opponent spun round and sliced his shoulder.
The girl flinched at the blow, then burped. ‘Yes, fifteen to one! Bokhoresh!’ She spoke with a heavy Kshatran accent. Odd, for someone who’d lived in Caimor since she was eight. The alcohol probably wasn’t helping. Only a fool gambled drunk.
I tapped the shoulder of a passing bookie. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘I’ll bet three hundred against that moron.’
Below us, the Shenti fighter’s knife darted forward, and the Kshatran dropped his bat, clutching his bleeding hand. As he looked down, the Shenti man reached up his sleeve and flung out a cone of sand into his opponent’s face. The bleeding Kshatran bent over, yelling. Nima Qasemi flinched again, blinking rapidly.
The Shenti went in for the kill. The blade sliced at his opponent’s throat.
And the wounded Kshatran turned into a blur.
Still blinded, the Kshatran grabbed the Shenti’s wrist. In three fluid movements, he snapped his fingers, kicked in his knee and smashed a fist into his throat.
The Shenti fell back, choking, and the Kshatran stomped on his face with a boot heel.
Groans erupted among the stands.
In the blink of an eye, the Kshatran had gone from a clumsy amateur to an expert. An act. His incompetence had been for show.
Angry gamblers pressed towards Nima Qasemi, shouting.
She giggled. ‘Kshatran strong! I’m a lucky! Go to – go to pit mathter to depothit my winningth.’
One of the furious gamblers slipped through the crowd, approaching from Qasemi’s blind spot. As he raised his fist, the girl slammed her ninth shot glass on the table, hard enough to crack it. Her other hand moved so fast I could barely see it, jamming a short, fat revolver into the man’s armpit.
‘This pistol fires twelve-gauge shotgun shells.’ Qasemi was suddenly sober, the accent gone. ‘You need magic to steady your hand, or the recoil breaks your wrist. At this range, it would hit you like . . . a grenade in a watermelon.’
The man backed away, and the crowd with him. Nima Qasemi gathered her winnings and threw on a ragged purple raincoat over her dress. She strode towards the exit.
‘What’s the play, Wes?’ muttered Gage.
‘She’s using a gun,’ I said, scowling. ‘Mages aren’t supposed to use guns.’
‘Wes?’
‘Guns are Humdrum weapons,’ I said. ‘We fight with our minds, not primitive boom sticks.’
‘Wes!’ Gage hissed. ‘She’s about to leave.’
Hopeless. ‘Just use Rainbow Veil,’ I said. ‘We’ll follow her home and have a chat with her and this Korin Nameless. Explain the importance of joining our side.’
‘What if she attacks us?’
‘Keep that prod handy,’ I said. ‘And keep your eyes peeled for booby traps.’
As Qasemi passed us, Gage threw an illusion over her eyes and ears, hiding us. We followed her on to the street, the stolen prod tucked into Gage’s raincoat. The rain had died down, and pedestrians still filled the dark roads.
Too many witnesses, said my memory of Samuel. His voice rang like a warning. Follow her somewhere private.
Qasemi was cooperating, striding away from the crowds. She devoured a Nekean pork cutlet burger from a place called Tonkatsu Cat, a repulsive monstrosity overflowing with sauce, paired with a giant milkshake. The streets grew emptier, the buildings darker, as we tailed her further down the slopes of Mount Elwar.
Gage pulled down the hood of her raincoat and slid on her red dust mask, covering her face with its painted eye. In the darkness, she looked haunting, like a creature with three eyes and no mouth.
Ten minutes away from the crowds, Nima Qasemi slid into an abandoned street. Empty townhouses towered on both sides, bursting with faded luxury. Chipped wood, splintered balconies and tattered curtains. The street sloped into the water, towards flooded brick houses overgrown with vines. As Gage followed Qasemi, something moved out of the corner of my eye. On instinct, I bent my knees, unfolding my sword.
Qasemi spun round. In a single motion, she punched Gage’s neck and swept her legs out from under her. Gage fell, and Qasemi’s knee slammed into her head.
Time seemed to drag, like the world was straining through invisible mud. Gage dropped in slow motion, her arms limp by her sides. That shouldn’t be possible. The illusions made her invisible to Qasemi.
As she fell, Qasemi’s milkshake shot out of the glass and spattered on my face, blinding me.
I wiped my eyes clean, and to my right, a boy kicked open a door on the first floor of a house. He strode outside, aiming a rifle over the balcony. I sprinted to my left, and the gun cracked. A bullet whizzed by my foot, ripping a chunk out of the cobblestones. Another bullet zipped by my head, and I dived behind a rusty news-stand, crouching to take cover.
I peeked over the news-stand, and the boy fired another shot at me, forcing me back down. In the darkness, it took me a moment to recognise his face. A tall, handsome Kshatran: the boy from the fighting pit. He wore black trousers and a wrinkled shirt, a grin plastered on his face. He’d opened the top buttons of his shirt, and a cap sat askew on his head. Like Qasemi, he had an effortless beauty: a sharp jaw and a thick brow that could hammer nails, with shallow cuts all over his skin. And like Qasemi, he wore a ratty purple raincoat and a cherry-shaped earring, hanging from his right lobe.
Twins? Or siblings, at least. Korin Nameless was a Shenti bombmaker, not a Kshatran pit fighter. This was someone else. But who?
The answers could wait. Whoever he was, this boy had me pinned. If I budged from this news-stand, he could fill me with holes, and I’d never learned the Bullet Shield.
Gage lay in Nima Qasemi’s arms, unconscious. The Kshatran held Gage’s own butterfly knife to her throat. She smiled, taking a huge bite from her katsu burger.
‘Not bad, squids,’ she said with a full mouth. ‘I almost didn’t notice you. Drop your weapon and I might not cut her throat.’
‘Let her go and I might not cut yours.’
Qasemi laughed. ‘Bold words for a boy in a corner. You’re here for the bounty, aren’t you?’
She thought we were working for Commonplace, not Carriwitch. ‘What bounty?’ I said. ‘I’m here because you cheated. You two rigged that fight in the arena, didn’t you? You almost stole three hundred pounds off me.’
Qasemi shrugged, then looked down at Gage, pressing the knife to her windpipe. ‘That’s them, isn’t it?’ Gage’s stolen cattle prod sat in her raincoat, hidden from view.
‘Who?’ I said.
‘The Whisper Specialist. The illusionist with the glowing blue eye. The one who killed Lyna Wethers.’ She poked Gage’s cheek. ‘You have a reputation now.’ She snorted. ‘I would have expected better.’
I watched Qasemi and the Kshatran boy, racing to come up with a plan. My fists clenched. A pressure built in my chest, a roaring tension demanding to be released. Do something, said the Samuel in my head. Move, or you’re both dead.
I growled. Damn it all.
I smirked at Qasemi.
Then I reached my Pith into Gage’s cattle prod, controlling it with my magic. In two sharp motions, I yanked it out of the sheath and jabbed it behind her into Qasemi’s stomach. I darted out of cover and sprinted towards the boy on the balcony, bracing for the gunshot from his rifle.
Qasemi let go of Gage and collapsed, twitching, her nerves filled with electricity.
Before I could jump towards him, the rifle dropped from the boy’s hands. It clattered to the street, unfired. Above us, the boy fell face first off the balcony. He snapped through layers of vines and crashed on to the cobblestones.
I blinked. What just happened?
I had shocked Nima Qasemi, and somehow, both she and her companion had been affected. Slowly, my muscles relaxed as I stared at the prone form of the boy who’d almost shot me.
I’m alive.
I was alive, and bullets weren’t whizzing past my face. In a single blow, both our enemies had fallen unconscious. But I wasn’t sure why.
Gage stood, coughing, massaging her temples and groaning. ‘How did you know,’ she wheezed, ‘that would happen? That hurting her would hurt the boy?’
‘I didn’t,’ I said, grabbing the guns and pocketing them. ‘I thought I’d get shot.’
‘You—’ Gage stared at me, blinking.
‘But their minds must be connected, somehow. Feeling each other’s pain.’ I grabbed the prod and jabbed the boy with it. Both he and Qasemi twitched in unison. ‘Take out one, and you take out both.’
Gage scowled. ‘Now how do we find Korin Nameless?’
‘We can discuss that.’ A man’s voice echoed in the distance.
We spun round to see a car on the street behind us. The headlights were off, and the engine was dead silent, muffled by magic, I’d wager. Its doors swung open, and six men in suits stepped out, fireballs glowing in their palms. Half had black sphinx tattoos on the backs of their hands. I recognised the closest face: Jasper Isley, the man Gage had drugged earlier. The Kraken’s Bone must’ve worn off. He sported the most expensive suit of the bunch, a two-piece with a black trilby hat.
Commonplace thugs. Black Arrows and mercenaries.
The group approached us. I bent my knees, quietly readying for a fight.
‘Exceptional!’ said Jasper Isley, striding over the unmoving bodies. ‘An astounding feat of strategy and talent.’
‘You followed us?’ I said.
‘Of course, my dear boy.’ Isley smirked. ‘After you drugged me and killed my co-worker, it became patently obvious where you were going. All that was left was to watch for you in the fighting pit and tail you after.’ He straightened his tie, looking at Gage. ‘You were at Clementine’s house. The Edgar with the illusions. Ordinarily, I might be looking for your head. But Commonplace wants Nima Qasemi more than you. They’ve been hunting him for days.’
I blinked. ‘I’m sorry, did you just say him? Nima Qasemi is a girl.’
Isley and the others laughed. None of them extinguished their fireballs. Isley pointed at the Kshatran pit fighter. ‘Does that look like a girl to you?’
My head spun. The boy was Nima Qasemi? Not the girl? Had we been chasing the wrong target this whole time?
‘I assigned him to Commonplace’s intelligence team,’ said Isley. ‘They were interviewing a new prisoner.’
‘Torture,’ said Gage through clenched teeth.
Stop talking, grey girl. I counted six men in this group, all of them mages. Each one out of range of her illusions. If we fought, they’d deep-fry us and serve us with tartar sauce.
Isley shrugged. ‘It was a great posting. Low risk, good pay. Then the bastard went crazy. Shot up the whole building and freed the prisoner he was supposed to be guarding.’ He chuckled. ‘The boss doesn’t like traitors. She has plans for him and his friend.’
Korin Nameless. The Shenti bombmaker. He was the friend, no doubt about it. The freed prisoner.
‘So, now you know we’re reasonable,’ said Isley. ‘Here’s my deal. You two are accomplished mages. Remarkable lads. Were we to fight, one or two of my men could get hurt.’
The others chuckled. Isley held up a hand, and they fell silent.
‘Commonplace’s bounty for this boy, alive, is half a million pounds. I’ll pay you half of that, right now, in assets.’ He gestured to his watch and the car behind him. ‘My colleagues and I will apprehend this dangerous criminal, and we can go our separate ways. This cut-throat almost tricked you out of three hundred pounds in the fighting pit. You get almost a thousand times that for your trouble. Sounds rather generous to me.’
‘She – he freed a torture victim,’ said Gage. ‘And you want to torture him for that.’
