Blood Royal Page 3

  ‘You should have let him kill me,’ grumbled Derindi. He dried his hands on the rough cloth of his clothes before trying to pick up the bottle again. Perhaps the foul liquid would kill him. ‘Bleeding to death through a bloody stump would be like dying in bed compared to what’ll happen to me if I talk.’

  Derindi thought about running. He looked at the door some metres past the bar and wondered about bolting for it, heading further downhive where neither Jerico nor Svend and his gangers could find him. Jerico wouldn’t dare shoot him in the back if he ran, would he? They needed him, and even in the Underhive murder is – well it’s at least frowned upon, especially in front of this many witnesses. Derindi looked at the bounty hunter, his teeth clenched into a tight-lipped smile as he picked at the hole in his shirt. Jerico was obviously still pissed off about the rip. And then there was the matter of the trousers. Kal was clearly a man fond of his clothing, and Derindi had thus far made an impressive fist of ruining damn near all of it. Derindi decided not to chance running.

  ‘Oh, it won’t matter whether you talk or not,’ said Jerico with another forced smile. ‘Everyone will think you squealed either way.’ He reached into his pocket and Derindi flinched, spraying sweat from his chin onto his shoulder. But when Jerico’s hand came back out, it was full of tokens and bonds. He picked one bond from his palm and held it up to look at it.

  Derindi saw the gangers at the bar ogle at the ceramite piece as Jerico pretended to check its authenticity. Then, with a flourish, the bounty hunter slapped the bond onto the table and spoke in an overly loud voice. ‘That’s just the down payment, Derindi. You’ll get the rest when we get our bounty for Svend. Thanks!’

  Kal flicked the ceramite bond across the table at Derindi, who caught it out of reflex before it slammed into his stomach. Scabbs reached out and shook Derindi’s hands, his wide smile causing a cascade of loose skin to fall from his cheeks. ‘Yeah, thanks, Derindi. You did the smart thing here,’ he said out loud. Far louder than was necessary, in fact.

  Then, in a softer voice, Scabbs added, ‘You’re right, Derindi. Don’t tell us anything. Besides, all we need to do now is sit back and wait for Svend to kill you, and then capture him while he’s digging that bond out of your pocket.’ Derindi pulled away from the scabby bounty hunter, and immediately noticed that the ceramite piece was no longer in his hand. Scabbs’s smile looked more sincere now.

  Yolanda leaned in toward Derindi. ‘Or you can tell us where to find Svend right now, and maybe we’ll get to him before he gets to you.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jerico. He picked at the hole in his shirt again. ‘Maybe.’

  Captain Katerin took a break from the mound of paperwork on his desk and rubbed two podgy digits into his tired eyes. He hated this part of the job. Weapon requisition forms, guard rotation schedules, disciplinary reports, promotion applications, leave requests – it all came across his desk. Most of it simply needed a signature, but he had to read every piece of paper to make sure his subordinates were doing their jobs correctly and, more importantly, that they weren’t trying to deceive him in some way. The last three Captains of the Royal Guard had lost their positions due to ‘gross incompetence’, which was just a fancy way of saying their subordinates had screwed up. That was not going to happen to Almar Katerin.

  The blurry office came back into focus after he pulled the fingers from his eyes, and Katerin practically fell off his chair. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ he roared, staring up into the hawkish features of Hermod Kauderer. He jumped to his feet, snatched a laspistol from his hip, and pointed it at the head spy. ‘Explain yourself, Kauderer. How did you sneak into my private office?’

  Kauderer remained calm in the face of the captain’s rage. He flicked at some invisible piece of fluff on his black robes and raised an eyebrow. ‘Your door was not locked, Captain,’ he said. ‘And I never sneak. I do not, however, make any sound when I walk, unlike you soldiers, who announce their presence from down the block.’

  Katerin decided not to rise to the bait. Instead, he dropped the laspistol on top of the pile of requisition forms and slumped back into his chair. ‘What do you want, Kauderer?’ he asked. ‘I have a great deal of work to do, so let’s just skip the normal banter portion of our conversation.’

  ‘Gladly,’ said Kauderer. There were chairs facing Katerin’s desk, but the master of intrigue did not sit in the presence of others. He enjoyed looking down at people and never gave up the high ground, literally or figuratively. Before continuing, however, he pulled a small device from the pocket of his tunic, flipped a switch, and set the item on Katerin’s desk. ‘To protect us from prying ears,’ he said. ‘Now, down to business as you requested. Armand Helmawr must die, and I don’t think either of us believes that bastard bounty hunter is the man for the job.’

  Katerin pushed the pile of papers aside and leaned forward, suddenly interested in what his rival was saying. ‘What do you propose?’ he asked. ‘That weasel Clein was probably right about using house resources. Our men will attract too much attention.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean we can’t direct others to do the job that you and I both know must be done.’

  ‘And done right this time,’ added Katerin. He spun the laspistol on his desk as he imagined Armand meeting with various, gruesome deaths. ‘Done completely and finally.’

  ‘You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?’ asked the Kauderer.

  Katerin nodded, a smirk growing on his face. ‘Spyrers.’

  ‘For a start, yes.’

  Dungo Bain strode into Hagen’s Hole, his metal-tipped boots clanging against the mesh floor, and slapped a token onto the bar. ‘Hagen!’ he called. ‘Snake me.’

  The current Hagen, a round man with a long beard and longer, stringy hair, sidled over to the end of the bar. After wiping his podgy hands on a brownish apron that might once have been white, he grabbed a bottle of Wildsnake from the shelf behind the bar and opened it with his last remaining teeth. He slammed the bottle down in front of the bounty hunter, making the credit token jump and sending a plume of the bitter drink sloshing onto the bar.

  Hagen wore no shirt beneath the apron, and his flabby chest and protruding gut peaked out around the edges whenever he moved. The patrons never asked nor checked to see if he wore pants. Hagen leaned over the bar to collect the token, dragging his hair and beard through the puddle in the process.

  Dungo pulled the helmet off his head and ran a hand through his thick hair as he checked himself in the mirror behind the bar. He still had helmet head, and the scar that ran from ear to ear across his chin seemed redder than usual. He scratched at the stubble around the scar as he gulped the foul liquid in the bottle, and then looked around the bar. A game was already under way in the back room, but there were few other patrons in the Hole at this time of morning. ‘Seen Bester?’ he asked.

  ‘Not since last night,’ said Hagen. ‘I thought he left with you.’

  ‘Nah, he stiffed us,’ Dungo replied. ‘Ran out for a smoke with three hundred credits in his pocket and never returned.’ He drained the bottle and spat the snake onto the floor. It flopped onto the grate, but didn’t quite make it through to the pipes. Hagen had another open bottle in front of the bounty hunter before his token even hit the bar.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Hagen. He owes me for a Snake, too.’ Hagen flipped his hair back over his shoulder, and it hit the mirror with a wet slap. ‘When I see that rat…’

  He never got to finish the statement, for at that moment Jak Skreed entered Hagen’s Hole carrying a body over his shoulder. Jak was a bull of a man, easily topping two metres tall and nearly twice as wide at the shoulders as he was at the waist. Sweat seemed to constantly glisten on his bulging, black biceps. ‘We have a problem,’ said Skreed.

  ‘Ya sure do, Jak,’ said Hagen. ‘Ya know better than to bring your bounties in here. It’s not sanitary.’

  ‘Not my bounty,’ said Jak as dropped the dead body on the floor. The corpse made an odd sound as i
t hit the metal grate, like a burlap sack full of sticks. The mouth on the body was wide open and the eyes bulged, as if the poor soul had been screaming at the moment of his death. The skin on the arms and face was cracked and leathery, and had shrunk so much you could see the contour of the bones underneath. He looked like he’d been dead and buried for months. But Dungo noticed the faded green battle suit and knew immediately that couldn’t be the case.

  Jak confirmed his suspicion. ‘It’s Bester,’ he said. ‘Or it was yesterday.’ To drive his point home, Skreed dropped the mangled remains of Arin Bester’s shotgun on top of the body. Dungo could see the hash marks etched into the barrel.

  ‘Thirty-six,’ he said counting quickly. ‘Seven tallies of five and one extra – that’s Bester’s gun alright. He just bagged number thirty-six last week. Bought us all a round of Snake. What in the Spire happened to him?’

  ‘Can’t say,’ muttered Skreed as he stepped over the body. He walked up to Dungo, and pulled a huge handful of credit tokens mixed with a few ceramite bonds out of his pocket and dropped them on the bar. ‘His winnings were still in his pocket, and all of his weapons were sheathed except the shotgun and his chainsword, which we found still running in his flop spot across the street. The body we found… elsewhere.’

  ‘It weren’t no robbery then, huh?’ asked Dungo. Skreed shook his head.

  ‘What could have done that to him?’ asked Hagen, pointing at the desiccated corpse of their former friend. ‘He looks, I dunno, deader than most bodies I seen.’

  Jak plucked a token from the pile and flipped it to Hagen, who got him a bottle of Wildsnake. Skreed took a long pull at the bottle before answering. ‘Beddy thinks it’s a vampire,’ he said after a long burp. ‘I think she’s read too many of those pulps, but near as we can tell, all of the blood’s been drained from his body and there are a couple of small wounds on his neck – puncture-like, you know.’

  He tilted his bottle up above his face, letting the liquor flow into his open mouth. He caught the snake between his teeth when it flopped out of the bottle, bit it in half and swallowed. ‘Beddy’s out hunting vampires right now.’ He pulled half a snake from his lips and flicked it onto the floor. ‘Says it’s better to do it in the daylight. I told her it don’t matter when you can’t even see the sun, but you know Beddy.’

  Dungo didn’t want to ask the next question, so he took a swig from his second bottle to steel his nerves. He swallowed hard as he realized too late that the snake had slid down his throat. He hated the damn snake. ‘Where d’you find the body?’ he asked after a coughing fit that failed to expel the slithering beast.

  ‘That’s the damndest thing,’ said Skreed. ‘It was stuffed into the power pipes – not the ones running from the Hole over to the machine shop – the main lines hung from the ceiling of the dome.’

  Hagen’s jaw dropped. ‘You mean the pipes nobody’s ever scavenged because they’re too high up?’

  Skreed nodded. ‘That’s right. We never would have found the body, except there was a pile of copper wiring on the roof. Beddy looked up and saw the feet sticking out. I shot a line into his boot and pulled him out.’

  ‘Lucky he was wearing his body suit, or his body would have got crushed when he fell,’ said Hagen.

  ‘Yeah, lucky,’ said Dungo. He grabbed a token from Bester’s winnings and tossed it to the barkeep. ‘Do you think that suit would fit me?’

  Nemo sat in the darkened chamber and contemplated the day ahead. The Underhive’s most notorious crimelord (as Nemo liked to think of himself) enjoyed the dark, and often dimmed the various vid screens that surrounded him. He’d lived in the dark most of his life in the twilight world beneath Hive City. That city was dimly lit compared to the golden splendour of the Spire, but it had power enough for luxuries like light and heat. In the Underhive, there was precious little power for anything.

  For the crimelord, the choice had been simple. Life was uncertain enough downhive without relying on tools that could fail, get lost or be stolen without a moment’s notice. Instead, he had learned to see, to live, to thrive in the dark. Nemo lived on pure instinct, sensing danger before it arrived, ‘seeing’ contours in the shape of the darkness around him, and relying on reflexes honed by the strap of experience to the unnatural sharpness of a power sword.

  A faint hiss from above alerted the crimelord to an incoming message. One of the most recent technological luxuries Nemo had installed in his subterranean base of operations was a message tube. Powering the tube had been easy; he simply tapped into the tube’s power source. The logistics of keeping the tube a secret had been monumental, however. The Hive City end of his tube rotated to a different nexus after passing each message into his network. There were simply too many tube stations in the Hive for the authorities to check, so it was nearly impossible for them to track the tubes back to his base.

  Once he had connected to the tube network, a well-trained, highly intelligent rat had been fed into the system that searched for the special capsules Nemo’s associates had to use, and routed these capsules to his tube network. Nemo had considered using the rat to hunt down messages to or from important figures in the Hive, but had ultimately decided the security risk was too high. If someone ever suspected their messages were being hijacked, or found rat droppings in one of the capsules, the game would be up.

  Very few people had access to Nemo’s special capsules, and those that did still needed a special code to send a message to Nemo. He periodically changed those codes to ensure that only his business associates could use the system. But the tube had been a profitable expenditure. His most lucrative jobs always arrived via the tube, generally straight from the spire.

  This particular message, like dozens before it, dropped from the tube into the inky blackness of the crimelord’s chambers, and Nemo grabbed the capsule before it hit his desk. His fingertips tapped another code – one only he knew – into the end of the capsule. This extra layer of security deactivated an acid trap that would destroy the message before it could be read. In addition to conditioning his senses to life in the dark during his long years in the Underhive, Nemo had also cultivated a healthy sense of paranoia.

  The capsule clicked open in his hands and a roll of paper dropped onto the table. Nemo flicked on a lamp to read the message – not because he needed the light, but because the lamp was part of the message system itself. The page practically glowed in the eerie, black luminescence, illuminating words that would have been invisible under any other light.

  Nemo read the message twice, not quite believing it the first time. He turned off the lamp after committing the details of the message to memory and then tossed the paper into a different tube that led directly into an Underhive sewage pipe with effluent so corrosive it would destroy the paper quicker than an incinerator. He sat in the dark for a few moments longer, letting his eyes readjust until the shadows came into focus again, then began to write a series of carefully worded notes to be sent to select members of his organisation. This job would require strict discipline and a certain finesse that only his top operatives possessed. Nemo thought he might actually have to get involved in this job personally, but it would be worth the risk. Well worth it, in fact.

  2: PLAN ‘W’

  Kal Jerico stood astride an air duct high above Glory Hole. His long, leather coat billowed around his legs, blown by a steady stream of air from a crack in the duct at his feet. He leaned out to see the settlement below with a pair of infrared goggles held up to his eyes in one hand. His other hand rested on the butt of the laspistol at his waist.

  Jerico had chosen this spot for the ambush carefully, sitting as it did above a crossroads that Svend Gunderson, rogue ganger from House Orlock, would have no choice but to pass. Assuming, of course, that Derindi’s information could be trusted. Plus, the cracked airduct allowed Kal to look heroic while he waited.

  ‘How long are you going to stand like that?’ asked Yolanda from one side.

  Kal looked over. The daughter of
Lord Catallus turned Escher gang leader turned bounty hunter was flipping her sword from hand to hand. The look on her face told Kal she was ready to use the weapon, on him if necessary.

  ‘Until I see Svend coming down the street,’ he replied, putting the goggles back up to his eyes.

  ‘Or until we push him off,’ added Scabbs. ‘It’s not a fashion show, Kal. You don’t have to strike a pose.’

  Kal turned to his old partner, who was picking at one of the perpetual sores that dotted his ugly face. ‘A lot you would know about fashion shows,’ he sneered. ‘Look, one thing you two need to learn about bounty hunting is that it’s as much about style and looks as it is about strength and courage.’

  ‘With you, Kal, it’s mostly about luck, dumb luck,’ said Yolanda. She sheathed her sword and grabbed the goggles from Kal. ‘Let me look for a while.’ She pushed the swarthy bounty hunter out of her way and took up position above the crossroads.

  Kal and Scabbs watched in dumbfounded silence as Yolanda’s breech cloth flapped in the breeze coming from the cracked pipe, showing tantalising glimpses of her inner thigh. She must have felt the warm air rising between her legs, because a moment later, Yolanda gave up on her heroic pose to move away from the crack.

  Kal drew a deep breath, shook the images from his head and regrouped. ‘Did you ever think, Yolanda, that maybe my style and grace bring me good luck?’ he asked, as he sat on the ductwork to take a break. ‘It’s hard work being this good looking. I should get something out of it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Besides all the women, you mean?’ asked Scabbs.

  Kal nodded. ‘Yes. Besides all the women.’ He slapped Scabbs across the top of the head and was immediately sorry he had, as he looked for somewhere to wipe his hand. Eventually he gave up and wiped it on Scabbs’s legs, leaving a slightly less disgusting smear on his palm.