SMOKE AND BLADES Read online

  A tense nervous ripple of laughter ran through the room. The two vocal thugs were instilling the rest with a hint of courage. The Vigilante nodded slightly.

  “I do bring you reward.”

  The swarthy man laughed and showed his broken teeth.

  “By that cryptic shit you mean you come to give us paradise? The sweet release of death from our lives of sin? Will you reward us with a glimpse of redemption as at the end we see the error of our wayward existence?”

  The Vigilante shook his head.

  “No. The only gift I brought is pain.”

  A wiry burglar took a swig of beer and shouted.

  “If I don’t like it can I exchange it?”

  Another ripple of nervous laughter, their bravado increasing as the pack mentality set in.

  The bald sailor stepped forward and his shoulders tensed, ready to fight.

  “That don’t sound like a present anyone here be wanting. You just a harbinger of fucking pain then, or have you got any good news?

  The Vigilante nodded. He swept back both sides of his long coat, showing a belt slung with pistols, knives and hatchets.

  “Only good news is that I brought plenty.”

  The swarthy man sneered and spat on the floor. A rat scurried across the reeds to feast on the sputum.

  “Your words might make lone men shit themselves in dark alleys, Vigilante. But in the light, you’re just one man standing in front of many. You really think we’re more scared of you than we are of Reach?”

  The Vigilante glanced up at the clock that hung above the rows of bottles on the bar.

  “Not for about a minute.”

  The Vigilante stood perfectly still in front of the motley group of men assembled before him. At the tables of the pub, palms sweated, heartbeats quickened and mouths went dry.

  Then the Vigilante began to mutter under his breath, a low chant in a guttural tongue that rolled from beneath his mask like a prayer.

  All the candles and lanterns extinguished in a sudden sputtering gust.

  The fight began.

  Suddenly the Oarlock’s Divination was lit in flickering moments like a dark night by lightning, as pistols roared. Men were dazzled by their own muzzle flash and in each moment of darkness they stared into a void. In the first few seconds eight men were shot by their fellow patrons, panicking to reload or firing wild into the pitch black. One man shot his own fingers off as he reached out to grope in the dark. Cutlasses and serrated knives were thrust out, each man hoping to feel the soft puncture of flesh at the tip of his blade. Sometimes they did, but never the right flesh. A few were faring better. The experienced cat burglars and footpads who had clamped their eyes shut tight from the start, knowing that they had to rely on other senses. They padded silently through the dark, straining their ears and keeping low.

  The Vigilante needed no light to see.

  When a man’s own light is dimmed, the light of others burns so much brighter.

  To his eyes, each man’s soul was like a candle that smoldered ghostly white within their chest, casting a pale moonglow around them that illuminated the room. He moved about the inn, weaving and twisting past blade and bullet.

  Every few moments he was visible in one place as his own dual pistols flared. His first shot blossomed a rose in the mustachioed sailor’s forehead.

  The swarthy thief was next. In one of the flashes of light the squat man had lunged close and slashed with his knife, its jagged blade rasping off the Vigilante’s reptilian coat. He roared in delight when he knew he had found his quarry. The elation faded a moment later when he felt a tube of cold metal slot into his mouth until he gagged. Then the muffled explosion as his skull was broadcast onto the mirror behind the bar.

  The Vigilante moved low through the room, emptying his pistols into every man whose cankered soul he saw. They were all guilty, by deed or by association. They were breadcrumbs in the trail.

  When his pistols were empty the Vigilante replaced them with a hatchet and shortsword, drawn from his belt.

  He swept across the reeds of the floor like a whisper, severing hamstring, slicing tendon and cracking bone. Blood sprayed in the dark and spattered the desperate lowlifes with hot rain. In the sporadic strobe of gunfire the Vigilante seemed to traverse the room faster than was possible, appearing at opposing corners in the few seconds of dark between flashes. Then as the ammunition began to diminish, the stretches of dark lengthened and the cries of panic and rage became more frequent.

  One of the smarter thieves had a moment of clarity. He stuffed a rag of his own shirt in his half-drunk bottle of spirit and lit it with the dying embers of his rillo. Then he threw it in the direction he guessed was the bar. There was a crack and screech as the wall length mirror smashed and rained glass down upon the floor. The bottles stacked on the shelves shattered as the alcohol went up in a whoosh and the pub was lit in a flickering orange light. A couple of unfortunate men were doused in flammable liquid and their clothes ignited. As they ran screaming like mobile beacons they cast their light on the darkest corners of the inn.

  The Oarlock’s Divination had become a vision of hell. Fire licked the walls and beneath them the reeds upon the floor had turned ruby red from soaking up spilled blood. Men crawled on hands and knees, desperately searching for dropped weapons or lost fingers. Severed limbs twitched on the floor like the larvae of bizarre new creatures separated from their parents. One man staggered back and his ankles became entangled in the spilled intestines of another. As the eviscerated man tried to tug his workings back towards him he tripped the other in a slippery lasso.

  The Vigilante was standing on top of the bar, glistening like a black snake against the flames. His sword and axe were slick with blood. His death-bird head surveyed the carnage.

  In his dry croak he addressed the room.

  “No one else need die. But any man who picks up arms has signed his fate.”

  A heavily muscled gang enforcer knelt on the reeds before the bar. He cradled one broken arm limply to his chest. His battered face looked up at the Vigilante.

  “You made your point, madman. What the hell do you want from us?”

  The Vigilante glanced down at him, the green lenses of his mask betraying nothing.

  “I have questions. Questions about Jonas Reach. I’ve heard rumor he is in the city.”

  The enforcer winced as he shifted his broken arm. He spat blood on the reeds and answered in a hoarse voice.

  “Reach doesn’t meet with us. It’s a game of whispers. He sends a man who sends a man. He always pays, that’s how he gets his loyalty, but as for the man, he’s almost as much of a ghost to us as you are.”

  The Vigilante stared at him in silence for a long moment. Then he nodded.

  He stood tall and looked out to the room.

  Suddenly a bald man rushed forward brandishing a single shot pistol. He spat and roared as he swung it up and fired. The shot struck the Vigilante hard in the shoulder. He jerked back for a split second and then a moment later his hatchet swung down and took the man’s hand off just above the wrist. The bald thug stared at it in shock before his head snapped back as he was kicked to the floor. The Vigilante unfurled the fingers from the pistol one by one and held it up like a dead spider. He stood up and tossed it into the stricken crowd.

  “Someone here will give me the answers I want. Finger by finger.”

  The patrons of the Oarlock’s Divination that were still conscious had huddled together a few meters back from the bar like a congregation before a priest. They clutched bleeding wounds and broken limbs and a few still held their weapons, but no one now chanced an attack.

  A scarred and grizzled smuggler took a step forward. He still held his sword but it was lowered.

  “What if no one here wants to talk with you?”

  The Vigilante cocked his head and regarded him for a moment.

  “You either talk to me. Or you talk to her.”

  The smuggler’s pitted features knotted in confu
sion.

  “Who?”

  Then a shiver ran through him as foot long fingernails that glimmered like razors slid around the sides of his head and met before his face like a knight’s visor. The smuggler froze and held his breath. Around him his former drinking associates shrank away with girlish screams it would have been impossible to imagine from such seasoned men.

  Behind the smuggler a tall entity hovered. It had a corporeal density to its center mass but the extremities were translucent and raggedy. They flickered like cold mirrors of the flames that were blackening the bar. Despite the burgeoning fire in the tavern, each man’s terrified breath clouded before him as the temperature around the Wraith plummeted.

  The curved blades of its fingernails closed in, slicing a series of thin cuts around the smuggler’s face. His eyes widened in shock and pain.

  From the huddled crowd, the thief Robyn Albright raised his hands and stepped forward.

  “Please. Wait. Vagranz!”

  The Vigilante turned his head.

  “What is a vagranz?”

  “It’s a he! Vagranz is an importer of drugs to the East city. If you find Opaque in Free Reign, it’s come from him.”

  The Vigilante shook his head and the Wraith cut deeper into the smuggler’s face.

  “I don’t want Opaque. I’ve already tried it.”

  Robyn Albright spread his hands and winced as he heard the man’s shocked squeal.

  “Wait! The rumor is that he’s met Reach face to face. He might know where to find him. He has a mansion on the outskirts of lower Sparkside.”

  The Vigilante seemed to consider this.

  “Prestigious.”

  “If Reach is in the city, he might know where to find him. That’s it, that’s the most we know. We’re foot soldiers, we don’t get to meet him.”

  The Vigilante was silent for a long moment as the flames rose and blackened the bar behind him. The moans of wounded and dying men came sporadically from around the tavern. Robyn Albright gave a nervous smile and nodded.

  “So we’re good? You can leave. You’ve made your point, we’ve given you all we can, so you can leave? Before we all cook or choke to death in here.”

  The Vigilante crouched down on his haunches and wiped his blade clean on the shirt of a dead man slumped across the bar. Before him men began to cough as the expanding smoke caught their lungs.

  Eventually he looked up, his green eyed mask impassive.

  “No.”

  Robyn Albright watched in horror as the Wraith closed her grip and the smuggler’s head separated into four equal segments. As he slumped to the floor the rest began to panic. They staggered towards the doorways, not caring that the fire seared their calves.

  But not one of them made it close.

  4.

  “I think it’s quite artistic, in a grotesque sort of way.”

  Constable Lemuel Vark peered up at the two dead men hanging above the tunnel entrance. Their hands were nailed into the stone and their intestines stretched out around them like the tentacles of a cephalopod.

  Maeve pulled her solshades an inch further down her nose and regarded him with mirthless eyes.

  “Well that says more about you than it does about the aesthetic merits of this tableau.”

  Vark looked to his boots and cleared his throat.

  “Yes Inspector.”

  Maeve cocked her head and frowned up at the dripping corpses. “Although I’ll admit it does have a certain macabre flair for the dramatic.”

  “That’s what I was insinuating Inspector.”

  Maeve squinted as she read the graffiti that had trickled and distorted down the wall next to the corpses. It had been scrawled in blood.

  In the World of Shade

  Our bond was made

  Blood for blood

  And kiss for kiss

  To settle score

  Then breathe no more

  FEAR THE DARK JONAS REACH!

  Maeve snapped her fingers at a nearby technician and pointed up to the dead men.

  “Get a simulacrum of this. I want to look at it more closely.”

  The technician nodded and fumbled with the lensed box around his neck.

  “I’ll get on it Inspector.”

  Maeve stood staring at the two hanging men with her chin resting on one hand, as if perusing in an art gallery. Vark scribbled in his notebook and then frowned up at the writing on the wall.

  “Jonas Reach? The terrorist? I thought he was killed years ago, Inspector.”

  Maeve chewed her lip nervously.

  “For all our sakes, let’s hope that he was. He was the worst mass murderer ever to set foot in Free Reign. How did he get those bodies up there? Any sign of ladders being used?

  Vark checked his notebook.

  “No Inspector. It’s like they flew up there themselves. It’s downright spooky.”

  “Would take more than any man’s strength to haul them up a ladder anyhow. There’s something else at work here.”

  Vark coughed and lowered his voice a little.

  “Some of the men are reluctant to go into the warrens to look for further evidence Inspector.”

  Maeve was only half listening. Her creative imagination was trying to re-enact the mechanics of the crime.

  “Hmm. I’ve got discretionary budget. They’ll be on overtime, Half a Florrek an hour.”

  “It’s not laziness Inspector. They think there’s something in the tunnels doing this that ain’t natural.”

  Maeve raised an eyebrow at Vark.

  “A ghost.”

  Vark shifted uneasily from boot to boot.

  “That’s what some of the men are saying Inspector.”

  Maeve gave him a fleeting smile.

  “It takes a lot for something to stand out as strange in Free Reign. But this one has managed it.”

  Vark brought out a small wooden box and rattled it.

  “The only physical evidence found, were these, Inspector.”

  Maeve leaned over and looked inside. She took some forceps from her coat and dipped them into the box. With a frown she held them up before her eyes.

  “I’ve never seen a bullet like that before.”

  “Me neither Inspector. It was prized out of the wall in the tunnel. Went clean through the victim.”

  Held between the pincers was a bullet of what looked like bright green stone. Considering it had been fired and pulled from a stone wall, it was completely undamaged.

  “Now I see why they’ve given this one to the Regulatory Department, Vark.”

  “Because no one else wants the case, ma’am?”

  “Hmm. Get this back to the Priory and have it analyzed.”

  Vark swallowed hard as he looked at the crime scene.

  “Yes Inspector. He’s on a mission whoever he is. Criminals have been turning up dead all across the city.”

  Maeve worked her mouth as she watched the nails being slowly pulled from the hanging corpses as they were taken down.

  “What about the empaths? Did they pick up any residual sorcery?”

  Vark cast his hands wide and shook his head.

  “Barrel loads of it Inspector. Some powerful magic occurred here, but it gets weirder.”

  “How so?”

  “No images. They’re drawing a blank.”

  Maeve curled her lip.

  “Hmm. So the cream of the Free Reign Warden’s department empaths can tell us that some magic happened, in some form, at some point, somewhere around here?”

  “That’s about the size of it Inspector.”

  “Well that narrows it down, doesn’t it?”

  “Hmm.”

  Maeve walked in a wide circle around the corpses as they were carried down a ladder, careful to avoid the puddles of gore that had dripped from them. She found herself standing half in the tunnel entrance. Light from the streetlamp cast over half her face, leaving the other half in darkness.

  “What’s he trying to tell us with these art installations
? The innards out like that. Are they meant to be wings? Angels I wonder?”

  Vark shrugged.

  “Some connection to Fallen Willow? Those creepy bastards might have a hand in this.”

  “Well we’ll just have to go speak to them and find out won’t we?”

  Vark seemed to baulk at this. He was unsure if she was serious.

  “Go into Fallen Willow Ma’am? The Fallen tend to police themselves.”

  Maeve stepped out of the tunnel and spoke in a tone that let him know he’d overstepped.

  “No one polices themselves in Free Reign Constable. They might think they do, but they don’t. We deal with crime in all districts.”

  Vark nodded and put his notebook away. He looked up at the dead robbers and shivered.

  “Begging your pardon, Inspector. But I think this fellow might be doing his own special form of policing. Bypassing all the trial and due process parts ma’am.”

  Maeve strode past him and out towards the main street.

  “Well I can’t allow that constable. So we will just have to track him down and have a word with him, won’t we?”

  As she exited the alleyway and the cordon, Maeve lit a long blue rillo and took a drag. She slumped back against the damp brickwork and sighed.

  Girls going missing, death cults, forbidden magic, Vigilantes no one could trace.

  Busy week.

  Free Reign was a delicate balance. A hundred different races, thaumaturgy seeping up from the underground pools it was built on to warp natural laws and tinker with reality. It took a delicate hand to keep that balance.

  This Vigilante worried Maeve. He was disrupting a finely tuned equilibrium and she couldn’t allow that. She needed to speak with the sorcerers on Candlehill about this. Because she needed to stop this man.

  Or ghost. Or whatever he really was.

  5.

  The Vigilante known as the Plague Doctor sat back in the chair, breathing hard.

  Dark patches of sweat and blood soaked into the layers of his clothing. His left arm hung limp and dripping at his side. The chamber he was in was bordered by a phosphorescent green stream that gave off cinnamon steam. A writing desk and small bookcase rested in the centre of the chamber and a small straw mattress in one corner.