Burn Me Deadly

SEVENTEEN

My rage boiled up like it used to before a battle, when I first caught sight of whoever I was being paid to kill that week. Back then I learned to summon it at will; now it sprang to life unbidden, with the force of something vicious released after too long in a cage. It took all my resolve to control it as the man responsible for everything stood ten feet below me now and all I could do was perch like a silverfish and listen. If I moved an inch to the right, I’d roll off the beam and crash through the ceiling right on top of him. He’d damn sure never see that coming, and believe me, the temptation was strong. But there was more at stake now than just getting my hands on Laura’s killer. I dug my fingers into the wood so hard it bent back my nails.

“Well, you made it,” Marantz observed with casual annoyance.

“Hey, had to stop at the house to change clothes when I heard the Big Mace was still in town,” dragon boots said. “What made you stick around?”

I risked leaning far enough to the left to peer through one of the ragged holes in the ceiling. There he was: surprisingly slender and wispy, with long brown hair and a dark beard. He looked about thirty years old. There was nothing in his appearance that advertised his vicious nature, but then again, the same thing had been said of me.

He did not wait for Marantz to answer. “Man, the old Lizard’s Kiss used to be so neat, with all the satin and velvet everywhere. Now it’s like a dungeon. C’mon, Father T., scoot over.” The old man grudgingly moved aside, and dragon boots slid into the booth next to him.

“So what do you mean, ‘complicated’?” Marantz said coolly.

“I’ve been on a horse all day; let me get a drink and I’ll tell you all about it,” dragon boots said cavalierly. Most people would not dare blow Marantz off like that; most people couldn’t slip up on me from behind the way he had, either. He whistled through his teeth, and a moment later Callie’s breasts appeared below me.

“Well, hey there, Mr. Candora,” she said in her professional voice. “What can I get for you?”

“Oh, call me ‘Doug,’ please,” he said.

“As in the hole I’d be getting myself into?” she flirted. “I know all about you. I bet you’ve got a girl in every tavern in Muscodia.”

“Lies, all lies,” he replied, and the smile was plain in his voice. Callie made everyone smile. “A tankard of blackberry, please.”

“On its way.” She turned, making her dress twirl.

How neat. Dragon boots was also Doug Candora, the very man I was supposed to keep away from Nicky. Well, if he was here, he couldn’t be bothering her, so at least I was doing that right. When Callie had gone, Candora said quietly, “Frankie and Jimmy are dead.”

“Dead,” Marantz repeated flatly.

“Did they find them?” Tempcott interrupted. “Is that how they died?”

“I don’t think so. I found Jimmy hanging in the cabin from Frankie’s manacles, and Frankie was at the bottom of a canyon.”

There was a pause. I was afraid they’d started whispering, but apparently this news was a big surprise. “What do you think happened?” Marantz said at last, carefully choosing his words.

“Frankie didn’t kill Jimmy. He had some knife cuts on him, but nothing like what Frankie would’ve done. And Frankie wouldn’t fall off a cliff, or jump. So somebody else was there.”

“What about Laura?” Tempcott said.

“She’s being kept somewhere else,” Marantz said just a hair too quickly.

“Anyway, the box was still in the cabin, empty,” Candora continued. “So it doesn’t look like they found them before they were killed.”

“Any idea who it was?” Marantz asked.

Candora snorted. “The only three men left alive who knew what we were looking for are sitting at this table, and we’d be idiots to double-cross each other so blatantly. So unless it was one of us, I figure it had to be those dirt-sucking idiots who live in the woods and think King Archibald is going to take away all their stuff. Jimmy had a run-in with one of them. It has nothing to do with what we’re interested in. I’ll go take care of them tomorrow.”

Tempcott was not mollified. “But what about the-”

“We send more men up there and keep looking,” Marantz snapped. “It’s just a setback, and it gets dealt with.”

“You buffoon!” Tempcott hissed in his most grating voice. “Both of you! You with your smug certainty, and you — ” He pointed a trembling finger at Candora. “Turning my beliefs into a game, making sacred symbols into trinkets — ”

“God damn, old man, will you lay off about the boots? It’s all about building loyalty. Every good organization needs some heraldry. We’re Team Solarian; the girls are the Lumina Auxiliary.”

“This is not some club!”

“Well, they look stylish, and I like ‘em. I wear your stupid scarf when I’m around your herd, don’t I?”

“I warn you, if someone else does know about this-”

“Here you go,” Callie said suddenly as she placed the tankard in front of Candora. If she noticed the tension, she had sense enough not to comment on it. “Can I get you other gentlemen anything?”

“No,” Tempcott said before the others could speak. “We’re done here. Please bring our check.”

“Now, now, Mr. Marantz’s gold is no good here.” I could practically hear the wink that accompanied this.

Marantz and Candora blatantly watched her twirl away. Marantz sighed wistfully. Then, all business, he said to Candora, “All right. Settle up with the people you think killed Frankie and Jimmy. I assume you’ll also take care of the search?”

“Yeah. I’ll take a couple of more men up there with me.”

“You’ll forgive me if I’m less than confident,” Tempcott said. Then he added, “What happened to your neck?”

“That? Oh.” Candora chuckled. “I’ve been trying to get close to a certain young lady. She insists on keeping me at arm’s length, and her nails are sharp. I showed her why that wasn’t a nice thing to do.” He took a long draught from his tankard. “She won’t be trouble to anyone anymore.”

I went cold again.

I probably sent a cloud of ceiling dust down on the patrons below, but I didn’t care. I scurried backward, dropped to the storeroom floor and grabbed my sword. Angelina looked up from retrieving some clean dishes from the washbasin. “What’s wrong?”

“No time,” I said, and pushed past her out the back door. I ran around the front of the building and down the main street. Over the thundering of my heart and the breath rushing up from my lungs, I heard a soft, vaguely amused voice in my head: Oh, Mr. LaCrosse, you think you can help me, don’t you? You think you can ride up and save me, like a knight in a children’s story.

Everyone from the riverboat had apparently decided to meet in the street at the same moment, and I shoved people aside with no regard for politeness. I turned up Ditch Street and leaped onto the porch of the former Lizard’s Kiss. As always, the building appeared dark and deserted, but now I knew better. I drew back and kicked the door hard; it moved, but didn’t open. I kicked it again, and this time it slammed back against the inside wall.

I rushed in and took a moment to orient myself. To my right, the old greeting room had been stripped of all its ornate finery and redecorated with only a long, crude dragon mural that went around all four walls. The image showed two dragons mating, their serpentine bodies twined together, flames shooting from their mouths. The rest of the room was bare except for pillows thrown on the floor for minimum comfort.

A half-dozen people occupied the room. A pair of women, still wrapped in their red cloaks, sat on pillows against the wall. The two drummers from the earlier ceremony froze in mid-pass of a giggleweed pipe. In that pose I abruptly recognized them: the minstrels from Angelina’s, including Callie’s deadbeat boyfriend, Tony. The other two men were Black River Hills folk. I guess Marantz could imagine no reason anyone would want to break in, so he’d left no guards. His mistake.

I grabbed the nearest backwoods guy, slammed him into the wall and punched him hard in the chest. Completely surprised, he collapsed with a ragged gasp as he tried to catch his breath. The others, frozen and speechless, stared at me.

“Doug Candora was here a little while ago,” I said, my own breathing heavy from running. “Where’s the girl he came to see?”

They continued to stare. I punched the other hill dweller in his dull-eyed face, and he fell backward onto the pillows. The minstrels dropped their pipe and scrambled back against the wall, huddling like the women.

I glared at the musicians. “Okay, now I’m going to start beating on you two until one of you answers me. That means one of you will take a beating for nothing.”

“Hey, man, we just work here,” Tony said. His voice was high and jittery.

I grabbed the front of his clothes and yanked him to his feet. He was the kind of handsome that hid all his personality flaws; I wanted to punch him on general principles. “Thanks for volunteering. I’ll start with you.”

“Up the stairs,” one of the women said in a small, sheepish voice. Her expression was young and weary, the face of someone with little hope and fewer choices. “Top floor. The last room on the left. He took her up; she hasn’t come down.”

The woman beside her, older and more scorpionish, glared her disapproval but said nothing. Both pulled their red cloaks tight around them and huddled together as if they could blend in with the pillows.

“I’m going to take the girl upstairs out of here,” I said to the sad-faced one. “Do you want to come, too?”

She looked down and shook her head. Scorpion woman smiled up at me, vicious and triumphant. I didn’t have time to argue. The first guy I’d punched got to his knees, still wheezing, but when he saw me he fell back down.

I took the steps two at a time. No one else seemed to be around, and the only light came from sconces on the landings. I found the indicated door and kicked it open. My hip would thank me for all this in the morning.

The room was pitch-black. All the windows were blocked, and the only light came from the feeble candle outside in the hall. I took it from its holder and stepped cautiously through the door.

There was little to hide someone: a narrow single bed, a chamber pot, a small closet with its door open. A man’s dusty trail clothes hung in it. In its previous incarnation, this room would’ve been tapestried, filled with flower petals floating in bowls and lit by scented candles. Now it was a utilitarian cloister.

The bed was disheveled, and I spotted unmistakable dark droplets along the sheets. When I moved the pillow, I found a smear of blood, still warm and just starting to dry. Candora must’ve come straight to Angelina’s from here.

My heart wanted to jump out through my throat and search the room for itself. I made it stay put and called out, “Nicky? It’s Eddie.” There was no response. I was about to leave when the obvious finally occurred to me and I looked under the bed.

If candlelight hadn’t gleamed off her eyes I might not have noticed her curled up in a tight ball. She was still wrapped in the dark red robe, and it made her almost invisible in the shadowy space. I reached out my hand toward her. “Nicky, come on out; it’s me.”

She said nothing, and for a heart-stopping moment I thought she was dead, but then her bare feet shifted as she tried to make herself even smaller.

“Nicky, it’s Eddie. I’m here to get you away.”

She did not move, and made a sound like a kitten.

“All right, hang on,” I said. I put the candle on the floor, took hold of the edge of the bed frame and lifted. It was magnificently heavy, and I felt its weight in my lower spine and knees. I got it tilted enough to squirm under and brace it with my back, and that allowed me to reach Nicky. I touched her bare ankle.

She screamed and exploded out of the cloak like a trapped animal. She drove us both out into the open, and the bed hit the floor with a sound like a thunderclap. The candle fell over and began to roll, filling the room with disorienting shadows. She was all clawing nails and kicking feet, but she was smaller than me and I finally got my arms around her, pinned her to the floor and used my weight to hold her there. “Nicky, it’s Eddie; calm the hell down!”

I retrieved the candle, miraculously still burning, and held it so I could see her face. Her eyes were wide, and her pupils almost covered the irises. Dried blood stained her lips, and a nasty bruise was forming on her left forehead. She again made a noise like a kitten. Saliva dripped from her mouth, and I smelled a rank, sickly-sweet odor on her breath. She’d been poisoned.

“Nicky, can you hear me?” I said, loud and distinct. “Do you know what he gave you?”

She went limp beneath me. I waited to see if it was a trick, but evidently her sense of the world around her no longer included me or anything else real. I didn’t know what poison Candora had used, but I had to act fast to save her, whatever it was. I wrapped her in her cloak and carried her out onto the stairs.

When I hit the second floor landing, three men came up the stairs toward me. We all stopped in mid-step. Two were wide-eyed rich pilgrims who’d arrived with Tempcott, while the third was one of Marantz’s pros. He drew his knife and said, “Put the girl down.”

I was two stairs above him, so I easily kicked the knife from his hand. It clattered down the stairs to the first floor. In the same motion I threw Nicky over my left shoulder and grabbed one of the younger men by the front of his tunic. I shoved him back down the stairs ahead of me, and followed quickly as he took his pal and Marantz’s guy tumbling with him.

There was no room for my sword, and I didn’t want to stop long enough to get the dragon-embossed knife from my boot. At the bottom of the stairs I stomped on the pro’s head as he tried to rise, slamming it into the floor and hopefully taking him out of the game. I was ten feet from reaching the front door when the two backwoods toughs I’d smacked around in the lounge suddenly blocked my path.

Both held wicked-looking, crude knives that would do more damage coming out than they did going in. “You goin’ nowhere,” one of them growled.

I heard outraged voices on the stairs behind me as other pilgrims emerged from their rooms. He might be right.

At that moment a door beside me opened and out stumbled Prince Frederick, his scarf ridiculously askew. He was barefoot and shirtless, and past him I saw a bored-looking girl on his narrow bed. Yawning, he stepped right between me and the bad guys and said woozily, “Hey, guys, what’s with all the slamming and stomping around?”

I never question luck. I grabbed him around the neck and yanked him against me as a shield. I clutched his throat hard enough for him to know I could easily crush his windpipe. Suddenly he was wide awake and completely sober.

“Hey, do you know who I-,” he started to say.

“Not another word,” I snarled. He nodded quickly.

More of the hill people emerged from the sitting room. Guess they didn’t get the fancy rooms upstairs and probably made do with a common area in the back. They filed in behind their brethren; that ten feet to the door was getting longer every minute.

“Any of you toads so much as blinks wrong, and Tempcott’ll need a new walking gold bag,” I said as I shoved the prince forward. He was slight and girlish, his bare torso no more muscled than a ten-year-old’s. He offered no resistance, but merely whimpered and raised his hands as if I held a crossbow to his back. The others stepped aside, grudgingly letting us pass. Any of them could’ve leaped forward and knifed me, but I counted on them knowing how important Frederick was to their leader.

“Open the door!” I snapped. One of the other rich boys hurried to obey. Nicky’s weight made my shoulder ache, and Frederick sweated so much my grip on his throat was beginning to slip. I turned as I went through the door, keeping the bad guys in front of me as I backed out.

And of course, because I’m a total fatalist, I wasn’t at all surprised when a voice behind me, from the porch, said, “Well, this sure looks interesting.”