Streets of blood

20

Midnight was closing in on them by the time they parked the Saab in Aldgate. The club wasn’t exactly classy, but the troll bouncer’s eyes lit up when he saw the notes Geraint waved under his snout. He got a nice advance, a promised fee per hour for making sure no one ran off with the car, and the further promise of a handsome bonus if the Saab was safe and undamaged when they got back. Geraint made a showy display of activating the car’s defense systems.

“Look, if anyone does touch it, some pretty unpleasant gas will start billowing all over the place, not to mention the ultrasonics, so make sure no one even gets close, right?”

The troll took the money and gave Geraint a greedy, confident grin. He opened his Italian-designer jacket and displayed a fine range of heavy throwing knives inside. “Don’t worry, boss. Anyone gets too nosy, you got their nose waiting for you when you get back. I’ll rip it right orf of their face. Pay me by the nose?”

Geraint smiled and walked away. “You’ll be paid well, term. See you soon.” I hope, he added to himself.

“We had to park farther away than I would have liked,” he told Francesca and Serrin. “Let’s hope we don’t have to make a run for it. Any closer to Houndsditch, though, and we couldn’t have relied on the car being in one piece when we got back. Tires would have been stolen and we’d probably find the doors beaten in just for the hell of it.”

“Is all that stuff you told Mr. Ugly true?” Francesca asked.

“Does it really matter? I certainly do have some defenses and alarms but unfortunately nerve gas isn’t licensed as one of them. Don’t know what this country’s coming to.”

They edged down the increasingly dark side streets. Some of the street lights had been shot out, but most had been dismantled and their cables and wires stripped for the copper. To their right, one of the very few remaining church clocks began to chime midnight.

“Hell, Geraint, I don’t like this at all.” Serrin’s stomach was protesting his fear. On top of all the food he had eaten, it didn’t feel comfortable at all.

“Okay, stop. Here. It’s the third house along on the left-see? Yeah, the one with the figure on top.”

Against the glimmering sky with its suffused glow of distant neon, they could dimly see the small statue perched atop the roof. Eros, the child archer.

“Serrin, time to do some checking. Top floor, back of the building.”

They’d discussed this move before setting off. Serrin hadn’t liked the idea of investigating with his astral body; being in a trance in the unlit mean streets of London’s East End was not a particularly comfortable thought. Instead he would simply assense the area first. He was startled by what he found.

“There’s a spell effect in the area. Detection spell. Someone’s running a detection spell.” Reacting swiftly, the elf dropped his astral perception and muttered a few words to activate a spell of his own. Probing for enemies what he sensed within the building confused him.

“Someone in there doesn’t like me much. But I can’t tell if it’s specific. It feels more like a spellcaster is expecting enemies to arrive, but I can’t figure out just how specific it is.” He stopped speaking and concentrated once more; the effect was like watching someone listening to instructions being delivered via a hidden ear-piece. “There’s some masking here, I think. There’s also some kind of-oh, frag it, I can’t tell.”

Switching his spell. Serrin began to search for the presence of a mage close by. He knew there must be one, surely; it couldn’t be just a spell lock, that wouldn’t make much sense. Screwing up his eyes in concentration and probing again, he shook his hands in annoyance.

“Check the woman!” Geraint hissed by his shoulder.

Of course; so absorbed in hunting for the source of the spell he’d detected, the mage had forgotten that part of the original plan. His mind probed for Catherine Eddowes.

“Gol her!.. No, she’s gone!” He was furious with himself, wishing he’d learned these mundane spells with more force. He concentrated all his magical energies into the detection, adding resources he’d been withholding for defense in case the target of the detection reacted against him with hostility.

“Bingo!” She was at the back of the building. Then the elf reeled backward as if kicked by a mule. The scream reverberated right through him. He wasn’t going to try that again.

“Geraint, I think-”

His voice trailed away. They looked at each other and readied their weapons, but Stain begged time to prepare some magical defense. There was a mage about, somewhere, and he sure as hell didn’t want to be caught with his pants down.

Geraint stuffed a handful of notes into the hands of the ork pimps lurking by the doorway. Bored and uninterested, they put down their stunprods and ushered the motley trio up the stairs. They’d seen it all before. The runners’ feet hammered up the wooden stairs, and as they reached the top floor, Geraint virtually fell into the tacky wooden door. It bulged in its frame, but it didn’t give way. From within, they heard a loud bang. The door began to splinter as they beat against it, but it so resisted their attempts to force it open that they guessed some heavy furniture must be piled up against it.

The orks came running up the stairs behind them just as Geraint and company managed to force open a wedge between door and frame, pushing laboriously at the wardrobe lodged there. The pimps were yelling. menacing, clearly intending to attack them. Geraint screamed to them that someone was being killed, but Serrin decided it was no time for conversation. Throwing a powerball spell into the orks, the elf almost fell to his knees as the orks reeled back down the stairs. One collapsed unconscious and the other could do little more than hold his head, groaning in system shock. Geraint glanced at the elf furiously as he labored to force the door.

By the time he could drag himself through the wedged door and climb over the wardrobe, the wave of cold night air from the open window told Geraint that Catherine Eddowes’ attacker was gone. He half-stumbled over the barrier and slid to his knees in the slick pool of fresh blood. Gore covered his hands and the sleeves of his jacket, and soaked the legs of his trousers. To get to the window and look out for any fleeing figure he would have had to climb over the bed. It was a prospect he couldn’t stomach.

“Just don’t come in here. You don’t want to see this. Oh, God almighty.” With that, he turned, almost sagged, away from the carnage. Only the neurochemicals kept him from bringing the thousand-nuyen meal up the way it had gone down.

Serrin was still groggy from the drain of the spell; he had really let fly at the orks with all he had. As Geraint reemerged from the room, his face was ashen, but he waved away Francesca’s frantic hands offering him slap patches for the girl inside.

“Forget it. There isn’t an internal organ left where it used to be, We’re too late. We’re too damn late. Let’s get out of here and call the police. That’s all we can do now.”

They descended the stairs, Geraint throwing some more money at the huddled forms of the dazed orks. Ace it, he thought; it wasn’t their fault Serrin had to cream them. They might even have thought they were protecting someone.

When the three stepped out into the street again, they saw something totally unanticipated: a cloaked figure carrying a bag was veering crazily down the road toward a limo parked in the distance.

In the dark they could see no clear details. What puzzled Geraint most was how the man could be in this street if he’d gone out the back. Before he could fire his pistol, however, the first of Francesca’s shots rang out. The cloaked figure disappeared into the opened rear door of the limo as two other figures moved out from the shadows, one with a snarling automatic weapon and the other gesticulating dramatically.

The mage. Serrin realized, almost too late. An invisible tidal wave of concussion slammed into their bodies. The impact sent Geraint flying, Francesca managing to stay upright only by hanging on to the remains of a lamp post, her gun hanging uselessly from a hand that had lost all power of grip. Only Serrin managed to stay in some semblance of shape. His magical defense kept the worst of the manaballs effects away from them. Clutching at the best spell focus he had for combat, he dropped the defense that had saved them and let the combat mage and the street samurai have it with the works.

A huge ball of fire sprang into existence at the end of the road, illuminating the scene with a hellish inferno. Dimly, the lights of the limo could be seen speeding away, but the two figures were still standing there, now become screaming, flailing human torches. Serrin collapsed to the sidewalk.

As the car squealed around the corner and away, the scene fell into an eerie silence for a second or two, a silliness broken only by the crackle of flames licking at the two charred bodies in the distance. Francesca slapped patches desperately onto the elf, whose hand clutched instinctively for the healing spell focus.

Gone. Gave it away. Oh, drek. Serrin couldn’t really focus his vision. Clouds swirled in his head: rocks hung heavy in his stomach.

Geraint fumbled in his bag and readied a subcutaneous as shoots began to ring out from the blackness of the streets. Francesca slapped patches on both herself and the noble while the elf’s body jerked into life at Geraint’s ministrations. From somewhere north of them, a whooping siren began to wail, getting closer by the second.

“Two assaulted orks, one maybe dead,” Geraint said tersely. “I’m covered in blood and you just torched two people. We are not staying around to explain this one to the Metropolitan Police. Come on!” He and Francesca draped Serrin's arms around their shoulders, limping away into a side-alley just as the flashing lights of the police cars appeared in the distance.

Serrin was beginning to feet as if he, too, was on fire. He dropped his arms from around the shoulders of his friends, but he stilt gazed at them with wildly dilated pupils.

“Come on, lets blow these fraggin’ bastards to hell and back,” he croaked as he reeled about. Francesca and Geraint exchanged frantic looks.

“What the hell did you pump him up with?’

“Too late to worry now, its only got a couple of minutes, then he gets the shakes. If he’s lucky. Run, you two, run!”

Speeding haphazardly through the dark back streets, praying they wouldn’t fall headlong over some smashed-out wino or shattered slab of concrete, the three fled into the murderous night.

Rani was a few minutes early, but even with that he was late. She huddled in the corner of the warehouse, shrinking into its darkness. At least she knew the exits, should she need them, the huge front doorway through which she had come in and the small barricaded door at the back. That is, it might have been barricaded if the wood weren’t all rotted. Still, it was an emergency exit, just in case. She also guessed that Smeng must have friends lurking about, though she didn’t look for them.

It seemed like an hour or more passed before the other ork suddenly appeared beside her in the cool darkness. He put his arms around her and she gave him the coconut sweet wrapped in rice paper. He smiled tenderly and murmured, “You didn’t have to do that.”

“But I wanted to.”

“Thank you.” He took half of it in one mouthful and chewed happily. “Oh, that’s good. Too good to eat all at once.” He shoved the remainder into a jacket pocket and refastened the zipper. “Rani, you asked my help in getting vengeance. I can only do so much, but what you do get, it wasn’t from me, right?”

“Of course,” Rani breathed. Their voices, held low in whispers, still sounded to her ears as though they were being broadcast throughout the silent warehouse.

All right, this Pershinkin, he has many, many contacts. And a lot of friends, too. He’s not someone who you can pull into a dark doorway and interrogate, right?”

Rani remained silent. She had expected as much.

“But one night, a little someone sees something. Maybe that someone hears something they shouldn’t. Get my drift? Good. That someone overhears Pershinkin acting as a middleman. He is being asked to find some people to make a run to a place called-Longstanton?”

He pronounced it oddly, over-extending the middle syllable. Rani was glad. It meant Smeng wasn’t the one who’d overheard the conversation; this sounded authentically secondhand. Somehow she didn’t want him to have seen or heard anything personally. not to have been involved in this terrible thing, not even inadvertently.

“That where you went?” he asked.

“Yes.” As simple as that.

“Let me tell you now, no one’s seen Pershinkin all week. Not as far as any of my people know, anyway. But that’s not so strange. The man is west of center a lot, so we hear tell. He talks to the suits and only comes back here to find heat, right?”

Again, it needed no more than a simple nod from her.

“Well, what I got for you is two more things. First, the men he meets. Two suits. One tall and thin, all sneers and hair slime; the other one a little shorter, losing his hair at the front, and he’s got something classy, some kind of jewel in his front tooth, yeah? My little bird says he’s a chiphead. He shakes a little, see? The suits disappeared into a flashy limo. Now, I can’t tell you where all this took place. That might not be in the interests of my source, got it? But not so very far away, I’ll tell you that. Hope that’s some use to you” Smeng paused and glanced carefully around him for the twelfth time.

“Second thing is, it was a bum run. What I heard is exactly what you said happened. The suits said, ‘Just get some suckers, a bunch of slints what can be relied on to rakk up.’ Sorry, Rani. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But that’s-”

At that moment they heard footsteps approaching. People were obviously heading toward them, splashing through pools of half-frozen water outside.

“I don’t like this.” He was backing away toward the secret door. “Let’s take cover.”

Rani was about to join him when the three figures appeared in the doorway. With her ork’s low-light vision, she could make them out pretty clearly. Two humans, bedraggled, but the third one, ah, the third one.

She knew him. She couldn’t ever forget him. Fire danced around his hands as his fatal power was unleashed again in her memory.

The sirens began to wail again, so close now.

“Here!” She called to them. They edged forward, unsure of themselves. They couldn’t see her, and were craning their heads left and right trying to see who was waiting for them in the gloom.

“No, Rani, no! Baggies coming!” The huge Under-city ork was furious. “Not here! Come now!” He stood by the exit, ready to close the door behind him at any moment.

She couldn’t desert them. “But he saved me. I know them!”

“No!’ Smeng screamed at her. “They’re not blood! I took chances for you, Rani. I can’t take any more! Hear the sirens! Now! Come on!”

She looked around, desperately torn, but she would not move toward him. With a growl he slammed the door and she heard the sound of bolts being slammed home behind him. The three figures were staggering toward her, obviously in desperate trouble. The sirens were growing louder by the second. Running forward as un-threateningly as she could, she yelled, Friend!” to reassure them, then grabbed the elf’s hand. He registered surprise without recognition; she thought he was either drunk or in shock.

“This is a dead end.” The voice of the man told her he was from another part of the city, another world entirely. It also expressed something close to despair. He was casting about frantically for a means of escape. She knew where to find it.

“Come with me. I’m a friend,” Rani urged. They weren’t going to stop and check. She got them out the back door and into the tiny cul-de-sac only moments before the first police car roared to a halt in front of the ramshackle building.

Somehow, against all odds they managed to drag themselves over the wall and to grab a few panting breaths behind it. There was no time for more than that, though. They could hear people still moving inside the warehouse. Some of the walls separating the houses along the street were little more than rotted wood and others had gaping holes in the plascrete and wire. By the time they’d squeezed their way through a dozen or so, all except Rani were just too shattered to go any further. The back door of a house stood before them; lights were on inside.

“This is crazy even for us, but I think we’re going to have to do it anyway. Smile and be nice to the people,” Geraint said. He reached out a hand and tried the door. which opened to his investigative push. They entered the darkness of the room beyond as Rani checked what was going on behind him, staring into the night with her sensitive eyes. It smelled bad, but that wasn’t really an obstacle. Not to begin with, anyway.

Geraint was about to use a flashtube when someone threw the lights. The room was bigger than he’d expected, somehow, but it wasn’t the room’s dimensions that concerned him. Distinctly more of a problem were the occupants.

“Well, gentlemen, what DO we have here?”

The guttural voice was full of sarcasm and hostility. It looked like seven, maybe eight, trolls, but they were so large Geraint expected another half-dozen to pop out from behind them at any moment. They seemed to cover the far side of the room without leaving any space for air. The single naked light bulb was all that lit the place, but at that instant it seemed to shine unbearably bright and harsh. Most of the trolls seemed to have guns, and one had a shotgun that looked like it could neatly blast all visitors to hell and back with one delicate squeeze of the trigger. At their feet lay some large plastic trays covered with opaque plasbags filled with soft substances Geraint didn't want to look at more than once.

He and the others retreated gingerly back against the doorway. The trolls were smirking, all weapons pointed at their surprise guests.

“Come in. why don’t you?” one of the trolls ventured, but the four newcomers stood stiff and rigid. Deciding on a less polite approach, the one with the blackened snout barked out an order.

“Shut that rakkin” door or well blow you to buggery,” he snarled. Trying desperately to still the shaking of her gun hand, Rani complied.

The four of them stood immobile with guns readied, Serrin managing to fumble the huge net-gun from his coat, shaking and shivering. His eyes registered the presence of forty trolls in front of him, but there were as many Geraints as he had hands on his fingers.

“Hur, hur, hur,” one of the trolls sniggered, then spat violently onto the stained floor. He fingered a serrated knife with what was left of his left hand. Several of the others licked their lips. All looked as though they were slowly edging forward.

“Well, my, my. What have we here?”

It was Rani, cool and calm beyond even her own dreams, stepping forward to confront the brutes. “We try a little run down here in the East End, then when we have to make tracks sharpish, we bust into just the kind of people we can talk to. Guns and money. Lovely. Nice to meet you.”

She had her Ceska pointed directly at the head of the troll who’d done most of the talking. Though the elf had the shakes real bad and the other man looked totally at a loss, Rani was glad to see that the woman also had her pistol pointed at the same target.

The trolls hesitated long enough.