Bloodforged (10 page)

She relaxed as Shanski opened his belt pouch and took out a coin. At least he was going to pay for his fun. But no, the gangster was cleverer than that. He dropped the piece into the blind girl’s case with one hand, making sure it clinked against another, while at the same time scooping up more coins with the other hand.

The girl bowed as she heard the telltale coin chime, and said, ‘Thank you, master,’ without breaking her rhythm.

There was an angry hissing and muttering from the crowd of watchers, but it all died away when Shanski turned and glared at them, hand on his sword. He sneered at their cowardice then strutted out the back door after his men, stuffing the stolen coins into his pouch.

Ulrika snarled with anger, then paused and smiled to herself. It was time to feed at last.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE SHEPHERDESS

Ulrika rose and sauntered out the front door – it wouldn’t do to be seen following the gangsters out the back – then trotted down the street, looking for a way to get behind the building. There was an alley up ahead. She sped towards it.

As she turned into it, she saw a man hunching along it in front of her, looking this way and that and calling into the shadows. ‘Lushaya! Lushaya, are you here?’

He looked up as he noticed Ulrika coming towards him, and held out pleading hands. ‘Have you seen my daughter, m’lord? Have you seen my Lushaya?’

‘It’s “m’lady”,’ said Ulrika as she shoved past him and pushed her senses ahead of her to search for the heart-fires of the gangsters. She found them off to her left, and turned down a side alley after them. The man behind her cursed her, then started calling for his daughter again.

Ulrika caught up to the three gangsters a block further on, just as they were entering the service yard of a small inn. She waited in the shadows until they all went in, then scaled the back wall of a rickety three-storey tenement that rose beside the yard and catted silently over its roof so she could look down on them from above.

Shanski rapped on the inn’s back door, and after a moment it cracked open and an older man handed out a small coin purse, then made to close it again. Shanski stuck his foot in and stopped him.

‘Hang on, Grigo,’ he said. ‘Let me count it first.’

‘It’s all there,’ said the man in the door. ‘I’d never cheat Gaznayev. You know that.’

‘I know the boss’ll have it out my hide if it’s short,’ chuckled Shanski, shaking the coins into his palm. ‘So…’

The man looked around, nervous, as Shanski methodically counted the money. Finally he nodded and returned it to the pouch. ‘Very good, Grigo. Wish all our clients was as reliable.’

‘Just go, can’t you?’ said the man, and closed and locked the door as the gangster removed his foot.

Shanski shook his head. ‘You’d think, with the service we give ’em, they’d be happier to see us. Ingrates.’

He tucked the bag into his fur coat, then motioned his two bullies towards the alley again. Ulrika wasn’t about to let them reach it. She tensed at the edge of the roof, letting her anticipation peak, then leapt silently down into the yard. The men cried out in surprise as she landed on her toes and fingertips amongst them and shot out her fangs and claws.

‘Leeches,’ she whispered, rising and drawing her rapier and dagger from their sheaths.

‘Kill him!’ barked Shanski, backing away wide-eyed.

The two toughs lurched in, swinging iron-banded clubs. She dodged them easily, then slashed left and right. They howled as her blades cut their shoulders and flanks. She could have killed them instantly, but she didn’t want to. All the night’s frustration boiled up suddenly within her – all her anger at Max, all her disappointment that there would be no war to fight, all her anxiety over the fate of Felix – and exploded in a whirling fury of violence. She cut the toughs’ hands and legs to ribbons with her rapier, gouged out their eyes with her dagger, tore their bellies, kicked and slapped and ripped them until they collapsed in blind, moaning heaps.

Shanski, paralysed at the gate during her frenzy, shrieked and fled into the alley as she raised her eyes to him. She impaled the blubbering toughs with two lightning thrusts, then sprinted after him. He shouldered through the gate of a potter’s yard next to the tavern and slammed it behind him. She vaulted it as if it weren’t there and kicked him face-first into the mud.

He rolled over on his back as she stood above him.

‘Spare me!’ he wept, digging desperately in his coat. ‘Please, I have gold!’ He held a double handful of little drawstring pouches up towards her.

Ulrika nearly hacked his hands off just to hear him scream, but then checked herself. She had no need of gold, but she knew someone who did. She sheathed her dagger and snatched a few of the pouches from his upstretched hands.

‘You will repay what you stole,’ she said, tucking them into her leather jerkin.

‘Yes, yes!’ he babbled. ‘Everything.’

‘But
I
want something else.’

She hauled him up by the collar, then, before he could guess her intent, sank her teeth into his neck and drank. He shrieked and struggled, but grew quickly weak, and his grunts of fear turned to moans of pleasure. She moaned too, for though his blood tasted of cheap kvas and burnt meat, it was warm and rich and heady, and filled her veins with strength and fire and contentment.

She had almost drunk her fill when voices and lantern light came from the yard where she had killed his guards. She paused, and lifted her lips from Shanski’s neck.

‘You didn’t hear it?’ said Grigo’s voice. ‘I thought I heard – light of Dazh! Look at that!’

‘Ursun protect us,’ said a second voice. ‘What did that? An animal?’

‘It’s Gaznayev’s boys. I… I just paid them!’

‘You don’t think he’ll think we…?’

‘Hell! I hope not,’ said Grigo, groaning.

‘Where… where’s that fat bastard Shanski?’ asked the second voice. ‘Didn’t you say…?’

‘Aye. We better look. If he’s alive he can tell Gaznayev it wasn’t us. Get Mikal’s pistols and come on.’

There was a moment of shuffling, and then two sets of footsteps started through the yard to her right. Ulrika cut Shanski’s throat, then silently lowered his body to the ground and looked around. If she went into the alley the men would see her, and they had pistols. But the back of the pottery workshop was half-timbered – easily scalable. She ran to it and leapt, then flew up it like a cat.

Just as she reached the roof, Grigo’s voice came from the alley. ‘What’s that? Up there! Shoot it!’

Ulrika dived over the peak as a pistol-crack echoed behind her, then scrambled to the edge that looked over the main street. The front door of Grigo’s tavern was below her, and men were going in and out. That wouldn’t do. She ran low along the row of buildings until she reached the end of the block and looked down again – a little side street, narrow and empty. Much better. She landed on the unpaved street with an almost noiseless thud, then cocked her ear. In the distance she heard Grigo and the other man calling to each other, but they seemed to be going in the other direction. Good. She stood and looked down at herself. Fortunately she had done all her butchery at longer range this time, and seemed unbloodied. She wiped her mouth with a handkerchief just to be sure, then pulled out one of the payment pouches she had taken from Shanski and spilled its contents into her hand.

That would do nicely.

The barman at the Blue Jug was collecting mugs and jars, and the students and old men gathering cloaks and hats, by the time Ulrika returned. On the stage, the blind girl was wiping down the neck of her balalaika with a rag. Ulrika grunted with relief. She was in time. She crossed to the stage and slipped the handful of stolen gold into her instrument case. She tried to be quiet about it, but the girl heard, and seemed to know how many coins she’d dropped. She looked up with wide eyes.

‘Th-thank you, master,’ she said.

Ulrika almost corrected her, but then paused. She didn’t want to talk to the girl. She didn’t want to discover she was common, or silly, or grasping. She wanted her to remain what she appeared when she sang, a pure and perfect spirit of home, untouched by the dirty realities of making a living in a hard city. Instead she only bowed – foolish, as the girl couldn’t see – then turned and headed for the door.

As she started down the empty street, Ulrika found herself walking with a jaunty stride. Perhaps it was only Shanski’s blood warming her and making her giddy, but she felt terribly noble and virtuous, and grinned at the thought of the singer sorting through her coins and finding her unexpected bounty among them. The gangster had stolen silver and copper, but Ulrika had replaced it with gold. She was like the hero from some hackneyed melodrama, defeating a moustache-twirling villain and saving a poor but virtuous maiden from ruin.

The thought sparked another, and her steps slowed as it grew in her mind. With sudden and perfect clarity she knew at last the answer to the questions that had been plaguing her since Chesnekov had told her the hordes weren’t coming. All night long they had trod their tight measure in her head. What would she do? How would she live? Why should she bother to go on?

The blind girl had given Ulrika the answer. Her songs had reminded her of her father, a wise and noble lord who cared for and protected his peasants. The songs had also reawakened the Kislevite in her. She had been so long out of her native land, and had recently become so changed, that she had almost forgotten her heritage, and how much she loved her home. Now, thanks to the songs, she remembered, and this, combined with her vow to only prey on predators, had given birth to an idea of a way to live that she could live with, indeed be proud of.

She would stay here in Praag, and she would follow her father’s noble example and protect the people of the city from monsters like Shanski. The hordes might not come, but she would still be able to lose herself in slaughter – and to kill without pricking her conscience – for Praag would provide her with an endless supply of villains to feed upon. It was a perfect solution.

She picked up her pace again, the burden of uncertainty that had weighed her down for so long lifting at last. It was good to have a plan. Now she could think about finding some place to stay, and settling herself into the fabric of the city.

She started across the street with renewed purpose, but then had to edge aside as three drunks weaved around a corner, talking animatedly amongst themselves.

‘Did y’see him?’ said the first. ‘Throat cut neat as y’please, but no blood in him. Like an empty wine skin, he was.’

‘An’ Grigo says he saw a bat the size of a man fly up t’the roof of Danya the potter’s place,’ said the second.

‘Wasna bat,’ slurred the last. ‘Wasa man. But flyin’ like a bat. Thass what I heard.’

Ulrika turned up the collar of her heavy travelling cloak and hurried on, groaning to herself as, somewhere in the distance, a violin played a lilting tune. If she was going to protect the people of Praag, she was going to have to be more discreet about it, or they would run screaming to the watch to be protected from their protector.

An hour later, with the eastern sky lightening from black to charcoal-grey, Ulrika picked her way through the demolished Novygrad, searching for a place to wait out the day. She had decided that, until she could get her bearings, the depths of the cordoned-off ruins would be the safest hiding place. People might be rebuilding on the fringes, but the areas closest to where the hordes had spilled through the collapsed city walls were not only smashed and burnt, but twisted as well by the dread powers unleashed there. Buildings of brick and stone had been melted to glassy black heaps, and ghosts and spirits were rumoured to drift amidst the piles, moaning and weeping and scaring the life from those who dared trespass on their territory.

Ulrika wasn’t troubled by these rumours. In fact she welcomed them. If the people feared the ruins, they would shun them, and she would not be disturbed, except perhaps by ghosts – and she no longer feared ghosts.

On a street where strange purple vines pushed up through the black rubble of the buildings, Ulrika found a likely-looking place – a tenement with an intact ground floor, which meant – hopefully – no sunlight would leak down into the cellar. She stepped over its shattered doors, looking for a way down, and at the back, she found it, a narrow set of wooden stairs leading down, and partially collapsed.

Ulrika squatted down to examine the threshold. There were recent footprints in the dust, and the smell of shed blood came from below – not fresh, but not ancient either. She detected no pulse as she extended her senses, but nevertheless drew her rapier and dagger before starting down the stairs, and looked warily into the shadows.

The cellar was an earthen-floored hole, studded with rows of brick pillars that supported a barrel-vaulted ceiling, and at first she saw nothing that would explain the scent of blood. But as she moved further into the darkness, she saw, sticking out from behind a pillar, a hand and arm stretched on the ground. She stepped around the pillar on guard, and discovered a grisly scene. It appeared others had been taking advantage of the privacy of the ruins as well.

The hand and arm belonged to a girl, no more than seventeen, who lay naked and spread-eagled in the centre of a circle that appeared to have been gouged into the earthen floor with a stick. Ulrika grimaced as she saw that the girl’s hands and feet had been pinned to the ground by heavy spikes, and that troughs had been dug under them to the gouged circle, so the blood from her wounds could flow into it, making a crimson moat around her. Strange symbols were carved into the victim’s body, but Ulrika could see no fatal wound. Instead, it looked as if the girl had died of terror. Her face was frozen into a scream, eyes and mouth wide open, and her limbs rigid with tension.

Standing over her, Ulrika noticed a livid purple ring bruising the flesh between the girl’s breasts. It was about an inch in diameter, and looked like a love bite, except that it was perfectly circular and slightly raised. She couldn’t imagine such a thing could have been the cause of death – it hadn’t even broken the skin – but there was something eerie and unpleasant about it that made her not want to look at it any more.