Guns of Alkenstar Read online

  Well enough. Time for him to start earning his pay.

  “Toablarr’s never been much liked in Parliament, nor by any who work with him,” he offered slowly, musing aloud, “but he’s always been untouchable, thanks to his three cronies.”

  Kordroun nodded. “They worked together very… shrewdly. But only Eldel’s left now. Toablarr’s advantage over his two worst rivals is gone.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been… away from high Duchy gossip just a little too long, Bors. Steelshrike and Hammerlees are dead. Murdered.”

  Gelgur couldn’t keep his jaw from dropping.

  Orester Steelshrike had been the current Ironmaster’s lover. No wonder she’d given Kordroun permission to haul an old drunkard back into harness.

  “Yes.” Kordroun was smiling grimly at the astonishment Bors knew he wasn’t managing to keep off his face. “You probably didn’t know Hammerlees was one of us, either. A gunhunter, our little spyhole into the heart of the dirtiest Duchy politics.”

  Big, bluff Jarack Hammerlees—secretly a gunhunter? Gelgur was glad he was sitting down, and had a solid table to cling to. Godspittle and dragonspew, what else?

  From across the table, Ralice Morkantul was regarding him with malicious amusement.

  A key rattled in the lock of their room’s lone door.

  Kordroun and Gelgur sprang up and raced for the corners of the room, the shieldmarshal snatching out his revolver as Gelgur palmed one of his icewine flasks, ready to hurl.

  The gunhunter was a little slower, but she had a revolver out, too, by the time the door started to open.

  To the clacking accompaniment of a gun being cocked outside.

  Chapter Four: Blasts and Spatterings

  “Don’t shoot!” a fear-filled, breathless voice squeaked from the far side of the door—which stopped moving when it was ajar about the width of Gelgur’s hand. “I’m alone, and come in peace!”

  Kordroun waved frantically for Ralice to crouch down. She obeyed, but still made a large, hard-to-miss bulk behind the table.

  “Drop your gun—drop all your guns—and come in!” the high shieldmarshal snapped.

  “Kordroun?” the voice asked, sounding almost tearful with relief.

  “Drop the gun,” Kordroun barked, “Now! Or I’ll start firing!”

  They heard the click of a hammerlock being applied, then the sharp, heavy thud of a gun landing on floorboards.

  The door opened a little more, and the gun—one of the smallest, newest sorts of revolvers, blued and gleaming—was kicked a little way inside their room.

  Then the door slowly swung wide, propelled by the boot of a lone man who stood with his hands raised. Empty hands.

  They all knew that face, though none of them had ever before seen it so pale and sweating, the eyes so large with terror.

  It was Aldegund Toablarr, Purser to the Parliament of Alkenstar.

  “Help me!” the purser blurted, almost leaping into the room and whirling to slam and lock the door behind him. “Kordroun, someone’s trying to kill me! I need you to hide me, and—”

  His panicked rush of words died away as he saw the high shieldmarshal’s gun trained on him, and the stern, set face above it.

  Ralice had her gun trained, too, but Kordroun cut through her rising hiss of anger with a coldly snapped question.

  “How did you find us here, Toablarr?”

  Toablarr looked genuinely startled. “Uh—ah—the doors you came through, to reach this place; unlocking any of them rings a chime in the Gunworks duty guardroom… wires, I think—”

  “And you were in the guardroom why?”

  “Th-the duty marshal took me there, to help me track you down. He—”

  Whatever else the purser had been going to say was lost forever in the loud, wet explosion that blew him apart.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Everyone’s ears rang, watery eyes making the wildly swinging lantern’s light blaze up like so many swimming golden moons.

  The blast had spattered the upper half of the purser all over the room.

  Left with nothing atop them, Toablarr’s legs spasmed, took two wild steps, and toppled. Their thudding landing sent a grisly wave of blood across the floor.

  Ralice greeted it with helpless, racking vomiting as she backed away, slipping in gore. She passed the shattered-pumpkin ruin of Toablarr’s head without noticing it.

  Gelgur saw that much through a mist of blood half-blinding him. Wiping it away with an impatient hand, he ran to the still-open door, past walls dripping wetly all around him.

  Kordroun was right behind, slipping and cursing.

  “He was alone, I’m thinking,” the high shieldmarshal growled.

  Gelgur nodded in grim agreement, Toablarr’s blood dripping off his chin. The passage beyond was dark and deserted—and in the distance, from the floor below, he heard the distant thunder of booted feet hurrying nearer. Duty marshals, responding to the explosion.

  “That was no self-killing,” he growled.

  It was Kordroun’s turn to nod. “He was carrying a bomb—but didn’t know it. I’d swear to that.”

  “We need to find out who he was last with!” Ralice said excitedly. “His wife will know, or his servants…”

  Her voice trailed off under the weight of two withering looks.

  “The purser has never wed, and may spend his evenings in many places,” Kordroun informed her coldly. “You did investigate him, did you not?”

  “If I were meeting a man I wanted to trick into taking a bomb from me,” Gelgur added, while the young gunhunter was still flushing crimson and working her open mouth in a silent struggle to find a reply, “I’d not be thick-skulled enough to go to his house and try to do it in front of all his servants, as witnesses. I’d invite him to my choice of meeting-places, where I could control matters. Now I’ll grant that if you were trying the same thing, I’m not so sure you’d have simple wisdom enough to—”

  “Enough,” Ralice snapped furiously, finding words at last. “Consider me schooled, long-jawed veterans, and answer me this: What now?”

  She started to pace, wagging one finger as she thought aloud. “We’re getting close, or there’d be none of these shootings and killings. Toablarr was working with someone, and didn’t want me—us—to find out more.”

  “Someone he had a falling-out with,” Kordroun agreed. “Eldel’s the only one of his cohorts still alive.”

  “Of those we know about,” Gelgur pointed out. “It could be anyone else—even Parliamentary Minister Blaklar or Trademaster Loroan. Or both of them. They were public rivals, yes, but…” He waved his hands in a flourish of futility. “We just don’t know enough.”

  “Come,” Kordroun said with sudden urgency. “I don’t want a dozen marshals and Irori knows who else seeing your faces. We’ll take the back stair down, and then the bridge into the South Safestorage, and out of the Gunworks that way. Shield your faces as we go!”

  They went.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “Ugh,” Ralice hissed, as they came out on a balcony and ducked their heads against the cold. The usual icy night breeze was blowing down the great river gorge; its chill would have long since driven inside others who might be out on rooftops or balconies, giving them some measure of privacy. “We’re covered with… Toablarr. We’re going to stink soon.”

  “We are,” Kordroun agreed cheerfully. “Which means the sooner we get to the bottom of this, the sooner—”

  Gelgur slapped the high shieldmarshal’s forearm sharply for silence, flourished his other hand, still dripping, in their faces, then used it to point down into the night.

  Keeping low, Kordroun and his newest gunhunter ducked around tables and benches and sped to the balcony rail, to peer down.

  Only to straighten, long breaths later—time Gelgur spent vainly peering all around to try to espy anyone out on a balcony or at a window, watching them—and trade grim looks.

  “Trademaster Daerold Loroan,” Kordrou
n said in a hard voice. “Who should have no business inside the Gunworks at this time of night—and even less success at getting past the guards to get inside.”

  “Whereas they didn’t even slow him as he strode right in, yes?” Gelgur asked, looking at their faces. That gave him his answer even before their glum nods.

  “High Shieldmarshal,” he said then, “I know it’s not my place here to give orders, but hear me… why don’t the two of us wait here while you go back down through the Gunworks and see where Loroan goes, then return to us? I’m wondering if he’s dropped by to see if he—or someone he’s working with—managed to silence the purser. Not that he’ll admit as much, but if it seems to you that he is, it justifies us in considering him someone to follow, and lean on.”

  Kordroun stared at him, then gave Ralice Morkantul a long look.

  “I’ll do that,” he said flatly. “While I’m about it, why don’t the two of you ponder what little we know of who might be part of this, and how we might find out more? Oh, and have a try at working together, the two of you, without, ah, open hostility.”

  He left those biting words hanging in the air and vanished back through the door, leaving Gelgur and Ralice alone together for the first time.

  They glared at each other long and silently, as the rising night wind blew down the great canyon of the Ustradi River, rushing endlessly past them with chilly claws in its haste to howl on into the rest of the Mana Wastes.

  “Well,” Bors Gelgur said at last, “we may as well see—”

  His voice sharpened, rose and became louder and firmer, to continue in nigh-perfect mimicry of the high shieldmarshal. “—if the two of us can have a try at working together without, ah, open hostility.”

  Ralice’s mouth fell open, her face twisted as if she was afflicted with sudden pain, and then she burst out laughing, great hearty roars of laughter that her large hands, hastily clapped over her mouth, did little to stifle.

  After a moment, Gelgur executed a sardonic bow, which turned her laughter into helpless snorts.

  Grinning at Ralice, Gelgur rose and started to pace the balcony, thrusting aside all thoughts of her, Kordroun, and the man whose lifeblood he was still drenched with, and thought instead about the living. The suspect living.

  “You’d think that someday I’d learn. You really would.”

  Haun Eldel, Toablarr’s sole surviving crony, was clever, but no fighter. Probably not much of a swindler, either. Haughty and prissy about details, rights, and being in the right, he was more the sort of man who would work within the rules, changing laws rather than bending or breaking them. He wouldn’t be hiring killers.

  Unless someone else they didn’t know about—which of course meant most of Alkenstar—was behind the smuggling, that meant Toablarr and his two longtime foes: Prostor Blaklar and Daerold Loroan. Either of those two would hire or coerce anyone and anything to get their own way. They went after power and coin like starving dogs, both of them… and behold, here was Loroan, turning up suddenly where he had no proper business being.

  Yet did it end with Loroan? Somehow, he seemed more follower than leader to Gelgur, though any trademaster could work a swindle well enough. Was he working with Blaklar? Or someone else? Or should that be and someone else?

  Bah! They had almost nothing to go on, short of catching Loroan in some quiet room without guards and breaking fingers and toes until he talked. That was how many a marshal had done things in the old days… back before every second man in Alkenstar had taken to strutting around with bodyguards, armored in friendships and “special understandings” with officials and those in Parliament.

  These days, there was only one person who could break fingers and toes legally: the Ironmaster.

  Gelgur’s onetime superior and sometime lover.

  Vryle Summairtar, the first woman to ever hold the post of Seneschal of Security for the Grand Duchy. Head of the gunhunters, faceless eyes, and special agents who stood behind the gunmarshals. Sometimes they stood there because a gunmarshal needed to be fed steel from behind.

  The one person who could investigate anyone, kill anyone in the name of Alkenstar, and had to anticipate all perils to the Duchy, keeping track of all known ones, and constantly taking stock of who was up to what, why, and with whom. The guardian of Alkenstar.

  The best Ironmaster Alkenstar had ever known, they rightly judged her, even when they said so with fear and loathing. A cold woman who let you learn from her only what she wanted you to. She’d changed from the calm, superb manipulator and sharp-witted diplomat Bors remembered, gone colder. These days she’d probably break any number of fingers, toes, necks, and entire households without the slightest hesitation, to find and bring down the murderers of her lover Orester Steelshrike.

  “Marshal Gelgur,” the large lass beside him dared to say then, with a newfound note of civility, “we are supposed to be discussing this matter of smuggling and murder. You’re the veteran here on this balcony; have you any suggestions as to how we should best proceed?”

  “Yes,” Bors Gelgur said firmly, giving his grin sudden fangs of malice. “We’re going to talk to the Ironmaster.”

  Ralice swallowed. “And how,” she asked softly, “are we going to manage that?”

  “Oh, she’ll see me,” Gelgur replied, watching the door Kordroun had disappeared through. “Now, will you humor me in something, gunhunter?”

  Her stare held suspicion. “What?”

  “Get down flat on the floor. To give anyone a much harder shot at you. Right now. Try to make it look as if you’re sagging down, wounded or swooning.”

  She gave him a defiant look, then slowly obeyed.

  “And you?” she snapped, once she was lying flat. “Are you somehow invincible?”

  “I prefer the word ‘expendable,’” Bors replied, his eyes on the door and his hands on a table.

  When he saw the door swing open and got a glimpse of the high shieldmarshal, Gelgur went down fast, tipping the table up like a shield.

  As Kordroun shouted and grabbed at his gun, two shots caromed off the tilted tabletop and whined away to crack off stonework higher up on the Gunworks walls.

  “Who—?”

  Muzzle-fire blossomed in half a dozen places in the surrounding night, and an enthusiastic volley spat and cracked all around the balcony.

  “We can be dead,” Gelgur called to Ralice, “or we can be inside! Move!”

  Ralice moved.

  Then the night really came alive with gunfire.

  Chapter Five: Death, Mystery, and an Ironmaster

  “Rather a lot of people seem to want us dead,” Gelgur growled, as they plunged down yet another dark Gunworks stairway, the cracks and whines of gunfire finally fading behind them.

  “We’re outgunned, all right,” Kordroun grunted, short of breath from hastening down flight after flight of stairs. “We’ll have to go through the cellars—the slower way—if gunfire’s going to welcome us at every door and balcony.”

  “The cellars,” Gelgur echoed thoughtfully, as they rushed through another door in a rattle of the high shieldmarshal’s keys, into utter darkness. Kordroun flung out his arms to stop his two companions, who heard him, as he panted, feeling around high up to their left.

  “Why not,” Gelgur suggested slowly, “abandon trying to get to the streets for now? Go down deep, instead, and take the Long Tunnels?”

  A hand-lantern flared, and in its light Kordroun stared at Bors. “To talk to the Ironmaster,” he said flatly, his face going grim.

  Gelgur nodded. After a long moment, the high shieldmarshal nodded too.

  Then they both turned to face Ralice.

  Who was pale, and busily swallowing hard. “The Ironmaster,” she said at last. “Well, why not? Days I spent, asking and watching, pondering and prying—and ever since the three of us have been together, it’s been all running and being shot at and more running.”

  Gelgur gave her a mirthless grin. “We’re gunmarshals, lass, not gunhunters. We s
hoot and confront more than we watch and think.”

  Ralice tried to smile, and failed. “You said it,” she agreed darkly.

  “Come,” Kordroun commanded, aiming his lantern down a long, low-ceilinged passage. Handing them another lit lantern each, he beckoned them to follow. “It’s a good long plod to Ironmaster’s local chambers.”

  Two descending stairs and a lot of walking later, they stopped at a metal wall-box.

  “Privy,” the high shieldmarshal said, pointing, as he busied himself at the box, keys jingling.

  Ralice frowned. “I don’t—”

  “Privy,” Kordroun repeated sternly, giving her a glare.

  Gelgur stepped between them, advancing on the gunhunter until she was forced to give way. As he backed her a good six steps, he murmured, “Whether you need a warmseat or not—and wise gunhunters never miss a chance—Kordroun needs you where you can’t watch what he does at that box. He needs to extract a key to get us through a door ahead.”

  Ralice nodded a little wearily, and obediently went through the door Kordroun had indicated.

  “Are we ever going to get to the bottom of this?” she asked, when she reappeared.

  Stepping past her to take his turn, Gelgur shrugged. “I don’t think we’ll have to, if we plod along slowly enough. Those involved are killing each other with such enthusiasm and rapidity that they’ll soon be down to a few wounded survivors.”

  “That’s when we’ll move in,” the high shieldmarshal said dryly. “This way.”

  He unlocked a counterweighted metal-bound door with double frame-latches. The short passage beyond ended in a metal door so wide and heavy that it took all three of them to budge it—after he’d unlocked it, using two keys in unison.

  It opened to reveal lanternlight, bobbing in the distance. Kordroun shuttered his lamp and hissed at Gelgur and Ralice to do the same, then hustled them a few steps toward the lanterns and down a side-passage. Unlocking a door in haste, he ushered them through it, then turned to hold it just ajar in the darkness, murmuring, “Ground your lanterns and keep hold of them. Be very quiet.”