Bloodforged (14 page)

Ulrika found a table in the shadows, far from the other patrons, and listened as the girl sang ballad after ballad in her pure sweet voice. The songs hurt to hear. Each one was a knife in the heart, but Ulrika couldn’t stop. The pain was terrible, but the memories that spilled from the wounds were exquisite, and well worth the agony – sitting on her father’s lap in the big dining hall as the musicians played a wild reel and the peasants danced their complex circles, being sung to sleep by her mother after a nightmare, riding out with the lancers when she was barely big enough to sit on a horse, and singing along in her squeaky little voice as they bellowed out a marching song, kissing Yusin, the farrier’s boy, behind the forge as his father whistled a tune in time to the clanging of his hammer, dancing with Felix before he went off to the Wastes with his dwarfen companions, reuniting with her father after the siege of Praag as the streets rang with songs of victory.

The songs were a bright window to a world she could never return to, a world closed to her by a poisoned kiss. It had never been a perfect world. The shadows of death and destruction had loomed over it since her birth – constant companions to any child born so near the madness of Chaos – but still it was a world that had allowed for hope, for sunshine and love and family and true companionship. Now her world was darkness without hope of light, love was a blood-sport, her family were backstabbing intriguers, true companionship seemed impossible, and it would last for all eternity. The longing to step through the window to her old life was so strong she felt her dead heart might burst from her body and vanish into the songs. If she could have cried, she would have, but tears were another thing her new world was without.

It was therefore something of a relief when the girl took a short break to have something to eat and drink. Ulrika too was feeling hungry, the urge to feed she had put off for so long returning stronger than ever, but she could not leave before the girl finished singing. If she sang until dawn Ulrika would gladly walk out into the sunrise and die content, so she forced her hunger back into its cage and looked around for something to take her mind off it until the girl resumed.

Near her, some of the students were arguing over their kvas about the singer.

‘You’re mad,’ said one with a scruffy beard. ‘Training would ruin her. She’s a pure talent, as wild and free as a horse of the oblast. If you tamed her, she would be just another Opera House donkey.’

‘But she can barely play,’ said a round-faced one with a tiny hashmark moustache. ‘Her singing’s lovely, but she’s clamming one note in five.’

‘You want to take away her charm – her passion,’ said the first. ‘You’ll make her like Valtarin. Look what happened to him when old Padurowski took him under his wing.’

‘He got better,’ snapped his friend.

‘Better? Aye, he’s the finest violinist in Praag now, but all his heart is gone. His playing is all just technique and posturing. It’s like he’s lost his soul.’

The round-faced boy laughed. ‘I’d part with my soul too, if I could play like that.’

‘That would assume you had one to part with in the first place,’ sniffed the scruffy boy.

After that their conversation dissolved into friendly name-calling and Ulrika became more interested in the pulse in their necks than their words. Perhaps she would have to feed now after all, but just then the blind girl returned to the stage, a small boy guiding her by the arm, and Ulrika’s hunger faded as she once again sat down to play.

Ulrika let herself drift back into memory on the wings of the songs, forgetting her despair as they called up images of the broad plains and vast painted skies of her youth, of riding and hunting on snowy mornings, of wheat fields and pastures on golden afternoons, of sunsets never to be seen again.

Her reverie was momentarily disturbed as three toughs came in through the back door and leered at the blind girl as they passed the stage, and then again a little later when raised voices came from the bar and she saw the same men were arguing with the barkeep.

‘Please, Shanski. Business is still slow,’ he was saying. ‘The Academy is barely open since the siege. So many young men gone to fight and not come back.’

‘Your lack of business is not our business, Basilovich,’ the leader of the toughs replied. He was a short, heavy-set gangster with rings on every finger. ‘Now pay up.’

Ulrika glared at them for a moment, wanting to tell them to be quiet, then returned her attention to the singer and they were forgotten again.

The girl was singing a soft old ballad about Mother Miska saying goodbye to her children and riding off into the north to her destiny. Ulrika knew it from the womb, and was mouthing the words along with her, when the gangsters intruded again. As they filed out the back door, the leader, the one the barman had called Shanski, stopped beside the stage, grinning and making rude gestures at the blind girl. She of course saw nothing and continued to sing, but Ulrika growled in her throat. What an ass.

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.