Bloodmoon (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 2) (40 page)

His fist was a blur as it caught the eager Dallow on the chin with a horrendous crack, sending him sprawling. In the same move, the fist hammered down on the rifle and splintered the barrel from the wooden handle.

The rest of the Sand Rabbits were a little shocked to tell the truth, frozen in confusion. But not for long. Rifles were quickly raised and triggers fondled.

Calidae hit the ground hard as the first shots rang out—sharp thunder without the clouds. A puff of sand exploded near her face and she flattened herself. She saw Gavisham in her peripheral vision, darting to and fro, his limbs a blur. One cry rang out, then another, and then finally, after several frantic shots, there was a crunch, and a muffled sob.

Calidae pushed herself up to her knees. Gavisham was standing over the bandit leader, who had a face like a mask of blood. He was whimpering, holding his hands up over his face. Gavisham was brandishing a fist, painted red.

The other three bandits were out cold, noses broken, bruises already flourishing. Calidae went to each one, kicking them hard in the stomach or the head, before joining Gavisham.

‘I think they were already down, Asha,’ he muttered, as they watched the fourth bandit writhe and wheeze in front of them.

‘Not going to let you have all the fun though, am I?’ she said, raising her knife. But she found Gavisham’s hand grasping hers. He shook his head.

Calidae narrowed her eyes at him, giving him a cold stare. ‘What, you’re just going to leave them alive, so they can rob the next traveller that comes along?’

‘No,’ Gavisham replied, much to the whimpering of the bandit at their feet. ‘But you aren’t the one to do it, girl. Give me the knife and get walking. I’ll catch you up.’

Calidae wondered if she should protest, and whether that would change anything. She saw the stubborn glint in Gavisham’s mismatched eyes and shrugged. ‘Fine,’ she said, handing over the knife, blade first.

Obediently, she began to walk, stomping her way back down the rise, She aimed towards the cliffs in the distance. The sounds of quiet murder joined the buzzing and rustling of the desert. The grating of a knife against bone. A muffled moan of pain escaping through tough fingers. The wiping of a blade on a dusty shirt or two.

‘I could have done it,’ Calidae muttered to herself. More than that, she had wanted to. Practice, was how she saw it, as callous as that was. A rehearsal for when the knife would truly be needed, sliding between Merion’s ribs.
Soon enough
, she told herself, secretly hoping for more bandits.
Soon enough
.

A sweaty strand of hair pestered her eyes, and as she moved to wipe it away, she noticed the smear of blood on her wrist, from where Gavisham’s hand had stayed hers. Calidae slowly lifted it to her mouth, keeping her movements slow and steady. Her heart thrummed. Her mouth salivated. She clamped her wrist to her mouth and sucked hard, tasting the tang of the warm blood in her mouth. She felt the shiver in her mouth as it seeped into her gums and tongue. She felt the warmth begin to spread. Calidae wanted to stop in her tracks and savour it. But she heard footsteps behind her. She licked the rest of the blood away and contented herself with swirling it around her mouth.

‘Look what I found,’ Gavisham said when he had caught her up. He waved a folded piece of paper in his hands.

Calidae snatched it from him and picked at the folds. It was a leaflet. ‘Cirque Kadabra,’ she read aloud.

‘One of them had it in his pocket. It’s heading east, like we are.’

‘Surely we don’t have time for circuses,’ Calidae replied, though she could not deny a little curiosity. She was only fourteen, after all. An envenomed, vengeful fourteen-year-old, of course, but that was all the more reason for it: to remind herself she was still a girl, to hold onto a little of the innocence.

Gavisham tapped his nose again. ‘I have a feeling they might be able to help,’ he said.

‘And if your feeling is wrong?’ Calidae challenged.

There came a chuckle. ‘I’m never wrong, my dear Asha.’

*

That night the infrequent rain came to break the monotony of the heat. They cowered in a shallow cave, deep in one of the wind-cut canyons the cliffs had to offer.

Calidae watched the rain patter on the dust, churning it to mud, and let the drumming distract her from her rambling thoughts. There was something calming about rain, something about the way it frantically hurled itself to the earth with neither a care nor a trouble, which did wonders for distraction.

No matter how she tried, she could not keep Merion out of her head. Every single encounter, every moment sitting in the lounge, or at the dinner table, everything her father had ever told her to do or say to him—she played it all over in her head, like an ever-changing book without an ending.

Even though she had nurtured her hatred for weeks now, tonight she was bored of it, tired of being consumed by it. She wanted to let it rest for a moment. Merion was still out of her reach, and it would do no good burning her mind to ashes with anger while she had no choice about the matter. His time would come. For the moment, she could afford to rest.

Gavisham was cooking up the last of their food—a meagre stew of bacon and pickled things that Calidae had no hope of recognising. The smell was barely appetising, but her stomach strongly disagreed. When a steaming bowl was finally passed to her, she wolfed it down.

‘Got quite the appetite tonight, girl,’ Gavisham commented.

‘Busy day, killing bandits,’ she smirked wryly.

Gavisham had to nod at that. He sipped his stew slowly watched the rain.

‘Do you know where we are?’ she asked, after a while.

‘Absolutely.’

‘Are you going to tell me?’

The man took a moment to chew. ‘We’re on the border of Nebraskar, a day’s walk from Orling. We’ll stop there.’ Gavisham held up a cup out in the rain to collect some rain water. ‘There’ll be a wiregram waiting for me,’ he said.

There was a pause as Calidae thought. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of doing what you’re told?’

Gavisham took a minute to pick something out of his teeth. ‘It’s all I’ve ever done.’

‘The masters?’

Gavisham nodded. ‘Got a sharp memory, Asha,’ he said. ‘Masters, generals, majors, warlords, lords, an emperor here and there if you believe it—all my life I’ve been ordered about.’

‘And you like it?’

Grinning, he replied. ‘Not that I ever had a choice, but yes, there are perks to being the right hand to the mighty of Europe. And of course, every now and again I get a job that means a little extra to me. Like this one. Oh, the secrets I could tell you, yarns I could weave!’ He winked.

Calidae shrugged. ‘Then tell me. Who am I going to blab to?’

‘I know what they say about campfires and stories, girl, but you know my rules.’

‘Tell me anything then. Tell me something about Suffrous.’

Gavisham poked the fire for a bit, trying to dig up something he was comfortable repeating. ‘Suffrous,’ he mused. ‘He and I used to work alongside each other, long ago. Did you know that?’

‘He never spoke much about his past.’

‘It’s rare for brothers to work together, almost unheard of. We were working for some Emerald Lord or another. A man with some interest in trade routes, as it happened. We were barely a year out of our training, still green as spring wood, but eager to please. This lord, one of the Cardinal party, if I remember rightly, wanted to put a stop to the Dutch using the ports in Kernow. They were embarrassing him, you see, sailing in before dawn and beating his ships to the mark. By the time his ships arrived, the prices had either flattened out or gone too high, and he was shedding coin faster than a rich man in a back alley.’

Calidae was not sure she understood the metaphor, but she nodded anyway. The story was like the rain, distracting, and she liked it.

‘So this lord had us down on the sea-battered cliffs, watching for ships. The plan was to lure them in and break them up on the rocks, pretending we were just simple wreckers. It was our job to see that the captain and officers never made it to shore alive.’

‘Why? Surely wrecking the ship was enough.’

‘Trade wars are vicious. The quietest war ever to rage on this good earth, I’ll tell you that. The only thing more important on a ship than its cargo is its captain. They know the routes, know the seas, and it takes years to train it all into them. Losing a ship is one thing, but losing the expertise of a captain hurts more than you’d think.’

‘Clever.’

‘Thank you,’ Gavisham said, as though it had been his idea. ‘We were just fresh from a war in Prussia, eager for some simple pickings after working with those land-grabbing underlings of the Bitter Prince. We got paid per ship and captain, and got to keep whatever we found, so the coin was good and guaranteed. Now, it’s hard work to wreck a ship. For most, that is. When you’ve got glow-worm or cardinal blood, it’s a little easier. No big fires. No mirrored lanterns. Just stand on a beach and rush hard. Suffrous had that job. He would find a high place along the cliffs and start flashing away, the brightest white you’ve ever seen. I would stay in the shallows a cove away, or on the rocks, rushing whatever I fancied to get the job done.’

‘One dark morning it was blowing a gale, and we spotted a fat Dutch clipper out in the bay. The sea was savage that day and she was running her sails hard to get closer in to shore. I had to rush some of the bear shade just to stay upright on the rocks. Suffrous was glowing hard, leading the ship closer and closer with every passing moment. It was working perfectly. We had missed the last one as it slipped by in the night, but this one had fallen for it, and she was right on course for the rocks. She was a big bitch, that clipper. With her cargo piled high on the decks and the waves running high up her hull. A perfect catch for our employer—or so I thought.’

‘What was it?’ Calidae asked.

Gavisham chuckled to himself. ‘So there I was, knee-seep in saltwater, half-blind in the pouring rain and half-deaf in the wind. As she comes close, barely a hundred yards from the submerged rocks, a fork of lightning gives me a better look at her. She’s no clipper, I think to myself, she’s a Dutch warship, no less. Iron-hulled. A kruiser out of Zeeland, running guns and powder to the West Indies. Now Suffrous hasn’t realised of course, and there’s no going back now. I start waving my hands for him to stop and take cover, but he can’t see a thing through the rain. Suddenly there’s this huge screech of iron bow plates on rock, and a bang that nearly shook the marrow out my bones. I go flying into the sea and start paddling for my life. Suffrous has realised now, of course, after hearing the noise, and is running across the clifftop by the time I haul myself out of the shallows, soaking wet. We share a look, nothing more, before the whole thing explodes on us.
Boom
,
boom
,
boom
, one magazine after the other. Practically turned the ship inside out. Wood and metal torn as easy as paper. Never seen an explosion so big, nor a column of fire so tall. Lit up the whole county.’

Gavisham gazed into the fire as he recalled the heat and the screaming of metal. He seemed to be done, and Calidae frowned.

‘Well, what happened after that?’

‘Suffice it to say, nobody was very happy with us. The Dutch wanted blood, and the lord was the one who had to give it to them. Prime Lord’s orders.’

‘And you and Suffrous?’

‘Spent a year in a Francian prison, wading through shit and piss. Worked in our favour though. The war was coming to a head. They started to recruit gun-crews from prisons in their desperation. Suffrous and I were put on a Spaniard ship-of-the-line. Found ourselves in the battle of Rafalgar, facing the Empire of Britannia. Of course, we sabotaged it from the inside out, sank the bitch right when they needed her most. Helping to win a battle goes a long way towards earning your pardons, I’ll tell you that.’

Calidae wore a confused look. ‘That was over sixty years ago, if my history is right.’

Gavisham levelled his colourful eyes at her. He knew he had slipped, somewhere along the way. ‘And you’re pretty educated, for a maid,’ he countered.

‘My mother saw fit to teach me all about the Empire, actually. But you can’t be a day over forty. Neither was Suffrous.’

Gavisham tried to put her off the scent with a wink. ‘Look good for my age, don’t I?’

A lamprey
, he was a damn lamprey—him and Suffrous both. It was a blasphemy of sorts. Those who rushed did not taste the human shade and vice versa. Each saw it as beneath them, in their own unique way. Her kind, lampreys, deemed it impure to put animal blood into their veins. Rushers saw drinking human blood as a defilement. Never did the two knowingly mix, and yet here was one such defiler, right before her eyes.

‘Yes,’ Calidae said, straining not to dig deeper at the risk of exposing herself. ‘Yes you do.’

Gavisham took his chance to rein in his tongue. ‘Time to catch some sleep, before we wag our tongues into the morning.’

For a second night in less than a week, Calidae rolled over onto her side and stared out at the night, pondering what it all meant. Suffrous. Arrid. Merion. They all clamoured for her attention as she drifted off into a fitful sleep.