Deathstalker (27 page)

He tried hard not to think about leeches.

Owen and Hazel trudged off down the street, lost in their separate thoughts, and never saw the hooded figure with a crossbow rise up from an overlooking balcony and draw a bead on Owen’s unprotected back. The assassin’s finger tightened on the release, and a stone from Cat’s slingshot hit him right between the eyes. He fell backward out of sight, and the arrow disappeared into the mists. A cat shrieked briefly in outrage. Cat grinned and recovered his balance on the outcropping gable he was crouching on opposite the balcony. Funny thing about assassins; it never seemed to occur to them that while they were stalking someone, someone else might be stalking them. This was the seventeenth bounty hunter he’d deterred, and he was running out of stratagems. Not to mention stones for his slingshot. He wished Owen and Hazel would work out where they wanted to be and settle there. It was hard work tracking them across the
city, jumping from roof to roof and taking care of the apparently endless stream of would-be assassins who dogged their trail. And now they were off again, heading even deeper into Thieves’ Quarter, into areas people usually had enough sense to leave well enough alone. Cat sighed heavily and set off after them, eyes alert for further dangers. He hoped Cyder had some plan to make money out of these people. He’d hate to think he was doing all this for nothing.

The Rabid Wolf was a festering dump tucked away up a side street with no lighting, as though even the street was ashamed of its presence. The only light came from a brazier burning unattended halfway down the street. Owen wasn’t sure what was actually burning in the brazier, but it smelled awful. Also, from the look of the street, several horses had recently taken the time to use the street as a toilet. At least, he hoped it was horses. He looked at Hazel, who was looking calmly down the street as though she’d seen worse.

“We don’t really have to go down there, do we?” said Owen. “It’s going to ruin my boots.”

“Don’t be such a wimp, Owen. Just watch where you’re treading, and don’t talk to any strange women, and you’ll be fine.”

She set off down the street, and Owen followed her, being very careful where he put his feet. The Rabid Wolf looked as though it had seen a great deal of hard use down the years, not to mention the occasional firebombing and outbreak of plague. The front of the inn was covered with scars and gouges and suspicious stains, and the two windows had been boarded over long ago. The open door was guarded by a huge hulking figure with bulging muscles and glandular problems. The last time Owen had seen something that big standing upright, it had been glaring back at him from its cage in the Imperial Zoo, as though telling him where he could stick his peanuts.

Hazel walked right up to it, stuck her face into its, and the two of them exchanged tough sounds for a moment, just to establish they were both hard, desperate types, and then Hazel slipped the figure a coin, and it stepped back from the door to let Owen and Hazel enter. Hazel stalked past it with her head held high, and Owen hurried after her, keeping a wary eye on the doorkeeper as he dodged past it, his hand never far from his sword. He tried a tentative smile, and the doorkeeper opened its mouth to reveal four sets of gleaming
steel teeth. Pointed gleaming steel teeth, in neat rows. Owen knew when he’d been out-smiled. He looked away as though he’d meant to all along, and almost bumped into Hazel from behind. She’d stopped just inside the bar and was looking around with barely disguised nostalgia.

Owen wrinkled his nose at the smell and thought he could detect several kinds of smoke in the air that were banned throughout the Empire on the grounds that they were dangerous to whoever happened to be around when someone else was smoking them. The light was dim, not helped in the least by the thick smog in the air. The inhabitants of the bar looked the kind who preferred it that way. At least, if Owen had looked that unsavory, he’d have preferred not to be seen too clearly. There was no sawdust on the floor, presumably because the rats had eaten it. He could see a few of them darting busily about in the far shadows.
If one of them runs up my leg
, thought Owen,
I’m going to scream
.

Hazel made her way through the smog to the bar, and Owen went after her rather than be left alone. The last time he’d felt this threatened, two starcruisers had been firing at him. The bar itself was encrusted with filth and the remains of spilled drinks, some of which appeared to have eaten holes in the wood. Either that, or the woodworm had been overdosing on steroids. Owen took one look at the bar and decided immediately that he wasn’t going to lean against it, even for a moment. Hazel gestured imperiously at the bartender, a grossly fat man with a long, stained apron that might have started out white several decades ago, and grilled him on Ruby Journey’s whereabouts. Owen took the opportunity to study the various bottles on display and decided very firmly that he wasn’t at all thirsty.

And he didn’t think he’d ask about bar snacks, either.

He put his back to the bar and looked about him. The Rabid Wolf struck him as the kind of place his tutors had warned him he’d end up in if he didn’t pay attention to his studies. He hadn’t seen such an assortment of thugs, villains and general lowlifes in one place since his last visit to the Imperial Court on Golgotha. None of them looked particularly hygenic, and Owen was seized with a sudden certainty that they all had fleas. An itch started immediately over his ribs, but he refrained from scratching himself for fear someone would think he was going for his sword. Not that he was actually afraid of any of these scum, of course. He was a
Deathstalker, after all. He just didn’t like the odds, or how far it was to the nearest exit.

A handful of ladies of the evening, or ladies of the mid-afternoon, to be exact, were gathered together at the other end of the bar, garish and striking in their working paints and finery. They were arguing fiercely over a large purse of money, presumably obtained from the man sleeping beside them with his head on the bar. Owen had to admit that they were rather attractive, in a grubby vicious way, and the beginnings of a fantasy stirred in his mind and certain parts of his anatomy. Perhaps the Rabid Wolf wasn’t such a bad place after all. At which point, one of the women produced a knife from nowhere and stabbed one of the other women right in her overdeveloped chest. She fell limply to the floor and lay still, and her murderer snatched up the purse from the bar. The other women thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen and shrieked with laughter. Owen looked longingly at the door and decided he was going to shoot anyone who even looked at him oddly. Especially if it was a woman. Hazel appeared suddenly beside him, and he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“What’s the matter with you?” said Hazel.

“What’s the matter with me? This is the most appalling, disreputable and downright awful establishment I’ve ever had the misfortune to visit! If you were to look up the word sleazy in the dictionary, it would say ‘See Rabid Wolf.’ Get me out of here before I catch something.”

“It’s not that bad,” said Hazel. “For Mistport. I used to do a lot of my drinking here when I was younger. Of course, I had no taste then. It gets a bit noisy sometimes, and the clientele isn’t exactly elite, but on the other hand, it’s never boring.”

“There’s a lot to be said for boring,” said Owen. “What did you find out about Ruby Journey?”

Hazel scowled. “Ruby worked here briefly, but they ended up firing her for excessive violence, which probably took some doing in a place like this. They’ve no idea where she might be now.”

“Does that mean we can get out of here now?” said Owen hopefully.

“You really don’t like this place, do you?” said Hazel, grinning. “Isn’t the ambience growing on you?”

“If it does, I’ll scrape it off,” Owen said firmly. “I just
know I’m going to come down with something disgusting simply from breathing what passes for air in here. I’ve had boils on my buttocks that were more fun than this.”

Hazel pointed out one of the ladies at the end of the bar. “I think she fancies you.”

“I’d rather die.”

And that was when the fight broke out. Owen didn’t see who started it, or why, but suddenly everyone in the inn was fighting everyone else with swords, knives, broken bottles and anything else that came to hand. The din was appalling, with battle cries, screams and foul language filling the air. Blood flew in all directions, and bodies fell to be trampled underfoot. Owen drew his sword and backed up against the bar. One of the few things he had learned from his tutors was that discretion usually was the better part of valor. Or to put it another way, only an idiot gets involved in other people’s fights. He shot a glance at Hazel and winced. She was grinning at the mayhem with undisguised glee and looked as though she might dive in at any moment just for the hell of it. Owen grabbed her by the arm, got her attention by shouting right into her ear and pushed her firmly toward the exit. She nodded disappointedly, and standing back to back, they headed for the door. A few individuals disputed their progress, but backed off rather than face the obvious competence with which Owen and Hazel held their swords. They eased out the door, stepping over the unconscious body of the doorkeeper, and lurched out into the street. It seemed very calm and peaceful, though the din inside seemed to be going on uninterrupted. Owen began to breathe more easily and put away his sword.

“All right, let’s get out of here before the law arrives.”

“The law? Around here? Not unless they’re new. The watch doesn’t bother this neighborhood for anything less than a full-scale riot.”

“And this doesn’t qualify?”

“Hardly. Just a few high spirits, that’s all. It’ll blow over as quickly as it started. You’ve got to learn to take things more casually, Deathstalker. Mistport’s not that bad. It just tends to the dramatic.”

The boarded-up window beside them exploded outward as a body came flying through it. Owen and Hazel backed away instinctively, just in time to miss a second flying form. This one wasn’t traveling quite so fast and crashed into a
snowdrift not far from the shattered window. He got to his feet with a groan, swayed unsteadily a moment, and then cautiously approached the window.

“I’d like to apologize.”

“What for?” said a voice from inside.

“Anything.”

He then set off down the street, walking slowly and carefully, as though he wasn’t sure everything was as firmly attached as it used to be. Owen and Hazel shared a smile and set off after him. Up on a slanting roof overlooking the Rabid Wolf, Cat watched them go with a feeling of relief. He’d been a little worried when they actually went inside the inn, and became even more worried when the mayhem started, because whatever happened, he had absolutely no intention of going in there after them. There were limits.

At the last moment, he glimpsed a movement in the shadows below, and instinct sent him diving to one side as the disrupter beam exploded the roof where he’d been crouching. Even so, the blast was enough to send him flying, all arms and legs, trying to find something to grab onto. And then there was nothing but air under him, and he fell thirty feet into a deep snowdrift and didn’t move again. Lucien Abbott, the Wampyr, smiled and lowered the disrupter. He’d never liked Cat. He started down the street after Hazel and Owen, still smiling, still holding the gun.

At the entrance of the unlit street, Hazel and Owen stopped dead in their tracks at the unmistakable sound of an energy weapon being fired and moved immediately to stand back to back again. Owen tried to look in every direction at once, but whichever way he looked there were far more shadows than light. Hazel had told him energy weapons were rare on Mistworld, and he’d stopped worrying about them on such an obviously low-tech world. Now he felt naked and vulnerable, and he didn’t even know from which direction the shot had come. He had his gun out as well as his sword, but that was all offense, no defense. A disrupter blast would tear right through him without even slowing. He knew he should have brought a force shield with him.

He looked back and forth, sweat starting out on his face despite the cold. And then, from every side, from every shadow, from every street and alleyway, came a small army of men and women. They were wrapped in greasy, mismatched furs, and they all had some kind of weapon. They
moved slowly, remorselessly forward to form a circle round their prey. Owen licked his dry lips. There had to be at least a hundred of them. Maybe more. And then Lucien Abbott stepped out of the crowd, carrying a disrupter, and Owen’s heart sank even further. The Wampyr was smiling. His teeth looked large and white and very sharp.

“You didn’t really think it was going to be that easy, did you, Deathstalker? Just brush me aside and forget all about me? Takes more than one blow to put me down. You have to remember: I’m Wampyr. I’m not human anymore. Haven’t been since they let me die and then brought me back. Do you like my friends? They’re all plasma babies. Blood junkies. Blood brothers and sisters, bound to me by ties stronger than love or family, life or death. You never did tell him the whole story, did you, Hazel? What it really means to be a plasma baby. I didn’t just drink her blood, Deathstalker; she drank mine. Only a few drops at a time, but a little of my artificial blood goes a long way. I take human blood in and refine it into something else. They tell me it’s the most potent drug imaginable; a high so intense it’s like living and dying all at once. Isn’t that right, Hazel?”

“That was a long time ago, Abbott,” said Hazel, and her voice was firm and very steady. “I broke free of you. It took everything I had and then some, but I beat you. You’re nothing to me anymore.”

“You belong to me,” said the Wampyr. “Just like the rest of my children. Come back to me. Taste my blood again, and I’ll let you live.”

“I’d rather kiss a cockroach,” said Hazel.

The Wampyr smiled coldly. “Kill them both. See that they suffer first.”

Owen brought his gun up quickly and fired at Abbott, but the Wampyr melted instantly back into the crowd, and the energy beam tore through one of the ragged men and set fire to several others behind him. They died in silence. Incredibly, the crowd didn’t falter, hands steady, eyes unwavering. And the Wampyr stepped back into the light, still smiling.