Deathstalker Legacy (26 page)

And you were
nobody
in Society if you didn’t already have your invitation.

The Parade of the Endless buzzed with rumor, and bristled with all kinds of life. Tourists were flooding in from all sides of the Empire, and you couldn’t book a room in a hotel for love or money. News channels were offering outrageous sums just for a peek at the wedding dress, and the wedding banquet organizers were getting everything from stock option offers to death threats over the seating arrangements. Excitement was in the air wherever you turned, and everyone agreed there had never been a better time to be alive. It was, in fact, the last great Season of the Golden Age, though no one knew that then.

On the surface, all was calm and peace and happy anticipation. But down in the dark, dark depths, something with teeth and appetite and awful ambitions was laying the groundwork for a terrible storm.

 

Brett Random’s stomach hurt all the time now. It hurt when he woke up, ached all through the increasingly long days, and barely subsided enough to let him sleep at night. He didn’t eat much, and he was drinking a lot. It was all tension, of course. Nerves. And it was all Finn Durandal’s fault. The Paragon drove Brett like a slave driver.

Brett had never been bothered with butterflies in the stomach before, even during the most complicated and risky of his confidence tricks; but back then he had always been the one in charge. He had always taken great pride in the careful planning that went into every one of his stings, and had the utmost confidence in his ability to function and if necessary improvise under pressure. But now Finn was in the driver’s seat, demanding remorselessly that Brett lead him further and further into the seediest, darkest warrens of the Rookery; searching out the extremely disreputable people and expertise that Finn had decided were necessary for his bitter revenge.

Brett assumed Finn had some secret overall plan, though he couldn’t see it for the life of him. But he had to assume that Finn knew what he was doing, because the alternative was frankly too awful to contemplate. Far better to be the accomplice of a master criminal than the victim of a raving lunatic. So Brett took Finn where he wanted to go, introduced him to the often appalling people Finn said he needed to meet, and did a lot of sitting miserably in corners, with his arms folded tightly over his aching stomach.

Sometimes Rose Constantine joined them, and then Brett’s head hurt too. He just knew the Wild Rose was a disaster waiting to happen. When he had trouble getting to sleep at nights, he just counted the ways it could all go suddenly and horribly and violently wrong when Rose was around.

Brett Random trudged unhappily down narrow lanes, knocked on hidden doors, and reluctantly led the way into windowless rooms with dramatically low lighting, where he introduced Finn Durandal to locksmiths, forgers, computer hackers, burglars, muscle and guns for hire, and all the other secret people a Golden Age didn’t like to admit still existed. A lot of them wouldn’t have been in for Brett Random, but they were all fascinated to meet a legendary Paragon gone bad. Most didn’t believe it at first, but you only had to be in Finn’s presence for a while, to hear his calm awful voice, and see the fey light in his eyes, to know this was no trick, no con. And somehow none of these alleged twilight people could bring themselves to say no to the charming, dangerous, tainted Paragon as he murmured his needs and requirements, and promised them rewards almost beyond belief.

Evil always knows evil, when it meets it face-to-face.

Finn was particularly pleased to meet a certain Mr. Sylvester; a faded actor of a certain age, who with the decline of his career had embraced computer hacking and character assassination with equal satisfaction. Mr. Sylvester was an absolute master at breaking into even the best-guarded of files, adding a damning line or two, and then leaving, with no trace to show he had ever been there. He could destroy a reputation with just the right planted word, here and there, and could change or corrupt the whole meaning of a phrase just by meddling with the emphasis. After all, a half-truth can be so much more damning than a total lie . . . Many a ruined life, and many a suicide, had been traced to Mr Sylvester; but only by those in the know. Finn talked with Mr. Sylvester for over an hour, while Brett waited in the corridor outside and failed utterly to make small talk with Rose Constantine.

The agents provocateurs had their own squalid little café, The Outcry, where they lounged around all day when they weren’t working, drinking bad coffee, and swapping the tales they could tell only each other. For the right price, they would infiltrate any march or meeting or organization, and guarantee to bring it all crashing down to ruin and disgrace. No one was safe from them, and some had been known to boast they could start a fight in an empty room. They were much in demand, and very well paid, but the nature of their profession, and the many enemies they’d made, demanded an anonymity that they found particularly irksome. What use was craft and skill and accomplishment if you couldn’t boast about it afterwards? They were all heartily sick of each other’s company, so they took to Finn Durandal immediately, as he sat and listened patiently while they all but fell over themselves detailing all the appalling things they could do for him, for the right price.

In the end, Finn offered a sum that made Brett’s eyes bulge, as a down payment for a series of actions yet to be detailed, and all the agents present agreed to abjure all other assignments and hold themselves ready for his call. Brett was so astonished he actually took Finn by the arm and insisted on talking privately with him. Finn sighed and agreed, and allowed Brett to lead him away while the agents chatted animatedly with each other. Finn had promised them a real test of their skills, and they did so love a challenge. Brett pulled Finn into a private booth, and the Durandal immediately pulled his arm free.

“Don’t touch me, Brett. I don’t like to be touched.”

“You must be touched in the head, to be putting up the kind of money you’ve been offering them!” Brett said angrily, too outraged even to be respectful. “And you didn’t need to hire them all, dammit! Jesus, you could at least have let me negotiate . . .”

“I’m touched by your concern, Brett, but you don’t know what I’m planning,” Finn said calmly. “I may have need of all of these people, or I may not. I’m not sure, yet. But either way, I don’t want any of them free to work against me. And anyway; money doesn’t matter to me.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” Brett said automatically. “And keep your voice down, or they’ll double the price on general principle. Are you really so rich you can just throw it away?”

“I’ve always had money,” said Finn. “I made a lot of it in my early days. It was just another way of proving I was the best. Another way of keeping score with my . . . contemporaries. But I never really had anything worth spending it on before. Certainly nothing that gave me so much pleasure. Don’t frown like that, Brett. It’ll give you wrinkles. I know what I’m doing, and you know only what I want you to know.”

And then they both looked around sharply, as a single agent came striding over to join them. He crashed to a halt outside their booth, his thumbs tucked ostentatiously into a wide leather belt from which hung all kinds of nasty-looking weapons. He glared at Finn and Brett impartially. He was almost as wide as he was tall, his body bulging with the best muscles money could buy. In fact, he looked like he got a bulk discount on the deal. He was a thug, and looked it, conspicuous in his lack of enthusiasm for Finn’s proposal earlier. Brett studied the man warily, and let his hand drift casually towards the dagger concealed up his sleeve.

“Do introduce us, Brett,” Finn said easily. “I don’t think I caught this gentleman’s name from before.”

“This is Toby Goddammit,” said Brett. “There’s probably a highly amusing christening story somewhere in his background, but don’t expect to hear it from Toby. He has no sense of humor and even less small talk. Not noted for his subtlety, or his charm, and vicious with it. Toby’s the one you hire when there’s a shortage of mad dogs. Living proof there’s no intelligent life on his planet of origin. What’s the problem, Toby?”

“He is,” said the thug, jerking his shaggy head at Finn. “I don’t trust him. I don’t care what he says, or what you say; once a Paragon, always a Paragon. This is some kind of trick, or trap; has to be. And if they’re all too stupid or too greedy to recognize that, I’m not. You shouldn’t have brought him here, Brett. I thought you had more sense. Now get out of the way. You’ll all thank me for this later. Say good-bye, Durandal. You’re a dead man.”

His hand came up, suddenly full of a long gleaming blade with a viciously serrated edge. Finn made a slight gesture with his hand, and Rose Constantine erupted up out of her chair in the corner, where she’d been sitting still and silent for so long that everyone had quite forgotten about her. Toby started to turn, but she was already upon him, and her sword flashed through the air in a blindingly swift arc. It sank deep into Toby’s neck, and the impact of the blow drove him to his knees. He cried out once, his eyes wide with shock and pain, while blood gushed down his shoulder and across his heaving chest. Rose set her foot against his shoulder, and jerked the blade free. Toby grunted, a deep helpless sound, like a cow in a slaughterhouse. Rose hit him again, and the blade sheared clean through his neck. The head fell away, rolling across the floor towards the other agents, who scattered away from it with cries of alarm, like startled birds. The head’s eyes were still blinking, and its mouth worked soundlessly. The headless body fell forward onto its chest, and lay still. Rose sighed happily. A shocked silence fell across the room. Finn emerged from the booth and smiled charmingly about him.

“You have to be strict, but firm,” he announced.

“I want to go home,” said Brett, from under the table.

 

But they still had one last visit to make. To see Dr. Happy, and his fabled subterranean chamber of stinks and perfumes. You could only get to it by descending through a trapdoor, and making your way cautiously along an underground passage with sulphur-smeared brick walls that was home to far too many rats and other small scuttling things, and finally through a series of state-of-the-art air locks. Dr. Happy was not a genuine medical person, as far as anyone knew for sure, but he certainly knew his chemistry. Whatever you wanted, or thought you needed, Dr. Happy had the cure for what ailed you. Love potions and battle drugs, mind benders and soul destroyers; from the sublime to the suicidal, from heart’s ease to potions that would blow the doors of perception clean off their hinges, Dr. Happy was right there for you.

Brett looked interestedly about him as he followed Finn and Rose into the good doctor’s laboratory. He’d never been able to afford the doctor’s more than extortionate prices, and he was curious to see if all the rumors were true. His fingers itched to steal something. Anything.

The laboratory was a long single chamber, carved out of the solid rock the city rested on. The bare walls were covered with what looked like miles of transparent tubing, stapled directly to the stone, all of them pulsing with the many-colored liquids streaming through them. Tables groaned under the weight of the very latest in scientific equipment, some of it straight from some poor fool’s development benches, who probably didn’t even know it was missing yet. Dr. Happy never had any trouble getting what he needed, whether the price for it was credits or in kind. There were computers, gene splicers, recombinant chambers, and a huge walk-in refrigerator absolutely packed with alchemical magic.

The man himself was almost impossibly tall and willowy, a spindly scarecrow figure in his stained and battered white lab coat, topped by a long thin face with bulging eyes and a frankly disturbing toothy grin, under a shock of white hair that seemed to stick out sideways from his head. He giggled a lot, and bit his fingernails when he got excited. His eyeballs were as yellow as urine, and his teeth weren’t much better. He smelled strongly of something. Brett wasn’t sure of what, but did his best to keep upwind, just in case. The good doctor bobbed happily along beside Finn as they strolled through the chamber, pointing out his various wares and processes like a proud father.

“Such a pleasure to have you here, sir Durandal! Such a pleasure, yes! I’ve heard so much about you. One does hear things, you know, even this far underground. Don’t touch that, Brett. I knew you’d come to me eventually, sir Durandal. Everyone does, you know. Everyone! Oh, you’d be surprised who I’ve entertained down here, in my time . . . I have it all here, you see. Such stuff as dreams are made of . . . in pill and liquid form. Don’t touch that, Brett. I have potions here to drive a man mad with lust, or grow hair on an elephant. I can drive sane men out of their minds or cure the crazy. Make the blind see and the deaf hear, and make a cripple take up his bed and walk even if he didn’t have a bed when he came in here! I have potions to give you emotions they don’t even have names for yet, to show you heaven and hell and everything in between. Every day I think the unthinkable, and nothing is ever too extreme! Brett, if I have to speak to you again I will spray you with something really amusing.”

“Brett, behave yourself,” said Finn. “Or I’ll let him do it.”

Brett thrust both his hands deep into his pockets, and did his best to look innocent. He wasn’t particularly successful. Rose had found a table to lean against, her arms loosely folded across her chest. She looked bored. Dr. Happy sneered at them both, sniffed moistly, and turned his toothy smile on Finn Durandal again, his bony hands clasped tightly together over his sunken chest.

“So; what sweet and sour miracle can I perform for you, sir Durandal? Hmm? Something to make a corpse sit up in his coffin, or make his widow dance? Something to make an angel curse or a demon repent? Just name your needs, sir Durandal, and I will supply them in an instant! Yes!”