Sliding Void (14 page)

‘We haven’t been living in the town long enough to have business with anyone we don’t know,’ said Noak. He had travelled far enough east to guarantee that. Any further and they would be across the border. ‘What name did they ask for?’

‘None,’ she said. ‘Not our real one or our new name.’

‘Probably just peddlers, my love,’ said Noak, ‘trying it on.’ He glanced towards the crossbow he had sitting near the roaring fireplace, its iron trigger face shiny in the orange light from the crackling logs. Always good to keep a weapon to hand. ‘Nobody knows us here.’ Most of the people he had served with were corpses on the other side of the ocean. Even Noak’s nodding acquaintances were rightfully toasting their feet by the fire on the far end of the continent. Certainly not out here, in the high mountains, colder even than the plains and the coast.

‘They might be customers,’ ventured his wife, ever hopeful.

‘Might be.’ And setting up a shipping concern river-running on a single-sailed sled out in the nub-end of nowhere, Noak couldn’t afford to be shy. Not with the wizard’s seed money mostly spent over the past six months.

His beloved showed them in. Two large rangy men, both wearing tidy bearskin jackets and trimmed beards to match – no swords or crossbows, though. One had a smart silver fur-lined jacket while the other wore black. This pair certainly didn’t look like trappers needing cargoes sailed back west. Their skin was pale too, almost pallid, didn’t get out much in the sun-glare. Not locals, for all that they wore tricorn hats in the alpine style.

‘Welcome gentlemen,’ said Noak. ‘Feel the fire on your bones.’ He indicated the opposite end of the table he was seated at, a couple of stools close by. ‘I am Bertil, the master of the town’s shipping company.’

The two stood standing and silver-jacket spoke first. ‘We passed your river schooner moored at the bottom of the valley. I am Mister Bligh and this is Mister Thetford.’

Noak nodded. ‘You boys aren’t peddlers, are you?’

‘Travellers,’ said the one named Thetford.

‘Seekers,’ clarified his colleague.

Noak looked at his wife standing by the door to main room. ‘Well then, how about you seek out a couple of cups of warm honey beer for our guests, my love? I handle cargo as a rule, not passengers,’ continued Noak. ‘Mountain salt and pelts, mostly. Not much room for cabins on a narrow-berth river runner. And with names as foreign as yours, I doubt if I’ll be sailing far enough away from the mountain ranges for your tastes.’

‘We have our own transportation,’ said Bligh. ‘And what we seek is truth, Noak Barlund.’

‘I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.’

‘I doubt that,’ said Bligh. He pulled out a frying pan from underneath his bearskin. Noak felt a sinking feeling in his heart. Last time he’d seen that pan, it’d been bouncing off a shield-warrior’s helm on the other side of the country. ‘But we are going to match your DNA to the skin traces on this, just to be sure.’

‘What’s Dee and Hay?’

It was at that moment that his wife re-entered the main room, swinging an axe at the nearest visitor, Thetford. She caught the man on the shoulder, cutting down and sending a severed arm flying away to the other side of the room. A youth filled with chopping wood for a house’s fireplace could do that for a girl’s back swing. Incredibly, Thetford just stood there, casually glancing at his bloody stump spurting blood as if the wife had done no more than jostle him on a market day.

‘That was clever,’ said the wounded visitor. ‘Your request for beer was a coded signal, warning your spouse.’

Bligh pulled out a pipe-like object from under his jacket. ‘Let’s just take it as read that you are the prince’s manservant.’

The stranger pointed his pipe at Noak and he barely had time to protest, ‘Ex-manserv—’ before Noak found himself falling to the stone floor, his body paralysed as if held in the clutches of a waking nightmare.

Bligh knelt by Noak’s side. He couldn’t see what they had done with his wife from the angle where he’d painfully collapsed, but he noticed there was a strange set of metallic strips tied like a glove around the intruder’s hand.

‘Is this the one?’ asked Bligh.

Thetford nodded. ‘DNA pairing scans positive, his ribs have fractures sealed with modern bone replication and there are micro fragments of rail-gun shell casing embedded in his spine. Here’s the shell match. A General Weapons Combine MA1002 flight drone. It’s old TAMC military surplus.’

It was spells they were talking about, magic.
Matobo the Magnificent, damn his bones
. The sorcery that had flown Noak away from certain death at the hands of the baron’s soldiers, the same sorcery that had healed his broken body.
And they can detect it. Have the priests hired their own sorcerers to track down Prince Calder? To track me down
?

Bligh came into view again, kicking Noak’s crossbow away. ‘Not quite as old school as one’s trusty crossbow, though, Mister Thetford.’ Bligh smiled, but without an iota of warmth. ‘Hello, Noak Barlund. There’s one thing you should always remember when consorting with a wizard. Their magic
always
leaves traces. Let’s see what you really know, shall we?’

‘And with any luck,’ said Thetford, ‘you will be able to help us locate Prince Calder. That’s rather what we’re hoping for, isn’t it Mister Bligh?’

‘Quite so, Mister Thetford.’

Noak couldn’t scream. It was as if his lips had been sewn shut. Bligh stroked Noak’s hair as though the ex-manservant was a hound, little spines of metal putting pressure on his scalp.

‘We’re going to take a copy of your mind, which will, I’m afraid, hurt immensely. Burning your synapses out one at a time is not a procedure you can experience under anaesthetic. You have to be conscious during magnetic resonance capture.’

Noak tried to struggle, but his body ignored his requests – not even a toe twitching in response to his increasing panic.

‘After you’re dead, you will be free. You shall live forever!’

Who is this maniac
? The madman’s first prediction turned out to be true. Noak’s brain burned like a tar fire execution in front of the walls of Narvalo. Noak wasn’t actually alive to see how the second prediction worked out. But it was amazing how much he could perceive
after
he was dead.

>>>

And the story continues…

… in the next in Stephen Hunt’s Sliding Void series, Book 2:
Transference Station
. Available now.

DESCRIPTION

Are things finally looking up for Captain Lana Fiveworlds? She's managed to reach what passes for civilisation in the wild border systems of the Edge - Transference Station - the largest trading hub in the free worlds. With her ramshackle starship, the Gravity Rose, safely docked, she's now desperately searching for a cargo to stave off bankruptcy.

Lana's crew needs paying - including the amorous barbarian prince she rescued from a failed colony world. But her crew have other priorities: the ship's android, Zeno, is distracted by terrible secrets from his past, while her alien navigator, Polter, runs into trouble indulging his religious fervour.

If that wasn't enough, there's a deal available... but only from the dodgiest broker in a thousand planets. With rival starship captains looking to sabotage Lana for good, and a dangerous mission to a mysterious planet which is far more than the lies she's been spun, things can only get worse from here on in.

Lana Fiveworlds and her crew of misfits are still sliding void, just, but for how much longer?

Sometimes, the brown stuff piles up so high you need antigravity thrusters to fly over it.

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>>>

Other books for the Kindle…

Six Against the Stars

DESCRIPTION

As the self-proclaimed biggest coward in the galaxy, Horatio has it easy on what passes for 40th century America. A much-favoured sycophant in the court of the King of Earth, Horatio lives in a genetically engineered paradise where there's a vat-grown slave waiting around every marble column with a bunch of grapes to drop into his oh-so perfectly designed mouth.

Unfortunately for Horatio, the artificial intelligence that rules the great mass of humanity spread across the stars has other plans for this feckless seducer. So, if you ever wonder how the galaxy's biggest coward finds himself actually trying to save it, you're not alone... but then, unfortunately, neither is our hero!

His misadventures are abetted by a psychotic Martian warrior, a robot who thinks it's related to Sherlock Holmes, a beautiful genetically enhanced assassin, a scientist with a computer for a brain, and a millennia-old clone who was alive when the last U.S. President was executed by a firing squad.

It's six against the galaxy. Six against the stars. They'll save the universe... but they might damage it first.

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In The Company of Ghosts

Book 1 of the In The Company of Ghosts series (The Agatha Witchley Mysteries)

Because sometimes, insanity and genius are indistinguishable...

Agatha Witchley used to be a spy in the Cold War, but now she's locked up in the UK's premier maximum-security mental institution. She believes that the ghosts of the celebrity dead visit her padded cell and whisper the world's secrets in her ears. Which is a big problem for the British government, because she's the only one who can help them when an American billionaire is murdered in London in one of the strangest killings yet.

The Home Secretary needs the case locked down and solved before the entrepreneur’s death becomes public knowledge and economic chaos ensures.

The woman he has in mind for the job might be paranoid, she might be lethal, she might half-insane and drawing a pension, but it's amazing how you can forgive that in a genius when it's a genius's help you need.

Yes, the security forces need Agatha Witchley again. It's just the ghosts of Churchill, Elvis and Groucho Marx they could do without.

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