Sword of Dreams (The Reforged Trilogy) (10 page)

"Having a nice night, sir?" she asked.

Coldhand took the tray and tapped the glowing lock. The door slid shut in her face.

Through the window, red and amber light filtered up from the city. It was beautiful but illuminated little in the shadowed hotel room. Coldhand carried the food back to his desk. His legs were stiff and prickled unpleasantly as blood flowed back into them after sitting for so long.

Dinner turned out to be some sort of white fish on a pillow of rice and drenched in a pale wine sauce. Coldhand picked at the unfamiliar meat. Fish was never a common food on mountainous Prianus. There were fish in the fast-flowing rivers, but not enough to ever become a major staple of Prian diet. Even after five years away from his homeworld, Logan still found meals in the rest of the core ridiculously extravagant. How many kinds of food could one man need? Whether it came from fish or cloned algae, it all ended up in the same place and served the same purpose.

Coldhand began eating and returned to his work. It seemed unlikely that Gavriel would have chosen Axis as his church's new home. While the lower levels might make for excellent – if dangerous – hiding, it was still the capital world of the Central World Alliance. Transporting that many wanted criminals onto the planet would be difficult, but far more problematic would be the proximity of the CWA Armed Forces, who were positioned in force on Axis. If the Alliance learned of Nihilists on their precious planet, a single Lyceum dictum would flood even the dankest, darkest recesses of Axis with soldiers.

Prianus had a much lower population, but with less habitable surface area than the gleaming globe of Axis, suffered even worse overcrowding. Still, there were Arcadians everywhere. The fairies on Prianus never met with the same hatred that they had on other worlds. But in spite of their long wings, the Arcadians who appeared a century ago were no more able to leave Prianus than the native humans. Most of them were still there, living in the same poverty and desperation as the Prians themselves.

Coldhand was not done eating, but the fish no longer looked appetizing. He replaced the cover and pushed it to the corner of his desk.

________

"Miss Carmine, there's a call coming in for you. Miss Carmine?"

Alexa Carmine sat up with a groan. The previous night's dose of Frag had left a thick, sweet taste at the back of her throat. She coughed and gagged, certain that she was about to be sick. Alexa tried to rise, but the lean masculine shape lay draped across her, holding her down. She picked up the boy's wrist and let go. His arm flopped bonelessly into the tangled sheets. He would not wake for hours yet. Frag always hit men harder. Alexa scratched her head. The boy looked familiar.

"Miss Carmine?"

Another man stood in the doorway of her small but lavish bedroom. This one was human, too, but older. Much older and much uglier. A cave-in three years back had broken his cheekbone and ripped most of the scalp from that side of his skull. The entire right half of his face was twisted and scarred, crumpled and hairless as a discarded wrapper. For some ridiculous reason, he would never let Alexa send him to her favorite surgeon to repair the damage.

"God, you're enough to give any woman nightmares, Harrell," she groaned.

"Very sorry, Miss Carmine. There's a call waiting for you."

Alexa fell back into the soft, inviting warmth of her bed and comatose boy. Her dark hair fanned out around her head. "I don't care, Harrell. Take a message. I'll deal with it later." She gave her bedmate a half-hearted prod. "Who the seven hundred hells is this, anyway?"

"That's your new secretary," Harrell said. "Miss Carmine, you really should take this call. It's Coldhand."

Alexa jerked upright. The color seemed to drain out of the room. She felt suddenly hot and prickly all over, as though she had just taken another shot of Frag.

"How long has he been waiting?" Alexa gave her unconscious secretary a hard shove. He groaned and curled into a ball at the corner of the bed. She kicked her way out from under him and wrapped herself in a thick, wine-colored robe.

"A few minutes," Harrell told her. He frowned with the left half of his face. "It was very hard to wake you, Miss Carmine. You had too much last night."

She did not have time to argue with him. Besides, Harrell might have been right. Alexa could remember nothing of the night before. But if she did not give Logan Coldhand what he wanted, Alexa suspected she would be spending a lot of memorable nights in prison. She ran from the bedroom and into the adjoining office. The stone floor was cold and hard against her bare feet.

Alexa leaned over her desk and told her computer to open the call. Coldhand appeared on the screen, sitting so still in the shadows on the other end that Alexa half wondered if it was a photo-mask. The Prian bounty hunter looked just as he had the last time he had been on Glaw: short, dark blonde hair framing those glacial pale blue eyes that alternately made Alexa want to run in stark terror or else rip off his clothes.

Right now, she could do neither. Alexa Carmine, the self-made smuggler queen of Glaw, needed to remain a more useful ally than a bounty.

"What do you need, Coldhand?" she asked. Did the quivering in her stomach come through in her voice? "More phenno? It's hard to move goods off Glaw right now. There's a burst covering the whole eastern hemisphere tomorrow."

"No. I need information, Carmine."

"What kind of information?" Alexa asked suspiciously.

If Coldhand was after one of her smugglers, giving him information would cut into her profits and could make her look unreliable to the other captains. The answer came after a tense moment, the delay between transmissions from Glaw to wherever the hunter was.

"I'm not interested in any of your people," said Coldhand, perhaps reading Alexa's fears in her voice. "I'm just verifying a theory. Has anyone new come into the Glaw tunnels?"

"A lot of people come and go every day. Can you be more specific?"

Another transmission delay. Coldhand seemed to be considering how much to reveal to Alexa. She could not blame him. If he ever tipped his hand too far, if he ever revealed some useful vulnerability, it would be a lot safer to remove the hunter than to keep working with him.

"There would be a lot of them, probably upward of a thousand, and many would be Arcadian," he said at last.

Carmine thought about that, drumming her long red nails on her desk. "I had a large group of passengers come through a few months back. Not in the numbers you're talking about, but two or three hundred. I noted them because almost all of them were bird-backs. I don't like it when anyone makes trouble in my tunnels."

"Came through? Are they still on Glaw?"

"No. They left again a few days later on another ship. Nice Narsus thing, custom job. Crewed by more bird-backs," Alexa said. "The whole thing was more than a little strange."

"Tell me." Coldhand's voice was icy and intense, like being falling into cold water.

"The fairies had money. Enough to pay for fuel and supplies for a long flight. But they were going to Prianus. If they had money, why fly out to that God-forsaken place? Anyone with enough color leaves Prianus and never goes back." Alexa realized what she had just said and fell uncomfortably silent.

"Like me," Coldhand said a few seconds later. "Did they do anything while they were on Glaw?"

"Do anything? Anything illegal, you mean? No. They were quiet and kept to themselves. They all stayed together in one of my caves and never complained."

When Coldhand received her answer, he did not seem surprised. He nodded once and cut the transmission without another word. Alexa flopped down into her chair and wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead. Harrell stood in the door of the office, curiosity on his ugly face.

"What did he want?" Harrell asked.

"If you weren't already listening in, then you're as stupid as you look. Go take my secretary home. I'm not in the mood for him anymore," Alexa said.

Harrell inclined his head. "Yes, Miss Carmine."

________

Coldhand had risen early, after only a few hours of sleep. When he was done speaking to Alexa Carmine, he put in a call to the CWAAF router on Axis, requesting similar information. A business-like young private verified the bounty hunter's clearance and promised to get back to him soon. Coldhand sent a message to the Stray police, too, but it went straight into an automated file collection. He did not expect any information back from them, but doubted that he needed any.

It was all only verification, anyway. Carmine had confirmed his theory. The Cult of Nihil had gone to Prianus. Three hundred quiet Arcadians with the money to fly out to the edge of CWA space? It had to be the Cult of Nihil. Still, Coldhand was curious where the money came from. The crooked, patchwork cathedral in Gharib did not exactly conjure images of vast wealth.

There was something else. The Mirran Emberguard who had taken a younger Logan's hand and heart in battle one cold, frozen night…

The Nihilists have been on Prianus before. Now they're going back.

It made sense. The Alliance chased Gavriel off Stray, so he was retreating to old and familiar territory.

While he waited for information from Axis, Coldhand ordered the fuel and water he would need to make the flight to Prianus. Twenty days in the cockpit of his Raptor was going to be uncomfortable, but finding a larger ship to make the journey would take too long. It was already hours past dawn and Logan wanted no more delays.

It did not take long to order everything he needed for the flight and even less time to pack up the handful of scattered clothing, datadexes and his Talon-9. Logan held the gun, feeling the weight of it in his mismatched hands. The Talon was huge and heavy. It weighed twice as much as a similar weapon manufactured anywhere else in the galaxy. Prian construction was sturdy, but no one could accuse it of being stylish or sleek.

Deep scratches scarred the length of the Talon's barrel, a long and violent history etched in a primitive script that only he could read. Coldhand traced his fingers over three parallel grooves. They were shallow and rough at the edges. Those were left by Orphia, Tiberius' aging hawk, back in Gharib as Coldhand circled Maeve in the hold of the Blue Phoenix.

Maeve was trying to bait me into killing her then,
he remembered.
She tried to trick me
.

She never succeeded, of course, but the attempt was admirable. Maeve poured more effort and passion into death than most people put into life.

Logan turned his Talon-9 over. A single deep line sliced straight and clean along the back end of the refraction barrel, from the sight and down almost to the stock. Unlike the marks left by Orphia's curved talons, this cut was deep and smooth. Maeve had left that scar on the first battle, a single overhead blow from her glass-headed spear. On that first day, the small, skinny Arcadian princess had seemed so sick and strung out on chems… How could she be any kind of challenge?

Underestimating Maeve almost cost me another hand.

Logan held the Talon in his illonium hand and flexed the good one. A stark white scar ran down the back of his hand where Maeve's spear had grazed him. Only a cool head and fast reflexes had kept the glass blade from sheering away everything past his thumb.

They were not the only scars Maeve had left. She was a skilled warrior and a wily mark. Not for the first time, Coldhand found himself wondering where she was. Maeve had not put out a new bounty on herself, Logan knew. He checked frequently. Had she finally tired of trying to taunt death – her Nameless goddess – into taking her? Was she still aboard the Blue Phoenix, ignoring orders from her surly old Prian captain?

Coldhand ran his fingers down the length of the barrel again. There were other fainter marks in the gray metal. Many of them were older than he was, carved there long before the gun passed to a young Logan Centra. It was an heirloom, like all police weapons. Three generations of Prian cops had worn it before him. But even this Talon-9 had been the newest, most powerful laser pistol in the Highwind precinct.

When I graduated, the others insisted I take it. I was the best shot. I deserved to carry the newest Talon, they said. When I showed Vorus, he grinned and slapped my back so hard I almost fell over. They were all so proud of me.

Returning to Prianus would be complicated. There were people who remembered him there, who would recognize Logan as a traitor to the Prian police. If any of the other cops knew Logan was back on the homeworld, there would be duels, at least. They might even try to arrest him. He was a thief, after all. Both his gun and ship were the property of the Prian police.

Coldhand dropped the Talon into its holster. There were other considerations. Being a criminal on Prianus meant that he would not be able to use the controlled landing fields. There were plenty of other places to set down his Raptor, but not many where it would be safe. Prians would steal anything that was not nailed down, camouflaged and protected by force. Securing the Raptor was probably going to be expensive, considerably narrowing the profit margin on the endeavor. But if the Nihilists proved half as interesting as Maeve had been, then they would be worth it.