The Mortality Principle (10 page)

The walls were just too far apart to be able to brace herself against them both to work her way up as though
climbing a chimney, but conversely it was too cramped to try to use the sword to dig into the mortar and make fresh holes where she needed them.

The handholds, she quickly realized, were uncomfortably spaced for her ascent, suggesting whoever had made them was considerably taller than her, or at least had a much longer reach.

That, too, supported the witnesses' descriptions of the giant brute.

Her shoes weren't really designed for free climbing.

There had to be a better way of getting onto the roof because she wasn't going to catch him this way.

The shadowy figure was already disappearing over the gables and onto the roof, out of sight.

She realized she wasn't going to be able to get up there quickly enough to see where the killer went. It just wasn't happening, no matter how athletic she was. She couldn't defy the laws of gravity.

She dropped back to the ground, her foot missing the body by mere inches. Annja knelt, checking for a pulse that wasn't there. There was absolutely nothing she could do for the killer's latest victim. There were no threads of life, no shreds of hope. She pushed back up to her feet, trying to judge the way the killer had run and carve out a path down below.

She ran out into the main street, scanning the rooftops for shadow or silhouette, anything that might betray movement.

Nothing.

It was difficult to get any kind of line of sight because so many of the old buildings were huddled close together. That also meant it would be easy for the killer to leap from one to the next if he was athletic. It wasn't
just down to agility; someone of his size and shape might not be as fast as she was, but it was impossible to track him from the street.

She scanned the street quickly, looking for a fire escape or something that would offer roof access, but this wasn't New York where every building had iron stairs bolted onto the facade. These buildings were old, three hundred, four hundred, even five hundred years old in some cases. Fire-safety regulations were obviously different when they'd been constructed, and now it was all about preserving the beauty of the original design.

They still needed gutters, though, and not cheap plastic modern drainpipes, either—good old-fashioned cast-iron drainpipes.

Annja found one that looked sound, tested it, then took a few steps back. She lowered her head, took a single breath, then launched herself up the wall, making a grab for the drainpipe high above the second bracket fixing it to the brickwork.

It groaned for a moment, threatening to pull away from the wall, but it held.

Annja pulled herself up, hand over hand, the muscles in her arms straining with every scrabbled step, but she rose much faster than she could have done trying to follow the killer using the almost-invisible handholds in the wall. It took less than a minute for her to reach the rain gutter below the roof. How it overhung the street like the brim of a hat made it impossible for her to just haul herself up and over the top of it.

Concrete and plaster crumbled under her weight, spilling to the ground below like tears weeping into the silence of the night.

It wasn't going to hold much longer, she knew.

Annja braced her feet, gripping the pipe with one hand, and reached up for the iron rain gutter. The bracket holding it began to buckle under her weight. Committed now, she had no choice but to go all-in, and reached up with her other hand. She squatted, bouncing once, twice, three times, and launched herself into a handstand high above the city streets, hanging there upside down for half a second. She then pushed off with her hands and flipped into a somersault and came down on her feet, the red clay tiles cracking under the unexpected impact. She moved quickly away from the edge as the bracket gave way and the length of iron drainpipe fell thirty feet back to the ground.

Moonlight illuminated the rooftops. Annja scanned the horizon, looking for the killer. Her hotel was the only taller building in the vicinity. Silver light shimmered on the ridged tiles. Too late. She'd wasted too much time getting up there. The killer was gone. She turned in a full circle, desperately trying to make out any sign of movement, any uneven shape along the line of rooftops, but there was nothing.

She'd misjudged the killer again.

He was long gone.

She'd had him in her reach only for him to slip through her fingers.

She crouched low, frustration threatening to bubble over inside her. He couldn't have gone far. It was impossible. The night was even quieter up there. She could barely hear the strains of music from the bars and clubs, no more than a distant susurrus like the wind. She was listening for a very particular sound: footsteps, or more accurately, the grating of clay with weight being put on the tiles, then removed as the killer fled.

Nothing.

It was pointless to blindly walk over rooftops without some sort of clue as to which direction the killer had taken.

He could, she realized sickly, have escaped a few moments after climbing, disappearing through a fire door, or down the side of another building. There was absolutely nothing to say he'd run across the rooftops, and the longer she stood there scanning the rooftops, the surer she became that he hadn't.

She was about to give up and make her way back down when the scrape of a tile sliding from a roof and falling, followed by the almost delicate smash on the ground below, had her moving again quickly, as sure-footed as a cat across the cold tiled roof toward the source of the sound.

A shape rose from the skyline and started moving.

The killer was more than two hundred yards away. He'd managed to get much farther away than she'd expected. She had no idea how many buildings were between them or how many streets she'd have to traverse, but at least she knew which direction she needed to go.

Another tile crashed.

He was moving quickly, without any kind of care for his safety, or for stealth.

Annja started the chase.

She moved faster than the lumbering shadow, light on her feet, barely seeming to rest on top of the centuries-old tiles as she moved quickly across the rooftop.

The gap between them closed quickly.

Annja ghosted across the rooftop, but as her foot came down, inches from the edge an instant before she jumped, the tile slipped. The clay tile grated across the
surface of the final tile, then spun away into darkness. Then she was in the air and it was shattering below her. She came down on the other side hard, falling forward. Her fingertips dragged across the tiles as she stumbled away from the edge.

A light came on in one of the windows. A second later the window was thrown open and a shout filled the air. The anger in it was universal, even if the words weren't. She could only assume the speaker was demanding to know what was going on.

The killer was still several rooftops away, moving with an almost-simian gait, knuckles seeming to drag across the tiles. He didn't slow for so much as a heartbeat, launching himself from one roof to another, and charging off again across the flat surface, putting more distance between them.

Watching him go, Annja realized that his bulk should have inflicted far more damage on the roof than it appeared to be doing. There was nothing graceful about his movement, but he kept on moving, not once looking back.

Annja launched herself in pursuit of the lumbering figure again, but the tiles offered little purchase and she felt herself slipping and sliding as she advanced. She crossed the middle of the roof, looking up to see the killer outlined by the moon. Her breath caught in her throat. He was huge. She recalled the illusion that Jan Turek's coats wove around him, but this was different. The killer wasn't padded with a dozen coats for warmth.

She misjudged the next leap, too focused on the man in front of her, putting her foot down awkwardly as she pushed off.

She felt herself falling, knowing she didn't have the
height or momentum to stick the landing on the other side, having horribly misjudged the width of the alleyway beneath her. It was a long way down. Too long. She arced her back, arms and legs pinwheeling to try to stretch a few more precious inches out of the leap.

It was all about nerve now.

Annja reached out for the rain gutter as she fell, knowing it was her only hope.

Rough metal dug into the palm of her hand as she tried to support her weight and reach up with her other hand. She kicked out with her feet, scrabbling desperately for purchase on the smooth wall as the rain gutter failed. The brackets groaned, the iron itself buckling slowly as the entire thing pulled away from the brickwork. The old mortar couldn't hold her weight.

There was a moment, the long, lonely silence between heartbeats, when it held and then the whole assembly began to fall away in slow motion.

Annja glanced around frantically, desperately hoping to find something she could use to slow her fall. Her gaze raced over the iron braces running through the center of the building to prevent the ancient walls from pulling themselves apart. No good. She looked across the line of the roof to other anchor points that were out of reach. No good. Then she glanced at the French balcony ten feet below her feet, desperately trying to work out any possible combination of gymnastics and contortions that might offer up a chance of grabbing hold of one of the elaborately filigreed bars before the ground came rushing up to meet her. She looked all the way down to the ground, where a pile of cardboard boxes lay invitingly, promising a soft landing that would be
anything but. The image of her broken body lying amid the crumpled cardboard flashed across her mind. No good.

The metal pipe continued its relentless collapse, peeling farther and farther away from the safety of the wall.

Annja scrambled her feet against the concrete, desperately trying to change the angle of descent, when the pipe lurched beneath her, two anchor points pulling away at once. She had no choice but to go with it, pushing herself back toward the building she had launched herself from.

The change of angles brought new pressure points to bear on the iron. It couldn't hold, shearing away into dozens of fractured pieces.

Annja held her nerve, waiting for the last possible second to reach for the French balcony.

Her fingertips snagged the metal bar for a second, but as she tried to close her fist around it, an iron leaf stabbed deeply into her palm and pain exploded in her hand. She recoiled, and by then it was too late.

The world above her was filled with stars.

And then it wasn't.

Roux had been on edge as soon as he'd hung up on Annja.

The old man knew her too well. He knew that by saying don't go out she was going to go out. Annja wasn't the kind of woman you could tell what to do. He'd known she was going to dive head-on into the investigation the moment she'd called simply because there was something strange going on. It didn't matter that she didn't know what it was. That only ensured she'd chase down every possibility until she did know.

He wasn't worried about her well-being; she was more than capable of dealing with the threat gripping the city of Prague.

That was not the issue.

The issue was that he knew who the killer was.

Or rather, what.

And it was his job to take care of it, not hers.

Maybe once upon a time, like in the fairy tales, he could and should have taken care of it, but he'd screwed up and the opportunity passed. How many people had died because of his mistake? More than the handful of most recent victims, that was for sure. That wasn't even the tip of the iceberg. This time he was going to
have to take care of it, no matter the cost to him, even if that cost was his life, which he suspected it would be. He'd always known there would come a time he'd have to face the reality.

Even the great Roux couldn't expect to live forever.

But maybe there was another explanation?

Just because he saw patterns within the killings and could connect dots no one else seemed to see didn't have to mean he was right. Garin being there, for instance. Was he involved? It was inconceivable that his appearance in Prague was a coincidence. The universe and Garin Braden didn't function that way. Garin had chosen this time to track Annja down for a reason. But what might that reason be?

The flight seemed to take forever despite being a short-haul trip, and it wasn't helped by the fact it had taken hours to tie up the few loose ends he thought would take minutes. In the air he'd put out a couple of calls of his own to people to see if they could shed any extra light on what was happening in Prague. There was nothing in those conversations to make him doubt his gut instinct. He looked down at the world through the window, the lights of the city looking like ley lines directing power all across the surface of the Earth. It was quite beautiful, but he didn't have the time for beauty. The miles weren't passing fast enough.

There would be another death tonight. He knew that. It was part of a pattern that went back centuries now. In daylight it would be impossible to track the killer. It moved only at night, using daylight hours to recuperate, falling into an almost-hibernation state. It was how the monster had always worked. And yes, that was the word he chose to use, not killer, not beast, not man. Monster.

The time passed agonizingly slowly.

There was nothing he could do but think as the plane made its way toward its destination, beginning its descent. He needed to devise a suitable plan, something that would deal with the problem once and for all. The problem was, the only thing he could think of that stood a chance of working was no more sophisticated than scouring the streets. London would have been better, some kind of city with the level of surveillance cameras that covered every rooftop and every angle, not Prague, which was almost backward when it came to that kind of security. He was going to have to rely on luck, and he hated relying on luck.