Chapter 107
Ardan was running across a layer of snow that had covered the iced-over Swallow Bay. Farther east, the cold waters of the ocean would not yield even to the most furious barrages of winter, but here, close to the shore, the bay had frozen several meters deep—too deep for anything but an icebreaker to pass through.
Ardan shook his head and discarded such useless thoughts. His mind was getting tangled up in itself. Why had the mark of Allane’Eari taken hold just then, and vanished only after Milar’s clinical death? What would become of Milar? Had Ardi reached him in time, or had the captain’s brain suffered serious damage? How would the Colonel and Parliament’s commission react to all of this? What did it mean that the Dark Aean’Hane had Star Magic at his command? And—most pressing of all—how was he going to hide the ten rays in his Blue Star? Ardan had no wish to become a lab rat in the secret laboratories of the Empire.
Concentrate, Ardan reminded himself. These are tomorrow’s thoughts.
The snow crunched beneath his bare feet. It was dry and brittle, like crushed glass. Ardan had long since ceased to feel the weight in his calves: his legs had gone numb somewhere midway across the Swallow Bay, turning into two fleshy stumps that he kept moving through sheer force of habit. His breath escaped in puffs of steam and dissolved at once into the gray air. The sky, low and weighted with lead, blurred toward the horizon, and at some point, Ardan stopped being aware of where the ice ended and the ocean began, and where the ocean ran into the sky. Everything around him had drawn together into a single, colorless haze, as though someone had rubbed a wet hand over an unfinished watercolor and smudged the borders of the world.
He ran.
His lungs were burning. Each breath ached in his chest with a dull, hollow heat—right in the spot where Milar still bore a dreadful mark. Ardi tried not to think about that. He tried not to think about anything at all, except for one thing: the trail in the snow that he’d been chasing for a quarter of an hour now.
And then the trail was gone.
Ardan slowed down, then halted, breathing hard. Steam poured off him like he was a horse driven close to death from exhaustion. The Matabar blood in him was doing what it could, but even it couldn’t quite undo the consequences of his brief duel against the Dark Aean’Hane. Ardi looked around. The flat white sheet of the bay lay all around him, perfect in its stillness. There wasn’t even a silhouette, or a movement, or even the smallest dark speck on the horizon. The spy seemed to have dissolved into thin air.
“Ahgrat,” Ardi hissed through clenched teeth.
He dropped to his right knee, willing his hammering heart to be still, and peered down at the snow. The footprints were still there. He hadn’t lost them; he had simply stopped seeing the one who’d left them behind. Ardan bent lower, almost pressing his face against the ice, and brushed his fingertips against the nearest footprint.
He frowned.
The footprint was wrong somehow. Ardan touched it once more, feeling around its edges, testing its soft, dented shape. Then he brought his fingers to his nose and drew in a breath. The smell, too, was… strange.
Not a human smell.
There was something animalistic there—a sharp, musky note known to anyone who had ever tracked a predator along strange paths in the Alcade’s forests. Obeying his instincts, Ardan brought the snow to his tongue and rolled the taste against his palate.
A forest cat.
The smell and the taste didn’t belong to a man. Nor did the imprint itself, now that he looked at it properly. The marks hadn’t been left by the sole of a boot, but by the long pads of paws, with the short furrows of claws adding to the texture.
Ardi remembered something: as the spy had been fleeing, his feet had already begun to change, bending at an unnatural angle and sprouting short fur. It hadn’t just been his imagination, then.
“All right,” Ardan exhaled. “That’s good.”
He straightened and closed his eyes. Long ago—in another life, it felt like—his friends from the Alcade’s forest had taught him how to hunt more than prey.
“Drink the scent in,” Shali had said. “Let it inside you, remember it with every part of your body. And then let the wind tell you where it leads.”
Ardan drew in a deep breath and held it, letting the musk settle into his memory. Then he opened his mind to the wind. It lashed at his cheeks, cold and cutting, carrying with it hundreds of smells out of the frozen city. And somewhere beneath all of them, fine as a thread, was that animal musk.
Ardan allowed himself a brief, almost nostalgic smile. The wind was blowing in his face, which meant that it was carrying the scent of his prey straight to him. This boded well for his hunt.
He bolted forward.
The pain in his chest flared anew. He felt something warm and salty rising up his throat and spat as he ran—a scarlet stain marred the white snow. He was coughing up blood. This wasn’t his first time doing that today, and certainly wouldn’t be his last.
A duel of two Aean’Hane tended to be costly…
Ardi’s body was very nearly falling apart at the seams as it paid the price for his recklessness over these past few hours. However, Ardan had long since learned how to ignore the signals his own body was sending him.
He was running north, toward the Baliero district, and that was strange. Baliero was a place of fashionistas, artists, opera houses, and expensive restaurants. What business did a mutant spy have in the flashiest district of the city? He should’ve run to the docks, to the warehouses, to any of the dozens of smuggling tunnels through which one might slip out of the capital. But no—the mutant was running straight for the heart of Imperial high society.
The canals of Baliero opened up before Ardan, one after another. He repeatedly leaped from the endless islands onto the embankments and then back down again, onto the ice, cutting corners. His bare feet slapped against the frozen stones, striking up a dull echo between the walls of the houses.
Passersby stopped on the embankments to gawk. A pair of stately women in fur coats recoiled as a bloodied, barefoot young man with a staff slung across his back tore past them; a heavyset man wearing an old-fashioned top hat dropped his newspaper; a delivery boy nearly tipped over his tray of pastries, staring at Ardan in stunned disbelief as he ran past him.
Between the heated houses and the Ley-generators, Baliero was almost warmer than the Firstborn Quarter.
And then the scent shifted.
Ardi was running along yet another canal, slipping every now and then on the bare ice, when the wind brought him a fresh thread of the musk—sharper now, more recent. The mutant was close. He seemed to be heading toward one particular building, one that rose above the rooftops of Baliero like a cake made of icing crowned with a gilded lyre.
The Baliero Concert Hall.
Ardan’s heart missed a beat. Not from weariness, but fear.
Tess…
“Mr. Belsky has invited Mr. Marnakov from the Holy Empress Theatre!”
“Ah… Well, if it’s Marnakov…”
“You ill-mannered brute,” Tess laughed, not at all offended. “He is one of the foremost theatre directors of our age! And he is coming to the Baliero Concert Hall! He’s going to stage the Death of the Tsar musical with us.”
Tonight was the premiere, and Tess would be on the stage. Ardi remembered how happy his wife-in-just-a-few-days had been when she’d been cast in the musical.
If the mutant was heading there because of her… But why? Why would the Puppeteers risk such a prized asset only to…
Ardi clenched his teeth and forced himself to run faster. His lungs answered with another fit of coughing, and he felt blood begin to run down his chin again, but he didn’t even bother to wipe it away.
Reaching the embankment by the concert hall, Ardan tore along the cobblestones, heedless of everything. Townspeople scattered before him, a woman in an evening gown cried out, and from the crossing, the shrill whistles of the guards were already making a racket. Two of them tried to head him off, but Ardan rounded the first of them like he was a mere lamppost, and the second simply couldn’t react in time. Ardan struck him with his shoulder and didn’t even slow down.
The whistles multiplied behind him. However, the bundled-up watchmen in their heavy greatcoats and winter boots had no chance of keeping up with him even though he was barefoot and wounded.
The back entrance to the concert hall was in a narrow alley between the main building and the reserve generator station, which stood apart. This was an alley Ardan knew well—he’d used this very same entrance before.
Ardan turned the corner and immediately caught the smell of blood. It was thick, fresh, and hadn’t yet cooled in the frosty air.
Two of the Dandy’s hired bruisers were lying across the concrete. Both of them had had their throats cut in one motion. It had been precise, with no hesitation. Ardi knelt beside the closest man and looked his body over. There were no marks of a struggle, no other cuts on their arms. Their iron—both their revolvers and their knives—hadn’t even been drawn.
The Dandy’s hired thugs hadn’t even put up a fight.
They’d stood quietly while someone had walked right up to them. Nearby lay a packet of cigarettes. It was empty and marked with blood. They hadn’t resisted because they’d known the killer and had wanted to give him a light.
“Or they’d thought they knew him,” he drawled.
Ardan froze. A wave of cold that had nothing to do with the winter air rolled along his spine. How could a mutant be both a trusted agent of the Black House and one of the hired bruisers? Whom had he presented himself as? After all, the Dandy’s people weren’t exactly castoffs from the Tend or Tendari. You couldn’t put one over on them with forged papers and some confidence. They would’ve only let someone they knew by sight near them.
By sight…
Ardan slowly straightened. The thought that had flared up in his mind now seared him. Alla Tantov. Her gift had been the ability to change her face, leafing through a wide but limited repertoire of guises…
What if this mutant had a similar ability, only his was far stronger? He could’ve presented himself to the guards in any guise at all—a colleague, an acquaintance, the Dandy himself, what did it matter? It was likely something similar to Tantov’s ability, but with the breadth of Captain Aloaeiol’s own power.
Then Ardi remembered the animalistic footprints. The mutant’s feet had turned into something bestial as he’d run. No. This was not merely a change of features. Tantov had been able to alter her appearance, even her sex, but she’d still remained human.
This mutant had altered the very structure of his body—bone, muscle, sinew. He’d rebuilt the skeleton of his feet as he’d run, like some mad sculptor kneading clay in an attempt to fashion a monster.
If his abilities truly went beyond Tantov’s gift, if he could alter not just his visage, but the whole architecture of his being, then the Puppeteers had made the perfect mole. This was a creature that could become anyone, anything. It wasn’t a mere illusion, nor an enchantment, not even a veil created by the art of the Aean’Hane, but a true transformation of the flesh.
“A perfect chimera,” Ardan whispered.
The crest of the Tazidahian Brotherhood flashed across his mind.
There was the explanation for their close ties…
Ardi stepped over the bodies of the guards and headed inside.
The stairway brought him to the backstage area of the Baliero Concert Hall—a wide corridor with high ceilings and dim Ley-lighting, where the staff seemed perpetually busy. There were costumers with armfuls of fabric, stagehands with ropes and hooks, make-up artists with small cases. None of them knew that two dead men were lying just outside. They were all occupied with one thing: the performance that was happening at that very moment, just beyond the wall.
Ardi heard the muffled music and the distant voices coming from the stage. He swallowed and forced himself to focus.
He moved among them, ignoring their stunned looks at his state. He was, after all, barefoot, bloodied, and wearing torn clothing, his eyes wild with the hunt. Someone called after him, another person backed away from him, and a woman dropped a box of pins. Ardan noticed none of them. He sniffed at the air, turning his head from side to side like a hound tracking prey, searching through dozens of human smells for that one musky thread.
He found it. Only it wasn’t quite what he had expected.
There was fresh blood. It didn’t belong to his quarry.
Ardi turned toward a narrow corridor leading to the back rooms. The smell grew stronger with each step. He pushed open an unlocked door and saw something that he’d already known he would find there. Even so, the sight made his jaw clench.
One of the stagehands—a young man perhaps only a little older than Ardan himself—was lying in a corner of the closet amid coils of rope and wooden battens. Stripped naked, his throat cut, he was staring up at the ceiling with glassy eyes. His uniform jacket and pants were gone.
Ardan bent and touched his bare chest. The body was still quite warm.
The mutant had only just changed his “clothes.”
Ardan followed the tracks with his eyes—they were faint impressions left behind by damp soles on the dusty floor—and saw where they led: to a narrow iron ladder that was used to reach the catwalk. It was situated right beneath the ceiling of the concert hall, and the rigging system could be operated from there.
Ardi had just placed his foot on the first rung when a thunderous echo coming from the stage stopped him.
The music had quieted. The silence was filled by the voice of the master of ceremonies. His tone was solemn and faintly trembling with emotion:
“Ladies and gentlemen! Please rise! The Imperial Box welcomes His Imperial Majesty!”
The auditorium burst into applause. Even here, in the wings, the wave of sound was almost a thing one could touch, and Ardan felt the ladder vibrate beneath his feet.
The Emperor was here. Now.
Ardan slowly looked up to where, among the weave of cables and beams, the catwalk disappeared from sight. From there, one could see the entire auditorium. The stage. The Imperial Box…
The thought struck him just as hard as Arkar had when Ardan, who hadn’t been thinking straight, had said something foolish.
This might not have anything to do with Tess. It might never have had anything to do with Tess. This was a shapeshifting mutant spy capable of going anywhere. He’d killed the Dandy’s trusted men and made his way onto the catwalk of the Baliero Concert Hall on the very same evening that His Majesty had chosen to honor the performance with his presence… The mutant hadn’t come here for a mere singer, even if she was the daughter of the Governor-General of Shamtur.
The Puppeteers were going to assassinate the Emperor!
Ardan gripped the ladder so hard that his knuckles turned white. Blood pounded in his temples. Weariness, pain, his cough—all of it had retreated to the edges of his mind, displaced by a single, crystal-clear understanding: he was the only thing standing between the killer and the conspirators’ target. And who was he? A tired Junior Investigator of the Second Chancery who’d only just completed his first year of service.
He was also the great-grandson of Aror Egobar, the teacher and right hand of the Dark Lord.
And he was supposed to save the Emperor’s life while they were playing the Death of the Tsar musical down below?
If the Sleeping Spirits had an abundance of any one thing, it was their sense of irony.
With a heavy sigh, Ardi unfastened the strap of the cloth sheath Tess had sewn for him and set his staff down. Every last ray had gone dim in his Stars, so it would do him no good. It might even get in his way, like it had when he’d chased after the Star-born werewolf. Ardan was usually content to learn a lesson after just one painful demonstration.
After removing his staff, he shrugged off his cloak, now wearing only his torn suit. Only then did he keep going, working his way under the thick cables, the lengths of rope braided together, the hooks and the lighting stands from which Ley-cables snaked away.
Drawing his father’s hunting knife from its sheath, Ardan tried not to breathe and started moving the way Ergar and Shali had taught him to. He rolled his foot from heel to toe along the outer edge of it, leading with his knee, and shifted his weight from one side of his torso to the other. Taking slow breaths in and out, dividing each of them between his next four steps, Ardan made sure not to look toward the dark silhouette that had dropped to one knee at the center of the catwalk.
Instead, he fixed his gaze beyond his quarry so that it wouldn’t feel his eyes upon it.
Ardi tried not to think about why the premiere had been moved from the last day of the Congress to only a few hours before the ambassadors’ round table. He also tried to avoid speculating on why the Puppeteers had suddenly chosen to strike at the Emperor, who…
Ardan squinted as the bright light struck him. From the orchestra pit below, the columns of spotlights had leaped toward the ceiling, their bright beams cutting through the dense catwalk.
The auditorium fell silent, and the curtain, with the dull echo of turning gears, slowly rose to reveal the stage.
Ardan’s heart started beating faster. Below him, on a small balcony decorated with flowers, Tess was sitting on a stone bench. Or rather, she was now Princess Verensa, the youngest daughter of the Last Galessian King and the First Emperor of the New Monarchy. She was wearing a beautiful, snow-white gown from a bygone age, with a crinoline and ruffles and a high collar, embroidered with gold and pearl, and bright gems framing the waist of the corset.
Verensa was holding an ancestor of the guitar, a thing that predated even the lute. It was something halfway between a long board strung with strings and a small harp. Tess moved her fingers across the strings and softly began to sing:
“Silent hangs the cage of gold,
In it a swallow, small and old,
Folded wings, no song to give,
Her heart aches, longs to live.”
Her voice, amplified by the Ley-equipment built into the floor, fell like the freely-cast feathers of a wanderer of the heavens. It whispered beneath the high ceiling of the concert hall where the aristocracy, the ambassadors, the magnates, and the Emperor himself were gathered. And high above, hidden beneath the false ceiling, the singer’s future husband and the would-be assassin who’d betrayed the Black House stood on the catwalk.
Ardan took one step forward, then another, then one more. The silhouette ahead, lost among the shadows thrown by the dancing spotlights, was assembling something. He’d lifted up one of the boards and drawn out a case that contained something composed of tubes and rods.
A disassembled rifle? Ardan thought, surprised by this development, and slid his gaze toward the technical slits in the floor through which one could watch the auditorium.
Despite his deep Ley-exhaustion, he could still feel a prickle at his fingertips. The whole auditorium—the boxes most of all—was very nearly drowning in the numerous protective wards fed by Ley-generators. Ardi now knew why the Dandy and the late architect had needed such an absurd number of them.
The mole had already set up a tripod, settled the barrel onto it, and screwed on the stock. Neatly, slowly, in no hurry at all, he drew out a long, heavy cartridge. It was even bigger than the ones used in Sergeant Boad’s four-shot revolvers. If an ordinary man fired such a thing, it would rip off his shoulder and shatter his spine, and the shockwave would reduce his brain to pulp.
Despite its heft, Ardan still couldn’t understand what the point of such a thing was. Even with an artillery shell, the mole surely wouldn’t break through the shields.
Somewhere lies a wondrous land,
Where the endless skies expand,
Where they fly without a chain…
But the castle’s locks remain.
Ardan crept closer, careful to make no sound, using the voice of Tess-Verensa to mask the creaking of the boards beneath him. While the audience, holding its breath, listened to the bewitching voice of the former lounge singer, Ardan hoped that he, just like the hundreds of spectators, was making no sound. After all, unlike the various gentlemen and their companions in the boxes, he wasn’t being shielded by any magic. The impact of such a round wouldn’t merely punch a hole through his chest—it would split his body in half, vaporizing most of his internal organs.
Ardan should’ve still hurried to forestall a plan that was seemingly destined to fail (except for the fact that the Puppeteers were not prone to pointless gambits), but he also couldn’t afford to rush. If he did, he might find himself upon the paths of the Sleeping Spirits.
The mole set the cartridge into the chamber and, just as unhurriedly, just as carefully, pushed the bolt forward until it locked. He began to calmly adjust the dials on the sight. The killer had only one shot, and he was preparing it with the same gravity and detachment with which Ardan was working his way through the maze of cables and other equipment.
Why has no alarm been raised? A brief, worrying thought throbbed in his mind. They all saw me!
While a shapeshifter mole who could put on any face he pleased might lose himself in a crowd, a tall, bloodied young man in ruined clothing should’ve made the staff desperate to alert security. But what if…
What if those who’d run to alert security had met the same fate as the young man who’d been killed near the ladder? The Puppeteers always had redundancies in their plans. And for just a single shot, they didn’t need a great deal of time. Just one trusted person in the security detail would be enough to buy the mole enough time to finish what he had begun. Which meant no help was coming.
“Crystal forests fill her dream,
Moonlit rivers with silver gleam,
Mountains crowned in rose-cloud weave…
She wakes and her dreams leave.”
Only a few meters separated Ardan from the mole now. The man had already settled his cheek against the stock. His left hand cradled it. His right lay softly on the trigger. The mole, whose face was still hidden in the shadows cast by the spotlights from below, was beginning to breathe slower and slower. Taking advantage of the fact that he was almost on top of his prey, Ardan managed to trace the line of the rifle’s barrel.
As he looked through the same technical openings in the false ceiling and the catwalk as the assassin, the young man understood, with a start, that the Puppeteers’ target wasn’t the Emperor at all. It wasn’t even some other member of the Agrov family who was present that evening in their box.
The sight, judging by its angle, was fixed upon a box well below the Imperial one. The one in which, before going to the round table, the representatives of…
Tazidahian! Ardan cried out in his mind. He’s trying to kill the Brotherhood’s ambassador!
There was no time to think about why the Puppeteers were trying to assassinate a representative of what seemed to be their closest ally. The Puppeteers always had backup plans for their backup plans, and those in turn pursued more than one goal at a time. To expect anything less from an organization that had refined its mysterious designs across entire centuries would simply be foolish.
Even so, Ardi, who was still feeling that prickle at his fingertips, couldn’t understand what the mole was counting on.
“Somewhere lies a wondrous land,
Where the endless skies expand,
Where they fly without a chain…
But the castle’s locks remain.”
The bewitching voice was still holding the attention of everyone in the auditorium. And even if that hadn’t been the case, the layered panels would’ve made it impossible for anyone below to see what was happening on the catwalk. Everything had been built so that the audience would not be denied the magic of the stage, and so that every technical detail would be hidden from the mesmerized crowd.
Ardan took another step forward, and as he did so, a disturbing thought went through his mind like a red-hot needle.
If the Puppeteers have a man who’s infiltrated the security, then… Ardi looked at the mole, who had glanced down at his wristwatch. They could’ve planned a strike on the generation bay as well!
The prickle at his fingertips suddenly began to flicker. It felt as though someone had found the Ley-wiring and was now attempting to break the circuit and cut the feed to the shields. They were doing it over and over, forcing the reserve power systems to come online—including the reserves of those very same reserves…
“Gold can never be the sky,
The silence melts a quiet sigh.
At the window she does pray…
Yearning for wings to steal her away.”
The mole wouldn’t wait for the system to restart and switch over automatically to the city Ley-network. All he needed was a wide enough window between the power going out and starting back up. That was likely why he kept glancing at the spotlights. In the end, when every other source of energy had cut out and the safety protocols had run their course, the wards would draw power from the network feeding the equipment, the lighting, and everything else.
Ardi’s heart started beating faster.
He wouldn’t make it.
He would not reach the mole before the cascading failure resulted in a tragedy. What would happen if a shot rang out in the Baliero Concert Hall and ended the life of the Tazidahian Brotherhood’s ambassador?
“In a month, the fields will bloom, and the flowers will cover the lines of the fortifications. The rain will stop and the sky will lighten. It’s beautiful here, Ardi. It was especially beautiful in my childhood. And not because everything is more beautiful and more wondrous in your childhood, but simply because… there were a lot fewer trenches and forts back then.”
“Whatever the Colonel is doing, he had better hurry, Corporal. The vultures can already smell blood, and we will not be able to drive them off forever. Sooner or later, they will gather enough courage to try a peck. And then your generation, Corporal, will have to show what it’s made of.”
Was this the Puppeteers’ goal? War? The kind whose fire would engulf the whole continent? Maybe even the whole world?
The spotlights flickered. Once, twice, and…
A short, sharp whistle cut through the air. Startled, the mole spun around toward the source of the noise—Ardi. The barrel of his rifle was already shifting from its target in the ambassador’s box to the young man when the failed assassin flinched and very nearly toppled over. He caught the rail and, slowly, taking care to make no sound, lowered his rifle.
Ardan, breathing heavily, looked through the slits of the false ceiling. For a second, the theater sank into darkness. Tess-Verensa’s voice hushed, only to return at once to its former majesty. Men started entering the boxes of the Emperor, the Prime Minister, and the ambassadors, urging them to leave.
The mole was currently pulling Hector’s hunting knife out of his shoulder. Ardan hadn’t had the time to aim properly, and besides that, he wasn’t particularly skilled at throwing knives in general. He could perhaps throw a knife a little better than he could shoot.
The young man bent at the waist and held out his half-clenched fists in front of him, locking his elbows in close to his ribs. The narrow catwalk wouldn’t allow him to use Guta’s wrestling. He’d already spent the element of surprise, so Ergar’s lessons were out as well. All that remained was to follow Shali’s instructions.
The mole, after calmly rising to his feet, finally drew the knife out of his shoulder. The wide, thin wound closed in an instant. No orc could regenerate so quickly, and not even Yonatan could manage it. A mutant from Tazidahian was perhaps the only thing that could. But for some reason, Ardan had no doubt that the man before him was an Imperial.
The killer, now with Ardan’s knife in his hand, turned and looked behind him. The catwalk ended in a blank wall on his side. The only way out was behind Ardi. The mole, who seemed oddly relaxed, acting as though the Cloaks couldn’t potentially come up here at any moment, went over to his rifle and pressed something on it. The entire thing emitted a brief, bright green flash and crumbled to the floor, turning into black grit that immediately dissolved between the boards of the catwalk. It now looked as though there had never been anything there at all.
Ardan drew in a deep breath. He and Milar usually ended up facing the kind of people the Puppeteers hadn’t staked much on, or were simply using as their pawns. But by all accounts, this mole was a far more important figure on the board. And one they had planned to use more than once.
“Foolish,” a voice spoke up all of a sudden. It was vaguely familiar. “This will change nothing, Egobar. It will only delay the inevitable and result in even more casualties than what was originally planned.”
Ardan couldn’t for the life of him remember where he had heard that resonant baritone before.
“You think you’ve saved someone, or stopped something, Corporal?” The shadowy figure went on. “No. You have only signed their death warrants. Now, instead of hundreds of thousands, millions will die. And all of it is your doing, boy.”
The mole placed Hector’s knife on the catwalk and kicked it toward Ardan. And while the young man, his eyes never leaving the mutant, bent to pick up the weapon, the enemy drew his own. It was a standard operative’s knife of the Black House. Just like the ones Alexander and Din carried.
“There is no honor in killing the unarmed,” the shadowy figure whispered. “But I will be remembered as the one who finally consigned the Matabar to the pages of history. I am sure that the Duke won’t mind you dying now, Egobar. And I never cared for you from the start.”
For a second, they just looked at each other.
Then the mutant ran his tongue along the blade of his knife and threw himself at Ardi.
Ardan recoiled. The steel passed within a hair’s breadth of his throat, and its cold whisper brushed his neck. Ardan caught the mutant’s wrist with his left hand, but the man twisted out of his grip—his joints cracked, bending at an angle no human could bear—and struck again from below, aiming for his jaw. Ardan jerked his head back. The tip of the enemy’s knife opened the skin on his jaw—not deep, but his blood still started flowing right away. It was warm and abundant, and had a foul, muddy smell.
His chin burned.
The mutant hadn’t licked his blade just to intimidate him…
Ardi drove his fist into the bridge of the mutant’s nose. His cartilage cracked. The mutant’s head whipped back, and dark, far-from-human blood gushed from his nose. Ardan didn’t hesitate—he stepped in and struck again, aiming for his foe’s throat with bent, tensed fingers crowned with long claws.
The mutant rasped and doubled over.
Ardan tried to knock the enemy’s knife loose by driving his knee against his wrist, but the mutant flipped his blade into his other hand and slashed across Ardan’s forearm.
The cut on the young man’s arm looked very deep. It was deep, smelled foul, and seemed to be in no hurry to so much as begin to mend. Whatever was in the mutant’s saliva, it could apparently interfere with a Matabar’s regeneration.
Ardi felt a hot ache rise inside his arm. His muscles burned. He stepped back, pressing his wounded arm to his body, and saw the mutant straighten.
The bridge of his nose looked whole again. The bleeding had stopped. His throat, which had been struck with enough force to tear apart a windpipe, looked as though no blow had landed there at all.
The mutant smiled. Amid the shadows that hid his face, the lower third of it was visible. His teeth were small and sharp.
He attacked again. He used a series of short, fast strikes without windup or preparation. The enemy’s knife flickered before Ardi’s face like a serpent.
Ardan defended himself. He turned the blood-slicked steel aside with his forearm and elbow. But each block cost him a new wound. The blade snagged the skin on the back of his hand, split open the muscles of his shoulder, and ran along his ribs. The mutant was moving so fast… faster than any man ever could. Faster than any beast, even. And he didn’t seem to tire.
Finally, Ardan saw an opening.
When the mutant lunged forward yet again, Ardan shifted aside and drove an elbow into the man’s temple. His head snapped back. Ardi, catching his own knife between his teeth, seized the mutant’s wrist—his wounded arm flared with pain—and wrenched it sharply to the side. With a wet click, the joint came out of its socket.
The mutant didn’t so much as grunt.
He bared his teeth and jerked his arm back. Ardan heard the joint slip back into place. It simply reset itself as though nothing had happened.
The mutant jabbed his knife into Ardan’s side. The blade didn’t cut him too deeply—the young man had turned in time—but it was still enough to feel the steel bite at his liver. Ardan drove his knee into the mutant’s stomach, threw him back a step and a half, and grabbed his own knife once again.
They stood facing each other. Both of them had bloodied knives. Beneath them, beyond the catwalk, the music drifted on, and the hundreds of people in velvet seats had no idea what was unfolding right above their heads.
This time, Ardan struck first. He came in with a straight thrust to the chest that the mutant turned away with his forearm, not showing the slightest bit of concern for his torn flesh, and counterattacked. Ardi took the blow on his own blade; steel clanged against steel.
Ardan twisted his wrist sharply and cut the mutant’s inner forearm, opening the vein there. Blood sprayed. It was dark, very nearly black. The mutant did not give any ground. The thought didn’t even cross his mind. Losing no momentum, cresting a wave of some mad ardor, he struck Ardan in the face with his free hand. His fist, now suddenly sheathed in a layer of bone, slammed hard into his left cheekbone.
Dark spots spread across the young man’s vision.
Ardi reeled, but kept his feet, and launched a backhanded cut in retaliation. His blade opened the mutant’s cheek from ear to jaw. The flesh parted and teeth glinted at the bottom of the wound.
The mutant paid the injury no mind at all.
The edges of the wound shook and crept back to meet one another. After three beats of his racing heart, only a thin, pink scar remained on his cheek. And after one more, there was nothing.
Ardan gritted his teeth and struck again. A second slash at his foe’s throat resulted in the mutant pulling back, but Ardi’s blade had time to split the skin beneath his jaw. Ardan didn’t stop. He stepped in and stabbed into his enemy’s stomach. His blade went in up to the hilt.
The mutant let out a breath, but did not fall.
Ardan wrenched his knife free and struck again, this time at his thigh, wounding him deep and twisting the blade.
The mutant flinched. His leg folded awkwardly, then straightened right away. The young man still didn’t stop. Ardan cut across his chest—a long, diagonal slash that started at his left collarbone and went all the way to the lowest rib on his right side. His shirt parted, baring muscle and the white of bone.
However, the wound had begun to close before Ardi had even finished his motion.
The young man struck again and again. He was relentless and unwavering. He cut at his enemy’s arms, legs, chest, back. He tried to attack his tendons and take away his mobility. He laid muscles open to the bone. He cut veins and tore arteries open. Almost every strike found its mark, but each wound knit itself back together in mere moments. Blood that had just started pouring from a cut would stop flowing. Severed muscles would bind themselves back together. Skin that had been laid open would draw itself back together like moist, pliable clay.
Ardi was running out of energy.
The mutant wasn’t.
His strikes came less frequently now, but were more precise. He landed one on Ardi’s thigh, opening a long, deep wound there that left his leg feeling heavy and unwilling to move. He opened the skin on Ardi’s brow and blood poured over his left eye, making it so that the young man could see nothing on that side. He stabbed him in the shoulder—not a deep wound, but still painful, and his left arm became less responsive.
Ardan barely had anything left at this point.
“You are no hunter. You weren’t born one. And you will not become one. But…”
Each of his own wounds kept bleeding. With every passing second, with every bit of blood lost, he grew slower, while the mutant remained as fresh as if their fight had only just begun.
Ardan’s strategy of overloading his foe’s regenerative capacity clearly wasn’t working. However much Ardi cut him, the mutant’s body bounced back, and it did so far faster than Ardi could inflict damage. And if his power was being fed by a Yellow Star accumulator like the one Captain Aloaeiol carried…
Ardan took three steps back. He was breathing hard and only dimly aware of what was happening. Blood ran from a dozen cuts, soaking into his clothes and dripping onto the grate of the catwalk. His left eye could no longer see. His right leg dragged behind him. His lungs burned, and the sour taste of copper sat in his mouth.
The mutant stood opposite him. He was unhurt, his head a little tilted. He looked like a cat watching a wounded bird.
“You are a Speaker, Ard. A Speaker of the Egobar line.”
The young man smiled sadly to himself. He had no Will left, nor a single ray in any of his Stars to so much as try casting magic with. It was kind of strange that his path as a student of the beasts of the forest who’d never grown into a true hunter was going to end for exactly that reason. He was not a full-blooded Matabar, nor a fully-fledged hunter.
He was just a man and…
“Caught you,” the orc hissed, smiling.
Ardan looked at the blade in the mutant’s hand. He looked at his own. Then he opened his hand. His father’s knife rang out as it struck the grate of the catwalk.
The mutant blinked. In his eyes, which were barely visible beneath the shadows, something flickered. It wasn’t disappointment exactly, but more like puzzlement.
“I expected more from the son of Major Abar,” the mole drawled.
Ardi stepped forward openly, without keeping his guard up.
The mutant didn’t stop to think—he simply struck. His knife went into Ardan’s stomach, a little to the left of his navel, sinking into his flesh up to the hilt.
The pain was monstrous. Blinding whiteness filled his vision. Ardan felt the steel pass through the muscles of his belly and stop against something hard inside him. The mutant pushed it deeper. Ardi rasped. Blood poured down his thighs and legs, hot and thick.
“Caught you,” Ardan hissed, smiling.
He wrapped both arms around the mutant. He moved them over the foe’s shoulders, locking his hands at the small of his back. He drew him close. The knife in his stomach shifted and the pain became so intense that his vision darkened, but Ardan held on. The mutant tried to break free by bucking and then placing his hands against Ardi’s chest before shoving him. Ardan did not let go. He pulled the mutant closer and began to squeeze.
He did so just like Guta had taught him. He tightened his calves, then his thighs, then the muscles of his back, followed by his shoulders, and only then did he tighten his arms. Leaning forward, he ignored the flood of blood seeping out of his stomach. No enemy that Guta had grabbed had ever returned to the hunters’ paths, and he would not shame his teacher and friend by failing.
First, Ardan heard the crunch. The mutant’s ribs—thin and mobile like a cat’s—couldn’t bear the pressure and broke. One, two, three. The mole jerked and hissed. His broken bones began to knit themselves back together instantly—Ardan could feel it through his hands, he could feel something moving beneath his foe’s skin, clicking and finding its place.
He squeezed tighter.
The ribs cracked again.
The mutant ground his teeth and clawed at Ardan’s shoulders, tearing into his skin with nails and fingers that were no longer human. Curved blades had pushed out of the pads there.
Ardan did not let go.
The claws tore at his back, opening up long, deep furrows from which blood ran in streams, but Ardan only squeezed harder. The killer’s ribs broke and mended, broke and mended, but each time, they did so a little slower. A little less properly. The bones were starting to heal wrong, never quite settling into their proper place, and Ardan broke them again, driving the splinters back inward.
The mutant groaned, and the noise was hoarse and strained. His groan was drowned out by the music thundering in the theater below.
Ardan shifted his grip lower, straight to the small of his foe’s back. He linked his forearms and squeezed, putting everything left in him into the move. The mutant’s spine creaked. His body thrashed in his arms like a caught fish, mad and desperate. The enemy’s claws bit into Ardi’s neck. Blood spurted. Ardan gritted his teeth so hard his gums ached and kept on squeezing.
There was a crunch. Then another. One vertebra slipped. Then another. The mutant’s legs went limp like cut ropes. But his arms still worked, and his claws still raked. The artificial regeneration of the human chimera was trying to mend his spine, and Ardan could feel the bones stirring underneath his hands, trying to knit themselves back together.
He squeezed even harder. Something inside the mutant burst. The killer’s arms jerked, lost their coordination. The claws scraped Ardi’s back blindly, leaving light scratches instead of deep furrows.
Ardan squeezed.
The mutant’s ribs were paste at this point. His spine was broken in three places. His regeneration was still working—Ardan could see something pulsing and twitching beneath the mutant’s skin, trying to gather the fragments of his body back together. However, it could not keep up. There were simply too many wounds. They were multiplying too quickly. The mutant’s body didn’t even know what to repair first, and Ardan didn’t give it time to decide.
Another crunch came. The mutant’s ribcage caved inward. He stopped groaning. Only a soft, bubbling rasp escaped his throat now. His broken ribs had pierced something inside him, and black blood ran from the corner of his mouth.
At last, his arms dropped.
The claws drew back into his fingers slowly, like the blades of a folding knife sliding home. His body slumped in Ardi’s grip, heavy, wet and formless. The mutant’s face—his stolen face—began to warp, losing its features. His skin rippled like the surface of disturbed water and began to change color, turning gray and ending up covered in short, mottled fur.
Ardan saw a lot of faces. He saw Alice Rovnev, Dagdag, Alexander Ursky, Din Arnson, Milar Pnev—even his own face. Besides these familiar visages, he saw dozens of unfamiliar ones as well.
And then all of it went still, and the mutant, before his death, finally took on his true form. However, did that really matter in the end?
“When does the underground open?” One of the men asked, drawing on his cigarette.
“At the beginning of the Month of Flowers,” Sukhoi answered him. “The first day of spring. Twelve stations all at once. They’ll go from the Risen Tsar Avenue all the way through to Market Street.”
That first name sounded familiar to Ardi. The Risen Tsar Avenue was next to Holy Warriors Street, where Boris and Elena lived. And as for Market Street, he thought it lay somewhere in the trade district.
“What underground?” Ardan asked, not holding his curiosity back.
Some of the Cloaks choked on their smoke, and Kot only chuckled and reached out to clap Ardan on the shoulder, then thought better of it.
“The underground tramlines,” he explained and turned to his colleagues. “Don’t be surprised. Mr. Egobar here is a bit absent-minded if the matter doesn’t concern Star Magic… isn’t that right, mister mage?”
Ardi said nothing. The fact that the Second Chancery knew so much about him neither alarmed nor surprised him. By now, the young man was used to it.
“It’s a project that aims to develop the city’s transportation system,” one of the Cloaks explained before putting out his cigarette against the sole of his boot and tossing it into the nearby trash can. “In recent years, there’ve been more automobiles. And more people. The street trams cannot keep up. Either they sit in traffic, or they break down in the weather… And so, the Engineers’ Guild put forward a proposal some seven years back: dig tunnels and lay tramlines underground. That way, transportation can be faster, and people can move about the Metropolis more easily, not to mention-”
“Artur, calm down,” Kot snorted, flicking his cigarette butt into the same bin.
“Damn Witch’s Gaze,” Artur sighed. “I read about it, too… It’s so subtle. It feels as though one is chatting with a good friend. It feels easy on the soul somehow. You want to tell him everything. Like, for instance, how, the other day, with my wife, I-”
“Artur!” The other Cloaks chorused.
Ardan unclenched his hands. He’d seen this man only once before, on the very same day he’d agreed to put on the black.
The mole’s name was Artur.
He’d been a rank-and-file operative of the Black House. That had made him the least conspicuous person possible because there were hundreds of his kind. The perfect mole…
The mutant dropped to the catwalk like a limp puppet. His legs—no longer human and bent backwards like a cat’s—stuck out at unnatural angles. His ribcage had been driven in, the ribs showing through his skin, looking like broken white sticks. His body was still twitching in that jerking agony of dying nerves, but his eyes were already glassing over.
Ardan stepped away and leaned his back against a metal beam. His legs wouldn’t hold him. The knife was still jutting from his stomach. He didn’t pull it out, assuming that the blade was, at the moment, the only thing keeping him from bleeding out in a minute or two. His back was a torn mess. His neck burned. His left eye was still incapable of seeing anything.
Below, the music had quieted. The last verse of Princess Verensa’s song filled the air:
“Perhaps a warrior wanders past,
Breaks the door, her cage undone at last,
The swallow alights upon his hand,
Through night and dark, to a far land.
He bears her hence, and so set free,
‘Fly, fly,’ she hears, and so flies she,
The wind beneath her wings at last…
And silent stands the palace vast.”
Ardan slid down the beam to the floor and closed his eyes.
For today, he had done enough.