Cadman's Gambit Read online

  ‘All right, I’m coming. Give me a chance, would you.’

  He lumbered across the room and threw on his dressing gown. Shuffling out onto the landing, he turned up the gas lamp he always left burning at night. A dangerous business, but better than the darkness. Someone was still hammering at the door as if all the creatures of the Abyss were coming for them. Cadman skipped nimbly down the stairs, feet clattering on the tiles by the door.

  Oh dear.

  He took a peek at his reflection in the entrance hall mirror. More of a skull, than a head—just the merest strips of parchment thin flesh clinging to mottled bone. His hands were rotten, black with mildew. Skeletal fingers cracked and groaned, joints barely articulated by decaying ligaments. He frowned at his bony toes, tapping them on the floor.

  Careless, Cadman. Very careless. Caution, caution, and caution again. He watched the fleshiness re-form in the mirror—great rolls of fat dripping from his jaw, waistline ballooning beneath the dressing-gown, fingers swelling until they resembled bloated slugs.

  Another flurry of thumps and the door rattled like the lid of a restless sinner’s coffin.

  ‘One moment!’ Uncouth bloody Sahulians. No manners. Absolutely none whatsoever. Cadman stroked his rapidly returning moustache. Better. Now then, let’s see what this racket’s all about.

  He pulled back the three heavy bolts, twisted the key in the uppermost lock, fumbled in his dressing gown pocket for the big key for the deadlock and then inched open the door until it caught on the chain. A small pallid hand flopped through the gap, blood staining the fingers. Oh, my giddy aunt! Cadman took a step back and threw up his hands.

  ‘Open up,’ a voice wheezed from the other side. ‘I’m a Sicarii.’

  An assassin. Another one of Master Frayn’s paid killers. This is getting beyond a joke. The fifth in as many weeks. Cadman entertained the idea of slamming the door on the hand and crushing it until it either fell off or withdrew. Not really an option, despite the appeal. It didn’t pay to mess with the Sicarii.

  ‘Name?’ he demanded through the gap in the door.

  ‘Shadrak.’ Pain in the voice. Breathing laboured.

  ‘One moment.’ Cadman waddled into his study and snatched up the list Master Frayn had made for him—in the unlikely event that any of his cutthroats should require discreet medical attention. Unlikely, my foot. If Cadman had done what any other self-respecting doctor would have, and charged them through the nose for his services, he’d have been a rich man by now. But he’d never been one for the pursuit of money. It always brought too much attention and risk.

  He ambled back to the door and peered through the gap. His visitor was surprisingly small for a hit-man. Exceedingly small. Couldn’t have been an inch over three foot. He was dressed like all the others in dark leather, a billowing black cloak trailing over his shoulders. His face was as white as his hand—and it wasn’t just from loss of blood. He was clutching at his chest, a misty look passing across the most unnerving eyes: pink irises and pin-prick pupils. Eyes that flitted this way and that as if expecting danger from every direction. Something we may well have in common. Even his stubbly hair and neat box-beard were white.

  ‘You’re not on the list.’

  ‘Frayn gave you a list?’ When he spoke there was a flash of pearly teeth. Quite the perfectionist, aren’t we? ‘Course I ain’t on it. I’m Shadrak…the Unseen.’

  But not any longer, I fear. ‘That hardly makes me want to let you in. If your reputation depends on invisibility and anonymity, what will you do once I’ve sewn you up?’ He started to close the door, gently enough to let the fellow get his fingers out of the way, but the albino wedged a boot into the opening instead.

  ‘Open the shogging door or I’ll put a hole in your fat head.’ The hand returned clutching a pistol.

  Now there’s a surprise. I’ve not seen anything like that for a while. Not since the Reckoning, and that was a very long time ago. Nine hundred and eight years, four months and sixteen days, to be precise.

  ‘You sure you know what that thing is?’ Cadman stepped back from the door.

  ‘Know what it does.’

  Yes, quite. I’m sure you do.

  ‘Don’t worry, Doc.’ A pink eye pressed into the crack, took everything in. ‘I won’t do you, you’re far too useful to Master Frayn, and I reckon I can trust you with my little secret, don’t you?’

  Cadman didn’t miss the threat. He never missed a threat—even when he was told he’d got it wrong. Oh, there were some fine actors out there, but Cadman could always smell a rat. He had a knack for it.

  He slid back the chain and opened the door. Shadrak stumbled into the hallway, pitched to his knees and moaned, a trickle of blood dripping through the fingers covering his chest wound and spattering the tiles.

  ‘Follow me.’ If you can. Hopefully the little runt will drop dead before he can bleed all over the carpet as well.

  He led Shadrak along the corridor and opened the surgery door for him. All beautifully white and clinical. Pristine. Sturdy shutters locked against prying eyes; shelves of gleaming instruments, all perfectly stowed in their alphabetised trays. Not a speck of dust to be seen. Immaculate. The midget might as well have been in a sewer for all the appreciation he showed.

  Cadman beckoned him to sit on the edge of the treatment table then flicked the switch on the angle-lamp, one of his few surviving Old World artefacts. Shadrak cocked his head but said nothing as the lamp hummed and flickered to life, casting its stark glow over the table.

  ‘Don’t make ‘em like they used to, eh?’ Never hurt to talk in the patient’s vernacular. Always paid to put them at ease. ‘Regenerating plasma cells. Keep it powered till doomsday. Seems you have some knowledge of the Ancients’ technology yourself.’ Cadman nodded at the gun. ‘Might I ask where you came by such a relic?’

  Shadrak winced as he holstered it then fell back on the table. ‘No.’

  Thought as much. ‘I’m something of a collector, but alas, technology’s not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s fine one minute,’ he grabbed some latex gloves from the vacuum store and snapped them on. ‘And the next it’s useless junk. Now tell me,’ he lifted Shadrak’s hand away from the chest wound. ‘What seems to be the problem? Ah…’ He pressed down on the edges of the puncture, causing Shadrak to whimper and bright blood to gush over the gloves. ‘Bullet wound. You really shouldn’t play with such dangerous toys.’

  ‘Weren’t…playing,’ Shadrak croaked. ‘On a job. Bastard made me just ‘fore I had ‘im. Struggled. Thunder-shot went off.’

  ‘Nasty.’ Cadman shoved a gauze square over the hole. ‘Press on this, would you.’ He scurried around the table and rolled Shadrak groaning onto his side. ‘No exit wound, which means a spot of digging in the dark.’ At least it had missed the lung, otherwise Shadrak would most likely be spewing blood. As long as there’s no cavitation or fragmentation he should be all right. Assuming the shock doesn’t kill him, which would be a crying shame.

  Cadman pulled over his trolley and ripped open some packets. Supplies were getting low. Soon he’d be reduced to the same barbaric butchery as his competitors, unless a miracle happened and the Templum opened its archives. All that knowledge shut up for the supposed good of the world, to prevent a return to the evils of the past. It hadn’t been that bad, Cadman mused. It all depended whose side you were on.

  Pinching a wad of gauze with some forceps, he dunked it in saline and swabbed the wound. Shadrak gave a pathetic cry, tears welling from his pink eyes.

  ‘Stings a bit, I’m afraid. Would you like something for the pain?’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ the assassin growled through clenched teeth.

  ‘As you wish.’ Cadman angled the light so that it shone directly on the wound. He pushed his pince-nez further down his nose and squinted over the top. ‘A touch of laudanum? A tincture of lignocaine? No? Very well.’ Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  He picked up some shiny tweezers and stabbed them into
the hole. Shadrak screamed and thrashed about on the table. Cadman forced him down with a meaty hand and continued to push and twist with the tweezers until he touched something hard. Shadrak had gone still, his jaw slack, a snail’s trail of dribble oozing down one side of his chin.

  ‘Nighty night.’ Cadman patted his cheek and then reached behind to grab his magnifying glass from the trolley. Peering through the lens, he could see nothing but blood washing over the tweezers. Sometimes he wished he had a third hand so that he could rinse away the gore and see what he was doing. The aperture widened as he forced the tweezers against soft flesh. For an instant he glimpsed the dark shell of the bullet before the blood rushed back in. With one last push he had it, whipped it out clean as a whistle and dropped it clattering onto the trolley. He swabbed around the wound with iodine, leaving yellow stains on the skin, and then took up a curved needle and began to stitch it up. Shadrak shuddered, his chest rising and falling erratically. Breaking off the thread, Cadman bent to inspect his work, dabbing at the seepage with a cotton wool ball and allowing himself a satisfied nod. Splendid job, Cadman. Splendid.

  He took down an antibiotic solution from its box on the shelf, drew it up with a syringe, and injected it into Shadrak’s vein.

  That was all he could do for now. Either he’d live or he’d die. It was all the same to Cadman.

  THE BARD OF BROKEN BRIDGE

  Rhiannon closed her eyes, loving the breeze playing through her hair, cooling her skin. It beat the blazing sun, but it wouldn’t last. That’s why you had to stand there and lap it up. The “Breath of Nous” , Soror Agna called it, and right now Rhiannon reckoned she had a point. Nous might’ve been the “Ground of Being” , the “Mind of the Universe” and all that baloney, but when you were frying in your own sweat he was a damned sight more useful as a gentle wind. The locals had another name for it, course. The figjams up in the smoke knew it as the “Doctor” , but down in the villages it was the “Oakendale Fart.”

  Sammy pulled on her hand, hot and greasy, mousy hair stuck to his forehead below the brim of Dad’s straw hat. ‘Can we go now?’ He looked up at her through squinty eyes, freckles shouting from the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Brothers.’ Rhiannon pinched his cheek. ‘Good for only one thing.’

  Sammy frowned and cocked his head. ‘What?’

  ‘Tucker!’

  He screamed and scarpered, glancing over his shoulder to make sure she was chasing him.

  The breeze died a quick death, leaving it a scorcher all the way to Delling Creek at the border with Broken Bridge. The two halves of the limestone bridge that had given the village its name made a “V” beneath the sparkling waters. Silver minnows shot between the reeds, passed amongst the copper coins glinting in the mud at the bottom. The farmers still tossed them in every summer, but it was a waste of time. It was hard to remember when it last rained.

  Rhiannon had once seen a shark stuck in the shallows, one of the big bronze whalers that must’ve swum up the estuary. She’d run home to tell her dad and he’d brought his mates back with forks and spades. She could still picture the creek running red, the shark’s thrashing sending weaker and weaker ripples through its own blood. Even now she wished she’d never mentioned it, but Dad said she’d done good.

  ‘Broke by funder.’ Sammy stuck his fists into his hips and puffed out his cheeks. He said the same thing every time, as if he’d just made a discovery.

  ‘Lightning, Sammy. Thunder is the noisy bit.’ Rhiannon fixed a smile as he gave his old man look, knitting his brows and puckering his mouth. Hard to believe he was six only yesterday.

  Soror Agna said a mawg shaman had blasted the bridge five hundred years ago when its swarm had been driven from the Abbey of Pardes. Then there was the story of a demon from the Abyss that tried to cross over to Oakendale to eat a wannabe wizard who’d failed to honour a pact. When the wizard wasn’t wearing pointy hats, his day job had been farming wheat. Poor bugger lost his whole crop to locusts the previous year. Must’ve thought a bit of black magic would keep them off. Elias had sung about it a few times at the Griffin, although Rhiannon suspected he’d made it up. She’d never seen demons, and those who claimed to be wizards were generally impotent geeks without any friends. Swanning about in robes and talking mumbo jumbo apparently gave you an instant personality. Elias’s song had Brannos the Brave, whoever he was, striking the bridge with his club and the demon plunging to the swelling waters below. It was hard to imagine now, as the long drought had dried the creek to the point that it was little more than a trickle above the silt. Dried up and wasted. Soror Agna would no doubt approve. Isn’t that what the Templum did? What it would do to Rhiannon? All that self-denial in the name of the greater good.

  Rhiannon bit down on her lip, told herself to stop whinging. She was half way to being a flaming Luminary already. She’d be all right.

  So why did she feel such loss? Wasn’t sacrifice meant to pave the way for the life of Nous? Crock of shit if you asked her. The only thing she felt from her rejection of Deacon Shader was emptiness.

  And what if Huntsman had been wrong? What if he was just a charlatan, the Dreamers’ bodgy excuse for a juju man? He’d asked her to give up so much and she still wasn’t sure she could bear it. ‘Nous will give you the strength,’ Soror would say. Course he flaming well would, and a fat lot of good it seemed to be doing. Maybe Agna was right. Maybe it would be easier once she’d entered the Templum of the Knot, given herself up to service.

  She tried to capture the creek: the spray of gum trees jutting from the ruddy soil, the air sweet with their scent; she felt the heat prickling her skin, blinked up at the cloudless blue, let the songs of lorikeets and galahs play over her. All her senses melded into a memory that would linger. She told herself to savour her last days in the villages before she joined the priests in Sarum.

  ‘When are we going?’

  Rhiannon smiled down at her little brother, his face glistening with a rosy sheen.

  She felt bad about marring his birthday with the news she was leaving. Maybe she was no better than Shader. He’d had his moment of drama, abandoning the lads of Oakendale so that he could bugger off back to Aeterna like a jilted kid. Maybe now she wanted hers. No one had shown the least surprise. She’d been meeting with Soror Agna for years and probably would have entered the Templum anyway. Even if she’d not met Shader; if he’d not saved her from the mawgs. She winced and shut the memory down before it could take hold.

  ‘Where’d you wanna go, soldier?’

  ‘Broken Bridge.’

  ‘You wanna play guitar?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Don’t you reckon it’s a bit hot to walk all that way?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘All right then,’ she sighed. ‘Let’s just hope Elias is in.’

  She knew he would be. The bard never went out these days unless it was to perform, and that was always at the Griffin. Elias had told her all about his wander years, his adventures amongst the Dreamers, but Rhiannon had never known him to set foot outside of the village.

  Sammy ran ahead of her to the cleft bridge, still passable if you slid down the slanting stone a ways and leapt to the other side.

  ‘Me first.’ Sammy spread his arms for balance and crept to the brink. Rhiannon pulled her sandals off and threw them across.

  ‘Here, give me your hand.’ She paddled into the stream, guiding him down one half of the “V” till his feet were just above the water. Sammy bent his knees and gathered himself, then straightened up shaking his head.

  ‘Come on, Sammy, jump.’

  ‘No.’ He slipped as he tried to turn, but Rhiannon caught him under the arms and hoisted him over her shoulder.

  ‘I can do it.’ He thumped her back as she waded to the far side and dumped him on the bank.

  ‘I know you can, so there’s no need to show me, is there?’

  She walked barefoot on the hard-baked road, Sammy pouting and dragging his feet until they reached the Griffin
at the edge of Broken Bridge, brilliant sunbursts reflecting from its latticed windows. The sign, a faded painting of a ferocious hybrid, part lion, part eagle, creaked gently back and forth.

  A group of lads in the white surcoat and red Monas of Shader’s Order sat at the tables outside, pitchers of beer in front of them. She hesitated as she spotted Justin Salace, ginger hair plastered to his scalp. She knew he’d seen her, but he tried not to show it, glugging his pint then leaning towards Barek Thomas, whispering in his ear. Barek peered over Justin’s shoulder, one half of his mouth curling into a smile. The pub door opened and Sheriff Halligan stepped out, flipping his notepad shut and slipping it into his pocket. Sneaky Nigel followed him as far as the doorway, drying a glass with his apron, looking grimmer than normal, which was saying something. Wasn’t surprising, though, considering what had happened last night. The way the boy-knights were staring at Rhiannon you’d have thought she’d been the one to murder Bovis Rayn; only the lads’ problem with her went back further than that. They’d been pissy with her since Shader had buggered off and left them to their own devices.

  Gripping Sammy’s hand tight, Rhiannon put her head down and walked past, feeling their eyes burning into her back.

  ‘Ouch, you’re hurting me.’ Sammy pulled away, wriggling his fingers as they passed the diggers’ shacks, flaky paint peeling from rotted timbers, shutters closed against the heat. They took the narrow track that wended up into the hills and followed it until they came to a rough stone hovel with a tin roof.

  Elias Wolf was rocking in his chair on the porch, rubbing at the neck of a mandola with a dirty rag. He was dressed in a motley outfit of patches sewn over threadbare strides and a matching jacket of faded blue, studded with a hundred badges that glinted like armour. They were painted with pictures, symbols and words, some funny, some political—slogans from yesteryear. Lank, unwashed hair hung in greasy disarray about his shoulders. His sharp face was all crows’ feet and furrows, softened by a smudge of stubble.