“If he slips us, use them. Use the girl.”
“He’ll give a shit?”
“Sometimes he gets sentimental. Especially when they’re pretty.”
“I’m feeling a little sentimental, myself. .”
“Keep your pants on. She won’t live that long.”
“I can be real fast-”
“Yeah. If there’s time we’ll all get a turn. But I’m first, get me? Whistler. Come on.”
I pulled up the rear of my tunic, drew the Automag and very gently racked the slide. Holding the big pistol tight against the back of my right leg, I started down the stairs.
Sometimes I do get sentimental. Especially about people who work for a living. Pretty or not.
To my left, through the posts of the bannister: Kravmik sat half hunched across Yttrall Pratt next to the dining-hall door, shielding most of her tiny figure with his huge curve of shoulder. In front of them slouched a nightclub-pale junior featherweight with glossy black hair, his compact efficient-looking frame loaded into a slashed-velvet doublet and hose under a loose knee-length cape. Hands empty. Loose.
Hawk. The gunman.
Middle of the lobby: Pratt, hurricane lamp in one hand, turning toward the stairs, catching sight of me, face lighting with a smile of pure uncomplicated welcome. At his side another smallish man, thin, long-faced, balding, folds of flesh sagging under eyes mournful as a bloodhound’s, wearing a thigh-length hunter’s vest, all pockets, a twist of thread between thumb and little finger on which spun gemstone flashes.
Whistler. The thaumaturge.
And half-turned toward the stairs, left hand extended to usher Pratt and Whistler past, bigger, solidly into cruiserweight, head shaved and polished the color of tea-stained mahogany, also doing the slashed-velvet doublet thing but his worn open like a jacket, no hose here-the pants would look normal enough on a darkened street, but even in Pratt’s lamplight they jumped up and bit: close-fitting heavy leather, flapped at the ankle to overlap instep and heel tendon, jointed at the knee, thick boiled panels over hamstring and quads joined by heavy wire, not much against a bullet or a Khryllian morningstar, but they’d turn most blades-and it was a good bet the jerkin under that open doublet was made the same way because that’s what Grey Cats favor when going out for red work. Or ex-Cats gone merc.
No-name. Calm Guy. Giver of orders. Whose right hand was out of sight.
This might turn out to be a bit of a trick.
Another step down the stairs and Pratt’s pure uncomplicated welcome burst out with pure good nature. “Hey, here he is now!”
“Hey, here I am now.” The Automag was cold through the thin cotton of my breeches. “Let’s nobody get stupid.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Calm Guy didn’t move. Didn’t even blink. “You first.”
Another step down the stairs. “Civilians can walk, huh?”
“Maybe they could have,” Calm Guy allowed, “if it had been my idea. Since it was yours, I like them where they are. At least until I see both your hands.”
“You first.”
A shrug. “I’m easy.”
Calm Guy turned and spread empty hands. The ruffled cuffs of his doublet draped his wrists and half his palms. The drape along the insides of his forearms was just exactly the wrong shape.
“Those blades up your sleeves’ll get you pounded by a Knight.”
Another shrug, and a tilt of the head at the kettledrum backbeat of gunfire in the night streets beyond the lobby’s lamplight. “Knights are busy.”
“Yeah. That’s exactly the problem.” I took another step. “We can still get out of this with nobody dying.”
“Dying?” Pratt looked from me to Calm Guy in growing distress. “What exactly is going-?”
Whistler said, “Shut up. Don’t worry about it.”
Pratt relaxed. “Oh. Oh, sure. I forgot: you guys are all friends.”
“Yes,” Whistler said, spinning his gemstone. “Yes, we are friends.”
Calm Guy squinted up the stairs. “Still haven’t seen your hand.”
“Yeah. I appreciate the invitation, but-”
“You think this is an invitation?”
“If you were here to kill me, we wouldn’t be talking.”
“Killing you’s Plan B. Moving up toward Plan A-and-a-Half. You’re coming with us. Peacefully. Peacefully in our company or peacefully in a bag.”
“I like peacefully.” I can play nice, when I have to. “Peacefully works for me just fine.”
“Come on, then.”
I didn’t move. “Where we going?”
“Simon Faller has requested the pleasure of your company. Forcefully.”
“Faller?” I tried them in English. “Y’know, I’ve been wanting a word or two with Mr. Faller myself-”
He gave me a what the fuck? smirk, and spread it around to his friends. “You talk too much already,” he said. In English. He had a Brooklyn accent. “We’re not here to talk.” He chuckled and made a slight, ironic bow. “Just guys with a job to do, you get it? Deliverymen.”
I went back to Westerling. “I’ll make you a deal.”
He did too. “I don’t think so.” I guess he was used to Westerling enough that he didn’t really care.
I did, though.
“The Smoke Hunt’s outside,” I said. “We don’t want to be on the street anyway, right? We’ll wait here. All of us. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, I’ll go with you to BlackStone and see Faller. Peacefully.”
And when those amped-on-God fuckers break in here and find, instead of some sleepy hostelers, an assload of heavily armed Actors, it’ll make me a shitty prophet, but a happy one.
Not to mention that it wouldn’t exactly break my heart to have Tyrkilld and Kierendal-and, say, Angvasse Khlaylock-know I’d been hauled at gunpoint off to see the Wizard. But nobody ever wants to do things the easy way.
Calm Guy shook his head. “We’re on a schedule. Once the Knights take care of the Smoke Hunt, it’ll be too late.”
“Too late? For what?”
“For you’ll find out, smart guy.”
“I made a good offer. Think it over.”
“Don’t have to.” I sighed. “Is your fucking schedule worth more than your life?”
“Maybe not.” Calm Guy grinned up at me. “But it’s worth more than their lives. Hawk-?”
“Hey.” A glossy white grin unfolded under the gunman’s glossy black hair. “Wanna see a trick?”
“Not really.”
Hawk’s right hand and arm became a blur that in less than an eyeblink resolved into a big black pistol leveled at arm’s length on Ytrrall Pratt’s pretty red head.
Kravmik growled wordlessly and tried to pull her closer.
“Go right on,” Hawk told him easily. “I’ll just shoot you first.”
I sagged. “That’s a pretty good trick.”
“Ain’t it just?”
“You’re fast, kid.”
“Fastest you’ll ever see.”
“Fastest I ever saw was Berne. Saint Berne, they call him now. Maybe you heard what happened to him.” I nodded toward Calm Guy: the ex-Cat. “Or you could ask him. He’ll know. He might even have been there.”
“Ancient history, old man. A whole different world ago.”
I looked down at this grinning killer who’d been in short pants then. Who had maybe just been born when Black Knives ruled here. But only maybe. Ancient history. “I guess it was.”
“Let’s see that hand,” Calm Guy said.
“Yeah, whatever.” I showed them the Automag. Nobody looked impressed.
“Put it on the stairs behind you and keep coming.” I didn’t move.
“You said you know things about me.” Half a shrug half lifted the Automag. Not enough to get anybody tense. “Most of what you know about me is wrong.”
“Let’s find out,” Calm Guy said. “Hawk: the grill. Leg first. Then the head. Then the girl.”
“The leg?” Hawk sighed. “I hate when they yowl.”
“Wait.” I scowled down at the blur of my reflection in the Automag’s chromed slide, tilting it like I wasn’t entirely sure what I was seeing. And I wasn’t. Not really.
I was trying to decide exactly who I was right then.