“Hawk.” I rolled the nickname around my mouth. “Hawk. Ever study at an abbey, Hawk?”
“Hey-” Calm Guy began.
“I’m talking to Hawk. I’ll talk to you again when I’m done with him.”
The words came out slower and slower, like my spring was winding down.
Slower and flatter and colder. “Ever do any Esoteric training?”
Those glossy white teeth showed up again. He had a lot of them in that soft red mouth. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m gonna ask you a riddle, Hawk. An Esoteric riddle.”
“Do I give a shit?”
“If you know the answer, Hawk,” I said, dead slow, dead flat, “I might let you live.”
A dead cold silence.
Calm Guy and Whistler exchanged a look like they were asking each other if either of them liked Hawk well enough to get in the way of whatever was about to happen without knowing what the fuck it was about to be. They each saw the same answer.
Hawk saw those answers too. His pale cheeks flamed. “Screw this-”
“What-” The riddle came out soft, gentle, quizzical, like I really wanted to know. “-is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Hawk’s eyes narrowed, then widened, and then his extended arm and hand and pistol became again a blur, now in a quarter arc toward the stairs, but even that blur had to cover a meter and a half while the muzzle of my Automag had to twitch only a couple inches.
Both pistols blasted flame. Hawk’s blasted once. Mine blasted three times: an autoburst, which is an accommodation for crappy shooters, which I am. The autoburst fired three of its caseless tristacks-a total of nine shatterslugs-in a brief sequence that kicked its muzzle through a short arc up and to the right. A couple of brief shrieks came from over by the dining hall door: Mrs. Pratt, maybe. Maybe Kravmik.
Splinters burst from the bannister in line with my naveclass="underline" Hawk’s round. A great shot, that kid-ten times the shooter I’ll ever be. For all the good it did him.
Splinters also burst from the floorboards past Hawk’s right knee. As well as from his right thigh, right hip, spine, and the left side of his rib cage. A different kind of splinter.
Shatterslugs break into tumbling needles after impact: full kinetic transfer and a shitload of internal shredding. Hawk went down like a sack of hamburger. He didn’t bounce when he hit the floor. It was more of a splat.
He lay there making dying-fish popping noises, and his eyes stared beyond the world.
“Good guess, kid. Too bad you can’t take a bow.”
And that told me who I was. For now.
I turned the Automag on Calm Guy. Calm Guy was backed off in a crouch, the snarl on his face distorted through what appeared to be a semisubstantial curve of shimmering glass that had sprung out of nowhere to enclose him and Whistler, along with the preternaturally calm Pratt.
A Shield.
“Hey, nice. You’re fast too.” I nodded a smile toward Whistler. “Was that on a trigger? Set on the first gunfire, I bet.”
“Hawk-Hawk!” Calm Guy’s calm had evaporated.
I shrugged down at them. “I was just kidding about letting him live.”
I thumbed the Automag to single shot and squeezed off a tristack against the Shield. The three shatterslugs burst into flares of sparks that crawled over the half-real curve of energy. Whistler grunted like he’d been punched.
“Feedback’s a bitch, huh? Think your Shield’ll hold against my whole clip?”
“Take him, Whistler!” Calm Guy had become Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy. “Take him now-!”
“I’ve got him.” Fast, smooth, professionally nerveless, Whistler reached into one of the pockets on his hunting vest. His other hand was busy keeping his gemstones spinning, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy had a knife in one hand and a pistol in the other and both eyes on the muzzle of the Automag and Lasser Pratt, without a word, a preparatory breath or so much as a flicker on his utterly serene expression, lifted the hurricane lamp and smashed it over Whistler’s head.
Whistler’s face went blank. The shield went down.
The lobby darkened.
The Automag roared but only floorboards splintered because Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy was quicker than a cat and had already thrown himself sideways into a shoulder roll that brought him to his feet on the far side of Pratt and the lobby was brightening again now because Whistler had fallen to his knees and the lamp oil had wicked his vest and caught fire, and Whistler went down on his face, burning on the floor, and Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy smacked Pratt on the temple with the pommel of his knife and caught his sagging body under the arm with the same hand, so that he had a knife in front at the notch of Pratt’s collarbone and a pistol under Pratt’s jaw at the rear, and he snarled, “Drop it! Drop it now!”
I walked down the stairs.
“I’ll cut his fucking head off! Drop your weapon!”
I said, “Why should I?”
Blood trickled along Pratt’s cheekbone. “Fuck this guy. He told that cock-sucker to kill my wife. Shoot him.”
“Shut up!” Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy jabbed the muzzle up into Pratt’s jaw hard enough to make the hosteler grunt. “Didn’t you hear me?”
“I thought,” I said, “you know who I am.”
“After I kill him-” His eyes were bright and hard and slick: gemstones wet with spit. “-we’ll move on to the grill and the woman. And the kids.”
“Why don’t we talk it over by the light of your burning spellbitch?”
Pratt said through teeth forced shut by the pressure of the muzzle under his chin, “Shoot this fucker.”
“Shut up!”
“When you get back to Faller, tell him I said there’s more going on here than he knows. More than he can guess. Tell him I said it’s Caine’s Law, here. Ask him if he knows Rule Three.”
“What the fuck are you talking-”
“You let Pratt go.” I gestured at the flames on Whistler’s back. “We put out your spellbitch while he’s still breathing. Then you go out that door and I never change my mind about letting you two live.”
“I don’t like this deal.”
I lifted the Automag. “You think Pratt’s life means more to me than yours does to you?”
Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy considered that. Not for very long.
This is a perk of being me.
He licked his lips. “Put him out first.”
“Kravmik. The tablecloth.”
The huge ogrillo reluctantly let go of Yttrall, pulled the tablecloth out from under the remaining lamp on the small lamp stand, and spread it over Whistler. The lobby darkened again.
Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy started backing for the door, yanking Pratt along with him. “You can’t protect them, old man.”
Old man. I felt every day of it. “Don’t forget to tell Faller what I said.”
At the doorway, Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy shoved Pratt stumbling back into the lobby. “I’ll tell your mother,” he snarled from the shadows beyond. “I’ll tell her that you-”
The Automag blasted another autoburst. From the night-shadowed street came another shredded-body splat.
I watched a wisp of smoke curl back along the Automag’s muzzle. “Guess I’ll tell him myself.”
I walked without hurry across the lobby. I thumbed the Automag again to single shot and put a tristack into the back of Whistler’s head as I passed. Whistler’s transition from man to corpse was marked by a single whiplash buck and a halo-splash of blood and bone splinters into the carpet.
At the doorway I kept close beside the jamb, where the dim lamplight wouldn’t line me to the street outside. I looked down into the shadows off the boardwalk at the crumpled mess of Pretty Fucking Nervous Guy, who had now become Writhing and Struggling to Breathe as He Bleeds to Death Guy.
“You-you said. .”
“I said-” I lifted the hem of my tunic and reholstered the Automag. “-I wasn’t gonna change my mind.”