The younger Hellan nodded gloomily.
“What about other places outside of the Temple?” Qhora asked. “Other places where the Osirians can be found? There must be some. This is a city of vices, isn’t it? Places to drink and whore and gamble. Can we find the Osirians in one of these places?”
Tycho suddenly looked quite thoughtful. “Probably. In fact I think I’ve heard of a place like that, a restaurant where the gangsters do business. I thought it sounded like a place we’d want to avoid. Normally. Should I go look for your Italian friend first?”
“No. I will.” Qhora stood up.
“My dear, please,” Philo said. “I must insist. Let Tycho go. You would not be safe, perhaps not even here in the Hellan Quarter.”
Qhora narrowed her eyes. “I go where I want. You should rest. I’ll be back soon with Salvator.”
She stepped out of the old house into the sundrenched street with Mirari at her side. “What do you think of our new friends?”
“They’ve saved us a little time and work looking for Don Lorenzo’s killer, but they don’t know much else,” the masked woman said. “I doubt they are of any more use to us. Certainly not as warriors, at least.”
An old man and a young dwarf. No, not much help there.
Qhora led the way down one narrow lane after another until they reached one of the larger streets at the edge of the Quarter. There wasn’t much traffic though it was still the middle of the day. Men streamed past in both directions, but all on foot. There were no mounts or carts here. She turned right and kept walking.
Out of the corner of her eye she watched the street beside her, scanning for hints of green robes, searching for weapons, looking for trouble. She found it a moment later. There were three men standing on the far side of the street, most likely locals judging by their hair and clothes. All three men were middle-aged, tall, and muscular. And they were all three staring at Qhora and Mirari.
Qhora quickened the pace and saw the men step boldly into the foot traffic in the street, angling to intercept the women. She looked up to the roof line but there was no black silhouette perched against the pale blue sky and no black silhouette gliding on wide wings above the street.
Turi! Stupid bird. Oh Atoq, if only you were here now…
“My lady?”
“I see them.” Qhora turned into a narrow alley, hoping to run to the end of the building and slip away on the next street. But a stone’s throw from the entrance the alley ended in a wall of garbage, rotting crates, broken barrels, and chunks of old brick and stone. “Back!”
They turned and saw the three men at the mouth of the alley. The men glanced around the street and then stepped into the shadowed corridor between the two buildings.
Qhora drew a knife in each hand. The lead man, the one with the black beard, glared at her and grunted something in Eranian. He lashed out, trying to grab her wrist. Qhora pulled back. Mirari stepped forward. The men said something and laughed. The masked woman pulled her long dirk and hatchet from the back of her belt and said, “Leave us alone.”
The bearded man stepped forward quickly, hands raised to grab the woman’s arms or weapons. His larger body crashed against her, but Mirari’s legs lashed out from behind her long Espani skirts. She kicked him viciously between the legs and when he stumbled back she leaned back to smash her boot into his face, sending him reeling against the two other men.
Shouting in Eranian, the bearded man pulled a small rusty pistol from inside his shirt.
Qhora blinked. She’d been watching Mirari struggle with the thug as though across a great distance, as though there was nothing she could do to help her friend, as though she were watching a dream. But the sight of the gun brought her back, and the alley no longer seemed a hundred miles long and Mirari was no dream-vision but a young woman who was trying to save their lives.
The Incan princess whipped her small body around in a half-circle and hurled her two knives at once. Both knives went wide, slicing the through the air just a hand-span to either side of Mirari’s head, and plunged into the throats of the two men closest to the street. They both fell to their knees with their hands groping their necks awash in blood. And then they dropped to the ground.
There was a moment of stunned silence when both Mirari and the gunman looked down at the two men dying at their feet and the rapidly spreading pool of blood on the paving stones. The man looked up first, no longer glaring, eyes a bit wider and more confused than before. And then Mirari’s knife came up, slashing aside the man’s hand holding the gun. As the man hissed and grabbed his bleeding hand, the mountain girl leapt up on a pile of old boards and then jumped down in the same heartbeat, letting gravity add its force to her swinging hatchet. The blade sank into the side of the man’s neck, and the man collapsed to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut.
Mirari gestured past the bodies. “My lady. If you will step out, I will clean up.”
Qhora nodded and paced out to the mouth of the alley and stared at the tide of human bodies streaming past in the street. No one gave her a second look. If anyone had seen the flash of steel or splash of blood or the dying men, no one cared.
She’d barely stood there a moment when Mirari tapped her on the shoulder and handed back her two knives, both blades shining and clean. Glancing back, Qhora saw that Mirari had dragged all three bodies into the shadows and arranged the refuse there over them, and then scattered a few small boards around the blood to discourage anyone from going too close by accident.
Alonso could never have done that so quickly and calmly. He wouldn’t have even thought to do it at all. He’s too kind, too gentle. I suppose that’s what brought him to Mirari. Endless kindness, endless patience. And some of that Espani chivalry, too.
Qhora paused to look at the masked woman. Her dark red hair was all loose and raggedy around the edges of her gleaming white mask with its black-rimmed eyes and bright red lips and little pink roses painted around the cheeks and forehead. To one side, a hint of silvery-blue skin poked out and Qhora reached up to gently arrange the woman’s hair to hide her twisted ear. “Are you all right?”
“I wasn’t hurt, my lady. He barely touched me.”
“No. I mean, are you all right? Are you really?”
The Espani woman hesitated, and with the mask hiding her features it was impossible to guess what emotions might have played over her lips or eyes in that moment. “I don’t like this place. I miss home. I miss the cold, and the quiet. I’ll be grateful to be done with this business and back in Madrid again. But don’t let that concern you, my lady. I’ll be by your side until Don Lorenzo’s killer is brought to the Father’s justice.”
The Father’s justice? But what if the Father is dead and all desire for true justice died with him? And what if the Mother, who is supposed to be the cradle of all life, is out hunting for the killer? And what if the Son, the voice of mercy and love, is far away in a strange land where no one can hear his cries?
Qhora touched Lorenzo’s triquetra medallion on her chest.
How did you ever make sense of your faith, Enzo? These images, these virtues. Peace and mercy. They make no sense in the real world.
She glanced back into the alley and tried to remember the faces of the two men she had just killed. She couldn’t. They were simply gone along with the dozens of other men she had killed over the years.
Men.
For so long, through the long war back home in the empire and then in Marrakesh and even in honorable Espana there had always been a need to kill men. It was simply a part of life. Killing predators before they could kill her.
But now, as she stared back into the alley looking for the hidden bodies, instead of men she saw boys. Little boys. Boys who had been babies. Babies with mothers.
They all had mothers, once. Then I killed them. Those poor women. I killed their babies.