Breighl gave him a disdainful smile. ‘You were followed here tendays ago. You’re nowhere near as good as you think you are.’
‘Where’s te Liss?’ Laszlo demanded, because he had assumed they had got his address from the girl, but now hope flared in him again.
‘So you are working with her, then,’ Breighl noted, with infinite regret. ‘We’ll pick her up, don’t you mind about that. You’re under arrest, Laszlo. You’re a foreign national working against the Cortas. The order to bring you in doesn’t specify that you have to still be breathing but, for old times’ sake, I’ll give you a chance.’
‘I’m not working against the Cortas.’
‘Laszlo, you’re working for the Spiderlands Aristoi, we know that. Don’t piss me about.’
All this time and he really believed that? Laszlo felt almost hurt. ‘Look, if you must know, I’m working out of Collegium, and you surely see that they, of all people, don’t want the Empire in here-’
‘The Empire?’ Breighl abruptly had the crossbow out and aimed at him, and Laszlo re-evaluated just who likely had the quicker reflexes. ‘You think we’re worried about the Empire now? So they have some troops up north, past Toek? So what? They’re worried about what we’re worried about, Laszlo. We know there’s a fleet of ships on the Exalsee even now, out of Mavralis. We know that a dozen Aristoi families have finally decided they can’t let Solarno remain independent any more. Don’t take us for idiots. We know your employers think this is all a game, but to us it isn’t!’ Abruptly he was shouting, the crossbow shaking wildly, making Laszlo flinch.
‘Believe me, Breighl, I have some really poor history with the Spiderlands. I’m not with them!’ Laszlo insisted. To his astonishment — almost his embarrassment — there were tears in the halfbreed’s eyes.
‘Oh, I know, the Spiders think everyone else is a fool, and so do their agents. Nobody’s as smart as them. Even the Solarnese Aristoi think it’s all so pissing clever, but we Solarnese don’t want to end up as the toys of the Spiderlands, just another cursed satrapy city, a pawn in their games. This is my city, Laszlo! I’m going to do anything I can to stop your filthy scheming mistresses get their hands on it, and if the first move in that is to put a bolt through your brain, then so be it!’
He jabbed the crossbow towards Laszlo for emphasis, and it went off.
Laszlo was already lurching to one side, an Art-sense unique to Fly-kinden warning him of it even before the string slipped. The bolt ploughed into the wall behind him, then he was going for the other man, not with the sleevebow, that would take a moment to aim in which Breighl’s sword could bat it aside, but with a dagger. Laszlo was the veteran of countless dockside brawls, skirmishes between pirates and the contested boardings of a score of ships, and in close quarters there was no weapon greater than a simple six-inch blade.
Breighl’s sword gave him reach but it was an advantage that Laszlo countered instantly, a rush of speed from his wings getting him within knife range, in the hope that a single blow might take the man down and clear the way to the window. The halfbreed was no stranger to this sort of fight either, and he was already lunging for Laszlo’s dagger wrist, his crossbow spinning away. For a moment he had a grip, sword drawn back outside the Fly’s reach, ready to stab, but Laszlo’s wings threw him into a backwards somersault so that he could kick Breighl in the face, the man’s grip loosening before he could dislocate Laszlo’s shoulder. The Fly came down at the far end of the room, for all the little space that gave him, and was already launching back at his opponent, his wings just a flickering blur.
Breighl stumbled back against the window, sword outstretched to let Laszlo run himself through, but the Fly slipped past the blade, the point shearing through his coat, his shoulder striking the man in the chest in an attempt to send him toppling out of the window. He got the back of Breighl’s other hand about the head for his trouble, before the halfbreed managed to steady himself with a flurry of his wings. The sword drove down for Laszlo again, the Fly earthbound for a moment and down on one knee with the force of the punch.
Breighl was bigger and stronger and almost as fast, and there was really no other way to do it. Laszlo slammed into the man’s legs, not to knock him off balance but because Breighl could not stab straight down the line of his own body with much force. Laszlo’s upflung arm got in the way of the strike, the blade slicing open the tough canvas of his coat sleeve and raking a line of red, but Laszlo was too close for proper sword work. Even as Breighl kicked at him, he rammed the dagger into the halfbreed’s groin.
The first stroke cut shallowly, deflected by the cuirass’s armour plates, and Breighl jerked away desperately, forcing himself half out of the window. Laszlo was beyond regrets then — they were not a currency a pirate could spend too often — and he followed, clawing his way up the halfbreed’s chest and slamming the bloodied dagger into the man’s throat.
Breighl died without a cry, hanging half out over the street, his blood an explosive mist that showered down below. Laszlo hauled him in with all his strength, letting the man’s last convulsive shudder tilt his body into the room.
Didn’t want that. Didn’t want to do that. He had been a factor for the Bloodfly crew, after all, their friendly merchant face at each port they traded with. He was seldom called on to kill people he knew. Oh, waste it, Breighl, couldn’t you be slow enough to let me out of the window?
He hauled his coat off. It was torn and cut, and there was a swathe of Breighl’s blood across it. The cut on his arm was, in contrast, inconsequential.
Her lodgings, and if she’s not there… He found he was still reeling, his heart refusing to slow, his head seeming to ring to the echo of some vast, unheard sound. Numbly, his hands recharged the spent sleevebow, slipping another bolt into the breech. His shock at killing Breighl had become a crawling dread for Liss’s fate. If things had gone this wrong this fast, then the list of bad things that might happen to her was endless. His only consolation was that Breighl’s people had plainly not tracked her down yet.
He kicked off from the windowsill, coursing over the city for te Liss’s little place out by the Venador street market, hope and fear fighting over him.
She drew on her bedroom wall. It had seemed endearing, but at the same time he knew the sketches must hold hidden meanings for her shadowy contacts. The entire bare expanse of plaster over her bed was strewn with overlapping scrawls of trees, flowers, veined wings in scholarly detail, childlike abstracts of people standing, running, fighting.
When she had finally let him in there, after his confession that he had tailed her, she had pointed out one little corner, a blank space just above her pillow. ‘That’s for you, just you,’ she had told him. Nothing more had needed to be said. Even then they had both known how they lived in an uncertain world.
Now he hung by her window, feeling the rough wood where the shutters had been wrenched off. The room itself had been turned over, furniture broken, her mattress ripped open so that twists of rag carpeted the floor like an early crop of dying mayflies.
That small space had now been filled, a rough, hasty image: a tall building with jagged rays. He stared at it blankly for a moment before matching it to a landmark. The Solarnese coast was gentle, but to the immediate west of the city there were rocks, a jagged out-thrusting of them that was probably man-made, from distant ages past, some forgotten seawall or ancient pier.
There was a squat lighthouse there, to warn off midnight shipping.
Laszlo hurled himself back from the window, well aware that his arrival might have been noticed by any number of watchers. He led any followers a merry chase, and only a Dragonfly, or another of his own kinden, could have hoped to keep up, as he went looping about the mansions of the wealthy, darting through the warrens of the poor, circling in a far arc across the water and then inland again, and all the while with no sense of pursuit, before bolting at last for the lighthouse — and Liss.