Bloodforged (15 page)

That would do nicely.

The barman at the Blue Jug was collecting mugs and jars, and the students and old men gathering cloaks and hats, by the time Ulrika returned. On the stage, the blind girl was wiping down the neck of her balalaika with a rag. Ulrika grunted with relief. She was in time. She crossed to the stage and slipped the handful of stolen gold into her instrument case. She tried to be quiet about it, but the girl heard, and seemed to know how many coins she’d dropped. She looked up with wide eyes.

‘Th-thank you, master,’ she said.

Ulrika almost corrected her, but then paused. She didn’t want to talk to the girl. She didn’t want to discover she was common, or silly, or grasping. She wanted her to remain what she appeared when she sang, a pure and perfect spirit of home, untouched by the dirty realities of making a living in a hard city. Instead she only bowed – foolish, as the girl couldn’t see – then turned and headed for the door.

As she started down the empty street, Ulrika found herself walking with a jaunty stride. Perhaps it was only Shanski’s blood warming her and making her giddy, but she felt terribly noble and virtuous, and grinned at the thought of the singer sorting through her coins and finding her unexpected bounty among them. The gangster had stolen silver and copper, but Ulrika had replaced it with gold. She was like the hero from some hackneyed melodrama, defeating a moustache-twirling villain and saving a poor but virtuous maiden from ruin.

The thought sparked another, and her steps slowed as it grew in her mind. With sudden and perfect clarity she knew at last the answer to the questions that had been plaguing her since Chesnekov had told her the hordes weren’t coming. All night long they had trod their tight measure in her head. What would she do? How would she live? Why should she bother to go on?

The blind girl had given Ulrika the answer. Her songs had reminded her of her father, a wise and noble lord who cared for and protected his peasants. The songs had also reawakened the Kislevite in her. She had been so long out of her native land, and had recently become so changed, that she had almost forgotten her heritage, and how much she loved her home. Now, thanks to the songs, she remembered, and this, combined with her vow to only prey on predators, had given birth to an idea of a way to live that she could live with, indeed be proud of.

She would stay here in Praag, and she would follow her father’s noble example and protect the people of the city from monsters like Shanski. The hordes might not come, but she would still be able to lose herself in slaughter – and to kill without pricking her conscience – for Praag would provide her with an endless supply of villains to feed upon. It was a perfect solution.

She picked up her pace again, the burden of uncertainty that had weighed her down for so long lifting at last. It was good to have a plan. Now she could think about finding some place to stay, and settling herself into the fabric of the city.

She started across the street with renewed purpose, but then had to edge aside as three drunks weaved around a corner, talking animatedly amongst themselves.

‘Did y’see him?’ said the first. ‘Throat cut neat as y’please, but no blood in him. Like an empty wine skin, he was.’

‘An’ Grigo says he saw a bat the size of a man fly up t’the roof of Danya the potter’s place,’ said the second.

‘Wasna bat,’ slurred the last. ‘Wasa man. But flyin’ like a bat. Thass what I heard.’

Ulrika turned up the collar of her heavy travelling cloak and hurried on, groaning to herself as, somewhere in the distance, a violin played a lilting tune. If she was going to protect the people of Praag, she was going to have to be more discreet about it, or they would run screaming to the watch to be protected from their protector.

An hour later, with the eastern sky lightening from black to charcoal-grey, Ulrika picked her way through the demolished Novygrad, searching for a place to wait out the day. She had decided that, until she could get her bearings, the depths of the cordoned-off ruins would be the safest hiding place. People might be rebuilding on the fringes, but the areas closest to where the hordes had spilled through the collapsed city walls were not only smashed and burnt, but twisted as well by the dread powers unleashed there. Buildings of brick and stone had been melted to glassy black heaps, and ghosts and spirits were rumoured to drift amidst the piles, moaning and weeping and scaring the life from those who dared trespass on their territory.

Ulrika wasn’t troubled by these rumours. In fact she welcomed them. If the people feared the ruins, they would shun them, and she would not be disturbed, except perhaps by ghosts – and she no longer feared ghosts.

On a street where strange purple vines pushed up through the black rubble of the buildings, Ulrika found a likely-looking place – a tenement with an intact ground floor, which meant – hopefully – no sunlight would leak down into the cellar. She stepped over its shattered doors, looking for a way down, and at the back, she found it, a narrow set of wooden stairs leading down, and partially collapsed.

Ulrika squatted down to examine the threshold. There were recent footprints in the dust, and the smell of shed blood came from below – not fresh, but not ancient either. She detected no pulse as she extended her senses, but nevertheless drew her rapier and dagger before starting down the stairs, and looked warily into the shadows.

The cellar was an earthen-floored hole, studded with rows of brick pillars that supported a barrel-vaulted ceiling, and at first she saw nothing that would explain the scent of blood. But as she moved further into the darkness, she saw, sticking out from behind a pillar, a hand and arm stretched on the ground. She stepped around the pillar on guard, and discovered a grisly scene. It appeared others had been taking advantage of the privacy of the ruins as well.

The hand and arm belonged to a girl, no more than seventeen, who lay naked and spread-eagled in the centre of a circle that appeared to have been gouged into the earthen floor with a stick. Ulrika grimaced as she saw that the girl’s hands and feet had been pinned to the ground by heavy spikes, and that troughs had been dug under them to the gouged circle, so the blood from her wounds could flow into it, making a crimson moat around her. Strange symbols were carved into the victim’s body, but Ulrika could see no fatal wound. Instead, it looked as if the girl had died of terror. Her face was frozen into a scream, eyes and mouth wide open, and her limbs rigid with tension.

Standing over her, Ulrika noticed a livid purple ring bruising the flesh between the girl’s breasts. It was about an inch in diameter, and looked like a love bite, except that it was perfectly circular and slightly raised. She couldn’t imagine such a thing could have been the cause of death – it hadn’t even broken the skin – but there was something eerie and unpleasant about it that made her not want to look at it any more.

She turned away, and saw a pile of clothes in one corner. She crossed to it. Girl’s clothing, of course, but there was a lot of it – more than a girl would wear at once. Six dresses, all patched and poor, as well as shawls, bodices, caps and shoes, and a broken tin-whistle.

Ulrika snarled, angry, remembering the man in the alley who had asked if she had seen his daughter, and the soldiers in the White Boar, mourning the disappearance of a street singer. She was suddenly certain she knew what had happened to them. What vileness. She had been right before. She would never go hungry here.

She sighed, then started back to the steps. She could have stayed and slept there. She doubted the cultists would return during the day, and the corpse was nothing more than an empty vessel, but it was too pitiful. She would find somewhere else to rest.

After spending the day hidden away from the sun inside a brick oven in the basement of a destroyed bakery, Ulrika woke and made her way back across the city, again passing the Sorcerers’ Spire and crossing the Karlsbridge to the Academy District to return to the Blue Jug. And though the blind girl was there, and sang as beautifully as she had before, that was not why Ulrika had come.

The night before, Shanski had mentioned his boss – someone named Gaznayev – and Ulrika surmised that if this Gaznayev had learned that three of his thumb-breakers had been killed while at their appointed rounds, he would send someone to investigate. With luck, all she would have to do was wait and his toughs would come sniffing around. Then she could follow them back to his lair and kill him, destroying his protection racket at the root. She smiled, looking forward to the havoc she would wreak and the blood she would spill, and all without guilt or consequence.

She was dressed tonight in the black doublet and breeches she had stolen from Gabriella – patched since her misadventures with the roadwardens. She had also polished her boots and brushed out her good black cape. The dusty leathers and worn clothes she had collected from her various victims along the way had been a good disguise on the road, but here in Praag, they made her look like a refugee, and while that was a look that allowed one to vanish into a crowd, it kept one out of wealthier places, and was not the sort of thing a noble protector wore when she walked among her flock.

She knew this wasn’t wise, that with her male clothing and her height and her short white hair she cut too memorable a figure, but having seen the fashions of Praag on parade the night before, she had decided she was safer dressing this way here than perhaps anywhere else in the world. What with nobles wearing bejewelled masks, boys flaunting rouge, girls flaunting corsets, students with elaborate facial hair and soldiers wearing ermine hats the size of pumpkins, she would only be one of a great crowd of memorable figures, just another oddity in a city of oddities – and hopefully no one would give her a second glance.

Just as she thought it, she felt eyes upon her. She turned, expecting to see some gangster sizing her up, or some watchman or dour chekist agent, but that was not the case. A young man with a rapier hilt showing beneath the grey robes of an art student sat slouched against the back wall, watching her from under a fall of lank black hair. His face was as sharp and pointed as a wolf’s, and his dark-eyed gaze as cold and cruel, and he was most certainly a vampire.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE CARGO

Ulrika looked away, angry at the vampire for spying upon her, but angrier at herself. She had expected her exploits of the previous evening to have aroused the interest of the gangster whose men she had killed, and perhaps the watch, but it hadn’t occurred to her the killings might awaken curiosity in other quarters as well. Fool! Of course they had. A corpse drained of blood, rumours of a man who flew like a bat. If the vampires of Praag were anything like the Lahmians of Nuln, these were the last sort of whispers they would want floating around, and the first they would investigate.

She should have been more discreet. She had let her blood rage run away with her again and she had exposed herself. Now they would come after her. They would try to control her as Gabriella had.

She closed her eyes, fighting for calm. Perhaps she could come to some sort of agreement with them. Perhaps, if she promised to be quieter in her feeding, they would let her be. Praag was a big city. Surely there was room enough for all of them.

With a grunt of resignation, she turned back, determined to confront the vampire head-on and see what he had to say, but he was gone. His seat by the wall was empty. She looked around the room and checked the exits. He was nowhere to be seen. She sighed, annoyed. What was the use of cat and mouse? If they wanted to speak with her, then come out with it. If they wanted to kill her…

She paused at the thought. There might be an ambush waiting for her outside. Well, good. Her blood was up. If they wanted a fight she would welcome it. And when she defeated them, she could return to the life she had mapped out for herself, free from their interference.

She was just rising and stepping towards the door when she heard heavy boots entering the bar from the back. She turned. Four hard-looking men were swaggering in behind a fifth, a trim blond dandy with a velvet cap pulled low over one pale blue eye. The customers edged away from them, and the barman fumbled the mug he had in his hands, almost dropping it.

Ulrika cursed to herself. Her gangster quarry had arrived at the most inopportune time. Now what did she do?

The dandy leaned on the bar and smiled at the barman. ‘Dobry vechyr, Basilovich. How’s business?’

The barman took a step back. ‘I paid Shanski last night, Kino. Everybody saw me.’

Kino waved a careless hand. ‘Aye, aye. No worries there. It’s only that some friends are saying Shanski stopped at the Jug just before he died. What do you know about that?’