Soldier of Fortune: A Gideon Quinn Adventure (Fortune Chronicles Book 1) (15 page)

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-F
IVE

AS SOON AS
Ronan shoved him out of the hukka den, Gideon saw why Nahmin had complained of the street’s size.

Wollstonecraft was less a road and more a glorified rickshaw path. For all that, the butler had managed to maneuver a coach and four large enough to hold Jessup Rand’s ego into the narrow byway, even parking so the carriage door aligned with the recessed door of the hukka den, reducing the chances of anyone seeing Gideon being forced into it.

Gideon, pressed between the twins, wondered if Rand was inside that carriage now, waiting, but before the thought could become a question, a sack was yanked over his head from behind, where Nahmin had just joined the party.

The sack was burlap, and smelled of oats, so Gideon assumed it was a feedbag appropriated from the carriage itself. Thus blinded, he was guided (none too gently) up and into the carriage interior, which felt as spacious within as it had appeared without.

The burlap which currently rendered him blind also muffled his hearing and his sense of smell, but he was still able to catch the essence of well-tended leather, a sense confirmed by his hands pressing against the back of the sprung leather bench onto which he’d been pushed.

Weaving through the burlap, oats and leather was also the merest hint of something else — something female and spicy and cunning — and somehow familiar.

He hadn't time to trace the origins of that familiarity, or to address whomever was seated on the opposite bench — an unseen presence as palpable as the twins on either side of him — as the carriage began to move. Gideon suspected the presence to be Rand and, if he was right, he also suspected this would be a very short trip.

And then the first fist drove into his kidney and much to Gideon’s disappointment, the journey — its route punctuated by the steady and expert application of fists, boots and Ronan’s shock-stick to various parts of his anatomy — was not short.

Not that Gideon was unfamiliar with pain. His years as a soldier and a convict both had been filled with explorations in the many and varied ways men and women could do damage to one another, but always before he’d been able to see what was coming at him.

Here, inside a moving carriage, deprived of his vision, his hands and most of his hearing, Gideon had no sense of himself in space and no idea from whence the next attack would come.

The only time he’d experienced anything close to this level of helplessness had been at the hands of a Midasian interrogator.

Rolling on the carriage floor from another prod of the shock-stick, he remembered that interrogator. He remembered in particular how satisfying it had been to snap the man’s neck, once Gideon’s company broke through the lines (against orders) to retrieve him.

Walsie, he recalled, as a fist (boot? Large handbag?) knocked his head sideways to rap against something hard and roundish (a knee?), had been the first through the door of the small, dark chamber.

But this wasn’t then, he reminded himself, spitting blood. Walsie wasn’t coming because Walsie was dead, murdered by a lie.

A lie, he thought, told by the man who was even now seated in this carriage, silently watching Gideon being beaten to a pulp.

Over the rush of internal static accompanying another application of the shock stick, he thought he heard a word and that word might have been ‘enough’ and perhaps this was so, as the attacks ceased as suddenly as they’d begun.

In the quiet that followed, he curled on the rumbling floor, where the odor of his own blood soured the leather and perfume trace he’d noted earlier.

His mind, eager to grasp at anything other than where the next shock would strike, danced over the memory of those scents, and what they meant in the vocabulary of his experience.

Leather, that was easy. Leather was war — boots shined to gleaming for inspection, the scabbard of his sword and the strap of a rifle, the commander’s saddle, that interrogator’s whip — and the interior of this very fine carriage, he thought, sliding closer to the present.  

* * *

“Suede,” Dani said, drawing him back, back to the past — to when she was his — her long fingers cool against the broken skin over his cheekbone. “Blue suede shoes.”

“You never wore blue suede shoes,” he told her.

“No,” she agreed, leaning close to brush her lips over his as she added, “I never wore perfume, either.”

* * *

Which was when he remembered.

Perfume.

Spicy.

Cunning.

Under the hood, Gideon’s eyes popped open.

The carriage had ceased moving and he felt the rush of chill air which said a door had opened and hands were already hauling him up and shoving him forward, to stumble over the carriage steps and down, down, down onto the cold, damp, smooth of a concrete drive.

He hit hard, then deliberately rolled sideways and to his knees before any more hands could get a grip. “Celia,” he said her name, forcing a voice thick with blood past the muffling burlap, “Why didn’t you just tell me it was you?”

There was a pause, longer for Gideon, unseeing, and then a laugh filtered through the sack, a laugh like smoke from the high end cigarette which, as the hood was yanked precipitously from his head, Ronan had just finished lighting for her.

“Because,” she said, exhaling that first, luxurious plume, the smoke in the night air as silver as the fur of her coat, “you have a history of refusing my invitations. Nahmin,” she glanced at the butler, climbing down from the driver’s seat, “tend to the horses and then see the general continues to remain undisturbed.” She looked at the twins. “Bring him. And, Gideon,” she paused, looked back over her shoulder, “try not to bleed on the carpet.”

C
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T
WENTY
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IX

“C’MON, C’MON, C’MON,”
Mia prompted herself as she slid through the gap in the row house’s fence and darted through someone’s handkerchief-sized garden.

It should have been simple, following a low-flying draco that was following a carriage, but neither Elvis nor the carriage had to climb over, under or through the people, traffic, fences and various other obstacles that made up a city.

And even as she did her best to keep up with Elvis (with the help of a few unpaid tram hitches), she wondered if the draco really was flying after Gideon, or if he was simply on his way to the nearest fishmonger for an early breakfast.

But then she glanced up and saw Elvis circling back to see she was, in fact, following before winging off once more towards the city center, where the rich and powerful of the city dwelt (and far, far from any fish stalls).

She ducked her head low and sidled under a gap in the next fence, which brought her to Carroll Square, across the street from the Elysium Hotel’s agri-center and wind farm. It was also, though the Keepers didn’t know, a convenient hide for dodgers working Shakespeare Circus, just a block away.

In addition to granting sanctuary to dodgers on the run, the wind farm in the middle of the park provided an excellent hide for Mia’s books. She thought of the novel Captain Pitte had given her, its edges digging into her ribs as she ran, but there wasn’t time for a detour.

Apparently Elvis felt the same for even as her eyes tracked towards the grove of energy-producing ‘trees’, a high, keening call drew her attention skywards, where the draco urged her on.

“I’m comin’, I’m comin’,” she muttered, picking up speed so that, when she reached the gap in the agri-center’s boundary maze, she fair dove through the opening.

And came up short against the bulk that was Ellison.

“Figgered you might make a stop ‘ere abouts,” the fagin said, grabbing her arm, “though I expected you a mite sooner — and wif a draco under your tunic.”

Saying this, he patted down her tunic but found only the book.

“Typical,” he said, tossing Pitte’s favorite Earth author into a patch of winter grains. “I always knew you was trouble,” he told her with a vicious shake, “but trouble can be beat outta a dodger. Disloyalty though, I can’t let that take root, now, can I?“

“Let go o’ me,” she cried, trying to peel Ellison’s white-knuckled fingers from around her bicep.  “Let go or —  or I’ll lose it!”

“Lose it?” Ellison ignored the young dodger’s struggles and hauled her up high enough she got a face full of whiskey-tinged breath when he asked, “Lose
what
?”

At which point a shrieking draco came diving down at Ellison, his extended talons raking the bald head and causing the fagin to drop Mia in order to cover his bleeding pate as the screaming, flapping draco continued to torment him.

“That,” Mia said, springing to her feet and literally diving over the cowering Ellison.

As soon as she was well away, Elvis gave one last, remonstrative shriek and then swooped up and into the night.

Running like she’d never run before, Mia gave up on the dodger routes and kept to the main roads where, even at this hour, Ellison would be less likely to make an untoward move.

She only hoped, in coming to her aid, Elvis hadn’t lost the carriage.

* * *

As it happened, Mia needn’t have worried about Ellison following. Thoroughly traumatized by the unexpected attack, the fagin remained where he was, hunched over between the winter wheat and the dead remains of tomato plants for many minutes, until he was convinced the demon with wings wasn’t going to come at him, again.

Eventually, when no further claws came tearing at his exposed flesh, he slowly lowered one arm to find that, yes, he was alone.

Or rather, mostly alone.

Just on the far side of the tomatoes, a man of stocky build, wearing the Keeper colors of saffron and crimson and carrying a hoe with the same assurance a soldier carries his sword, was standing. “Might one ask,” the man began, his basso voice deceptively pleasant, “what in the comb you’d be doing in my wheat in the wee hours?”

“I —“ Ellison’s eyes darted wildly to the sky, and then around him, and then to the sky again. “Didn’t you see it?”

The Keeper’s eyes widened and he hefted the hoe suggestively. “See what?”

As he spoke, two other Keepers, a woman of middle years and a youth, came racing up to join their fellow.

“We telephed the precinct — again,” the youth said. He’d had to make the first call, many hours ago, when some vandals had jammed the alley bypass with the hotel’s compost bin. “They’ll be sending someone along, quick as they can.”

“They also said it may be awhile,” the woman turned her disapproving eyes on Ellison. “They say it’s a busy night.”

“That’s fine, that is,” the first Keeper said. “It’ll give our friend here time to settle, and explain himself in proper fashion.” He focused on the cowering, bleeding Ellison. “Won’t it?”

“It — I — yes,” Ellison replied at last, still hunching in on himself. For though he was a large man, and strong, most of his confrontations were with people under the age of fourteen. When it came to facing off with adults, he generally found cowardice to be the better part of valor.

Cowardice and bald-faced lies, that is. In this case claiming himself a victim of thieves who set upon him as he stepped out of his favorite tavern.  Afraid for his life, he’d run roughshod through streets and private yards alike, until he’d finally gone to ground in the agri-center.

The scratches? Received when wrestling through a wire fence, two, or was it four? streets back.

“And can you identify these thieves?” the officer, who’d arrived within the hour, inquired.

She was a young one, and Ellison marked her as new to the job, the way her supervisor watched over her.

“Of course,” Ellison said, accepting a mug of tea from Bren while DS Hama and the two older Keepers looked on, visibly unimpressed. “Well, two of ‘me, any road. One’s a kid — one o’ them dodgers as works the streets of a night. You know the type,” he added, glancing Hama’s way.

“And the other?” officer Prudawe prompted, her tongue poking from between her teeth as she transcribed his statement into her spanking new notebook, oblivious of the mug Bren set at her side.

“Tall feller — and skinny with it,” Ellison replied promptly. “Hair’s sorta brownish-grey, not much to look at, oh, and he wears an Infantry long-coat.”

At which point the last mug, which Bren had been about to hand to DS Hama, tipped wildly, sloshing its contents over the floor.

Hama looked at his tea, spreading across the tile, then up at flushing youth. “Something you’d care to share, Keeper Bren?”

Which was how DS Hama who, with his young trainee had already taken a report on the composter, vandalism in an outer circle diner called Kit’s, a stolen (or mis-parked) Edsel Comet, an upsurge in Morph sales among the gentry and a near riot in the streets along Marlboro, first learned the name of Gideon Quinn.