Julesin proved to be a fellow of unwisely regular habits. He would arrive from the coal pits at the same time, under heavy escort, whereupon he would enter the centremost house in the row. The windows in this house glowed brighter than the others, and the smoke rose more thickly from its chimney, making it easily identifiable as the Coal King’s domicile. Whilst the king himself was never seen out of doors in the hours of darkness, Julesin would eventually re-emerge to make a tour of the guards. There were only two other Scuttlers with him as he made his way around the perimeter. He seemed to command great respect amongst the guards, or more likely fear since he was not shy in administering punishment. Lizanne saw him send one droopy-eyed unfortunate to the ground with a vicious back-hand cuff then stand by as his two escorts kicked the man unconscious. Consequently, she had little chance of evading detection here as she did regularly at the sulphur pits. There was only one point in Julesin’s nightly routine that offered a workable opportunity. Having completed his tour he would linger on a bench alongside the plinth. The two escorts would retire a short distance whilst Julesin sat smoking a cigarillo, the tip glowing red in the gloom.
A decent aiming point for a ranged weapon, Lizanne decided on the second night. It was far less subtle than she would have liked, entailing a swift ground-level escape as the surrounding guards reacted. Still, she had no other options besides making use of one of Tinkerer’s timed grenades and they were needed for Ore Day. Also, she would have had to explain to the Electress where it came from. Fortunately, King Coal himself had seen fit to provide the means by which she could assassinate his lieutenant.
She had been obliged to practise in the basement of the Miner’s Repose, Scorazin being somewhat lacking in open spaces where one could loose a cross-bow without being noticed. At her request, Melina harvested the darts from the bodies left in the wake of the Scuttlers’ attack, each wrapped with cloth to avoid contact with the poison that still lingered on the barbed steel-heads. The ingenious loading and drawing mechanism would have been easily operated with a drop of Green in her veins. Without it she found herself capable of loosing off only two darts before the strain on her limbs forced a pause. Realistically, this meant only one shot at Julesin. Gauging the effective range of the weapon had been a simple matter of arithmetic. The basement was fifteen yards long at its widest point and repeated practice shots at a wooden board revealed the darts would lose one inch of altitude for every six point eight yards travelled. Working out the correct angle of elevation for a kill-shot was therefore a relatively straightforward exercise.
She watched Julesin complete his nightly inspection then take his place on the bench, smoke blossoming as he lit his cigarillo. The gurgle arising from the exposed sewer provided enough noise to cover the sound as she primed the cross-bow, the string sliding back and dart slotting into place with a pleasing mechanical elegance. Whoever had crafted the weapon had seen fit to equip it with both front and rear sights, crudely fashioned from hammered tin but still accurate. She centred the front sight on the glowing tip of Julesin’s cigarillo, meaning the dart would bury itself squarely in the centre of his chest. She took a shallow breath and squeezed the trigger as she exhaled. The cross-bow jerked in her grip as the string snapped forward, the dart streaking away. It covered the distance to Julesin’s chest in a fraction of a second, whereupon it froze in mid air, an inch or two short of its target.
Julesin’s cigarillo glowed brighter as he got to his feet, eyes fixed on where Lizanne lay prone in the filthy alley. It was obvious he could see her, and had most likely done so for the previous two nights. Green and Black, she realised, mind racing as she calculated her options. Julesin, however, didn’t allow her the time to formulate an escape plan.
An invisible hand jerked the cross-bow from her grip, sending it spinning into the dark. She tried to roll away but the Black closed on her with suffocating force, lifting and dragging her from the alley. Julesin seemed to be in no particular hurry, standing still and continuing to smoke as he slowly drew her to him. He was evidently highly skilled in the use of Black, as he kept the dart she had loosed at him suspended in mid air. He halted her a few feet away, lifting her body so that she faced him. The dart flipped over and rose to hover parallel with her left eye.
Julesin stood regarding her in silence, head tilted in appraisal as the dart inched closer. Lizanne found she couldn’t close the lid of her eye as the tip of the dart came within a hair’s width of her pupil, where it lingered for a very long moment.
“Just joking,” Julesin said, the dart making a loud ping on the cobbles as he allowed it to fall. There was an odd note of sympathy in his voice as he stepped closer, offering an apologetic grimace. “And, as one professional to another, I’m sorry about all this.”
The Black closed in with increased force, clamping onto her throat, making her lungs burn and vision turn first red then black as the void claimed her.
CHAPTER 28
Clay
Clay came awake to a warm sensation in his leg, as if it were being caressed by a summer breeze. His eyelids fluttered over gritted orbs, harsh light birthing an instant ache in his head. He tried to move but found his entire body constrained somehow. More rapid blinking revealed him to be sitting on the stone floor of the chamber, his back pressed against something hard and unyielding. Looking down he saw ropes tightly bound across his chest and realised he had been tied to one of the pillars. He strained against the ropes, grunting with the effort, then stopped as an important fact rose to the forefront of his awareness: his leg didn’t hurt anymore.
Lowering his gaze, he found himself gaping in frozen disbelief. The bandage was gone and so was his wound. Not scabbed or scarred over, but gone. His denuded and ravaged flesh had been remade, leaving a hairless but otherwise whole segment of skin and muscle. The warm sensation he had awoken to was revealed as the result of a beam of light descending from above to bathe his leg in a soft, greenish luminescence. His gaze instinctively tracked along the beam to where it connected with the crystal floating above. It still cast a more intense beam down on the segmented egg but for some reason had seen fit to cast out another. The mystery and novelty of it provoked a laugh as his toes flexed and the movement failed to produce the expected blast of pain, a laugh that died as a voice spoke to him.
His head jerked up to find a slender figure standing a few feet away. Clay had no difficulty in recognising the woman who had shot him. She was now clothed in what he recognised as the spare trousers and shirt presumably taken from Loriabeth’s pack, with the silver belt still fastened about her waist. It seemed to be formed of some kind of metallic material from the way it caught the light, and was bulky with several large pouches and an empty holster, presumably for the gun she had used to shoot him.