03 - Death's Legacy (18 page)

“Ah, there he is.” Hanna glanced behind them. A shadowy
figure stepped out of the doorway of a ramshackle tenement, shrouded in a cloak.
“Remind you of anyone?”

Rudi nodded. The man’s arm was strapped up beneath the cloak,
hanging awkwardly. This just had to be the wizard he’d shot the previous night.
A moment later, the man confirmed it.

“You should have let me take it without waking you,” he said,
in an unmistakable Marienburg accent. “Now we’ll just have to do this the hard
way.”

“The hard way’s fine by me,” Mathilde said, drawing her
sword. She took a step towards the young wizard, who raised his uninjured arm in
what was clearly intended to be a threatening gesture. Rudi flinched, expecting
an onslaught of phantom knives, like the ones Alwyn had unleashed, or the
cobbles to vanish beneath his feet, but it seemed that the shadow mage had
something else in mind. Mathilde’s charge faltered suddenly, a dazed expression
entering her eyes, and she looked at her surroundings with an air of vague
bewilderment. “Sorry, what was the other thing?”

“Protect Fritz!” Rudi yelled, hoping that her feelings for
the simpleton would overcome whatever sorcery was befuddling her mind. He
realised, too late, that he’d just revealed who was carrying the package of
artefacts. The wizard would know anyway, of course, because he’d be able to see
the mystical energy it gave off in the same way that Hanna had done, but the
thugs bearing down on them wouldn’t have had a clue who their target was, and
would probably have split up to tackle everyone in the party individually. As it
was, they all targeted the young bodyguard, running towards him with murder in
their eyes. Cursing under his breath, Rudi leapt to intervene.

As the sword left his scabbard, he found the street fighting
instincts he’d learned as a city watchman kicking in, and assessed their
assailants with a cool-headed detachment that vaguely surprised him. There were
five of them, all rough-looking fellows, armed for the most part with clubs and
daggers. Only one carried a sword, and he seemed to be the leader of the rag-tag
band.

Despite the odds against them, Rudi felt confident. He knew
the type: a local gang of petty criminals recruited in a hurry with the promise
of quick and easy cash. The Fog Walkers must be getting desperate, he thought to
himself, recruiting street scum like this to do their dirty work, but no doubt
most of their more competent operatives had been left at the bottom of the Reik
after their ill-fated venture into piracy, leaving them no option but to take
whatever help they could get.

Fritz had his sword out too, and the two erstwhile enemies
stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the onrushing thugs. Rudi had hoped that the
sight of drawn steel would make them think twice, but they came on regardless.
No doubt they were counting on their superior numbers, and were more afraid of
losing face in front of their friends than they were of anything Rudi and Fritz
might do. Rudi smiled grimly to himself. That could be the last mistake some of
them would ever make.

He struck out at the first man on his right, ducking under a
descending club, and opening up an ugly gash along the fellow’s leg. The man
screamed, trying to hop backwards, and Rudi followed up, spinning around to
smash the hilt of his sword into the thug’s face. The man went down hard,
howling as he clapped a hand to the wreckage of his nose.

Once again, Rudi’s old street brawling skills had served him
well. By targeting the man at the end of the line, he’d opened up a significant
gap in their ranks, keeping the fellow with the club between him and the rest of
the mob, so he could pick off his chosen target at leisure without having to
worry about interference from the others.

Stepping into the space he’d created, he turned, finding
himself behind the main group, and hoping that Fritz had had the common sense to
duplicate the move on their other flank. No such luck, of course. True to form,
Fritz had simply charged at the nearest foe, and was now surrounded. He was
giving a good account of himself, though, Rudi had to admit. The dagger-wielding
bandit he’d tackled was kneeling on the filthy cobbles, hugging his belly fresh
blood seeping from beneath his arms, and the young bodyguard was engaged in a
furious duel with the swordsman apparently leading the ragged band. Stepping in
again to engage another bandit, whose knife was flashing towards Fritz’s
kidneys, Rudi glanced up over the milling heads to see what was happening to
Hanna and Mathilde.

“Snap out of it!” Hanna said, slapping the swordswoman hard
around the face. The vacant look fled from Mathilde’s eyes, and her muscles
twitched as she overrode the instinctive counterblow that she’d been about to
launch. Comprehension dawned across her visage.

“He’s using magic,” she said, as if such a thing was both an
everyday occurrence and the direst form of personal insult, and raised her sword
as if to attack the shadow mage again.

“I know.” Hanna pushed the red-headed woman towards the
melee. “Go and help the boys. I’ll take care of this jumped-up little sneak
thief.”

Mathilde opened her mouth as if she was about to argue the
point, and then caught sight of the blade lunging at Fritz’s unprotected back.
Rudi tried to complete the blocking movement he’d already begun, but stumbled as
his shins met the ruffian he’d just downed. The man clutched at his leg, trying
to trip him, and Rudi cut down again with his sword, not even bothering to look.
There was a meaty thud somewhere around knee height, and the grip around his
calf was abruptly released.

Prevented from parrying the blow aimed at Fritz, he watched
Mathilde leap towards the knifeman, time slowing and stretching, as it so often
seemed to in combat. He even had time to notice that the bustling streets had
quieted, a few of the passers-by pausing to watch the spectacle as they had in
Carroburg, although most of them continued to go about their business regardless
of the fracas, giving it little more than a cursory glance.

“Look out!” Mathilde called, but Fritz’s attention was wholly
on the fight he was having with the swordsman, and he barely acknowledged her
warning shout. Before Rudi’s horrified gaze, the dagger struck squarely home,
and then rebounded, the point snapping off with a faint metallic ring. A gleam
of metal became visible beneath the ragged new tear in Fritz’s immaculate
jacket, and with a sigh of relief, Rudi recalled the concealed mail shirt that
Mathilde had been wearing during the brawl in the gambling den when they’d first
met her and von Eckstein. Obviously, the nobleman believed in equipping his
employees with a little discreet protection as a matter of course.

Before the knifeman could recover, Mathilde was on him,
striking him down with a furious blow that cleaved deep into his shoulder. As
the wounded man tried to crawl away, she kicked him hard in the face, her
expression murderously vengeful.

“Not so tough face-to-face, are you, you backstabbing little
runt.” Her blade rose and fell again, and the thug expired with a single
choked-off scream of mortal terror.

Rudi turned to face the last ruffian, who was already backing
away, and took a step towards him, raising his blade. That was enough. The man
turned and fled, weaving through the growing crowd of onlookers at an impressive
turn of speed. His comrade with the belly wound followed, rather more slowly and
erratically, leaving a trail of spattered blood behind him. Unless he found a
healer or a chirurgeon pretty soon, Rudi thought, he wasn’t going very far.
Fritz seemed to be gaining the upper hand against their leader, although his
handling of the sword still seemed a little less elegant and instinctive than
Mathilde’s or Rudi’s own, so Rudi left him to it while he hurdled the body of
his fallen opponent and turned towards Hanna again.

“You talk a good fight for a hedge wizard,” the shadow mage
said, “but you’re in way over your head, little girl. You’ve got no idea what
you’re dealing with.”

“Neither have you,” Hanna said. Before Rudi could intervene,
a ball of seething red flame winked into existence in the air ahead of her, and
streaked towards the black-clad wizard. Before he could react it struck him full
in the chest, and he went down shrieking, a neat, charred hole punched almost
the whole way through his torso. For a moment Rudi thought he could see the
man’s spine from the wrong side, and shuddered with instinctive revulsion. Then
the fellow expired in a miasma of burning flesh and smouldering cloth.

“Hanna!” he gasped in horror, anticipating an outbreak of
hysteria among the crowd like the one they’d fled from in Carroburg. To his
astonishment, however, none of the passers-by reacted at all, other than to step
around the gently smoking corpse with carefully composed expressions of
fastidious distaste. Hanna shrugged.

“He didn’t leave me any choice,” she said, her tone making it
perfectly clear that any doubts Rudi might have harboured on that score would be
best kept to himself.

“Come on.” He looked around grimly, prepared to fight his way
clear of the inevitable lynch mob, but the crowd remained strangely passive. For
a moment, he found himself wondering if they were all under some kind of
enchantment.

“You got that thing off your head, then,” Fritz said, taking
advantage of his opponent’s momentary distraction to get in under his guard.
There was a brief scraping of metal on metal, and the gang leader’s sword
clattered to the ordure-slick cobbles underfoot. Fritz rested the tip of his
blade against the man’s throat. “Leave. Now,” he said, slowly and distinctly.
With a squeak of relief, and the sudden smell of soiled britches, the would-be
assassin complied. Fritz sheathed his sword, and beamed happily at Mathilde.
“How did I do?” he asked proudly.

“Not too bad,” the woman said. “You’re still dropping your
point a little, but you’re definitely getting the hang of that disarming move.”

“Which way?” Rudi asked urgently. He glanced around at the
curiously passive crowd, eager to be gone before they came to their senses. None
of them seemed remotely interested in what had just happened, except for an
enterprising halfling who was already removing the dead wizard’s purse from his
belt. “We have to get out of here. The last time Hanna did something like that,
we nearly got lynched.”

“Calm down,” Mathilde said, with evident amusement, although
she was covertly eyeing Hanna with a faintly wary air. “This is Altdorf, not
some scabby village in the middle of nowhere. There’s a lot of wizards round
here.” Rudi felt his jaw go slack.

“I suppose we’d better get on, though,” Fritz conceded,
clearly determined to follow his girlfriend’s lead. “Like you said, we can’t
keep the boss waiting forever.” He linked arms with Mathilde again, and shot a
slightly forced grin at Rudi. “Close your mouth, Rudi, you look like a
provincial.” Nettled, Rudi snapped his jaw shut, his temper hardly improved by
Hanna’s barely stifled giggle. “I thought you were used to Hanna doing magic
stuff.”

“Oh, that’s right. You were studying at the college in
Marienburg, weren’t you?” Mathilde said, the barest trace of relief seeping into
her voice. “Fritz told me he’d seen you there a couple of times.” She began to
lead the way through the maze of streets with all the assurance she’d shown
before, and Rudi began to relax. Before more than a few moments had passed, the
street where the slain wizard still lay had passed from sight, and he truly felt
he couldn’t have found his way back to it if he’d tried. Hanna nodded.

“That’s right.” Her hand crept towards her satchel, without
her apparently having been aware of the gesture. “I’ve got my papers here with
me.”

“Just as well,” Mathilde said. “Altdorf is crawling with
witch hunters as well as wizards. You’d be surprised how many witches think they
can hide here, by blending in with the college-trained wizards.”

“And can they?” Rudi asked, trying to sound casual. Mathilde
shrugged.

“I doubt it. If the witch hunters don’t get them, the Knights
Panther probably do. They both seem pretty busy, anyway.” She shrugged again.
“On the other hand, the only ones we ever hear about are the ones that get
burned. For all I know, there are dozens of them running loose in the streets.”

“So why have you come all this way?” Fritz asked. “I’d have
thought you’d want to stay put in Marienburg, at least till you got properly
trained by Baron Hendryk.”

“I thought I’d do better with one of the colleges here,”
Hanna said shortly. By this time, to Rudi’s great and unspoken relief, they’d
left the maze of narrow streets behind them and emerged onto a wider
thoroughfare, so they could all walk abreast. The buildings around them didn’t
seem all that different, though, being the same mixture of shops and houses that
had closed in on them the moment they’d left the docks. Fritz glanced longingly
at a few of the more expensive-looking taverns as they passed, but the brawl in
the alleyway had clearly focused Mathilde’s mind on the errand at hand, and she
kept walking with an evident air of purpose. Fritz nodded sympathetically, as if
he understood, and voiced his thoughts with his usual lack of tact.

“Things not work out with Kris, then? Shame, I kind of liked
him.” Hanna’s jaw tightened. Parting from the young Marienburger had been a
severe blow for her, perhaps almost as bad as being forced to take her chances
with the witch hunters again, and Rudi squeezed her hand sympathetically. To his
pleased surprise, she returned the pressure for a moment before pulling away
from his grip.

“Kris is fine, thank you. I’ll be writing to him as soon as
I’m settled here.”

“Oh, good,” Fritz said, with every sign of sincerity, and
Rudi tried not to acknowledge the pang of disappointment he felt at the girl’s
words.