“Just don’t come in here. You don’t want to see this. Oh, God almighty.” With that, he turned, almost sagged, away from the carnage. Only the neurochemicals kept him from bringing the thousand-nuyen meal up the way it had gone down.
Serrin was still groggy from the drain of the spell; he had really let fly at the orks with all he had. As Geraint reemerged from the room, his face was ashen, but he waved away Francesca’s frantic hands offering him slap patches for the girl inside.
“Forget it. There isn’t an internal organ left where it used to be, We’re too late. We’re too damn late. Let’s get out of here and call the police. That’s all we can do now.”
They descended the stairs, Geraint throwing some more money at the huddled forms of the dazed orks. Ace it, he thought; it wasn’t their fault Serrin had to cream them. They might even have thought they were protecting someone.
When the three stepped out into the street again, they saw something totally unanticipated: a cloaked figure carrying a bag was veering crazily down the road toward a limo parked in the distance.
In the dark they could see no clear details. What puzzled Geraint most was how the man could be in this street if he’d gone out the back. Before he could fire his pistol, however, the first of Francesca’s shots rang out. The cloaked figure disappeared into the opened rear door of the limo as two other figures moved out from the shadows, one with a snarling automatic weapon and the other gesticulating dramatically.
The mage. Serrin realized, almost too late. An invisible tidal wave of concussion slammed into their bodies. The impact sent Geraint flying, Francesca managing to stay upright only by hanging on to the remains of a lamp post, her gun hanging uselessly from a hand that had lost all power of grip. Only Serrin managed to stay in some semblance of shape. His magical defense kept the worst of the manaballs effects away from them. Clutching at the best spell focus he had for combat, he dropped the defense that had saved them and let the combat mage and the street samurai have it with the works.
A huge ball of fire sprang into existence at the end of the road, illuminating the scene with a hellish inferno. Dimly, the lights of the limo could be seen speeding away, but the two figures were still standing there, now become screaming, flailing human torches. Serrin collapsed to the sidewalk.
As the car squealed around the corner and away, the scene fell into an eerie silence for a second or two, a silliness broken only by the crackle of flames licking at the two charred bodies in the distance. Francesca slapped patches desperately onto the elf, whose hand clutched instinctively for the healing spell focus.
Gone. Gave it away. Oh, drek. Serrin couldn’t really focus his vision. Clouds swirled in his head: rocks hung heavy in his stomach.
Geraint fumbled in his bag and readied a subcutaneous as shoots began to ring out from the blackness of the streets. Francesca slapped patches on both herself and the noble while the elf’s body jerked into life at Geraint’s ministrations. From somewhere north of them, a whooping siren began to wail, getting closer by the second.
“Two assaulted orks, one maybe dead,” Geraint said tersely. “I’m covered in blood and you just torched two people. We are not staying around to explain this one to the Metropolitan Police. Come on!” He and Francesca draped Serrin's arms around their shoulders, limping away into a side-alley just as the flashing lights of the police cars appeared in the distance.
Serrin was beginning to feet as if he, too, was on fire. He dropped his arms from around the shoulders of his friends, but he stilt gazed at them with wildly dilated pupils.
“Come on, lets blow these fraggin’ bastards to hell and back,” he croaked as he reeled about. Francesca and Geraint exchanged frantic looks.
“What the hell did you pump him up with?’
“Too late to worry now, its only got a couple of minutes, then he gets the shakes. If he’s lucky. Run, you two, run!”
Speeding haphazardly through the dark back streets, praying they wouldn’t fall headlong over some smashed-out wino or shattered slab of concrete, the three fled into the murderous night.
Rani was a few minutes early, but even with that he was late. She huddled in the corner of the warehouse, shrinking into its darkness. At least she knew the exits, should she need them, the huge front doorway through which she had come in and the small barricaded door at the back. That is, it might have been barricaded if the wood weren’t all rotted. Still, it was an emergency exit, just in case. She also guessed that Smeng must have friends lurking about, though she didn’t look for them.
It seemed like an hour or more passed before the other ork suddenly appeared beside her in the cool darkness. He put his arms around her and she gave him the coconut sweet wrapped in rice paper. He smiled tenderly and murmured, “You didn’t have to do that.”
“But I wanted to.”
“Thank you.” He took half of it in one mouthful and chewed happily. “Oh, that’s good. Too good to eat all at once.” He shoved the remainder into a jacket pocket and refastened the zipper. “Rani, you asked my help in getting vengeance. I can only do so much, but what you do get, it wasn’t from me, right?”
“Of course,” Rani breathed. Their voices, held low in whispers, still sounded to her ears as though they were being broadcast throughout the silent warehouse.
All right, this Pershinkin, he has many, many contacts. And a lot of friends, too. He’s not someone who you can pull into a dark doorway and interrogate, right?”
Rani remained silent. She had expected as much.
“But one night, a little someone sees something. Maybe that someone hears something they shouldn’t. Get my drift? Good. That someone overhears Pershinkin acting as a middleman. He is being asked to find some people to make a run to a place called-Longstanton?”
He pronounced it oddly, over-extending the middle syllable. Rani was glad. It meant Smeng wasn’t the one who’d overheard the conversation; this sounded authentically secondhand. Somehow she didn’t want him to have seen or heard anything personally. not to have been involved in this terrible thing, not even inadvertently.
“That where you went?” he asked.
“Yes.” As simple as that.
“Let me tell you now, no one’s seen Pershinkin all week. Not as far as any of my people know, anyway. But that’s not so strange. The man is west of center a lot, so we hear tell. He talks to the suits and only comes back here to find heat, right?”
Again, it needed no more than a simple nod from her.
“Well, what I got for you is two more things. First, the men he meets. Two suits. One tall and thin, all sneers and hair slime; the other one a little shorter, losing his hair at the front, and he’s got something classy, some kind of jewel in his front tooth, yeah? My little bird says he’s a chiphead. He shakes a little, see? The suits disappeared into a flashy limo. Now, I can’t tell you where all this took place. That might not be in the interests of my source, got it? But not so very far away, I’ll tell you that. Hope that’s some use to you” Smeng paused and glanced carefully around him for the twelfth time.
“Second thing is, it was a bum run. What I heard is exactly what you said happened. The suits said, ‘Just get some suckers, a bunch of slints what can be relied on to rakk up.’ Sorry, Rani. I don’t want to hurt your feelings. But that’s-”