“I’ll be back,” she said. She walked away into the dark and quickly vanished into the shadows. I closed my eyes for a second — I’m sure it was only a second.
“He’s not dead, he’s snoring,” said a voice. I opened my eyes to find a pale face under a baseball cap looking down at me. “And he’s got his eyes open.”
I blinked. The voice sounded black and street, but the skin was very definitely pale.
“Look at this, bro?” said another voice. The face over me moved back revealing another in the same style — except this one was brandishing my sword. In my injured state I’d forgotten about it, and my glamour must have slipped enough for it to become visible and obvious.
“I’d leave that alone if I were you,” I croaked, but I was in no state to enforce the threat. They both ignored me.
“That’s wicked,” said the second guy. He sliced at the air experimentally, making his friend step back. To my trained eye, he was more likely to injure himself than anyone else, but the problem of getting it back remained.
“Just give it to me, OK?” I asked, hoarsely.
“Or what?” he said, posturing with the sword.
Amber spoke from behind him. “Or we find out how far you can run without a head.” He spun round to find her standing behind him, holding her own blade alongside her leg. As he turned, she stepped in and her blade flashed. She stepped back, with her blade resting by her leg again.
“Missed,” he said, grinning broadly at her. Then his trousers began to slowly droop as his belt fell into two pieces and gave way.
“Unless you can use that, you’d better put it down. Slowly and gently,” she warned.
He was caught between holding the blade and holding his trousers up. He glanced to his friend.
“You’ll never make it,” she warned.” I’ll cut your hamstrings so you can’t run and then I’ll slice you into little pieces,” she said.
“Believe her,” I rasped.
He glanced back at me.
“Last warning,” she said. “Sword. Ground. Now.”
He exchanged glances with this friend and for a moment I thought they were going for it, but he gently lowered the blade to the ground.
“You’re wiser than you look.” said Amber.
“You’re fuckin’ crazy carrying stuff like that around. The plod‘ll have you banged up, well tight.”
“We don’t bother the police, and they don’t bother us. Walk on. Don’t come back.” He backed away and joined his friend and they both jogged away.
“Fuckin’ crazies!” he shouted back when they were far enough away to think they were safe.
Amber stared after them, then collected my sword.
“They’re just kids,” I said.
“Time was,” said Amber, “they’d have more knowledge, and more fear. Here.” She passed me a plastic bottle. “It’s some kind of sports drink. I found it in the vending machine in the college. The sugar will get you on your feet and you need the liquid.”
I sat up slowly and struggled with the top of the bottle. I felt weak as a kitten. She pulled it from me, twisted off the top and handed it back, sitting down beside me with my scabbarded sword resting on her lap.
“You lost a lot of blood. If I hadn’t followed you, you’d be dead.”
I licked my chapped lips. “You were following me?”
“Someone has to look after you,” she said.
“Garvin,” I said, tracing my way back through her words.
“He asked me to keep track of you,” she said. “Looks like he made the right decision. No, don’t sit up. You’re going to be light-headed for a bit.
“How did you find me?”
“I saw you leave the courts with one of the drivers, figured that you were going back for the horseshoes. I waited at Claire’s flat, saw you enter and then leave.”
“Someone cleaned up the mess before I got there,” I told her.
“After you left I walked it through. A professional job — very thorough. I thought you would head back to the courts, so I headed back after you, except you didn’t arrive.”
I took a long drink and sifted through her words.
“That doesn’t explain how you found me. I could have gone back with Dave in the car. I would have been on the motorway by now.”
“That would have been slow,” she remarked. “Why take the long route when you can use the Ways.”
“Why are you avoiding my question?” I asked her.
“It’s a secret,” she said. “If I tell you, I have to kill you.”
Was she teasing me? “You’ve tagged me,” I said. “There’s something…” A realisation dawned. What did Garvin always tell me to take with me? “My sword. That’s how you found it after I lost it on the Tor. That’s how you found me now.”
“All the Warders weapons are warded for finding,” said Amber. “You never know when you might lose one and need to get it back. If you’d left it behind you’d have been dead. Who shot you?”
“Sam Veldon. He told me he had something for me. He didn’t say it was a bullet.”
“You’ll have to track him down. Give him something in return,” she said, with a wry smile.
“The edge of a blade?” I tried to laugh but it emerged as a dry cough. “No, someone put him up to it. Someone guided him to me. I need to know who it was.”
“OK. You get what you need from him and then you kill him.”
“He thinks I killed Claire. He’s just an angry man who lashes out at the nearest target.”
“If you don’t want to do it, I’ll do it for you,” she volunteered.
“It’s not a matter of… do we have to kill everyone?” I asked.
“It’s a challenge. If you don’t deal with it, it will only come back and bite you.” She was sat on the bench beside me, relaxed and calm, talking about murdering someone.
“He’s not fey,” I told her. “He’s not challenging me. He doesn’t even know me. He’s just angry because he messed up his relationship with Claire and now she’s lying in a morgue somewhere with her throat cut. The only thing he can do to assuage his loss is to lash out. I was nearest, that’s all.”
“He’ll try again, mark my words.”
“Then I’ll kill him when he does, if it’ll make you happy.” I said. “Aren’t you going to give me a hard time about letting those yobs take my sword?” I asked between swigs. “Garvin would.”
“No. I’d give you a hard time about getting shot. But it’s too late for that as well.”
I drank some more. It was sweet, fizzy and tasted like cough mixture, but at that moment it was like nectar. “I’m pretty useless at this, aren’t I?” I admitted, shaking my head. “I guess I just don’t have the killer instinct.
“There are two kinds of Warders, Niall, dead and alive. We were all useless to start with. We all made mistakes, and we have the scars to prove it. Those that didn’t make the grade aren’t here to boast about it.”
“What about Garvin?”
“Not all scars are on the outside. Fellstamp made a bad decision. He’s paying for it now.”
That silenced me. I’d fought Fellstamp in my initiation into the Warders, and he’d lost when I’d pierced his shoulders with a long sword. We both knew that I’d won because he was wielding the wrong weapon. If he’d had something lighter he’d have slaughtered me. I gulped some more of the fizzy drink and burped noisily.
“Charmed,” said Amber.
“So you would have gone in heavy?” I asked her. “With Sam, I mean?”
“I’ve already given you that advice and you made excuses for him. Either kill or be killed, that’s the rule.”
“You have a black and white view of the world, you know?”
“I’m not the one sitting in a pool of his own blood,” she pointed out.
I looked down at the congealed stain on the bench. She had a valid point. Maybe the rain that was starting to spot the pathway around us would wash it away. “Drink up,” she encouraged. “You need the liquid, and those friends of yours will be back shortly. Paddington Green Police Station is just beyond and they’re just the type to break a habit of a lifetime and enter a police station willingly to report us.”
“The police won’t believe them,” I said. “They’re more likely to be carrying themselves.”