Our hostess disappeared into a storeroom, clutching a clipboard and pen. We remained standing at the bar. I took off my mask, faced my pirate captain and smiled expectantly. “There,” I said.
She merely nodded, made no move to remove her own mask. She did take off her hat. The moment might have called for a shake of the head, coquettish or not, but she just let her long black curled hair fall about her shoulders without ceremony. The workman facing us glanced up, nodded to his fellow, who turned. Both eyed her for a few moments. She put her head back and glugged half the bottle of water in one go, exposed throat moving. She wiped her mouth with a couple of fingers, then sipped delicately on her spritz, back to ladylike. Dim though the bar was, the angle of a light above the gallery of bottles gave me the best view I’d had so far of her eyes behind the almond-shaped piercings in the black mask. They glittered, hinting at lightness; pale blue or green or a delicate hazel.
“Would it be time for names yet?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“I could tell you mine,” I said. “Like it or not.”
She put one finger to my lips, very carefully and gently. Her finger was warm and smelled of a dark, oily perfume. I hadn’t even seen her take off her glove. The finger pressed my lips very briefly, then withdrew. I might have made to kiss it, equally gently, but there had hardly been time. She smiled.
“Do you know the word ‘emprise’?” she asked.
I sighed, thought. “I don’t believe I do.”
“It means a dangerous undertaking.”
“Does it?”
“It does. Do you partake of dangerous undertakings, sir?”
I leant forward, my gaze going to one side then the other. “Am I partaking in one now?” I asked quietly.
She tipped her head forward. “Not yet,” she murmured. “No more than you would usually. Less so. You would be off duty now, yes?”
“Off duty?” I asked, confused.
“Not travelling.”
“Ah, yes. In that sense, then, I suppose so.”
One of the workmen walked up and stood behind her, rapping his knuckles on the bar’s wooden surface. The blonde girl reappeared from the back room. My companion seemed to be about to say something, then checked herself. She turned and looked at the workman behind her, who had just asked the barmaid for two beers. His mouth was still open.
The workman and the barmaid looked straight at each other. Then she shivered and he twitched. And that was that; they were changed. Their bodies and their faces appeared identical, but were not. Their stance, balance, body language – what you will; that changed, in an instant and almost more than I’d have believed possible, as though every muscle in their bodies had flicked instantaneously to a completely different setting, carrying their skeletons and organs with them.
I was still in the process of realising what had just happened when my pirate captain stepped back, away from me, the bar and the workman, just as the barmaid grabbed at something under the bar and the workman kicked out savagely. My companion folded back from the man’s kick, which roundhoused past and would have caught me on the thigh if I hadn’t jumped away too.
The sword was in her hand with a noise like the wind through a fence, flashing in the light as she lunged forward. The workman was still turning from the momentum of his kick; the sword’s blade seemed to slip into his neck and his own rotation opened a line across his throat in a pink spray as his booted foot finally connected with the bar. His right hand started to go up to his throat as the masked girl swung one leg to knock both of his from under him. He started to fall to the floor, clutching his neck.
The barmaid brought the club up only a little too late. A scything stroke from the thin sword caught her laterally across both breasts and one arm, making the baggy jumper flap like wet rags as her face screwed up with pain and she thudded back against the gallery, bringing bottles crashing down. My pirate captain, meanwhile, was stamping one heavy heel into the groin of the workman, who had just hit the floor, shoulders first. She barely glanced at him as he rolled into a ball. She did glance at the other workman, who was sitting where he had been all the time, open-mouthed. She peeked over the bar where the barmaid was lying, also curled up, blood spreading from an arm slashed to the bone, bottles and glasses still falling and crunching and settling around her.
I had stepped back from all this mayhem, closer to the door. My pirate captain glanced again at the remaining workman, who looked like he was trying to decide whether to rise from the table or not. I was guessing he’d decide not. She sheathed her sword and went to take me by one arm. “Time to go, sir.”
I moved to take her by the arm instead and started to move with her to the door. Then I was hit by a sudden feeling like a kind of sideways vertigo, a sensation instantly identifiable to any transitioner as slew, the result of one’s consciousness having been dragged into a fractionally different world. Nothing visible had altered and the fragre of the place seemed the same, but something had effectively changed around us, something small but concentrated, hard and important. During my field training I’d been particularly bad at identifying slew, but it was one of those skills that had improved with experience and I’d never had it as strongly as now. Something told me that whatever it was had changed, it was behind us. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to rise. My little pirate captain stiffened and jerked as though she had felt the same thing. Her hand darted to her sword as she began to turn.
The shot filled the small room in an instant, ending all other sound but for ringing in the ears. The flash, from the table where the other workman sat, seemed almost to come after the noise. My pirate captain was spun round, thudding into my chest. She started to go limp as I went to hold her. I tried to grasp the pommel of her sword, glancing at the man who had shot her. The workman who had been sitting in the back all this time carried himself quite differently now. He held a small, flat-looking gun and was rising from the table, his free hand spread out to me as he shook his head.
“Hunting in packs now,” the dying girl in my arms muttered. “Motherfuckers.” I looked down into her eyes. She was a dead weight now and her sword was unreachable as the workman started towards us. Weakly, she brought one hand up and for a moment I thought she was about to remove the mask. It looked as if moving that arm and keeping her head from flopping forward was taking all her remaining strength. Then I saw that she held something like a tiny gun in her hand. She put it under her jaw near her neck. “Another time, Tem,” she murmured. The second workman had almost reached us.
“Don’t-” I had time to say. Then something clicked and hissed and a second later she went perfectly slack, sagging in my arms.
“Fuck!” the second workman said, kicking the tiny device from her hand.
I caught the heel of his boot and swung him round and down so that he whacked into the floor even more heavily than his comrade. I rolled the pirate captain’s body on top of him, unsheathing her sword as I stood. I had one foot on her bloody back, so pinning him beneath her, and the sword’s tip just breaking the skin of his wrist on the hand still clutching the gun, ready to skewer him to the floorboards if necessary before he got his breath back.
“Cavan!” he gasped. “Your name is Mark Cavan. We’re on your side! We’re Concern!” The bar girl made a sound that might have been meant to be a confirmation of this. The other man, foetal on the floor, just moaned. “We’re Concern!” the man with the gun repeated. “L’Expédience! We were sent!”
My little pirate captain – or whoever’s body she had inhabited for the evening – bled to death on top of him while I thought about this.