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Sliding from patch of growth to pile of broken tile to heap of cleared growth—they had spruced up the hotel for the conference, it seemed—she drew close enough to distinguish the facial hair on the guards.
Fading back into the hillside, step by careful step she headed for the lower lands south of the hotel. The wide road running up to the parking entrance divided the hotel from a rather overgrown garden and some kind of outbuildings that had trees growing out the broken windows. The garden smelled like sweet rot, and she instantly identified the smell of death.
She crossed the road with an easy stride, hoping that she would be seen only at a distance and mistaken for someone with business at the hotel, then quickly took shelter beneath a picturesque bench ringing an oak. None of the men on the porch gave any indication that they’d seen her; their eyes were light-blinded.
A crunching step approached. Heavy boots with the measured tread of a cop walking his beat. Her back burned with the fear of a Reaper, but she glanced up and saw a mustachioed face. A Reaper could no more grow a beard than achieve an erection. Probably a southerner, then. Ordnance soldiers were almost all clean-shaven.
He glanced at the men on the balcony, unzipped, and urinated on a tree root extending from beneath the bench. He whistled a non-tune as he did so, sounding more like he was trying to entertain a bird than form music. She kept her face buried in the soil, feeling the warm splatter strike her hair.
She heard a sharp intake of breath. She looked up and saw the surprise and embarrassment in his eyes.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Warmest I’ve been all night.”
Rolling and lashing up, she caught him with the handle of her sword-stick in the solar plexus. His breath came out with a whoosh as muscles involuntarily contracted. So much for a scream for help.
Not wanting blood, she rose and struck again, this time across the back of his neck. That put him on the ground, giving her a moment to unloop the nylon cord around her wrist, slide its falsely decorative beads out of the way, and finish him quietly by strangulation.
Sorry, sport, she thought. Shit luck for both of us.
She heard laughter from the balcony.
Some of her clan relished swapping stories of Kurian atrocities. They tried to convince one another that their victims deserved their fate, that justice was being done. She held to no such illusions. The moment he saw her it was her life or his, and she intended to keep on living—at least through the death of another Kurian or two.
If she just left the body there, it would be a fine starting point for trackers.
With an effort, she lifted him into a fireman’s carry and tottered across the road, as far outside the paired decorative streetlamps as she could manage. She staggered to the hedges surrounding the outbuilding.
She followed her nose to the death smell. It was strong… and she was approaching it from upwind.
She burst through a hedge and almost fell into a long trench. The bottom was lined with bled-out bodies, mostly older specimens. She saw a half-closed stomach scar on one younger specimen—the victim of a botched operation, it seemed. All the bodies near her except the one with the cut above the appendix bore the distinctive tongue marks of a Reaper at the base of the neck or in the upper rib cage.
“Holy mother—,” she began, then clamped her hand over her mouth and nose.
She set the body down as quietly as she could.
A growl sounded from the hedge line behind her. She froze, searched out of the corner of her eye.
A dog and a handler stood thirty feet away, peering into the darkness. The dog was alert to her, but the handler couldn’t see her in the night shadow.
She flowed down into the body pit at the speed of molasses running on a hot day. The dog whined and pulled.
The bodies were soft and rotting.
The handler raised a flashlight and cast the beam of light carefully into the darkness where she’d been squatting a moment before. She pulled her sword-stick tight into the crook of her arm and covered it with the withered leg of an old man. He had bristly hair.
The beam of light passed over her, resting on her breast for just a moment. In the glare, her own healthy flesh wouldn’t be markedly different from the flesh of the bodies.
The dog padded forward, leading the man holding its leash. It sniffed about and snorted in disgust.
The body of the guard she’d dropped drew the handler, following the beam of his flashlight, which had caught the Ordnance insignia, a sort of elongated pentagon—a stylized capital “O.”
Slithering with sword-stick cradled, she approached across the bodies. The corpses made noises like sponges.
The handler drew something shiny from his pocket, attached to a short lanyard. A whistle. Its sound could carry a mile or more.
She sprang upward, drawing her blade from the stick. “Help me!”
Arms out and open as though pleading, or rushing to embrace him, she ran forward.
