The guard walks to the entry to the third bay, where Sigrud’s hidden his radio. The guard stops, the torchlight slowly crawling across the piles of coal.
This won’t do, thinks Sigrud. I need you to turn the corner….
He turns his radio back on and taps it again, softer. Another tok, but not quite as loud.
“What?” says the guard. “What is that?”
The guard turns the corner and walks behind the wall, out of sight from his partner.
Sigrud slips around the corner behind him, knife in his right hand. When the guard has gone far enough, Sigrud springs.
He worried that he’d botch it up, but muscle memory takes over. With his left hand he reaches around the guard and rips the gun from his hand, and with his right he whips his black knife up and around the guard’s throat, cleanly severing the jugular.
The guard chokes and the torch falls to the ground, though its beam is still out of sight from the other guard. The spray of blood is terrific, painting the dark concrete wall before them. Sigrud holds the guard up, hugging the man’s body so it won’t fall and make noise. Warmth spreads throughout Sigrud’s arms, then his thighs, a tremendous surge of blood soaking over him.
The guard struggles, his legs beating uselessly against Sigrud’s knees. Then the blows taper off, weaker and weaker, and he goes still.
It takes less than twenty seconds. Sigrud is breathing a little too hard for his liking.
I’m out of shape, he thinks. And slow…
He gently lowers the guard’s body to the floor. His entire front is wet with the man’s blood. Then he creeps to the edge of the corner to peer out at the second guard.
In the darkness, his scarred, beaten face twists into a savage grin. But one, alone—this should be easy.
Khadse takes the silver knife, holds out his left arm, and makes a slight incision across the back webbing of his hand, grimacing as the blade cuts. At first he thinks he barely broke the skin, but then the blood comes welling up, bright red.
He squats over the perfect circle of darkness, stuffs his torch up under his armpit, and wipes his right thumb across the blood. Then he takes his thumb and reaches down to the circle of darkness….
I hate this part, he thinks.
His bloody thumb penetrates the dark circle as if it were just a hole, but then he feels a gauzy membrane, as if within the circle of darkness is a layer of spiderwebs, except he can’t see them….
Something squirms up against his thumb, like a creature running its back under his hand, eager to be petted.
“Eugh!” cries Khadse. He pulls his hand away, shaking it as if it’d been burned. There’s no pain, but the sensation is so disturbing, so alien, as if there were some blind, wet creature asleep in the bottom of that black pit, waiting for his touch.
Which might be the case. This being his third time here, he understands that the hole functions something like a safe, carefully guarding its package until someone can provide the right identification.
Though there’s no visual change, he can’t help but get the sensation that the circle of black is shifting, changing, flattening, and then…
Something rises up in the circle, like a fishing bob floating to the surface in a pond: a small square, made of black paper—an envelope.
Written on the front of the envelope, in spidery handwriting, is a word: KHADSE.
Khadse shivers. He bends down, picks up the envelope, and stores it away in his coat.
Well, he thinks as he turns around. I’m fucking glad that’s over.
Even Khadse has his limits, though. After his first trip to the warehouse—the first night with the knife, the blood, and the gap of darkness—he was so disturbed he worked his own networks to find out a little bit more about his employer, trying to figure out who he was and how he had access to such…means.
What he found out was two things.
One was a name.
The other was a rumor that whoever said that name out loud, no matter who or where they were, tended to disappear.
He chose to drop his investigation there.
Remember your retirement. Remember the light at the end of this very long tunnel….
He walks out the office door. Zdenic looks at him, eyebrows raised. “All good?”
Khadse is about to tell him it’s all fine, thank you very much, now let’s get a damned move on—but then they hear the gunshots and the screams from downstairs.
They stare at each other.
“What in the hells is that?” says Khadse.
It’s all coming back to him now. Sigrud finishes up the second guard at the bay door pretty ably: he clocks him on the temple with the handle of his knife, rips the gun out of his grasp, and slashes his throat.
He takes the man’s pistol. He has no intention of using it, as he wants to keep this as silent as possible: to fire a gun would give away his position, and could alert Khadse to the fact that he’s just one man, not an army. He holsters the pistol, then runs to the ropes dangling from the side of the warehouse.
He tied these up two nights ago, a set of ropes dangling from the fourth floor all the way down to the very bottom, hidden up against one column. Much of the coal warehouse is wet and crumbling, whole floors falling away after years of so many Ahanashtani rains. Using ropes to traverse the floors not only gives him the element of surprise, it also prevents him from taking one wrong step and tumbling to his death.
Though he did do some prep work on a few of the crumbling floors, just in case the fight spills off into some of the other portions of the warehouse. Always pays to be careful.
He grabs one rope, tugs on it to free it from its hiding place, and looks up. He’s fairly sure it’ll hold—he must have tied thousands of knots back in his sea days—but then, that was a very long time ago.
As if this, he says as he begins to climb the rope, will be the stupidest thing I’m doing tonight….
He climbs until he’s just below the second-floor window, where he pauses, listening. No voices within, no movement. He continues up.
He pauses again below the third-floor window, listening carefully. He hears a voice, very faintly:
“…pretty sure I heard him shout just now.” A woman, Sigrud thinks.
“Something’s up with this client,” says a second voice—a man. “They’ve got Khadse doing some weird shit.”
“Weird enough to frighten Khadse?”
“Yes. That weird.”
“Quiet,” says a third voice, softly. Another man. “We’re on duty, remember.”
“As if anyone’s coming out to this reeking shithole,” says the woman’s voice.
Sigrud slowly, slowly inches up a few more lengths of rope, arms quivering under the strain, and peers into the third-floor window. He can see faint illumination down a hallway, the castoff of their torches, probably. They’re close, in other words, but not too close.
Sigrud slips into the third-floor window, hunches down behind a row of molding desks, and pulls out the shoulder-mounted, high-powered bolt-shot he hid there mere hours before.
Most war markers and operatives these days prefer pistols and riflings, since they shoot much farther and faster—but if you’re operating in total silence, a bolt-shot is the weapon of choice, in Sigrud’s opinion. This particular bolt-shot sacrifices convenience for power, though, firing only one bolt at a time. There are some models that have clips, reloading automatically, but the reloading mechanism is extremely loud and could give away his position. He’s got a much smaller bolt-pistol hanging from his belt, which means he can get off at least two silent shots quickly.