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“Which doesn’t mean an ambush team didn’t come in through another airlock.” Rance prowled through the opening, his every sense on high alert. Zarifa’s boots scraped on the corridor’s stone as she followed him. Like him, she was wearing full armor, a nanoblade great sword sheathed across her back.
At the end of the corridor lay a pair of enormous double doors that probably led to the warehouse Edin had spoken of. After a cautious scan, Rance drew his sword, triggered the doors open, and walked in.
The room was cavernous, filled with stacks of crates that towered meters high. Rance spotted one that still bore the logo of Conlon Shipping. He’d probably brought it over himself years before.
A man stepped from behind one of the stacks. Tall, rangy, he wore the stark black uni favored by Kuarc’s men. His hair was thick and red, and his eyes were the distinctive violet of the Lorezo clan. Rance noticed a strong resemblance to Kuarc in the aquiline shape of his nose and the thin line of his mouth, but he looked even more like Lodur, the old emperor. He gave Zarifa a slight smile. “Greetings, child.”
“Edin!” Zarifa started forward, a grin of pure happiness lighting her face.
Rance clamped a hand over her wrist, not taking his eyes off the older man. “No closer, Zarifa.”
She looked around at him, startled. “But—”
“He smells dirty. And I don’t think it’s just that he set you up for an ambush by the Bastard’s men.”
A bitter smile twisted Edin’s mouth. Steel hissed as he drew the sword sheathed across his back. “Fucking werewolf. Kuarc always said you could scent a lie.”
Suddenly far too many things became far too clear. Rance spun his sword in a circle and started forward, a snarl twisting his werewolf muzzle. “I always wondered why I’d never met Kuarc’s second-in-command.”
Zarifa shot him a look as she drew her own weapon and fell into guard. “Wait—he’s working for Umar?”
One of the crates slid open with a hiss of escaping air. A warrior in imperial armor stepped from it. “Edin’s never worked for anybody but himself.”
“Gerik!” Zarifa took a step back, the scent of her fear acrid to Rance’s wolf senses. Not surprising; she’d told him how the bastard had terrorized her for years.
With a lupine howl of pure rage, Rance swung up his sword and charged.
The two armored men collided with the thunderous crash of steel meeting steel. Zarifa heard Rance’s ripping wolf snarl and Gerik’s furious curses. The Fist’s massive blade blurred in a glittering arc, and she sucked in a breath.
Rance met it with a ringing parry, then pivoted into his own ferocious attack. She realized that as powerful as Gerik was, he might have met his match.
A blur of motion in the corner of her eye jolted her into awareness of her own peril. She spun aside and brought up her sword for a parry that rattled her teeth.
Edin’s too-familiar face sneered across their locked weapons. “You know, don’t you? My fucking cousin got word to you from beyond the grave.”
“Except for the part about you being a traitor.” She disengaged her sword from his and brought the weapon up in a furious slash that forced him to leap back. “So what nasty role did you play in our sorry family story?”
He laughed in her face and tried to take off her head. Zarifa leaped back, parrying strike after strike as he chased her. Finding her rhythm at last, she retaliated with a blurring combination of strokes that drove him back. Daring a glance over her shoulder at Rance and Gerik, she found them hacking at each other like madmen, with grunts and curses of effort and a display of inhuman speed. In werewolf form, Rance towered over the cyborg, but she knew Gerik’s viciousness made him a match for his opponent’s greater size.
Beyond them, in the shadows of a stack of crates, Zarifa thought she saw a flicker of motion. For just an instant, a pale face stared back at her.
Casus? What the hell was the—
Edin’s sword came whirling at her face. She ducked and forgot the slaver as she focused on staying alive.
Zarifa’s fiancé might be an aristo, but he was also a hulking, powerful cyborg who was fast on his feet, strong as a Centarian dragon, and mean all the way to the bone.
“You’re not bad, for a mongrel slave,” Gerik sneered as the two men circled, each looking for a weakness in the other’s defenses. “But you’re still a dead man.”
“You first,” Rance sneered back, even as he used his nanosystems for another scan. Besides Gerik, Edin, Zarifa, and himself, there were three other people in the room, which begged the question of why they were just hanging back watching. But why only three? Why not an army?
Unless somebody’s minimizing the number of witnesses to the empress’s assassination…
Not good. Not good at all.
He parried another teeth-rattling attack and danced around Gerik on the balls of his feet before launching a lethal swing at the cyborg’s chest. Gerik’s parry was a fraction late. Rance’s nanoblade sliced through that black imperial cuirass, then tore free in a rain of scarlet drops.
He grinned at the sweet copper scent of blood. “Bet that hurt.”
