Discarded Gods: A Bastard Cadre Story Page 8

  “What changed?” Marin asked, her tone softer than before.

  Ethan could see she was reassessing him. He shrugged, aware of everybody watching him. He mumbled, “Time, I guess, but I’m not staying here either way. I can’t.”

  “Why not?” Marin asked.

  Ethan studied her, then said, “You said we don’t know each other.”

  Marin nodded.

  “I swore an oath to serve Obdurin when he put Rhysin’s heart on his wrist and became the God’s Chosen. I only broke that oath when keeping it would have meant watching him die. I take my promises seriously.”

  “And you’ve promised to protect Avril?” she glanced down at the baby in her arms then back at Ethan.

  They held each other’s gaze for a moment. Ethan remembered Maria looking at him with that same certainty and determination. He said, “You should have been involved in that decision, I’m sorry you weren’t, and I won’t take it back, but why don’t we try it before we decide it won’t work?”

  A small smile turned Marin’s lips, and Ethan guessed she’d recognized his foot-in-the-door tactic for what it was, but she nodded and said, “Let’s go.”

  14

  Colors ran into each other and streaked as Ethan and his companions traveled. Ethan anticipated an end to the disorientation, but it continued, and he felt himself start to fall. The streaks of color, deep reds turning yellow, tilted, and Ethan braced himself for an impact that never came.

  A strong hand gripped his arm and propped him up. He looked up into Mattatan’s face and nodded when he regained his balance.

  They’d left the hospital at Frake’s Peak and now stood in what looked like a luxury apartment.

  “That felt like a long way,” Ethan said.

  “It was,” Mattatan said.

  Fahlim looked around at their surroundings. “Very nice. Is this…” he trailed off as though the word was on the tip of his tongue.

  “Nice try,” the female bondsan who had traveled with them said.

  Marin added, “You know, we’re not going to tell you where we are.”

  “I know, and it’s absurd. Are we going to pretend that Lord Obdurin couldn’t pluck the information straight out of Mattatan’s head?”

  Marin and the bondsan held Fahlim’s questioning stare.

  “Surely, it makes sense for somebody to know where Obdurin’s scattered cadre is so that assistance might be sent when it’s inevitably needed?” When silence was his only answer, Fahlim said, “Very well, I can take a hint. Tell me, Lattan, did you pick this place? You have remarkable taste, if you did.”

  “I’m Kattan,” the bondsan said.

  “Lattan, Kattan, Rattan, Mattatan, your names are frightfully predictable. Tell me, is there a Tattan? A Pattan? A Battan?” Fahlim grinned at the last name he said. “Who came up with these dreadful names?”

  Mattatan turned and stared at Fahlim for long seconds. Finally, he said, “We named ourselves.”

  Both Mattatan and Kattan kept their eyes on Fahlim, their expressions stern.

  “Oh, I see. Well, I’m glad Obdurin doesn’t let his bondsan name themselves,” Fahlim said looking around. “I’m going to check the place is up to Ethan’s usual standard.”

  When Fahlim passed through a door at the back of the apartment and wouldn’t hear their words, Ethan said, “Lord Benshi named you on the day you were born.”

  Mattatan shrugged. “Sometimes the immortal annoys me. I try to discourage conversation.”

  “Does it ever work?” Ethan asked.

  Mattatan shrugged again and glanced at Kattan. He said, “Take the immortal back with you.”

  The bondsan sniggered, then she disappeared.

  “Don’t trust him,” Ethan said, quietly he added, “He thinks this cadre is a distraction.”

  Mattatan frowned and said, “Obdurin knows what he’s doing.”

  Ethan wondered if Mattatan was referring to Obdurin’s plans for the cadre or his association with Fahlim, but he didn’t ask.

  Marin walked to a sofa and sat down with the child in her lap. “Are all the supplies I requested here?”

  Mattatan nodded. “The apartment is stocked to keep you going for a couple of days. There’s a car in the basement with everything else.”

  Ethan told Taro, “Why don’t you find a room for yourself?”

  “What are you going to do?” Taro asked.

  “I’ll just take a quick look around. I won’t be long.”

  Taro nodded and went to the doors that led to the back rooms.

  Ethan glanced at Marin, then headed for the door.

  Mattatan followed him out into the corridor between apartments. Ethan wanted to tell the bondsan to take care of himself and his cadre. He would have liked to tell him to get out from under Lord Obdurin and Rhysin, but he knew the futility of that, so he kept it to himself. He said, “I’m not coming back again.”

  Mattatan nodded somberly, then said, “I think that’s for the best.” Silence persisted between them for a second, then Mattatan added, “The whiskey you brought tasted like piss.”

  Surprised, Ethan asked, “Did you drink it already?”

  “There’s eleven of us.”

  “So you did?”

  “Yes. Protocol.”

  “Protocol?” Ethan asked and contained his smile.

  “You taught me to follow protocol when you trained me. When somebody gives you a bottle of whiskey, no matter how bad it is, the protocol is to drink it.”

  Ethan considered this then said, “There’s more of it in the car I left behind.” He dug the remote out of his pocket and handed it to Mattatan.

  Mattatan’s stony expression finally broke into a smile. He accepted the remote and said, “I’ll wait for you to get back before I return to Peak City.”

  Ethan nodded and said, “Protocol.”

  He went to an elevator further along the corridor and rode it down to street level. He walked through a marbled foyer and out onto an empty city street. The street was four lanes wide and lined with businesses that had once served the people who had lived there.

  He remembered Mattatan’s word, Protocol. He wouldn’t be surprised if the bondsan had deliberately used that word just to put it in Ethan’s head. Deliberate or not, it was a useful reminder. He and Marin would need protocols to keep the child, and he supposed themselves and Taro, safe.

  Ethan walked out into the street and looked up at the buildings lining it. He smiled and shook his head at the unexpected optimism he felt. He hadn’t asked for this, and he wouldn’t have sought it, but working with Marin to keep the infant bondsan safe would give him a purpose.

  He supposed Obdurin knew what he was doing after all.

  “Trust,” he muttered, thinking of Obdurin and then back to Nea and Taro.

  He’d thought it impossible to trust Nea, and when he’d discovered she’d rigged his car to fail, it had confirmed her as untrustworthy, but he realized now, he’d been wrong. She hadn’t known him when she fitted that device to the car, she’d merely been following a protocol she’d developed to keep herself alive. If things had gone differently, that protocol might have saved her life.

  It’s not about trust. It’s about protocol. Protocol makes trust irrelevant.

  He pushed his hands into his pockets as he looked around. The tintia knife Mattatan had given him was still in his pocket, and Ethan took it out to look at it. He slid the sheath down to expose the red tinted blade.

  Mattatan had pressed the blade onto the back of Ethan’s hand before he gave it to him. Mattatan insisted he already knew Ethan was who he appeared to be, but he’d followed the protocol anyway.

  “Protocol,” Ethan muttered, hoping to make it stick in his mind.

  Ethan hadn’t tested Taro with the blade when he found him asleep because he wanted to trust him, but he realized that was a mistake, it wasn’t about trust.

  Curtains fluttered in Ethan’s memory, and a chill passed through him.

  The window in
the room where Taro slept had been open.

  “It’s nothing,” Ethan told himself, but then he remembered the laser-cutter Taro had lost then found again. “So what if the window was open?” Ethan asked himself and immediately knew the answer. The pintaran turned into a bird.

  It’s not Taro, Ethan told himself and thought back to when he first saw the boy being dragged across a rooftop by a flesh trader. “It’s nothing,” he said, feeling better already. He would put the correct protocols in place and questions of trust would become irrelevant.

  He remembered the fat man forcing the boy into the aviary. Ethan knew his type and felt nothing at his murder. The world was better without people like that in it. That man had seen Taro as merchandise, nothing more. He hadn’t cared at all for the boy or what the people he sold him to would do with him. When he slammed the boy’s hand in the door, he hadn’t even looked around to see how badly hurt he was.

  Ethan remembered the boy’s howl of pain and thought, He’s lucky he didn’t break any bones.

  Ethan stopped and frowned. Why didn’t he?

  He thought back over the past day and remembered freeing Taro from the aviary. He’d handed him Sloan’s laser-cutter, and the boy had accepted it with both hands. Both uninjured. They’d shaken hands the next morning when Ethan met him on the street. Ethan was sure it was the same hand that was slammed in the aviary door. When he’d considered testing Taro with the tintia blade as he slept, he’d sat next to Taro’s right hand, and it hadn’t had a scratch on it.

  Sloan had complained to somebody about taking the job when Ethan listened to him through the door. Ethan had assumed his accomplice had gotten away.

  He jogged back to the marble foyer and ran to the elevator. The doors slid open immediately, and he rushed inside. He pressed the button to take him to the apartment and took a deep breath. The elevator climbed slowly. He told himself again it was nothing, but his pulse was racing, and his breath came in quick, short gulps.

  Was it a setup? he wondered, thinking back to the rooftop where the flesh trader had tried to imprison Taro. Was Taro working with that man? Was he speaking to Taro when he said it was a dumb job? No, he dismissed the idea as ridiculous.

  The elevator finally reached his floor, and he stepped out to see Mattatan struggling to get to his feet.

  Ethan ran to him.

  Mattatan fell from his hands and knees and muttered something, then pointed at the apartment door and gestured for Ethan to go.

  “Who is it?” Ethan demanded.

  Mattatan squeezed his eyes shut against the pain and fell again.

  Ethan drew and armed one of his laser-cutters. He peeked around the door and saw the room was clear. Marin had positioned a bassinet by the window and stood over it with her back to the door.

  She heard Ethan enter and turned to face him with a laser-cutter in one hand. “Godkin, Fahlim never left. He tried to get Avril, but I injured him. He went back there.” She pointed at three doors at the back of the apartment.

  “Fahlim.” Ethan cursed and ran in the direction Marin indicated. Even frantic, he felt relief that Taro wasn’t the pintaran.

  He crossed the room, past the dining area and the breakfast bar that separated the living room from the kitchen, toward the back rooms, but he stopped and turned to face Marin.

  “What did you call me?” he asked.

  Marin looked up from the bassinet with a confused expression on her face. After a second, she grinned ruefully and said, “Shit. I always do this.”

  The voice was different, but the tone and amused resignation were the same. Ethan had heard those words spoken with that same attitude not twenty-four hours earlier. He raised his laser-cutter and gripped it with both hands. He thought, Impossible.

  “Careful of the baby,” Marin said.

  “What do you want?” Ethan demanded.

  “Come on, Godkin, you’re smarter than that, you know I’m here for the wee one.”

  “But not to kill it,” Ethan said. “You could have done that by now.”

  “Your Lord Obdurin isn’t the only one who thinks this little one’s cadre might amount to something one day.”

  “Who?”

  Marin shrugged and said, “Come on. Think about it. I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “Who are you?” Ethan asked, frantically trying to figure out how Marin had been able to fool Obdurin.

  “I’m whoever I want to be.”

  “Who are you?” Ethan demanded, squeezing the grip of his laser-cutter.

  “I’m called Sarlyn, but I really can be whoever I want to be.”

  Marin started walking toward Ethan across the wide open room. She smiled, and Ethan recoiled stepping back until he bumped into the countertop behind him.

  “I could be whoever you want me to be,” she said.

  “Why would I…” Ethan trailed off as Marin’s hair lightened, gradually changing from brown to blonde.

  Her face changed shape, and her eyes became blue. “Come on, where’s that handsome smile of yours?”

  “Nea?” Ethan grunted. “That was you?”

  He fell back against the wall as he realized, “You’d left Peak City, you tried to come back with me.”

  “I did more than try, handsome,” Nea smiled. She blushed and trapped her bottom lip between white teeth. “At first, I wondered if you were on to me and that’s why you left me in Eliz.”

  “What?” Ethan stepped back around the corner he’d bumped into.

  Marin lay face down in the kitchen. Her blood pooling around her. She was dead.

  “Oh, come on now, you can put it together, Godkin. A smart fellow like you.” As Nea spoke she changed again, her hair shortening and becoming ratty so that it stood up above her, no his, head. “You’re a hard man to get through to. When the friendly drinking companion didn’t work,” the pintaran gestured at his current form, James, “I figured I’d try the lovely Nea. No damsel in distress for you, am I right, Godkin?” When Ethan didn’t answer, James continued, “I think I got her mostly right. You were tempted, I could tell, but you’re so broken, you wouldn’t let yourself near a woman you were instantly attracted to. What’s with that?”

  “You said I brought you back to Peak City,” Ethan said, hoping he was wrong.”What did you mean?”

  Please, not Taro, he thought.

  “And why should I tell you anything? You threw me off a building! I thought we were bonding. I guess it just goes to show how wrong you can be about a person.” James shrugged, then disappeared. A small green bird flew in a straight line past Ethan toward the back rooms.

  Grimacing, Ethan strode around the breakfast bar, feeling rage building inside him. Marin was dead, and this thing had manipulated him to get what it wanted.

  Not anymore, Ethan thought.

  Of the three doors Ethan came to, only one of them was open.

  Ethan pushed it all the way open.

  Taro sat on a bed with his back to the door. He turned around to face Ethan as he entered the room. His eyes were wide, and there was a smile on his face. “I found it again.” He was holding the laser-cutter Ethan had given him the day before.

  “Enough,” Ethan snapped and pulled the trigger. This creature made him sick.

  Taro fell forward onto the bed, then looked up at Ethan in confusion. He coughed, spraying blood. Sloan’s laser-cutter slipped from the bed and thunked when it hit the floor.

  Ethan lowered his weapon and reached into his pocket for the tintia blade, determined to finished the job. “Enough games,” he snapped and went to the pintaran on the bed.

  “Oopsie,” a voice behind Ethan said. “You’re a hasty fucker, aren’t you? You know, you might want to stop and think things through once in a while.”

  Ethan turned, realization at what he’d just done settling over him. The laser-cutter. The pintaran was the laser-cutter!

  The weapon was no longer where it had fallen on the floor.

  James backed out of the room, his eyes wide an
d his hands spread in a gesture of mock regret. He vanished, and the small bird flew toward the bassinet by the window.

  Ethan bellowed and charged toward the pintaran who appeared as Marin again. Ethan saw Mattatan in his periphery vision as he ran at the pintaran. She was reaching for the child but Ethan dove at her and together they crashed through the window and fell toward the street.

  Marin laughed, and her features shifted into Nea’s even as they fell. She shouted at him, “Too hasty, handsome. It didn’t work last time you threw me off a building, and it won’t work this time.”

  The ground rushed toward them. Ethan roared at the pintaran in rage and stabbed the short tintia blade as hard as he could into her torso.

  She was transforming, her features retracting and changing from human into something else, the transformation halted, her eyes went wide and then she exploded into a cloud of red dust. Ethan fell through the formless dust toward the hard road in front of him.

  He screamed and the gray tarmac blurred. White and yellow streaks threaded through the gray and then he was standing in the apartment again. Mattatan had his hand on Ethan’s shoulder, and the bondsan dropped to one knee.

  Ethan looked around and fell to his knees as he supported his friend who had just saved his life.

  15

  Ethan studied the baby pod he’d fixed into place in the passenger seat of the car Mattatan’s cadre had acquired and stocked with supplies.

  The baby wriggled and cooed, oblivious of the day’s events and the part it played in them.

  The sound of footsteps alerted Ethan to somebody’s presence, and when he looked around, he saw Mattatan approaching.

  He turned back to the car. It was a full assault vehicle. Ethan wondered if it had been transported from Peak City or sourced locally. He didn’t suppose it mattered.

  When Mattatan stopped a few paces away, Ethan asked, “Are you done?”

  “Done?” Mattatan grunted and looked shocked behind his tattoos. “Marin’s and Taro’s bodies have been taken back to Peak City. They’ll have a place in—”

  “The dead don’t care where their remains end up,” Ethan said, hating the hollow callousness of his words even as he said them.