cobra cover

 

meantime my editor's computer is hors de combat so I am waiting on that being fixed before I can publish any more...

Falconburg ascendent 1

 no more votes in so falconburg chapters 1-12 won by a squeak. 

Chapter 1

 

The big man with pale blond hair shivered.

“Are you sure it’s safe?  That he won’t find out?” He whispered, running his tongue over his dry lips.

His companion gave him a look of scorn.

“Of course he won’t find out.  He’ll be dead.”

“But what if he remembers ….”

“He will be mindless.  Your puppet. You have the ritual materials?”

“Yes, Lord Clovis.”

“No names! Come then, we must blend his fingernail clippings with the bone of a relative and your blood as his master, along with my own ingredients, and place the two near-identical smooth stones in the potion.  You have the river stones?  One for his heart and one as a control?”

“Yes my lord.”

“Good.  It would work better with his flesh and bone, but I recognise that this is difficult for an underling to obtain, so the bones of his ancestors from the churchyard will have to do.”

The blond looked shifty but nodded.

The cloaked Lord Clovis made a careful brewing, scorning to explain to his tool what he was doing.  Finally he laid the two stones into the liquid and chanted.  When he brought them out, they had a silvery sheen.

“And now to his chamber before he awakes, and a poniard in the heart,” he gloated, “And I will be able to see how well it works before I try it on that old fool Engilbert.”

The blond shivered. If anything went wrong, this was treason.

He hastened to the castellan’s chamber, his companion following.

Peter Haldane awoke in a hurry, confronted by his illegitimate son, the captain of his guard.  Before he could register that he was betrayed, however, the slender poniard had slipped through his skin, between his ribs and into his heart.  He died surprised.

“Good.  Now open his chest and put in the replacement heart,” said Clovis.

This was something which was almost the undoing of Kort, Peter Haldane’s son.  He was a brutal enough man normally, but this was his patron and father, even if he was surviving too long, and had failed to make a will in favour of a bastard son while he had a living, legitimate daughter.  A daughter married to the warlord, Gyrfalon, who would not accept his wife’s inheritance being usurped.  Better to keep the ailing Haldane in the semblance of life and enjoy the benefits of being castellan de facto.  He gulped, and cut, and blenched at the blood.

“I’m wondering whether to cause death by exsanguination would be a better course of action,” murmured Clovis.  “The blood might just putrify quicker if left in the body; a dry body might last longer before the smell is apparent.”

“Now you tell me,” said Kort, angrily, thrusting in the stone and sewing up the body, fighting on the desire to gag as he did so.

“You knew this was an experiment when you agreed to take part in it,” said Clovis.  “You can always have him will his lands to you now.”

“True,” said Kort. “If Gyrfalon will accept that.”

“Place it in the hands of the ecclesiastical court; that will hang it about for years,” shrugged Clovis.

“If Gyrfalon doesn’t decide to make sure it goes to my next of kin by gutting me,” said Kort.

“He has to catch you; and it’s a strong castle. I’ll leave you a scroll which you can use to raise all the dead in the churchyard if need be.”

“That would help.  What do I do now?”

“You have put in the new heart and sewn up the hole.  Rather badly, but never mind.  Now put your hand on the other stone and command him to get up.”

Kort swallowed hard, trying to keep his stomach contents where they belonged.  Dead men were supposed to stay dead.  Everything in his being screamed at him that this was wrong, and that he should never have listened to the necromancer.  Too late.  One more swallow and he laid his hand on the stone and thought at the corpse to get up.

It got up.

“Tell him to open his eyes, moron,” said Clovis.  Kort made a face and did so.  It was horrible, seeing the staring, unseeing eyes of his former parent. He started to retch.

“Control yourself!” snapped the necromancer.  Kort swallowed on the thin, bitter taste of vomit.   “Now get him to speak.”

Kort thought of a trite phrase like ‘good morning.’

Peter Haldane’s corpse bleated, loudly.

The necromancer’s staff threw Kort to the other side of the room.

“What did you do, you incompetent?” screeched Clovis. “Did you fail to obtain bones from the churchyard and settled for those from the midden?”

“I … I was afraid of the dead,” Kort did vomit then, ashamed as he did of the sharp, acrid taste of his own fear, remembered and present.

“Afraid of the dead?  You idiot, the dead cannot harm you.  Not unless I’ve had anything to do with them,” sneered Clovis.  “Well, you will have to make the best of it, and make sure you tell people some witch has cursed him.  He can write notes.  He can write?”

“He … yes, well enough,” said Kort.  He got up from the crumpled position he had been thrown into.  “But it worked.”

Clovis sighed.

“After a fashion,” he said.  “I must be going before anyone gets up.  Let me know how it progresses.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Kort, repressing the urge to cross himself.  He had gone too far for that comfort now.

 

 

“Floris,” said Gyrfalon, “I was thinking that when winter starts setting in, it might not be a bad idea to visit your father’s court.”

“Won’t the barbarians attack in winter?” the young prince asked.

“No, they have enough trouble surviving.  Much more snow where they come from than we have,” said Gyrfalon.  “So as he is an old man, it would be prudent to go and see him while he is still alive.  He will want to know what you have been doing, as my page, and he did express an interest, however badly couched, in meeting me, as well.”  He smiled grimly, recalling the arrogantly-worded letter, written by a scribe, summoning him like a naughty boy to the capital.  Cardinal Alessandro Cordo had sorted that out very quickly, but King Engilbert never knew how close he had come to having his summons answered by an invasion. 

“Besides, with the signalling towers in place, and working properly now, there will be plenty of warning to withdraw all the village and their animals and food within the walls,” said Falk.  “And I presume you did not mean to take all the church knights from their chapterhouse?”

“No, though I shall expect Sir Lyall to work with whomsoever I leave as castellan,” said Gyrfalon.  “I should think that Foregrim will be happier to run the castle, even with attacks, than to make a ride at military pace?”

Foregrim shuddered.

“I grow too old for military pace, my lord,” he said.  “I would rather face a barbarian horde.”

“Good; and young Lyall is in the habit of doing as you suggest anyway,” said Gyrfalon, sitting back in satisfaction.

“And what of your wife, my love?” asked Annis. “Not to mention your son,” she indicated the baby she carried in a sling at her hip, currently sleeping off his last meal.

“Did you want to stay, then? No, I thought not,” as Annis shook her pale head.”And our adopted sister? Pauline?  You are not due for some months.  Will you come?”

“I will,” said Pauline. “I want gold wire to sew up the insides of our people when they are sore wounded, as it seems to work, especially as we have determined that what Annis does with her healing is magical, to enhance my skill.  I can ride military pace; I never heard that being pregnant stopped Annis from doing so.”

“I wouldn’t dare ask her not too,” grinned Gyrfalon. “We are lucky to have you both as healers.”

“And lucky to have strong stomachs to put up with tales of healing over breakfast,” laughed Falk, grinning at his brother.

“Oh, the children soon stiffen our stomachs,” Annis smiled on Floris, Lukat, and Wilgarth, her husband’s pages, and on her half-sister Sylvia. Sylvia was more occupied with a mug of milk and a bowl of porridge than on the conversation.

“I am promoted from being one of the children?”  Sylvia’s sister, Jehanne asked.

“You are well on the way to being a warrior,” said Annis, and Jehanne glowed with pleasure.

 

 

The elf who called himself Hrafyn was travelling on his own business.  He had been to see his people, but as always the stay had been brief.  Elves kept themselves to themselves these days, and private and standoffish as most humans would have considered Hrafyn, he found himself stifled with the same conversations, same music and same opinions, day in, day out.  He had fallen in with a human companion once, and had found some humans to be stimulating.  He preferred to watch them from a distance, as a child watches a disturbed ants’ nest, but watching them amused him. 

He rarely gave much attention to the efforts of individuals, but this individual had caught Hrafyn’s interest.

The low, autumnal sun flickered golden speckles through the trees in a small clearing, and danced on the silver-gilt hair of a youth, slender as a wand, slender almost as an elf.  She was using a longbow to shoot at a target, and it was quite plain that she had never been taught properly.

It annoyed Hrafyn. 

The bow and its art were his passion.

The girl gave a sigh of frustration.

“I am doing something wrong,” she said to herself.  She was not expecting an answer when Hrafyn said, simply, “Yes.”

His voice had her starting, and reaching for a dagger as she turned towards the sound.  She relaxed slightly at the slender, leather-clad figure of the elf, hardly taller than herself. She noted the bow that he carried, and that he raised it with the casual grace of one so much an expert that he hardly had to think. Almost before she could realise it, let alone react, he had three arrows in the air. The first thing that she consciously noticed was three brief thuds, the sight of three arrows growing out of bullseye of the target, though he was further from it than she was.

“That’s how you do it,” said Hrafyn. 

“Not much help to me when you are so good that you move faster than I can see, Master Archer,” said the girl. “Do you look for an apprentice?  I’m not afraid of hard work.”

He regarded her.

“I do not generally work with others.”  His voice was slow, every word weighed and considered. “But I will not leave a young girl helpless.  I will start you on the path of learning.”

“Thank you,” she said.  “My name is Idonea.”

“Hrafyn.”

“Thank you, Master Hrafyn.”

“Just Hrafyn.”

Hrafyn was an elf of few words; he took her bow, and placed it in her hand, showing her how to push the bow away from her when she had the arrow nocked.  Once Idonea had been shown the proper technique, the improvement was dramatic.

“Why?” asked Hrafyn.

“Why do I want to learn?  You might call my reasons whimsical.”

He shrugged; she might expand on that, or not, as she chose.

“It’s a complex story,” she said.  “My mother was a maid to a great lady, Lady Emblem.  Lady Emblem married, by arrangement of her parents, one Peter Haldane.  It so happened that my mother, Edgyth, was also the half-sister to Lady Emblem, and when Lady Emblem was ill after her daughter was born, Haldane used my mother.  He threw her out when she conceived me.  The Lady Annis is about two years older than I am, and word is that she is married happily to a strong marcher lord.  I thought to join her, but I will not be a maidservant.  I hoped to bring useful skills as a warrior to a northern march castle.”

“I have heard the name of Lady Annis, daughter of Peter Haldane,” said Hrafyn.  “Do you know the name of her husband?”

Idonea shrugged.

“Gyrfalon the Dark,” she said.   “Some speak ill of him.  But it is said by the peasants of Haldane’s demesne that Lady Annis is good and kind.  She would scarce choose, as rumour says she chose, a man who does not use her well.  Though by all accounts about My Lord Gyrfalon is that he has ever been less hated by his underlings than our shared father.”

“I … have stood against Gyrfalon,” said Hrafyn.  “I, too, am following rumour.  The rumour that a friend of mine, Gyrfalon’s brother, has reconciled with him.  Our paths lie together.”

Idonea brightened.

“Will you have time to continue to teach me if we travel together?  I will, in exchange, readily undertake all camp chores.”

“You have a good eye.  It would be a shame not to teach you more.  I do not need you to act as a servant.  I camp with little fuss. You humans need so many things. I do not.  I will teach you to camp like an elf.  Have you eaten?”

“You are an elf?  I … I saw the ears but did not like to ask.  I thought all the elves were dead.”

“No.  We … have ways of hiding at need.  One day I do not doubt we will disappear, unless we learn to change.  Change … is frightening.  You have not answered me.”

“I … I think it would be a shame if you disappeared.  No, I have not eaten. I have a bag of meal with me to thicken a stew, and can recognise some edible herbs and roots. I  hoped to get good enough to hunt one day.”

“You may yet learn enough,” said Hrafyn. “Determination gets further than pure talent. You will have to learn the sword from Falk. It has never interested me as much.”

“Tell me about elves, please!”  Idonea was eager.

Hrafyn hesitated, then shrugged.

“It does not matter; nobody will find an elf who does not want to be found,” he said. “Elves are some of the oldest beings. We had magic before anyone; and our magical skills are valued.  We live in forests by preference.  At need, we can merge with a tree.   We build by making trees grow as we want them to, living architecture.  We value learning and beauty, and music.  There is learning and music and beauty in the firing of the bow.  One must become the bow to be a true archer.  There is no arrow, only the firing.  Thus we approach those skills in which we excel.  For me, there is no path through the woods, only the passing.  For my brother Lwysgain, who is a bard, there is no harp, only the music flowing from his body.”

Idonea nodded.

“I think I understand,” she said. “I will find that helpful when learning.”

“Yes,” said Hrafyn. 

 

Simon's adventures with the washing.

 So, having got the washing out of the machine, Simon took it out to the washing line, no longer shaded by the  tree that is gone. He was helped by Toddles dashing about underfoot, enjoying the warm weather. 

And then, the attack of the duvet cover.

Men and duvet covers are always dangerous in combination, but this one, in the machine, had turned into some kind of amorphous Lovecraftian monster, which tried to engulf him whilst he sought, fruitlessly, for an edge or corner. At this point, he was torn between crying, "Ariadne! the edge! the edge!" or "Ai Ai Ftagn Cthulu!" to propitiate the thing.

Fortunately for my poor husband's sanity, he found a corner, and wrestled the struggling monster onto the line, held firmly with pegs, where now it hangs, sullenly, waiting for a chance to escape its wooden manacles and go on the rampage of wetly aggressive polycotton fury.

Cobra 1 With Pleasure

 here's where it all began, a throwaway short story which never was intended to be more than that. But I liked the Cobra, and found myself doing a couple more about him - and now he has a backstory and so on. I'll catch up to those I started posting here after DWG, and then go back to the most recent ones. I've tagged all the older ones cobra now.

1 With Pleasure

 

Grey sheets of rain were falling in stair-rods from a sullen grey sky, impacting and bouncing as they hit the dark, uncompromising ground. Streetlights made little impact in the crepuscular gloom, their insufficiency of light struggling through the dim haloes around them. Only the garish neon sign made any impact on the greyness, and its reflection broken into random shapes on the slick pavement might have been a magical sight if only the promise of the lush interior of the club it proclaimed had not been a sham. These places are all much alike; at night, when you can’t see the grime, the neon seems to whisper promises of excitement, colour, a break from the tedium of life. Inside? They stink of stale cigarettes, stale booze, and staler bodies, and the lights are kept low for the privacy of the cockroaches.

I was waiting on top of a building across the street and some way down; and I had a high velocity rifle as my only companion in my long, wet, vigil.

You can say what you like about laser rifles – and a lot of hired guns do, in nauseatingly tedious detail – but you cannot beat a high velocity rifle. It is not subject to diffusion by the rain as a laser weapon must be.

I must admit that doing pro bono work is not my usual thing. Nor indeed vigilante work, as this might be seen to be. However the circumstances were unusual; almost personal.

The man I was waiting for was the most influential controller of the new addiction; the Pleasure Dome. Don't get me wrong; on the whole I have no interest whatsoever in the foolish fits and starts people will get up to in order to bring some kind of excitement into their colourless, humdrum lives; they might as well kill themselves with some kind of addiction as by blowing their brains out. Same result; just as messy for the morgue men to deal with, and their choice. Life’s about choices.  My choice of excitement is to lurk in the shadows of society, defying authority and making a living taking down those who have got in someone's way. Last month I took down one left wing extremist, one right wing extremist and a banker on the take. I couldn't tell you for sure which of the extremists was left wing and which was right; there isn't a whole lot to pick between them when you come down to it. A bullet has no politics, only a target.

My street name is Cobra; and I'm good at what I do and I charge accordingly.

So, you ask, why pro bono work and what was it about?

I have an excellent landlady, who thinks I work in the Parks Department. It explains odd hours and coming back rather the worse for weather. She's under the impression I dig graves, instead of making work for gravediggers. It's a convenient fiction. And as she’s shrewd, I would rather that she thought my diffidence about my job were down to being faintly ashamed of being in manual labour in a field which some people find funny than that she should turn her ex-schoomarm’s brain to figuring out what I really do. I like her, and I don’t want her knowing too much.

My excellent landlady also has a cute niece who lives with her, being an orphan. And last week the kid was snatched and wired up to a Dream Helmet™ and made into an addict of the Pleasure Dome™.  Did I forget the TM that first mention? It's legal enough for adults after all. In the unadulterated form. A connection to the pleasure centre and the ability to slot fantasies into it to play, half hour slots of ecstasy.  They market it “Purchase the Dream Helmet™ and enter the world of the Pleasure Dome™”.  I’m not sure they can trademark Pleasure Dome legally, after all, Coleridge wrote about Kublai Khan decreeing a stately pleasure dome, only his was a building, rather than  a suggestion that the dome involved is the inside of your own cranium, as stimulated by the light half-helmet of plastic and steel you put on.  It connects up to the electronics woven by the nanobots they inject into the skin of the scalp; less intrusive-seeming than a cyberdeck link, but actually more insidious, building a network of pathways to the pleasure centre inside the brain.

Of course the adulterated ones have no time limit and can slot fantasies with darker themes too. These were the ones Takashi Sato was supplying.

And I kind of have a down on people who think it's okay to snatch teenage kids off the street and make them pleasure addicts. I have my code, and in my book, kids are off limits. For anyone.

Yes, the kid is getting treatment, and yes, I have contributed towards it. Don't go thinking I'm soft though. If my landlady gets upset she doesn't cook so well, that's all. And as she gives me a hot evening meal and packs a lunch for me if I give her enough notice, and as even an assassin likes to feed the inner man, this is important.

 

 

So, I was waiting in the rain, for a certain crime lord to turn up to inspect his club. The club where some of the girls were trained with darker fantasies in their Dream Helmets™ to willingly engage with those clients who had the other side of the same fantasies. With the promise of a slot of a good Dream if they did well. And one reason I wanted to take him down here was that the cops would be almost forced to get involved – and would hopefully find all this out. It had not taken me long to find it out, but then I have shadier contacts than the police. I also take short cuts that they are not allowed to take.

I also had a head start because the kid recalled the licence plate of the car that snatched her. Bright girl; and as shamed by what had happened to her as she was desperate for another slot. She was determined to help. That number led me to a man, and he led me further. Were you wondering if I tortured him? Nothing so crude. I gave him nothing but pleasure; the way he gave it to the kid. To get his next slot he was willing to tell me anything. I left him with a reboot box in his hand; if that means he starves rather than give up his buzz, I'm not going to lose any sleep over it. People who live by such rapacious rules should not complain when they also die of them.

I was wearing the latest Core-Tech™ full body suit of course, allowing sweat out but no rain in, but it was still pretty miserable. It occurred to me as I waited, that killing one crime boss would ultimately make little difference; there would always be more to take his place. However if I let it be known why he had died, at least the snatching of kids off the street might stop as a form of aggressive salesmanship. My street name is not unknown. My readiness to go to any lengths to fulfil a sanction is also quite legendary. It should be a salutary lesson and a clear reason to make any hard sell crime lord pause.

When Takashi Sato emerged, it was almost an anticlimax.

I had him in my sights, breathed in, released a part of it and held the rest, gently squeezing the rifle's trigger.

The silencer reduced the sound to a genteel ladylike cough; and Sato clutched his chest and went down. A red blossom grew on his shirt front.

Unprofessional to go for a body shot you say, not a double tap to the head? Perhaps; but it was raining. And I had filed a cross on the bullet's nose. He was not going to be getting up again.

The streets below had acquired that brief, sudden silence they always do after any unscheduled disassembly of anyone or anything in the neighbourhood, by any means; it lasts a deceptively long-feeling time, but is, in reality, about half a second. Then someone screams to break the tension, and others start yelling or screaming, and the pounding of footsteps mark those who run towards, or more often, away, from the scene of mayhem.  Someone calls the fuzz, and that shortly adds to the noise and confusion.

I was not about to wait for the sirens.

 

What marks a professional from an amateur is the planning.

And I don’t just mean the planning of the job itself.

I expect you are picturing me with a room full of weapons, which I fondle and nurture with loving assiduous care. You couldn’t be more wrong. I own a couple of hold-out pistols which might be carried by anyone; I also own an Ingram M12, semi-automatic, which is useful in tight places. I use it when travelling; otherwise it lives in my bank vault.  For emergencies I have a little beauty made of ceramics which is undetectable, highly illegal, and breaks down into innocuous looking parts.. I always assume there will be an emergency. Otherwise, I acquire a weapon as needed for each job, and appropriate to the job.

The rifle was one I had purloined for the purpose from a hunting supply store; they would get few enough clues from it, I wear gloves to prepare and load my bullets. It would stay here. Out of sight; I stowed it in a ventilator shaft. They might or might not find it.

 

The other important piece of planning is getting away.  We call it ‘exfiltration’ in the trade. Having killed someone, getting away with an intact skin is really rather important. An idealist might well toss a bomb and think the world well lost for his ideal; but my skin and my freedom are important to me, and any fee also covers my getaway. So, a bit of planning ahead means I walk away and don’t end up on the run. It’s about tying off loose ends, and being tidy.

 

I had my escape route planned. Over the rooftops and down a fire escape to the sleazy hotel room I had hired earlier. The really top feature of this hotel was that the trash chutes led straight to an incinerator. My overcoat went straight down it, and the Core-Tech bodysuit, and on went the costume of an unassuming travelling salesman. No DNA to be found that might lead to me. Even if they found any at my firing point; which was unlikely.

I hadn’t had to lurk there long enough to pee; sometimes a wait is for twelve hours or more, and the bladder must be relieved. I wear a motorman’s friend to avoid leaving anything personal behind, but they can leak. Good habits are worth cultivating.

Indeed, as he had twisted as he fell, figuring out the firing point might take some time. And the delightful acid rain was doing its job for me of expunging evidence of my existence on that roof.

The cleaning bot was already sorting out the wet patch on the floor where I had come in the window that gave to the fire escape. No evidence there. I’d spend a couple of days in this room, the average time, including my arrival the day before, that any travelling salesmen spent in any hotel, then I would check out, with some inanely jocular remark from the concierge, usually of the variety of ‘travelling in ladies’ underwear then, chummer?’ and I would smile a pained smile of one for whom that was funny the first five hundred times.

A busy metro station, an unremarkable bag retrieved from a nice, anonymous left luggage locker, the salesman’s suitcase with clothes left in a waiting room to be taken to lost property – or blown up in a controlled explosion in case it’s a bomb – and then back home. Auntie would commiserate on my overly long hours, which I had prepared her for, feed me a cup of tea and suggest a nice bit of steak with pepper sauce and mushrooms for tea, with green peas, mashed potato, and a side salad, and all real food too, no substitutes.

Oh, yes, a landlady in a million.

 

Covering one's trail can be an expensive business. That's one reason I charge such high fees. Another is to make sure the client really wants the job done. Killing people is easy; bringing them back to life because someone has changed their mind isn't covered in the warranty. And it's why you won't find a hired gun ready to do pro bono work.

Sometimes, though, just sometimes, a point has to be made. And I took on this one with pleasure.

a parody

 ... I guess everyone knows the tune of 'there's a hole in my bucket....'

There's a hole...

There’s a hole in your bridges, Comrade General, Comrade General

There’s a hole in your bridges, Comrade General, a hole!

 

Well fix it, Comrade Jerkoff, Comrade Jerkoff, Comrade Jerkoff,

Well FIX it, Comrade Jerkoff; Comrade Jerkoff – fix it

 

With what shall I fix it?...

 

With stressed concrete...

 

But that comes from the Rodina...

 

Go and get some...

 

But how shall I get there?

 

Well DRIVE there...

 

How will I drive there?...

 

In a truck by the highway....

 

There’s a hole in your bridges, dear General....