Guns of Alkenstar by Unknown Read Free Book Online

revolver and listening for the clicks of springs or triggers, lifted the lid.
    Nothing happened.
    After a moment or two more of tense silence, Ralice rose cautiously until she could peer in.
    Her face changed, and she sank down again.
    “Either of you care to identify who it is?” she asked tonelessly, swallowing. “The… the head’s got turned around.”
    Gelgur stood. The corpse in the gun-case had been dismembered—somewhere else, because the case wasn’t full of blood, and long enough ago that the gore had dried—and its severed head was lying sideways-up. “Eldel,” he said flatly, after one look.
    “Anything underneath him?” Kordroun asked.
    Gelgur looked again. “No.”
    The high shieldmarshal nodded and undid the latches of the next case. When he levered the lid up—using the butt of his revolver, and raising it on the side facing away from him—a faint ticking began.
    Hurriedly but gently he lowered it again and sprinted after Gelgur and Ralice, who had hastily scrambled back out of the tunnel, back into the Gunworks cellar they’d entered it from.
    “This way,” Kordroun said grimly, rushing across it. “We’ll take the other way out. Up a level, then three cellars that way—they’re all linked—and out down by Oldcogs.”
    Nodding, Gelgur and Ralice ran with him.
    ∗ ∗ ∗
    “They must’ve grown too bold and successful to care overmuch if they’re discovered,” Kordroun muttered, as they panted in near-darkness in front of a closed door, trying to get their breath back after a seeming eternity of running. “Where we found Eldel—that’s a tunnel duty marshals check often. If I were a smuggler, I’d steer clear of it, and use this way we’re taking now. No patrol would find me or what I was smuggling down here.”
    “Eldel was meant to be found,” Gelgur reminded him. “That was a trap.”
    Kordroun nodded. “Yes, but if a blast damages that tunnel, shipments up to Cloudreaver will have to use this way, unless they’re planning to put them on mules and take them in the open! It makes no sense to—”
    Finding the right key on his ring, he unlocked the door, swung it open to reveal utter darkness, and reached confidently into the unknown.
    “There’s a catch, just here, to unlatch the portcullis and give us light, too, and—ah! There!”
    There was a klack. Triumphantly, the high shieldmarshal stepped back.
    And kept on backing, dancing involuntarily, as a harsh, clattering hail of gunfire spat out of the darkness into his face.

Chapter Six: No Safe Haven
    The point-blank stream of bullets took the front of the High Shieldmarshal’s head off as it drove him back, a loose-limbed, dancing dead puppet, until Gelgur plucked him out of the line of fire.
    And stared over the limp, heavy body at Ralice, who was biting one knuckle hard to keep from screaming.
    There was another, lower klack as the last firing triggered the clockwork that started the next battery of gun-barrels, and the gunfire started to pan sideways.
    Gelgur flung himself over on his back with Kordroun’s body on top of him, but before they’d bounced to a halt, the next battery had kicked in and the hail of balls were tracking back in the other direction. Ralice flung herself away, kissing the floor in her haste.
    Then the firing ended, so abruptly that its echoes rang in their ears. They could smell scorched gunpowder, but see nothing beyond the dark doorway.
    The dim light they were working in came from far behind them; a fixed gas-jet that was high up, out of reach.
    It shed just enough radiance for Gelgur to make out the fear on Ralice’s face, and that she was silently mouthing, “What now?”
    He pointed at her and back the way they’d come, then slid free of Kordroun and pantomimed crawling.
    When she nodded and obeyed, he tore a strip off the tail of Kordroun’s jerkin, and crawled after her.
    Twice he held up a hand to halt and listen, but there came no sounds from the doorway or the cellars