Guns of Alkenstar by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

more like a big, burly lad. Gelgur knows the Works well, and is probably trying to get out the wagon-port nearest the Oldcogs and Tankard tavern. I’ve men waiting there already, but if we can catch the two of them between us and those doorguards, we can prevent them doubling back, and save having to hunt them the length of the Gunworks. So through here, and all eyes alert!”
    A door creaked, and booted feet shuffled. Gelgur and Ralice waited, immobile and silent, for what seemed a very long time before Bors took his hand away.
    “Sorry,” he whispered gruffly. “You recognize the voice?”
    Ralice shook her head.
    “Trademaster Daerold Loroan.”
    Ralice frowned. “He’s not a marshal, and never has been.”
    “Yet the marshals are obeying him,” Gelgur said grimly. “This runs as deep as we feared. Come.”
    Without a word of protest, Ralice followed him into deeper darkness.
    ∗ ∗ ∗
    “Where are we now?”
    “Where they keep acid to etch inscriptions in gun barrels. The damage the spills do are why this is deeper than the storage cellars.”
    Ralice waved at the many large, round lids set into the floor. “Is that what these…?”
    Gelgur nodded, and pointed. “That mark means acid—larger is stronger—and that one is acid-quench, to turn acid into harmless but reeking water. Avoid them all. We have to get—”
    He waved at a far, dark corner of the room.
    Out of which promptly stepped a man. Their guns came up—and wavered.
    The man gave them a tight, pain-filled smile as he came toward them, hands empty. High Shieldmarshal Ansel Kordroun.
    Battered but whole again, as if they’d never seen him killed in front of their eyes, his face blown off. So unless all they’d ever been told was wrong, and magic did work in Alkenstar, this must be a shapeshifter.
    Unless the Kordroun who’d brought them together and led them through the Gunworks had been an imposter.
    “Gelgur,” Ralice said quietly, her gun—the revolver that had been Kordroun’s—coming up again, “this can’t be Kordroun.”
    Gelgur stared into eyes that were Kordroun’s, yet couldn’t be, and remembered seeing Kordroun firing at him in the alley and then another Kordroun joining him just after that. He tried to remember what he’d heard about shapeshifters—creatures called doppelgangers, yes. One had once been unmasked in the Duchy, long before his time…
    Kordroun was striding steadily nearer. Dropping the little gun he’d scavenged from Kordroun’s body into a pocket, Gelgur went to meet him, stepping into Ralice’s line of fire.
    “You can tell he’s a doppelganger because he’s slightly uglier than Kordroun himself.”
    “Ansel, old friend,” he said firmly, putting a smile on his face as he slid his other hand into his other, already bulging pocket. They’d never been friends, old or otherwise.
    The high shieldmarshal’s smile widened, and he nodded.
    “Oh, it’s really him, all right,” Gelgur said over his shoulder, to Ralice.
    “What?” she exclaimed. “Gelgur, are you mad?”
    “No,” he replied calmly. “Not mad. Just close enough.”
    And he was. To fling a handful of balls from the clockwork trap-gun batteries into the shapeshifter’s face, and a second handful under its feet.
    It fell hard, and Gelgur game down on top of it, knife out and slicing hard.
    Across the throat, and back again, deeper, blood that was the wrong hue spurting, sawing hard, beheading the thing.
    Kordroun’s mouth yawned in pain, stretching impossibly wide, as the head rolled away. It was going pale, the hair melting back into the whitening flesh. The rest of the body convulsed under Gelgur, limbs going long and thin and white.
    Ralice fired twice into the rolling head, her face twisted in disgust. Gelgur calmly slid a vat lid aside with one foot, and kicked the shapeshifter’s body into the acid. When Ralice lowered her gun, he added its head, too.
    Sliding the lid back into place, he took the gunhunter by the