City of Ruin - Mark Charan Newton [35]
Was she being merely licentious? She hoped not.
A knock at the door.
She froze, then realized it would need to be answered by herself. She headed downstairs and with deep breaths opened the door to one of Malum’s hired men.
‘’Scuse me, madam,’ the thug grumbled, broad-shouldered and shaven-headed, wrapped in a thick cloak. ‘Someone from the military to see you. Says he’s from the Night Guard.’
‘Yes, that’s OK . . . I was expecting him. It’s to do with my research on defence methods.’ She should have known these men would be here first. What if they then told Malum? She didn’t want to arouse his suspicions, so she had to act calmly.
‘Fine.’ The man gestured to one side.
Within moments, Lupus stood there, puzzlement evident on his face as he stepped around the thug’s hulking figure. He was dressed in his Night Guard uniform, utterly black save for subtle patterns in the sewing and the gold star of the Empire on his breast. How he’d matured, she realized.
She let him in and closed the door. ‘Please, come to the study area, and let’s continue our business there.’ Her voice was loud enough for the thug at the door to hear, and she could tell from Lupus’s expression that he understood her need for secrecy.
‘Lead on.’ Lupus gestured eccentrically, playing along.
Beami’s heart thumped as they headed down the corridor, entering the basement room in which she pursued her explorations of cultist technology.
She lit three lanterns, knowing their location by instinct rather than touch, but nearly knocked one over in her flustered excitement. To a stranger this workroom must look like a junkyard, a litter of curious devices that would mean very little to the layman. But she had organized and investigated much of this over the years, made notes, tested, then tested some more, all the time wondering if she might thus unlock some device the elder races had set, and if, as a result, this was how she might die.
She moved her Brotna relic – a great lumbering metal cone with wires sprouting from the top end – to one side.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘A project I’m working on for the masons and architects,’ she explained, wondering why they were wasting time talking about her work. She told him how she had found a way to reduce stone to dust, and how the project had now received sponsorship from the city developers. As she spoke, she found her mouth turning dry, her nerves increasingly getting the better of her.
All the time she was examining him: he looked more athletic than she remembered.
Lupus turned his face this way and that, inquisitively, to where papers covered the walls: diagrams, sketches, a profusion of arcane symbols that she barely understood herself. His profile, too, had become more hardened, better defined.
He finally turned to face her. ‘Quite the fire hazard, this place.’
Before she could give herself the opportunity to respond, she was kissing him, thrusting him back against the wall, and no sooner doing so than pulling away, flummoxed by her own actions.
‘What was that for?’ he asked, smiling.
‘I don’t know.’ Pacing the room and running her hands through her hair and feeling her pulse accelerating. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I missed all that,’ he said. ‘And your scent, I haven’t smelled it in years.’
Lupus had such big eyes, and a world of empathy lay within them. He was always the only one who could make her melt with a glance. He took her hands in his own. ‘I have never – not once – stopped thinking about you.’
Perhaps the ice age and the coming war made her want to live for the moment, but she could not really help herself any longer. A host of memories returned through his touches: because she remembered the diligence with which he would