A Quantum Mythology Read Free Page A

own blood in the arrowheads’ cores.
    All the while he watched the house he could see the cooling heat of the bodies in the upper floors, and the vibrant oranges, reds and yellows of the murderer on the ground floor. The Hellaquin nocked the first arrow, waiting for the murderer to provide him with a shot.
     
    Sir Ronald screamed with hopeless, impotent frustration when he heard the town house’s front door thrown open, and then he was on his feet and staggering into the hall. He had but a moment to take in the well-dressed, blue-eyed, blond-haired man striding across the hall towards him, a pistol in each hand, before the figure disappeared in the smoke from his own guns.
    Sir Ronald staggered back as a pistol ball caught him in the chest, but the demon moved him like a puppet now. He raised his pistol arm and fired into the smoke, rotated the barrel as the pan mechanism ticked, fired again, rotated, fired again.
    The blond man strode out of the smoke, a sabre in one hand, a knife in the other. Bone poked through skin torn and bloodied by a nasty-looking head wound, but still the man came. Sir Ronald fired, the barrel turned, he fired again, and again. The man staggered as shot after shot hit him, the front of his coat darkening as blood soaked into it, but he kept coming. Sir Ronald moved to one side to get a better shot as the hall filled with yet more smoke.
     
    The Hellaquin watched Sir Ronald’s heat-ghost as his arm breathed fire at the Knight’s fainter ghost. Sir Ronald moved to the left. It was the move the Hellaquin needed. He exhaled, visualised the shot, lifted the bow and drew back the string. The poundage on the weapon was such that no mortal man could have drawn it. With hundreds of years of experience and the benefits of the ‘gifts’ he had been given by the Red Chalice, it took him but a moment to sight, and to judge the slight breeze in the hot night. He loosed and heard the window break almost immediately.
     
    Shot after shot and the blond man finally stopped staggering forwards and collapsed onto the marble floor of the town house’s hallway. The devil was already devising plans for the body, but first Sir Ronald would have to reload.
    Sir Ronald didn’t hear the window break. The adamantine-tipped arrow flew through the sitting room, then through an internal wall, and finally through Sir Ronald’s head before embedding itself deep in the outer wall, quivering. Sir Ronald collapsed forward onto the floor, leaving the demon to slowly fade away, trapped in cooling dead flesh.
     
    The Hellaquin stalked through the sitting room and into the hall. He saw the man, his arm fused with what looked like a multi-barrelled pistol, lying face down on the marble in a pool of red. The Knight was lying in a similar pool on his back. The Hellaquin nearly put an arrow in the Knight when he sat up.
    ‘I almost had him,’ the Knight muttered. The Hellaquin nodded with a sceptical expression on his face. Clouds of grey and black powder-smoke hung in the air. Through the windows at the front of the house, the Hellaquin could see the milling crowd.
    The archer kicked the grotesque man onto his back and knelt down next to him.
    ‘Is he healing?’ the Knight asked as he got up unsteadily and bent to retrieve his pistols, his sabre and his knife.
    The Hellaquin looked at the hole in the man’s head made by the arrow he’d fired.
    ‘Is there a maker’s mark on the pistol?’ asked the Knight.
    The Hellaquin picked up the deformed limb and checked the visible metal of the barrel, grimacing as he saw up close the fusion of wood, metal and flesh. The Knight was standing in the pool of his own blood as he sheathed his various weapons, the pool shrinking as he reabsorbed it. The healing would leave the Knight very hungry.
    ‘There’s no mark. What do we do with him?’ the Hellaquin asked, glancing out at the crowd again.
    ‘Damnation! We can’t take him with us – we’ll have to burn the house down and hope