The Albino Knife Read Free Page B

was on his way to his cube from work, the corpse-stealer's shift, and Fox's sun had yet to come up, though it was trying. The narrow street was quiet, only a few electric carts humming along,no other pedestrians up at this hour.
    Ahead four men came out of a pub, laughing too loudly and making broad gestures in the dimness of false dawn. They looked like an all-night party winding down, but as Bork walked toward them, he saw that they were watching him and pretending otherwise.
    He was used to being the object of awed stares, but this was different. Alarms tripped in his head.
    He no longer wore the uniform, nor did he mount the standard weaponry, but the training he'd gotten as a matador did not disappear so easily. A man could not graduate from the elite bodyguard school without learning how to recognize a potentially dangerous situation. After all the years of instruction and practice, it was nearly a reflex.
    Bork altered his path and started to cross the street. He had no client to protect and the simplest way of avoiding trouble was to be elsewhere when it came down. After Mayli and Red died, Bork decided he did not want to be involved with death again. He carried no weapons, save his own skills and strength, and he would avoid using these if possible.
    The four men pretended to ignore him as two of them stumbled out into the street and began a showy, fake argument. The other two played at encouraging the first pair to fight.
    None of the four were drunk or stoned, Bork realized. They all moved too well. You could hide a lot, you were a good actor, but body control and balance were hard to disguise. Little moves gave it away; a stumble uncontrolled made the hands and arms go out reflexively, and the motion was different if you faked it. Bork had been taught by the best. These four were fairly big, if not as big as he was, and they moved like men who knew how to fight.
    Worse, this wasn't some random act. These four were set to attack him, and he was the target they'd been awaiting.
    He didn't see any weapons, but that didn't mean anything. He was too close to turn back without exposing himself to a hidden gun.
    Bork took a couple of deep breaths and moved to meet the four. That was a bad number; fewer could be danced around, and more only got in each other's way. The why of it could wait until later; now, it was time to deal with how.
    Despite his size Bork was as much a matador as any. He would never be as graceful as Dirisha or as fast as Geneva or as cocky as Sleel, but he'd learned to walk the Ninety-seven Steps of sumito from start to finish without missing one or stumbling or losing his balance, and that made him one of only a few in the galaxy who could do so. Any man or woman who could dance the sumito pattern could also rank in the top players of the Musashi Flex, did he or she choose that path. None had, but the flexers were professional fighters who could hand-kill most men without much effort, and even the hardest of them respected the priests who had created sumito.
    Bork smiled broadly and shook his head as he neared the four men. They turned to watch him openly now, and maybe the smile gave them a false sense of confidence.
    The big man caught the first of the ersatz drunks unprepared. Bork snatched him up as a boy might pick up a pet cat. He twisted through the Magician's Hands, spun through Helicopter, threw the startled man into the face of an equally startled second would-be attacker, and danced into Laughing Stone at the third man.
    The third man was good, he was fast, and he was ready. He ducked and sprang away to Bork's left, but made the mistake of going for a weapon instead of following up with a kick or punch. Bork altered his dance and skipped to the Braided Laser.
    The assassin managed to clear his shotpistol from his hidden holster and had it halfway up when Bork's fist hammered down in the form of the Sword of the Sun.
    Too hard, Bork realized, as the man's skull cracked under his blow. Well.