Din Eidyn Corpus (Book 2): dEaDINBURGH (Alliances) (21 page)

Steph lowered her bow and shouted across to him.

“I need a new teacher. You’re it.”

Bracha nodded once in agreement and then collapsed onto the tarmac.

Chapter 24

Steph

“Again,” Bracha said quietly.

Steph’s heart sank, but not a sliver of it showed on her face. Giving her mentor a single sharp nod, she restarted the routine she’d been a slave to for almost two months.

 
Five minutes lifting five-kilogram weights with her fingers, each one for fifteen reps in sequence, thumb to pinkie-finger, crawled past.

Next was
blade-hands
. Making her aching hands straight, she alternated between left and right, slicing them into a gravel-sand-filled bucket. Twenty reps each hand. A series of whole body, core and balance exercises using her own body weight followed. She took her mind elsewhere as she robotically flowed through the routines he tortured her with daily.

Next up was
bad bag,
a canvas bag filled with heavy denim and suspended above her head height. Steph leapt relentlessly at the weighty, rough bag, peppering it with a series of strength-sapping kicks, fists and elbows.

A series of knife exercises followed, each forcing her muscles to adapt to different blade techniques.

After forty-five minutes, she sat serenely on the fat tractor tyre she’d been flipping from one end of the driveway to the other. Fetching a slim six-inch aluminium shard, sharpened at one end and smooth and fat at the other, Steph began rotating and passing it between her fingers in the same way people did with coins in years past. The concentration to accomplish this when every muscle trembled and her glass-filled joints screamed was excruciating. Steph ignored the cries of her body. She wouldn’t be dropping the rod today. No matter how many sets she had to complete. This was the fourth.

Completing the dexterity exercise, Steph stole a glance at Bracha. He was seated on a log twenty feet away, right hand on the log for balance and his left performing a similar routine with his stiletto blade. The one he’d used to pull her eye from its natural position. Steph twirled her own lethally sharp shard one more time and casually propelled it at Bracha’s hand. He watched the silver missile for a second before snorting derisively and turning his attention back to his own finger exercises. Landing between Bracha’s index and middle finger, the shard clunked into the log and wobbled for a second.

Bracha’s lips tugged into a half smile.

Excellent,” he muttered, “again.”

Another hour passed but Steph would’ve sworn to any god who’d care to listen that a month had crawled past before Bracha finally called a halt to the session.

“Dinner,” he said.

Steph grunted and walked on shaky legs back to the cottage they’d occupied since she’d found Bracha on Craigmillar Castle Road. Once very white, the little cottage was covered in ivy and surrounded by overgrown shrubs and trees. A little rock wall, also host to wild flora, kept its borders guarded and partially hidden from a distance.

They had a log fire for heat and solar panels provided a limited supply of hot water. An orchard lay to the rear and a huge garden filled with wild root vegetables could be found a short walk away. It may well have been the most luxurious place Stephanie had ever been. Bracha liked his comforts; he seemed at home surrounded by them. Steph, whilst grateful for the cottage, couldn’t get used to sleeping inside brick walls or on a bed.

Steph clattered around the kitchen retrieving pots, potatoes, herbs and some cleaned rabbit she’d snared the day before. She despised cooking for Bracha, but had grown accustomed to it. She’d even stopped spitting in his food the last week or so.

The physical work was torturous, but it had paid off. She was stronger than she’d believed possible, fluidly agile and lethally quick. Bracha, his jaw – not broken as Alys had thought – had painfully instructed her through clenched teeth the first few weeks and now through mumbles as his jaw muscles slowly returned to strength. He’d taught her knife technique, including his signature move in which he’d plunge his stiletto into an artery during a stand-off.

He’d taught her to read body-language and to interpret every muscle twitch and facial tic. With something approaching love or perhaps pride in his eyes, he’d taught her the basics of anatomy to better place her blows and her knives. With a wild boar as her test subject, Steph had explored every artery, nerve cluster, tendon and organ, with Bracha pointing out the equivalent spot on his own body for comparison. He seemed to enjoy the flaring violence that flashed in Steph’s eyes when he pointed her towards his own heart or artery or nerve.

It seemed at times that he could read her mind – that he could sense the almost irresistible urge to slip her knife from the boar’s flesh and slide it smoothly into his. His eyes sparkled as he watched the conflict in her.

Fetching a broad cleaver, Steph began chopping Bracha’s food into small enough pieces for his healing jaw to cope with. Having reset his dislocated jaw the day she’d met him on the roadside, she’d prepared his meals and assisted in his recovery in exchange for him sharing his skills with her. Initially, Bracha’s jaw had hung loose, giving him a gaping, jester-like expression. Since then, he’d tied a cloth around his head and under the chin, effectively holding his lower jaw tightly in place. Even once Steph had reset the bones, chewing wasn’t an option, so his meat and vegetable meals had to be ground into a paste that he could simply swallow whole.

As well as resetting his jaw, Steph had assisted in repositioning Bracha’s finger bones from the myriad of angles they’d been forced into. Bracha pulling while Steph guided each bone back into its natural position
–
or as close to it as they could manage
–
they repaired the wreckage of his hands. Throughout the process, Bracha didn’t make a sound, but his eye blazed with pain. Steph looked deep into it with satisfaction.

After the third week, his breathing had changed from being a ragged rasp to a much smoother passing of air. The bruising around his ribcage went through many colourful changes, finally shining a lurid purple, but none of the blackness they’d worried over came through from beneath. No internal damage was a definite bonus.

Steph fashioned splints from old pallet wood for his arms and pulled out jagged stumps of teeth left behind from her cousin’s attention.

Despite the gruelling workload and training regime Bracha had imposed on her, the cottage had proven a serenely quiet place to be for almost seven weeks. The winter stillness, the snow and the remoteness of the cottage lacked all the usual city sounds Steph had been mostly unaware of, but was now grateful to be rid of.

 
Bracha, jaw muscles too tender to use, had been uncharacteristically silent. Now that the binding had been removed, he still rarely spoke. Steph wondered if the grinning, fast-talking knifeman he’d been before had vanished for good. His demeanour was unnerving. She’d happily listened to the lunatic’s merry, upper-class accent after almost two months of him grunting at her and demonstrating techniques with his hands like some broken marionette.

His arms had healed well as had the fingers. In recent weeks he’d begun to practice small but carefully-targeted exercises designed to return physical strength and dexterity to his hands and forearms. He was walking lighter, gliding along with something approximating his old smooth cadence. He’d lost a degree of flexibility, probably for ever, and a sliver of speed. Bracha still moved fast, but he wasn’t the liquid mercury he’d been just months previously. Healing had taken a toll on his body. Now in his late sixties, age and injury had finally caught up to him.

Steph looked up as she heard him approach the door, another sign of his diminishing powers. Once the man who had stalked silently through the city, a scuff on stone from his sciatica-dulled right foot on the concrete was forever the herald of his coming.

He glanced at her through a mass of unruly, greying red hair as he entered and caught her amusement. A little of the black humour that had once filled his eyes flashed across the remaining blue orb.

“Enjoy that did you, my dear?” he asked, voice a dusty misused instrument.

Steph shrugged and showed him a curl of a cynical smile.

Despite her mentor only recently beginning to fully recover, Steph knew with certainty that he would kill her easily should she attack him.

Taking his seat, he placed both hands lightly on the table. Steph placed a bowl of rabbit stew, chopped to a paste, down in front of him.

In two months he’d said practically nothing. Charades and grunts had been his preferred communication methods. Sitting smiling up at her from his seat, earthy-smelling steam crossing the space between them, Bracha narrowed his eye and began assessing her.

Steph returned to the kitchen, feeling his eye move across her body as she walked. Retrieving her own plate, she rested a buttock against a worktop, grabbed a chunk of rabbit and began ripping at it with her teeth.

Bracha’s eye widened and filled with joviality and congeniality. The old Bracha, the golf club-swinging murderer who strolled through the city of the dead, whistling happy tunes, shone through.

“You’re ready now, Stephanie.” His ssss whistled through broken and misshapen teeth, making him laugh aloud in utter delight. Extending both his arms and opening his palms out in a
taadaa
gesture, Bracha sing-songed, “Sally Sellers sold seven sweet squash soupssss.”

Steph shook her head.

Failing to raise a smile from her, he waved a hand dismissively.

“Anyway, Stephanie,” he whistled, “it’s time we took you on a hunt.”

“Stopped sulking and talking again are we?” she asked, forcing as much sarcasm as possible into her tone. It was petty, but she’d earned it after the long silence. “Besides, I told you, I won’t kill people to amuse you,” Steph said.

Bracha rolled his eye dramatically.

“Yes, yes, very gracious of you. You are without a doubt the last bastion of morality in this beautiful city. Tell me, my dear, why don’t you walk across to the meadow, over there, and lay those gentle, healing hands on the first Ringed you stumble across? It’d be a shame to keep all that heavenly goodness locked up inside. Selfish, some might say.”

Stone-faced, Steph raised an eyebrow defiantly. She was beginning to miss the silence.

The playfulness disappeared turning Bracha’s face shades darker.

“You’ll be killing Ringed. It’s time to test you. Your body looks strong, agile and fast. Your technique is quite… exquisite.” Bracha’s face softened on the word. “But you must be properly tested in a real-world situation.”

Steph nodded, only once, to let him know that she agreed. In truth, she’d felt ready for days now.

“Once you’ve proven that you can use the skills and strength I’ve given you,” Bracha allowed the monster he truly was to show on his face, “then your training really starts.”

Interlude

This is how it feels to be Stephanie

Breath escapes from my nose and mouth in a whoosh, condensing into the night air. I take a deep breath and feel pain in my diaphragm.

Too soon. It’s too soon to be winded.

I feel like slapping myself in the face, but instead I force breath into my lungs and feel the stitch that was threatening subside. My mind finally enters that passive state that
he
told me would pass over me when the fight was mine. When the outcome was completely in my control.

As if from afar I watch my cold, calm face as my right arm fires out, underhand and twisting up. The slim knife I hold in my fist barely trembles as it slides into the forehead of one of the dead. He looks fresh, at least six-two and still heavily muscled. He looks like he’d been a farmer in life. None of this stopped my blade. This is the eighth Ringed I’ve killed in seven seconds of beautifully intricate violence. Their bodies, truly lifeless now, lay scattered around me in a ring of measured destruction

I pull my empty hand back, leaving the blade in the head of the dead creature. He falls on top of it, pushing it deeper. I go to my knees and grab The Ringed who has come up behind me by the back of her neck. Tucking my strong core in, spring-like, I pull her over and past me. She lands in a heap, face-up on the grass. As I take the three paces to her, I scoop up my bow and loose an arrow into the right eye of the only other remaining Zom. As it clunks into his brain, my booted heel crushes the weak face bones in the female’s head and stomps the brain-matter to a pâté.

I close my eye and confirm that
he
is the only monster left out there in the dark.

His applause is only slightly mocking. It’s mostly genuine.