Page 10
Story: A City of Swords and Fangs
CHAPTER 10
G ertrude took me to a little bistro a couple of blocks away from the Guild Hall complex. We sat outside under an awning, and I noted that the shops on the street were very upper-class, as was the dress of the shoppers.
“Pretty ritzy,” I said after the waiter took our order.
“Zürich is ritzy,” Gertrude replied. “My father makes double what he earned in Germany, but we live about the same.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a professor of Geology at the university. A geomancer, like me. We’ve been here two years. You see, that’s why we have to stick together—girls like you, me, and Siobhan. Most of the mages our age grew up here and have their own cliques. We’re outsiders. That’s why you’re attracting so much attention from the boys.”
I took a sip of my beer. “Yeah, fresh meat.”
She laughed. “Exactly. I scare them, but you’re very pretty, and they probably don’t take you seriously as an Enforcer. I think you’re doing a good job of setting boundaries, though.”
I laughed along with her. “I’m certainly trying.”
We had a couple of beers, and I learned a lot about the Guild Hall and the university that wasn’t in any official guidebook. Then I bid her goodbye and walked home for dinner.
* * *
M y days with the Enforcers were Tuesdays and Thursdays. Captain Le Pen called me and said I was scheduled to work Thursday evening, so I should show up at four o’clock. I talked with Frau Buckner and Master Adolphus and arranged to eat my dinner in mid-afternoon. I would be getting off shift between midnight and two o’clock in the morning, and the Master told me to call if I was going to be later than two.
I discovered that Hans would be my patrol leader. There were twelve of us, split into two groups. Hans and Gertrude were in my group. We were assigned to an area of the entertainment district that bordered the strigoi district.
“What do the local mundane police do?” I asked as we rode over to our rally point.
“Not much at night,” Hans said, “at least in this part of town. In the Altstadt —the old city—night time is rather like your Wild West.”
“Where do the mundanes go to party?”
Gertrude laughed. “People out nightclubbing in any part of town are taking their chances. The Kantonspolizei try to keep order as best they can, but they depend on us—or the Knights—to deal with the strigoi and lycans.”
“Shall we say that it’s complicated?” Hans said.
“How often do you run into trouble?” I asked.
“Real trouble? Draw-your-sword-and-cut-off-heads trouble? Every so often. Usually no one wants to die, so we negotiate a strategic withdrawal. You stop chewing on the pretty girl and go home, we don’t cut off your head. It’s sort of a play-it-by-ear kind of dance.”
“I feel sooo much better.” I thought Queen City was lawless at times. It appeared that some of Master Adolphus’s more extreme warnings about the city had been watered down.
Our group unloaded from our SUVs and left them parked on the street. We walked down the street—one guy in the lead, then two of us abreast, another pair behind, and Gertrude at the rear.
“It’s pretty boring, most nights,” Hans said. “We wander around, nothing happens, then we go home.”
Gertrude chuckled, then muttered to me, “Except for the occasional attack by a pack of lycans or an ambush by a patrol of Knights Magica. Don’t ever drop your shield.”
We walked past a nightclub where a couple of strigoi bouncers stood at the door, and a queue of mostly mundanes and magic users—plus a few strigoi—waited to get in.
“This is a really popular place for university students,” Hans said.
“I’ll pass.”
He laughed.
A while later, we heard what sounded like a dog fight a couple of streets over and sauntered over that direction. We came to a small square, similar to the one in front of Master Adolphus’s building.
I counted a dozen lycans—three of whom were in their half-shifted wolfman form and two in their naked human form—battling with three strigoi. I assumed the naked humans—lying on the ground and not moving—were dead. A couple of the wolves were bleeding from various wounds, and one of the strigoi had a shredded arm hanging uselessly.
“And what do we do about this?” I asked as I drew my sword.
“We watch,” Hans said, “and try to contain it. There aren’t any true humans to protect. We need to keep it from spilling out of here and stop anyone from the outside from stumbling in.”
“Popcorn time,” Gertrude said, shuffling around the edge of the Platz and taking up a position across from where I was standing. Hans and the others did the same, and we effectively surrounded the fight.
I couldn’t be quite so complacent. People were dying. Maybe not my kind of people, but most lycans didn’t ask to get infected. That was true of the strigoi as well, but they were technically dead, and most maintained their existence by preying on humans, so my sympathy for them was rather limited.
We watched for about fifteen or twenty minutes. Another lycan died, one of the strigoi was dragged down and had his head chewed off, while another was staked by one of the wolfmen.
The remaining strigoi climbed the wall of a building to its roof and escaped. At that point, Hans moved in, calling out, “Hey! Party’s over! Call your friends and clean this place up, or we call the Kantonspolizei!”
I must have looked a little puzzled, because Gertrude leaned close and said, “The police will arrest them for brawling. No one wants to go to jail nude.”
“What the hell was that all about?” I asked.
Hans shook his head. “The lycans were probably out hunting. This is a strigoi part of town. Looks like a draw.”
“That’s insane.”
He nodded. “Sure you want to go to school here?”
Table of Contents
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- Page 10 (Reading here)
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