Read Online Guns of Alkenstar by Unknown - Free Book Online

Chapter One: Too Old To Be Running Down Alleys
    “I thought you’d be eager,” Kordroun said coldly. “You were more than a good shieldmarshal, once. You were one of the best.”
    Bors Gelgur nodded, took another long, sweet quaff of ice wine, and went on gazing at the cracked, soot-caked wall. “Once.”
    “So you don’t care what happens to Alkenstar?”
    The retired shieldmarshal looked up with obvious reluctance. He was drunk, but not nearly as gone as Kordroun had often seen him in recent days.
    “Does Alkenstar care what happens to me?”
    “Yes, as it happens,” Kordroun snapped, striding impatiently across the drunkard’s squalid room—it only took two steps—and then back again. “We need you.”
    “I retired.”
    Kordroun nodded. “To sit here,” he observed flatly, “waiting to die.”
    Gelgur shrugged and took another sip from his flagon. Seemingly surprised to discover that he’d emptied it by doing so, he peered into its depths, as if to see if it held some secret compartment.
    Kordroun waited, while a fresh bank of the ever-present Gunworks smoke drifted through the open window and curled around them, but although the usual muted clanging could be heard from inside the foundries, inside the room silence stretched.
    Gelgur wasn’t going to rise to that goad. Time to try another.
    “If the walking dead of all Geb flood through Alkenstar, there’ll be no more of that wine you’re so fond of.”
    “And likely no more Bors Gelgur to drink it,” the old man growled back. “So? How will my putting on my badge again stop an army?”
    Kordroun went to the window and tried to force it closed. The rusty metal frame squealed in protest.
    “Leave it,” Gelgur snapped.
    Kordroun kept on shoving. With a long shriek of protest, the window closed. “We mustn’t be overheard.”
    Gelgur rolled his eyes. “By half the spies of Golarion listening at my window, when we’re four flights up? I think not.”
    High Shieldmarshal Ansel Kordroun prowled toward the old man like a hungry wolf, head lowered between his shoulders as he snarled, “Gelgur, it won’t be your window much longer if you don’t find some coin! You owe more than you can ever repay, no one will lend you more, and you’re down to your last—” He waved at the shelf above the bed, and the forlorn little net that hung there. “—two onions and half a roundloaf. And as I can only see empty bottles under the bed, you’re probably about out of your precious ice wine, too.”
    “Get out,” Gelgur said dully, looking at the nearest wall.
    “How would you like three years of a shieldmarshal’s pay? All at once, in your hands?”
    “Get ou—who is going to approve handing anyone that much?”
    “The Ironmaster,” Kordroun breathed in Gelgur’s ear, shaking a heavy, clinking purse and setting it on the old drunkard’s shoulder, so he could feel its weight. “If you undertake this for Alkenstar. Plus a good heavy purse—this one—to cover expenses, as you work.”
    He left the coins draped over Gelgur’s shoulder as he went back to the door and leaned against the wall beside it, arms crossed.
    The retired shieldmarshal went on staring at nothing as the clanging and hammering of the Gunworks went on outside the closed window, but Kordroun noticed those old and hairy-backed hands—still strong, by the look of them—starting to tremble.
    “I’m… my legs, the old wounds… my shoulder, blast it… Roun, I’m too old to be running down alleys and climbing walls to fight young murderers—or the ghouls of Geb, for that matter!”
    “You won’t have to. You’ll be working with a young, strong, fast gunhunter. Who needs your wits and your experience—and will obey you.”
    Gelgur gave Kordroun a long, expressionless look.
    Kordoun knew that the old man had never liked gunhunters—most shieldmarshals didn’t—but by his own admission, had more than once found them useful.
    “Let’s go see this gunhunter,” Gelgur said