Ruinous Rendezvous

Synopsis

Aldo, still wearing the sailor, had cleaned up at cards and Mikhail had busked the room when the contact stood up and said it was time to go and see the merchandise. The two of them walked out toward the ruins with Koa and Mikhail sixty yards behind in the dark; Aldo bought them the distance by being conspicuously, horribly drunk: leaning on the man, stopping to dry-heave, taking four steps for every two.

At the edge of the rubble a man walked out to meet him with a spiked club held loose, and two more closed from behind: one winding a chain around his wrist, one drawing a dagger. The contact began to renegotiate (two had become five), which is how the party learned what the price had been for. Mikhail spoke a word that dropped the knifeman where he stood; the chainman shook it off, panicked, and bolted into the ruins shouting something about the Congress. The club drove a spike clean through Koa’s thigh, and Koa, bleeding and furious, took the clubman’s head off with one swing and stood there wearing most of him.

They put the sleeper in his own manacles (the party took to calling him Willie), and Aldo talked the contact into surrendering rather than joining him on the ground; that one became Casper. The dead man’s forearm carried a single lash tattoo. Aldo gagged Willie with a sock he had been wearing three days, which nearly killed him an hour later; Mikhail cleared his airway when he began to choke, which was the only mercy anyone showed that night.

The ruins are a collapsed walled keep sitting inside the town: rubble fields, one wall-section still standing some thirty-five feet, thief-worn catacombs beneath, and stone veined with the same metal as the ancient bridge at Loshev. Casper showed them what they would not have found: a barricade of cartwheels and scrap hiding a stair down to two cages, a table and a cold campsite. Cargo is put here off the wagons and kept until somebody higher up comes for it.

What the party did with two men in cages was Aldo’s idea, and it worked. He pitched a criminal enterprise that does not exist, offered one place on its crew, and let the pair bid against each other for it: the loser, he said, becomes product. Jobs came down through the dead man, whose name was Gargoth, and above Gargoth there was a woman: red hair, very beautiful, the same lash on her arm, a small estate in the town and another out at Harad. Cargo lands in Haudh-Gwenn, waits here anything from hours to a week, and is then collected and sold on south toward Meshtes. Casper does not know where it ends; he says he can find out. He also let slip that Gargoth answered to a boat captain, and that people further up may sit on a council.

The lash is not a crew mark. Everyone who wears one is running the operation. And the people in the crates are largely runaway Peren fleeing the Dhel, recaptured for owners who pay handsomely to have them back, which makes the men who run the trade comfortable about it.

That left the one who had run, and he had to be taken before he could carry word: Messy, real name Diggle, an amateur alchemist holed up in a disused shop behind the blacksmith. They came in through the basement bulkhead and found the trip-wire rigged to a clay jar before it found them; a squeaking step on the stairs gave them away anyway. Messy fought through a doorway, was cornered, surrendered to the threat of Mikhail’s magic, then kicked the door to signal the men knocking on it, and finally lit his jars. The blast was weaker than he hoped and sufficient regardless: the floor went out, Koa fell through it onto his ruined leg, Mikhail went down the stairs, Aldo went out a window, and Messy knocked himself cold. They told the gathering neighbors they were carrying him to the Chantry, and carried him to the cages instead.

He gave them one more name first: Edrick, a broker in the wealthy quarter who knows everyone and charges for it. Casper argued that he could not run (the operation would find him) and offered instead to be their man inside it. They believed him, gave him back his belongings and a silver on account, and told him to come at daybreak. Then the party bedded down in the slavers’ own basement, Koa on first watch with a leg nothing had closed, Mikhail sitting apart in the dark and taking some trouble not to let Koa see what the night had cost him.