by Deck Davis
“I think we found what we’re looking for,” he told Ben. “Stay here and guard my stuff.”
He left the bison and his inventory bag a few hundred yards from the cave in case he needed to make a quick escape. Then, holding just his dagger, he headed toward the rock.
The desert was strangely quiet now. The weird nocturnal cries and hisses and far-away animal screams were gone, and only the wind could be heard, giving a ghostly howl as it tried its best to bring his body temperature down to a fatal level.
As Jakub reached the cave entrance, he heard something else.
He froze. His nerves fired, his pulse beat with the dizzying rhythm of a drum at a drunken barn dance.
Footsteps sounded from inside the cave.
CHAPTER 9
Billy ‘Hips’ Maguire
The sudden hush made Hips suspicious. He was a man of limited emotional response, and his repertoire consisted of only one way of acting when faced with his feelings. Be it happiness, feeling a little down or, like now, suspicious, he responded the only way he knew how; he drew Magdalena from her sheath.
The blade left her home with a satisfying schwing sound. Out here, out in Sun Toil, the moonlight was perfect, and it shone perfectly on Magdalena, over the curve in her blade that was like a woman arching her back, over the etchings on the metal that resembled tiny tattoos.
As beautiful as she was, seeing her made Hips sad. Magdalena had a twin blade. She had been forged as a sibling, inseparable from her brother Marcus, who was just as beautiful, just as sharp. Hips had been forced to part with Marcus. It was the only way to raise the funds for this operation, and he just prayed that he wouldn’t spend his years regretting it.
Holding Magdalena gave Hips the confidence he’d always lacked growing up. Men who knew Hips would have laughed until their eyes watered if you suggested he wasn’t born that way, but Hips knew the truth.
He had learned his swagger when he was twelve and fled his abusive parents and traveled out of Dispolis and then east, surviving on the road until he met a traveling bard troupe who took him in and taught him how to tease sweet sounds from a lute. Those four years were the happiest he’d ever had, but ultimately, he’d always known that bard life wasn’t for him. He sought something a little more…dangerous.
That was how Hips Maguire found himself in Sun Toil with a band of unscrupulous folks, ones who right now were standing all around him and had suddenly stopped talking all at once.
The sudden quiet made every danger instinct in his body scream out, but he tried not to make it show.
Holding Magdalena, Hips looked at the bonfire-lit faces around him. He saw old faces, new ones. Men who’d spent thousands of nights like these in places like this and were as comfortable as cows on grass, and some of the younger faces, faces that looked like Hips’ face had once looked. Teens – boys and girls, because Hips knew that there were some outlaw jobs only a girl could do – who’d lived in houses like his and with parents like his, who wore bruises when other kids wore smiles, who would have been ready to climb up to the moon if got them out of their home.
The idea was that the old hands would teach the newer ones how to live in this world. Just like every master bard had to learn his first chord, so every slaver had to learn his trade from nothing. And while it might not be the most moral of professions, Hips knew he was giving these teens a chance, and he’d long ago decided fuck everyone else. He only looked after him and his own.
Now, his own were quiet. Too quiet. The crackling of the bonfire punctuated this, and Hips saw the orange and red flicker over Magdalena’s blade, and wondered if he would have to use her on his own people.
“If you’ve got treachery on your mind,” he finally said, “Best you spit it out now. Treachery is poison, and you won’t like the taste. Me and my gal here can purge it from you,” he said, holding her up.
All his men knew what he and Magdalena had done over the years. Some of them had heard it, some had seen it. Few knew why she was so special to him.
“Salvator,” said Eyan. Salvator was Eyan’s nickname for Hips, and in his native tongue, it meant savior. It had always made Hips uncomfortable, even if it was true that he’d helped Eyan escape his abusive four mothers and fathers. The concept of quadruple parenting worked for the Spyre people, but not in Eyan’s case.
“I don’t like the edge to your voice,” said Hips. “There’s something in it I’ve never heard. You’re planning something.”
“You’re a quiet man, Salvatore. You act like every word is like stabbing a hole in your purse.”
“Now we’re coming to it. It’s because we’re in Toil, aye? The sun has melted your brain. I know that some of you had misgivings about this place, but I gave each one of you a choice. I told you about the caravan. I explained the plan, and you chose to come.”
“Hips,” said Marleya. She had barely made a whisper before approaching and then there she was, a woman made from as much pure beauty and she was venom. The things Hips had seen her do…even as a slaver, it gave him pause.
His thoughts took him back to the wife whose husband Marleya had seduced in a tavern. How, when the wife discovered it and marched to their camp to confront them, Marleya had used her oil-whip and lashed the woman to within inches from death, scarring her with hot, black scratches. The look of horror on the husband’s face still stuck in Hips’ mind.
But then she could be kind, too. Once, after selling a dozen slaves to a Baelin warship, Marleya had given half of her cut of the gold to a rundown orphanage in Queensbrook. Hips suspected that she had spent her own younger years in places like that.
For all her cruelty and her reckless pursuit of whatever pleasures her whims demanded, consequences seemed to shirk her. The woman was indestructible. She’d once taken three crossbow bolts to the gut and, after she lived through the fever and a healer closed her wounds, she had demanded a glass, a whiskey bottle, and enough opium to put a troll to sleep.
Yeah, if death ever came for Marleya, it’d come as a blur. It’d have to catch her unaware, appearing as some terrible force out of nowhere too quick for her to see it.
He was glad of it, too. She was Hips’ long-serving crew member and his oldest friend. He had met her in a forest thirteen leagues from Dispolis, and like him, she was foraging to stay alive.
They had first met when they were both strays, chancing upon each other at a particularly dense berry bush patch. The two teens had fought like hell over the turf. Hips was used to fights, having grown up under the swing of a fist, but this girl had taken him to the seven hells and back.
By then end, neither of them could truly overpower the other, and they decided on a more logical course of action; to share the berries.
After that, they shared journeys, and before long they were traveling together as friends. Hips wouldn’t say he was in love with Marleya. He wasn’t as pathetic as that.
No, it was simply a case that whenever he looked at her chestnut, saucer-wide eyes, he felt like he was floating into the cosmos above, carried away on the breath of a goddess so that he might see the world through the lens of eons gone by. That’s all.
One day he’d probably try to tell her that, and when the words went through Hips’ brain they’d come out of his mouth as “Marleya, why have we never fucked?”
Maybe he’d never get to say them. Not if she was in on this mutiny, if that’s what it was.
“Marleya,” he said. “You’re part of this too?”
He fully suspected a plot now. Every outlaw gang, no matter what their chosen area of criminality, faced this at some point; there always came a time where the members thought their lives would improve if they overthrew their leader.
He just never thought Marleya would help them tie the noose. It filled him with a deep sadness he hadn’t felt since leaving his parents’ home. That day was a strange mix of freedom and pity, but this felt worse.
“I’m afraid so,” Marleya said. “I wasn’t only in on it…come on, Hips.
You know me now. I planned this.”
Hips stood up, ready to kill but knowing he wouldn’t relish a single second of the act. “Treason runs in a man’s blood. It’s a survival instinct, sure enough, and I don’t blame any of you for harboring it. I brought you out here. Feels like a place that’d boil your blood to dust. But we got what we came for, didn’t we?”
The only reply was the spitting of the bonfire. Hips looked at a dozen faces, some old, some young, all who he’d considered not just his crew but his friends. Pain at realization of their plot was worse than the fear of what they’d do to achieve its goals.
“We have our cargo,” he continued, glancing briefly at the wagon parked fifty feet away and guarded by two of his men. “We got what we needed and we rode out the storm. The hardest part is behind us. You picked a bad time to swim in dark waters, you empty-skulled knuckle draggers. A cleverer bunch would have waited until we’d sold the slaves and divided the loot before hissing like snakes.”
Silence again. It seemed that holding their treachery to the light had made it melt. Or, he was forcing them into early action. Either way, they would have whispered together for days before now. They would have a plan, and they would be scared. Hips’ only hope of countering a mutiny was forcing them to act before they were ready.
“Aye, a bunch of folk with anything but worm shit for brains would have waited until we get outside of the deadliest place in the queendom, and until we have actual gold in our purse. Did you stop to think about what you’d do with the cargo? Selling a person isn’t easy, you cretins. Do you think it’s easy to align contacts? That they’d merrily buy a live person from you without good old Hips being there?
No, you didn’t think. And now, you’re going to have to face up to your whispers. If you’ve got plans, then reveal them. Magdalena and I will answer them, and we’ll be all the better for it; fewer people to split the loot with.”
With his challenge issued, Hips waited. A curious mix of sadness and fear welled in him. He knew that by their very nature, outlaws weren’t the most trustworthy of people. It was just that he’d really taken a chance on some of these guys and girls. He’d gone out of his way to trust them.
Marleya stood up now.
So you’re really one of them, he thought. This hurt the most, that his oldest friend would be part of, maybe even lead, insurrection.
He’d been fair to them. He’d told them the risks of Sun Toil and the rewards of the plan. He’d explained that he’d heard rumor of a caravan of people a hundred strong were heading deep in Sun Toil. For a slaver, that was a free meal too delicious to pass up.
The only snag was that for a slaver band comprising of 10 to 12 people, it would be tricky to overpower a 100. After learning that a man named Gunar Helketoil led the caravan, and after asking about him in a few places, Hips was even less sure of his success.
Yet, it was an opportunity too golden to miss. A hundred people of all ages. All of them heading to the most remote place in the queendom, where if they didn’t make it back, nobody would suspect slavers. They’d assume the desert had swallowed them. Even if they captured only ten of them, well…ten people would fetch quite a price.
So, Hips pondered how to strong-arm Gunar and his people. He thought and he drank and he thought some more and he drank some more, and inspiration hit him while he was in a brothel, bollock-naked and mid-way through half a silver’s worth of fun time.
“A weather elemental,” he said.
The strumpet he was with was understandably confused. Hips disengaged from her and dressed. He threw her another half silver. “Nothing personal,” he said. “I just had a stroke of inspiration. Some strokes have to be attended to immediately.”
It was then that he’d felt more confident of his plan, and he relayed it to the crew as an official job. He told them how he would raise money to pay a weather elemental mage to trap the trader fleet in dust storms, and then the slavers would swoop in and collect as many survivors as possible.
Hips made a few scouting trips into Toil to see what they were dealing with. He only ventured fifty or so miles at a time, barely dipping the tip of his big toe into the desert.
What he found was something that made it hard to breathe; such a mix of danger and attraction. Toil was a place that cast spells on a man. It sang to Hips when he pitched his tent in the cold, cold nights. It conjured colors in the horizon, promising water and coconut trees in a distance where he knew none could be found.
Toil wasn’t just a desert containing lots of little living things; it was a beast on its own. The winds were its breath, the cracked ground and occasional dunes were its flesh. Hips felt Toil watching him as he teased along its borders. He swore that he could speak with it in his mind and that it wanted to draw him further in and reveal more of itself to him.
This wouldn’t just be a job for the slavers. It would change them, he was sure of it. Some of them, most likely including Hips, would enter Toil as their normal selves, and they would leave with their minds expanded. The Gods knew some of them could take some time to look within themselves.
He’d never been surer nor more scared of a job before. He’d never been more certain it had to happen.
“Those of you who want to pass up on this, I’ll bear no grudge,” he’d said. “And you’re still welcome back when the Toil business is over.”
Nobody had complained. Nobody had refused the job. That being the case, why insurrection? Why now? How could Hips Maguire, leader of outlaws and the best slaver in the queendom, have been fairer to his people?
Marleya whispered to Eyan. Eyan in turn nodded, and two apprentice outlaws, who Hips had picked for the position himself, scurried away from the bonfire.
Her lack of attention was short-lived, but it was all Hips needed. He raised Magdalene and let her see firelight. With a flash of fire on steel, with the reflexes he’d practiced for years and years, Hips held Magdalene against Marleya’s throat.
That was where he stopped, with the blade pressing against her skin.
“Hips,” said Marleya, calmer than a nobleman on trial for murdering a peasant, so sure was she that nothing would happen to her. “I know what you’re thinking. Listen to me for a second. I need to say something.”
If it had been anyone else leading the insurrection, their need to say something would have been hampered after Hips cut out their tongue. But Marleya was different.
“These’ll have to be the sweetest words ever spoken to save your life.”
“I only need four,” she said.
“Go on.”
Marleya turned to the outlaws behind her, some of whom grinned as though they were loving their rebellion. A moment like this, and they were smiling. That made him think that they’d planned this for a while, but if that was the case, why didn’t they just tell him what they were unhappy about? He’d never hurt anyone in his band for voicing constructive criticism.
Well, he’d rarely hurt anyone for voicing it. Word had it that Brown Barden was still struggling to eat solids. But still.
He couldn’t believe it had come to this. What a bunch of low lives. Even for a gang of slavers, these guys were the pits. Was there no honor anymore? No decency?
“Hips,” said Marleya, drawing out the silence. “I have just four words to say to you tonight…”
He could feel the tension now. He felt it inside him, tightening like a belt over his mind, making it hard to think rationally. He could kill two, maybe three of them. One-on-one he would destroy them all, but if they attacked him together…
He faced Marleya. Her betrayal hurt most, so he would murder her first.
Now he just had to summon the nerve to kill his friend. He felt his hand tighten around his blade, as if he wasn’t controlling it.
This is it.
And then Marleya smiled.
“Happy birthday to you!” she shouted in a sing-song voice.
The outlaws cheered and hollered, their voices unnaturally loud in such a desolate place.
They laughed at Hips, at his surprise and even at his readiness to use Magdalene, but it was a good-natured laughing.
As his initial anger began to die, Hips found himself enjoying the sound of them laughing, and loving it even more when they broke into a ‘happy birthday, our captain, happy birthday’ song.
Marleya slapped him on the back. “Didn’t think we’d forget, did you?”
Hips smiled. “There’s a reason I don’t bring it up.”
“Yep, because you’re an old bastard. Listen, we got something for you.”
“A present?” said Hips. “Really?”
“Really. See, do you remember sending Barret into town to buy rope?”
Hips shrugged. “I send lots of people to lots of places.”
“Well, he walked by a pawnbroker and saw you there. Saw you handing something over for money. And then you came back with heat salve and new blades for everyone.”
“This job is big. I wanted it done properly.”
“Well, we’re a team. I know you’re the captain and all, but there’s no reason for you to take everything on your own back. Eyan and I went into town and we visited the broker. We know what you sold to buy our elemental mage and stuff.”
She took a bundle from underneath her sleeping bag. She brought this to Hips. It was a cloth parcel wrapped in a bow.
“Happy birthday, Mr. Maguire,” she said.
Happy birthday. Nobody had said that to him in years! He held the parcel, and his hands were shaking.
He unwrapped it, and the sight brought tears to his eyes.
It was Marcus, Magdalene’s brother blade. A weapon he’d given up so he could do this job and get his people the bounty they deserved. Such loyal, lovely people.
Hips felt such a joyous union with the world. He’d never had such a wholesome moment in his life, and he doubted there was any man as content in his friendships as Hips was right now. The world was a beautiful, joyous place.
“Go check on the caravaners,” he told Marleya, while wiping a tear from his eye. “No point trying to sell them as slaves if half of them die on the route out of Toil. Make sure they’re warm enough and have water.”
