Leomin bowed his head in pleased agreement and soon he was following the small man inside. “That’s amazing,” Caleb breathed, staring after the Parnen with wide eyes.
“Yeah,” Aaron said, rubbing at his temples as he moved toward the door, “amazing.”
Once they were all inside, Aaron closed the door behind them. A woman sat on the bed in what appeared to be a silk robe, the bottom of which came to about halfway down her thigh. She was pretty, with long blonde hair and blue eyes, but there was a coldness to her gaze as was often present in women who sold their bodies for coin. She stared at the three newcomers warily, her arms folded over her ample chest. “I don’t like this, Bert,” she said, “you said not to let anybody in, not anyone. Now these three here show up, and you just open the door as if you’ve not a care in the world.”
“But this is different, Carla,” he said, turning to her, a smile on his face, “these are friends.”
“The way you acted when you came by a week ago, it didn’t seem like you had a friend in the world you’d trust,” the woman said, unconvinced, “and these don’t look like friends any sane person would want to have, you ask me. I mean, look, that one there’s bleeding.” She pointed a thin, painted fingernail at Aaron.
“He usually is,” Caleb blurted, grinning widely as Leomin laughed.
“Trust me, Carla, it will be okay … won’t it?” he asked, turning to Leomin, a touch of uncertainty entering his eyes.
“You have nothing to fear from us, Bert,” Leomin said, smiling reassuringly.
“You see?” Bert said to the woman. “Nothing to fear. You heard it out of his own mouth.”
The woman scowled, “I’ve heard plenty of things out of plenty of men’s mouths, Berty. That doesn’t make them true. When I was younger, I had a man tell me about how he’d grown rich from the shipping industry, told me about all his nice and fancy things, then took me to bed. After that, I never heard from him again until I went searching and found that he lived in the poor district with his mother.” She shook her head. “Just because a man says a thing doesn’t mean it’s true.”
Leomin started to speak, but Aaron held up a hand, silencing him. “You’re right, Carla,” he said, “it doesn’t. Men lie, and I won’t pretend that I’m any different. But I would like to point out that if we did mean Bert any harm, the harm would have already been done. Men who come in the night to a man’s room meaning him harm don’t sit around and talk about it.”
“Well,” she said, “that makes sense at least, though I can’t say as it’s any comfort.”
“The truth rarely is,” Aaron agreed.
“Carla,” Bert said, his voice taking on a wheedling tone, “why don’t you go downstairs for a bit, maybe have a drink? I know you’ve probably got tired of being stuck in this room with me for the last week.”
The woman shrugged, rising from the bed. “It’s your coin and your affair, Bert,” she said. She made her way to a closet in the corner of the room, stripping off her silk robe as she did and displaying the nakedness that had hidden underneath. She reached in and pulled out a dress that—from what Aaron could see as she slid it on—didn’t cover much more than the robe had.
He turned and saw the youth, Caleb, watching her with eyes so wide it was a wonder he couldn’t see the back of his own head. The youth didn’t so much as blink, as if he was terrified of missing anything, and Aaron couldn’t help but smile. “Anyway,” the woman said, turning back and not showing the least surprise to see everyone in the room staring at her, “it’s your life, Bert. I can’t tell you how to spend it.”
“I’ll see you soon, Carla,” the thin man said.
The woman gave a small shrug as she slipped on some shoes. Then she walked toward the door, opening it. “I hope so, Bert,” she said, glancing back at him, “you were always one of the nice ones.” Then she was gone, closing the door behind her.
The thin man looked at the three strangers, blinking as if seeing them for the first time, a tremor in his legs that made it seem as if they would give out at any moment. “H-how um…how can I help you, gentlemen?”
“Relax, Bert,” Aaron said, motioning to the bed, “sit down before you fall down. We haven’t come to hurt you—that was the truth. We just have some questions for you.”
“A-alright,” Bert said, walking over and sitting stiffly on the bed, trying to watch all three of them at once. “What um…what can I do for you?”
“A few weeks ago,” Aaron said, “you were in a tavern and you told the barkeep, Nathan, a story about something you’d witnessed. Do you remember that?”
“M-maybe,” the thin man said, swallowing hard, “b-but sometimes when I drink, I say things. I can’t be sure of what I might have told him.”
“Well, Bert, you told him that you saw the blacksmith, Odel, get attacked by two men. You said that you saw a big man in a cloak carry Odel away over his shoulder. Is that true?”
The man wiped a hand at his sweaty forehead and shook his head slowly. “No, I don’t…Oh, you know what?” he said, giving a sickly smile. “It must have been a joke I told him, that’s all. Just a way to try to mess with Nathan. I do that sometimes—tell jokes. I didn’t see anything, I swear. I just made it up, you know, to get a laugh.”
Sitting there sweating, his face as pale as a sheet of parchment, the man looked to Aaron like he’d never told a joke in his life. Or heard one for that matter. “Bert, we haven’t come to hurt you, alright? We just want the truth, that’s all. Once you tell us what you can, we’ll leave, and you can go on about your night.”
“Y-you swear?” the thin man said, meeting his eyes.
Aaron nodded, holding his gaze. “I swear.”
“A-alright,” Bert said, and he seemed to gain some bit of confidence, “well, I did see something, saw it just as I told Nathan, but he wouldn’t believe me. The truth is, I’ve never seen a man as big as the one I saw carrying Odel. I liked Odel—we’d talk sometimes, when I was coming home from work, and he was getting ready to leave his shop for the day. He was nice. A lot of big guys usually aren’t—I’ve had my fair share of experience with that, believe me, but he was. I didn’t like seeing that,” he said sadly, “the way the man was carrying him. And Odel was all bloody, as if he’d been in a fight.”
“If that’s true, Bert,” Aaron said, “then why didn’t you go to the city guard? Surely, they would have done something.”
The thin man was shaking his head before Aaron was finished. “No way. I’m not the only one that’s seen things, even known a man or two that did. They went to see the city guards, and no one has seen them since. No,” he repeated, his head still moving from side to side, “not me. Whoever is out there, taking people, they also take people who see things. They come for them, snatching them out of their homes and their lives, and they’re never seen again.” He paused, his eyes welling with tears. “And I’m next. They’re going to get me next.”
“Relax, Bert,” Aaron said. “They’ve not got you yet, and you were right to hide. But tell me, if you were so scared, why didn’t you leave Baresh altogether?”
“I wanted to,” the thin man said, “gods, how I wanted to. But, well, you may not believe this, but sometimes I’ve got a little bit of a reputation for…overreacting. For…being afraid.”
Aaron had no problem at all believing it, but he only nodded. “Go on.”
“Well,” Bert said, “the thing is, I knew what I saw, and I even walked by Odel’s shop the next few days—I figured that was safe enough as I always did when I came home from work—but I would always look for him. Normally around that time Odel would be getting ready to leave himself, in which case I’d often run into him coming out of his shop. Unless he was working late, in which case I’d still be able to see the smoke from the forge he uses, but I didn’t see either for those days, and I knew that I hadn’t imagined it, knew that it was true and he’d been taken.”
“Yet you didn’t leave,” Leomin observed.
“No
,” Bert said in a voice that was almost a moan, “no, and I’m a gods-cursed fool for not doing it. It was just, I needed to be sure, you understand? I didn’t want to think that, you know, maybe I’d just overreacted. I was hoping that if I could find some proof that people would believe me.”
“So what did you do, Bert?” Aaron asked, his sense of urgency growing. The woman downstairs hadn’t called the city guard yet—those who lived in a city’s poor district tended to avoid such things—but sooner or later she would decide that it would be better to have the guard poking their noses into her business than having Aaron and the others there, and they had to be gone before then.
“There’s a guy I know,” Bert said, “or, well, used to. He’d sometimes come into the office where I worked. A big man. Mean too,” he said, frowning, “but, then, they usually are. Anyway,” he shrugged, “he’d always come in with several guys with him—sailors they were, you could tell it by the way they talked and dressed, wearing sleeveless shirts and walking the way they often do, as if their legs are never really comfortable on land after so long at sea.”
“Nathan, Odel the blacksmith, and now this other,” Aaron said. “Bert, just how many freakishly big men do you know? What do you do, go looking for them?”
The thin man smiled, but there was little humor in it. “I know more than I’d like, sir. Many more. And when you’re a small, thin man, prematurely balding, living in the poor district with a voice that sounds slightly feminine no matter what you do to change it, you don’t have to go looking to find such men as that—more often than not, they find you. Usually in a tavern or when you’re walking down the street alone. They like to make a big show of pushing you around, giving their friends something to laugh about. It’s the reason I always went to Nathan’s tavern—he was always kind, and he’d never let others harass me while I was there.”
The thin man frowned. “That didn’t stop them from waiting for me in the street, though. Why is it,” he said, his voice both curious and hurt at the same time, “that the strong insist on targeting the weak? You would think they would like to match themselves against each other, to figure out who the best really is.”
“Because the weak are easier,” Aaron said, “that’s all. Men like that, Bert, they don’t want to be the best—they just want to think they are. Now, let’s get back to your story.”
“Fine,” Bert said, taking a deep breath as if to steady himself, “anyway, Decker—that’s the sailor—was strong, and it wasn’t just a show. They have a fair here every year with a variety of games and prizes to win, and one of those games is a competition to see who can lift a barrel filled with the most bricks. Decker always competes and, for the last five years, he’s always won. I needed proof and, besides, Odel had been a friend. So I thought…” He hesitated, shrugging, staring at his feet as if embarrassed.
“So you thought that if strong people really were being taken, you could wait and watch Decker and sooner or later whoever had taken Odel would come for him,” Aaron finished.
Bert swallowed. “Yes.”
Aaron stared at the man before him. A thin, frail-looking man with eyes that seemed unsteady in their sockets and a pale face that wore a perpetual grimace, as if he’d learned early on that life was a raw deal, and the world was always waiting for its chance to pull the rug out from under you. The type of man that looked as if he was always on the verge of running—more a rabbit than a man. Yet this same man had witnessed something terrible and, instead of fleeing as his instincts no doubt would have begged him to, he’d not just stayed, but put himself into a position where he might not only witness the same thing again, but also be taken himself. It had taken balls to do that, more than Aaron would have credited him with. Stupidity too, of course. But balls.
People, I have found, Co said in his mind, are always much more complex than they may at first appear. You can never truly know them.
It’s more than that, firefly, Aaron thought back, we can never really know ourselves. “So what happened?”
Bert rubbed a hand across his mouth. “I took a week off from work. I haven’t taken a day off in years, so my boss didn’t give me too much trouble about it. You wouldn’t think it from looking at me, but I rarely get sick. Anyway,” he said hurriedly, apparently noting the impatience in Aaron’s expression, “I went to the docks and found the boat that Decker worked on with his friends. And I…well, I followed him.”
Aaron grunted. The man was surprising him more and more. “Then what happened?”
“Nothing at first,” the thin man said, his face taking on a haunted look, “and I was just thinking that maybe I was crazy after all, planning to give it all up. But on the third night …” He swallowed hard, his face growing visibly paler as if even the memory of what he had witnessed terrified him.
“Go on, Bert,” Leomin said, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder, “it’s alright.”
The thin man nodded, taking a slow, shuddering breath before continuing. “On the third night, Decker and some of his friends were in a tavern drinking. I stayed outside, figuring that whoever had been taking the men wouldn’t come for him in a crowded tavern. And I was right,” he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head, “but gods, how I wish I hadn’t been. After a while, Decker left the tavern with his friends and one by one they split off to go to their homes or wherever they spend their nights, until finally I was following Decker and him only.”
The man paused, grabbing a half-full glass of water from where it sat on the nightstand by the bed and downing it in one large gulp. “I followed him to his home, a small place close enough to the docks that he could walk to them without trouble.” He paused, glancing up at the others. “I know you must think me a fool, following the very man who has been tormenting me for years and doing so at night in the poorest part of the city but, you see, I had to know. And…maybe it was more than that, too. For those three days following Decker, I didn’t feel as weak and afraid as I always have. Oh, sure, I was still terrified. Terrified that Decker or one of his friends would see me, or that whoever—whatever—had taken Odel would come and take me if for no other reason than that I would be a witness to what had happened, but I also felt…it’s hard to explain.”
“You felt in control,” Aaron said.
“Yes,” Bert said, his head bobbing up and down quickly, “that’s exactly it. It was as if, for once, I wasn’t the one being targeted, being hunted. It was like…” He paused, shrugging. “Anyway, Decker had been inside for five minutes, no more than that, and I was just getting ready to go home myself, maybe get something to eat first. I don’t guess any of you have done something like this before, but following someone is hard work, and I was always afraid to stop to eat for fear that I would lose him.”
Bert waved a hand, shaking his head in frustration. “That doesn’t matter. What matters is that I was just about to leave when I saw two figures walking down the street in front of Decker’s house. At first, I thought that they were just some other sailors or men coming home from a long night at the tavern, but neither of them looked drunk. Instead, they seemed to be walking with a purpose, as if they were men who were out in the night on a very particular mission.”
He swallowed hard. “It was a dark night, but the moon was up in full. I had hidden in a back alley, crouching behind a pile of trash that had been sitting there for the gods knew how long, the smell so strong that I nearly puked just sitting there. But then the men stepped out of the shadows and, by the moonlight, I noticed the impossible size of one of the two, at least as big, if not bigger, than the man I saw take Odel. He was cloaked, and I couldn’t make out any of the features of his face, but no cloak could hide that kind of size, and they both paused in front of Decker’s house, looking around as if to see if anyone shared the street with them. Smell or not,” he said, a shamed look appearing on his face, “I burrowed down into that pile of trash as much as I could and as quietly as I could.”
The man buried his face in his hands and,
for a minute, the only sound was that of his quiet sobs. Leomin glanced at Aaron, a sad expression on his face, and started toward the thin man, but it was Caleb who got there first, sitting on the bed beside Bert and patting him on the shoulder. “It’s okay, Mr. Bert,” he said softly, “what you did was very brave.”
Bert glanced up, his face covered in tears and a runner of snot hanging from one nostril. “Really?”
“Really,” Caleb said, smiling. “I think that I would have peed my pants.”
Bert smiled at that, the kid’s innocent, kind face doing what the other men could not have, setting him at ease. “I won’t say it wasn’t close,” he said, half-laughing as he wiped his face with the sleeve of his shirt.
“I’ll bet,” the youth said, his eyes wide. “What happened then? Did you run? I would have run.”
“No,” Bert said, “I didn’t run. I just…waited. And watched. The two men walked up to Decker’s door, and the one—the big one—he reached out. I thought at first that he meant to knock, but he didn’t knock at all. Or, at least, not the way normal men knock. Instead, he reached out and laid one hand on the door, and it broke off the frame, falling into the house. I heard the crash from where I crouched in the alley, and the two men walked inside. A moment later, I heard Decker shout, angry, and there was another crash, and the shouting stopped.” He paused, swallowing. “It all happened so fast,” he said, shaking his head, “the men couldn’t have been in his house for more than a minute, maybe two, and then they were walking out, the cloaked figure carrying Decker over his shoulder like he weighed nothing. Decker’s shout had been pretty loud and, at first, I thought that someone would come out, that they would check on him.” He shook his head sadly. “But either they didn’t hear or they didn’t want to help, because nobody came.”
Oh, they heard alright, Aaron thought, but hearing and acting on what you hear are two very different things.
“Anyway,” Bert said, staring at Caleb now as if the other two weren’t even in the room, “I waited until they were further down the street and then I…I followed them.”
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