by J. S. Volpe
* * *
When Illyana and Luornu re-entered the tavern, Moe, the only person who hadn’t rushed outside, stood behind the bar drying a mug with a filthy rag. He was an obese, balding man known for his utter imperturbability. He calmly went about his business even when his patrons were beating each other senseless. As long as their coins ended up in his pockets by the end of the night, he didn’t give a shit what they did to each other.
He looked up at Illyana and Luornu without raising his head. The rag squeaked as it circled around the inside of the mug. Aside from that and the snap and pop of the fire, the bar was unnaturally silent. Half-empty mugs still sat on the abandoned tables. A couple of chairs had been knocked over in the stampede to the door. Luornu immediately went to work setting them upright. Illyana made no move to help her. She simply stood there just inside the doorway, gazing thoughtfully at the floor, her arms folded across her chest.
“So what happened?” Moe said.
Luornu cast a worried glance at the door and said, “Bastard Jack killed all the horses out there. Those poor horses.” She sounded as if she were about to start crying.
Moe raised his head and then his eyebrows. He pursed his lips. “They still there?”
“The horses?” Illyana said without taking her eyes from the floor. “Yeah. Everyone took off to try to get the gold before anyone else could. They just left the horses lying there.”
“Huh.” He nodded slowly. “I can sell ‘em to the butcher, then.”
“What’re you gonna do with him?” Illyana nodded at Ichabod Quackenbush’s corpse.
Moe shrugged. “Butcher ain’t choosy.”
Luornu gasped. “You wouldn’t!”
“Yeah he would,” Illyana said. She eyed her boss for a moment as he set the mug aside and started wiping another one, then she strode forward and grabbed Luornu by the arm. “Come on,” she whispered.
“What? Where?”
“Just come on.”
Illyana led her into the storeroom at the back of the bar. She lit a lantern that hung on a hook next to the door. The dim yellow light illuminated dusty mugs on worm-eaten shelves, a heap of rags on an empty barrel, a line of broken chairs. Mice scrabbled softly in the shadows.
“What’s going on?” Luornu said. “We still need to clean off the tables and—”
Illyana smiled. Luornu shrank back. She had seen that impish smile before. It usually meant Illyana was entertaining some devious idea, one that would probably wind up causing a lot more trouble than it was worth. Last time Illyana had that look she wound up dosing a particularly offensive customer’s ale with mesko root, a natural and extremely powerful laxative. The results had been briefly amusing in a low-brow kind of way, and thankfully no one realized the source of the customer’s sudden, explosive incontinence, but when all the devious fun was over someone still had to clean up the mucky, nasty mess, and which two individuals do you think Moe assigned that particular task to?
“We’re gonna go after that gold ourselves,” Illyana said.
“What?” Luornu glanced around the room as if she hoped there were someone else present who would constitute the other half of Illyana’s “we.”
“You heard me. This is our ticket out of this shit-hole.”
“But—but—” Luornu shook her head. “What about our jobs?”
“Fuck our jobs.”
Luornu’s eyes went wide and she clapped a hand over her mouth. She’d heard Illyana say some outrageous things before, but this surpassed them all.
“But—”
“Look, do you want to spend the rest of your life getting pawed by drunk assholes?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
“If we get that gold, we can do pretty much whatever we want. We can retire and live like queens. We can hire guys so we can grab their asses if we want.”
Luornu emitted a snorting laugh at that image, then looked startled and almost horrified that she had done so.
“But how are we supposed to get the gold in the first place?” she said. “There’ll be all those other people after it. Crazy, violent people. We don’t stand a chance against them.”
Illyana clamped her hands on Luornu’s shoulders and looked her in the eye.
“Look,” she said, “we don’t stand any chance if we don’t at least try. And honestly, I’m convinced we stand a better chance than you think. I mean, think about it: They’ll be at each other’s throats so much they probably won’t even notice a couple of ‘lowly’ barmaids. We can just sort of slink along in the background and let them pick each other off one by one, then swoop in and snatch the loot at the last moment.”
“But if we don’t, if it doesn’t work, we won’t have anything. We won’t even have jobs to come back to. Moe isn’t gonna keep our jobs vacant in case we ever decide to show up again.”
Illyana gasped in exasperation. “First of all, that is completely the wrong attitude. It will work. Think positive. Second of all, there’re always jobs for barmaids. It’s not like you need special qualifications beyond a full set of working limbs and a nice ass.”
Luornu thought it over, unconsciously chewing her lower lip while nervously twining a lock of her brown hair round and round her left index finger.
Finally she sighed and wobbled her head about in a sort of reluctant indication of agreement. “Okay. I guess. I don’t know how I let you talk me into these things.”
Illyana took her arm again. “Come on, then. Let’s get our stuff together and go. Those fuckers have a head start on us.” She led Luornu out into the main room of the tavern and toward the front door.
“We quit,” Illyana announced as they strode past Moe. Beside her Luornu winced and looked as if she wanted to shrink down into nonexistence.
Moe just nodded without looking up from the mug he was wiping off. “Thought you might. I’ll start interviewing new girls in the morning.”
Illyana had meant to breeze right out the door and march off to her fortune, but at the door she stopped and turned to Moe with a frown.
“How come you’re not going too? I mean, you’re the only one who isn’t.”
Moe finished cleaning off the mug, set it on the bar-top, draped the rag over his shoulder with a flick of his wrist, and fixed his insufferably calm gaze on the two girls. He tilted his head toward the front of the bar, the direction everyone else was going, the direction of Ghost Gulch and the gold.
“All them guys, only one of ‘em’s gonna get that gold. The rest—at least the ones who don’t wind up dead—they’ll come crawling back to drown their sorrows in a mug of ale just like they always do. And the coins they give me might not be gold, but you add ‘em up, ale after ale, night after night, sorrow after sorrow, and they eventually turn into gold.” He smiled serenely and patted a bulging pouch that hung from his belt. It chinged.
Illyana and Luornu looked at each other, blinking. Then Illyana’s eyes narrowed, and she turned back to Moe and said, “Yeah, but see, the thing is, some night one of those guys is gonna figure that out and be waiting for you and your money-pouch with a big ol’ knife come closing time.” She flashed him a smile about as sharp as that big ol’ knife would likely be, then dragged Luornu out the door.
