by Alex Bledsoe
Liz was trim, with short red hair and freckles. She was also smart, brave, and tough, which she had to be since she ran a courier business that took her all over. She knew how the world worked, and how to navigate it.
She said, “You don’t really think you’re going to find him after all this time, do you?”
“It’s unlikely.”
“Then you’re just taking Angie’s money.”
“I’m taking her money to look. And I will, as hard as I can, and as long as I think there’s any point. She knows there aren’t any guarantees.”
Liz looked at me from beneath unruly bangs. It was a look that tended to make me agree with anything. “Is it a good idea to work for a friend?”
“I thought about that. I think it’ll be okay. I also think,” I added as casually as possible, “that I’m going to bring Jane Argo in on this.”
Liz sat up, tossed her bangs from her face, and set her jaw. I knew that look, too. “Really,” she said flatly.
“Yeah. She was a pirate hunter before she turned sword jockey, you know.”
“And she was a pirate before that.”
“Well, I’m looking for a pirate. It’s her area of expertise, not mine.”
“Is she still married to that worthless little weasel?”
“Miles? As far as I know.”
“Didn’t you have to go pull him out of one of Gordon Marantz’s gambling houses last year?”
“Yep. Didn’t change a thing.”
“Amazing how some people can have such huge blind spots.” I didn’t say anything. Jane Argo knew exactly what her husband was; she just didn’t care. She loved him. It couldn’t be explained rationally. Not by Jane, certainly not by me.
Liz continued, “I can trust you on a long trip alone with her, then. Right?”
“She’s a colleague, that’s all.”
“But suppose your ship sinks and you get washed up on some desert island, just the two of you…” she teased.
“Do you want to come along?”
“Kinky. But I can’t. I have to take a bunch of scrolls to the Society of Scribes archive in Algoma.”
“Then you’ll just have to trust me.”
She grinned. “It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?”
We both laughed. We drank some more wine. Then we abandoned our dinner for more intimate activities.
Sometime before dawn, I got up and walked out onto the landing. The stairs leading up to our apartment went down the side of the building, and I saw a lamp burning in old Mrs. Talbot’s rooms on the ground floor. Neceda’s riverside location gave her the perfect means to receive and dispose of stolen property, and it was no secret that she did so. Still, she was discreet, and I had no interest in knowing her business. She gave me the same consideration.
The clouds were beginning to break at last. I caught glimpses of stars behind the irregular blobs. Neceda was asleep; even the whore houses and taverns were silent. Liz snored lightly, femininely, in the room behind me.
“Hey, what you doing up there?”
I looked down. Mrs. Talbot stood at the foot of the steps in a shapeless, too-short nightgown. At her age, I assumed it was for comfort against the heat and humidity. At least I hoped it was. I said, “Just thinking.”
She took the pipe from her teeth and said, “About what?”
“Pirates,” I answered honestly.
She laughed. “They’re bad luck, you know.”
“How so?”
“My second husband was a pirate.”
“No. Really?”
“Sure as the moon in the night sky. Not a very good one, though. He lost a foot during a boarding, but he still got his share of the loot. Name a navy that would do that for him.”
“What finally happened to him?”
“Got his peg leg stuck in the mud making a run for it ashore. A soldier cut him down and trampled him. That wooden leg was the only way I could tell it was him.”
Chuckling, she went back inside. I heard male voices muttering before the door closed.
I looked up at the stars. Finding one pirate after twenty years was a lot like picking one star out of this sky. Just when you thought you had it, a cloud slid by and you had to start all over when it passed.
My star was Edward Tew. And my cloud was the two decades that separated us.
Chapter Two
Jane Argo looked at me down the length of her sword. Her arm was fully extended and her feet spread wide for balance. From my perspective, I saw her face reflected upside down in the blade, distorted a bit by the accumulated nicks and dings. Sunlight sparkled from the numerous rings on her fingers. A strand of hair drifted into her eyes, but she didn’t blink. Neither did I-the sword’s tip was right at my throat.
I was hyperconscious of everything around me: the wind in the trees, the splash of a fish in the lake, a woodpecker’s persistent knocking. Sweat trickled down my forehead. Not many men survived seeing Jane Argo from this angle. Offhand, I’d put the count at “none.”
With a flick of her wrist, Jane knocked the bee from my collar and slapped it to the ground. She crushed it beneath the sole of one knee-high leather boot. “There.”
My voice sounded reasonably normal when I said, “Thanks, but I could’ve just slapped it away myself, you know.”
“Ah, where’s the fun in that?” She looked at her sword longingly. “Was a time I could’ve sliced it in half before it hit the dirt.”
“No, you couldn’t,” I said, wiping the sweat from my eye.
She laughed. If you spent any significant time with her, you realized she laughed a lot, and her voice was incongruously high-pitched and girlish for someone her size. She was my height, busty and wide-hipped but with a wasp-narrow waist. Her broad shoulders were as muscular as a galley slave’s, and she wore a large ring on every finger. Her hair fell past her shoulders, and only the faint streaks of gray in it and slightly deeper smile lines indicated that she was older than she sounded. “Yeah, you’re right, but it’s nice to pretend we once had a mythical prime, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. I tried not to pretend about anything, but that didn’t mean Jane couldn’t.
She turned to the young man tied to a nearby tree. He was scruffy, unshaven, and his clothes were often-patched rags. “So what did you think of my little trick?”
He glared at us and said nothing. The anger in his eyes was plenty loud, though.
“Kids these days are just so hard to impress,” she said as she put away her sword. She wore a sleeveless tunic that showed off her shoulders and barely contained her bosom. She picked up the cape she perpetually wore in any weather and buckled the clasp around her neck.
I’d stopped by Jane’s home, where her no-account husband, Miles, told me I’d find her on the road to Barre Dumoth, escorting a prisoner for trial. Miles was under house arrest, Jane Argo style-his right ankle was chained to a huge rock in the middle of the cottage floor, with just enough slack to reach the out house. Given Miles’s penchant for drinking, gambling, and whoring, I thought it a wise precaution. I ignored him when he tried to bribe me to set him free.
I caught up with Jane and her prisoner in the middle of the forest, and we stopped by a lake to discuss my case. As we talked, a mule-drawn wagon driven by a white-haired old man made its slow way past on the narrow road behind us.
“So you’re going to sea,” she said as she settled the cape around her shoulders.
“Seems like the best place to look for a pirate.”
“And his name is Edward Tew?”
“That’s what he told my client. Don’t know if that was his real name, or just what he called himself. Ever heard of him?”
“There’s a lot of pirates in the world. What about his treasure?”
“What treasure?”
“Come on, you expect me to believe there’s not a treasure involved? Nobody searches for a pirate just for the hell of it.”
“If there is a treasure, I’m not being paid to find it,
and I’m not interested in it. Only the guy.”
“Assuming you’re not bullshitting me about the lack of a treasure, why would you even take a job like this, anyway? It’s hard enough to find someone who’s been gone a week, if they really want to stay hidden. Two decades…”
“I like the challenge.”
She laughed again and skipped a stone across the lake, getting an impressive six bounces. “Knowing you, Eddie, I’m guessing this is a favor for a friend. I’d say a girl friend, but I can’t picture that skinny ginger-hair of yours ever tumbling with a sailor.”
“Funny-I can picture Miles doing it.”
That made her laugh even more, until we simultaneously noticed that the mule-drawn cart had stopped in the middle of the road, and its white-haired driver was nowhere in sight. Neither was Jane’s prisoner. The ropes that had bound him to the tree lay in a pile across the knobby roots.
There was no exchange of words, no You go that way, I’ll go this way. We simply drew our swords, she headed up to the road, and I ran into the forest.
I found them first. The prisoner led the way through underbrush still slick from the recent rain, and the older man tried to keep up. Mainly for Jane’s benefit, I shouted, “Stop right there! No need for anybody to get hurt!”
The two men froze halfway up a slight rise. The older one leaned on the nearest tree and gasped for breath. The younger one said, “I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I don’t care,” I said, continuing to move toward them. I held the tip of my sword up so it wouldn’t snag on anything. I knew Jane would locate me by my voice, and I wanted to keep their attention on me. “That’s not my problem.”
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” the young man demanded. “You show up, you jump into the middle of something that’s not any of your business-”
“If you don’t surrender now, I’m the guy who’s going to see what color your intestines are.” I sliced through a hanging tangle of vines for emphasis. “That’s more of a chance than Jane Argo would give you.”
“He’s right, son, give up,” the older man croaked. “We tried our best. We’ll have to trust in Lord Corrett’s conscience.”
“Like hell,” the younger man said, and was about to turn and run, when Jane’s sword suddenly slipped under his chin.
“I don’t like hell, since you mention it,” she said as she grabbed him by the hair. “But I’ll probably go there anyway. Now, don’t move. Pops, get over here and tie your son’s wrists. Do a good job of it and I won’t have to hamstring him.”
“He’s innocent,” the older man insisted, the words barely getting out. He was a disturbing shade of red, and seemed to be having no luck catching his breath.
“Then he’s the one man in the world who is,” Jane said. “Now, do what I say. Please, for everyone’s sake, okay? You’re both out of your league here. Eddie and I do this for a living.”
The old man tried to say something else, but he had no wind left. His eyes rolled back and he collapsed beside the tree, rolling down the slight slope to land in the wet leaves at my feet.
I stuck my sword in the ground and knelt over him. I heard Jane tell his son, “Stay put. If you so much as think about running away, I’ll catch you and geld you before sundown.”
Then she was on her knees on the other side of the fallen man. She bent and put her ear to his mouth, listening for breath. When she found none, she put her lips over the old man’s and repeatedly blew hard into his lungs.
Meanwhile, I ripped open his tunic to expose his pale, still- muscular chest. I put my palm flat over his heart and felt nothing. I drove my fist into the back of my hand, trying to get his heart going again, just as a moon priestess once showed me on a battlefield. Sometimes this worked; most of the time it didn’t. And it was tricky not to break a rib and puncture a lung. But any chance was better than none.
And in this case, luck was with us. After the third whack, his whole body spasmed and he began to cough. Jane looked back at his son, still standing where she’d left him. “Go get the canteen off my saddle. And no funny stuff.”
He left, while Jane and I helped the old man sit up. He was now a bad shade of pale blue, and I knew we’d just stirred the coals and not really restoked the furnace. “My son didn’t do anything wrong,” he wheezed. I admired his tenacity. “He’s innocent, I tell you.”
“Look, pops, let it go,” Jane said patiently. “It’s not for us to say. My job is to take him from point A to point B, that’s all. Guilt or innocence is way above my pay grade.”
He looked at me. “And you?”
“I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”
The son returned with the canteen, and his father sipped from it. The younger man looked at Jane and said, “Now what?”
“Well, now we take pops back home and make sure he’s comfortable, then we finish taking you to jail.”
“How can you do that? You taking me to jail is what nearly killed him!”
Jane jumped up, grabbed the front of his tunic, and yanked him nose to nose. “I’ve about had it with you simpering barn swallows questioning my ethics. What nearly killed pops here was running uphill after cutting you loose.” She shoved him back. “Now, if you want to help take him home, pick him up and carry him to his wagon. If you don’t, you can just stay here tied to a tree until we come back. It’s your call, so make it. Now! ”
Sensibly, the boy gently picked up his father. He might really have been innocent of whatever crime he was accused of, but as Jane said, that wasn’t her problem. And that was what I liked about her. She looked at the world the same way I did, and operated under the same rules.
After we delivered the old man back home, where his wife shed copious tears both for his return and her son’s imminent departure, we took the boy on to Barre Dumoth. We arrived at sunset.
It was an old manor town, where the population lived and died at the pleasure of the lord, who owned everything. There weren’t many of these left in Muscodia, and the ones that remained fiercely guarded their power. We had to wait while the sentries at the town gate sent a message ahead to Lord Corrett.
When we got to the jail, Corett was waiting under the watchful gaze of two bulky, out-of-shape bodyguards. He was a tall, smooth- faced man with bad taste in expensive clothes. He regarded Jane with contempt as he paid her for her job, individually doling out each gold coin.
When he finished, Jane smiled and said, “Pleasure doing business with you.”
The nearest bodyguard jabbed her shoulder with his fingers and prompted, “My lord.”
Jane’s glare could’ve melted rock. “Poke me again, lard bucket, and I’ll fold you up so you can lick your balls like a dog.”
“The prisoner is ensconced in his cell?” Corrett asked in a blase near-yawn. His voice was like the tines of a fork scraping across a plate.
“Yes, sir,” the jailer said. He stood at attention beside the cell door and gestured inside. The young man sat on the straw, rubbing at the metal collar clamped around his neck. When he saw Corrett, the boy hissed, “Proud of yourself, my lord?” He spat the last two words.
“My pride has nothing to do with this.”
“This is all about your pride! Elaine prefers me to a driedup prick like you, and your ego can’t stand it!”
“Gag him,” Corrett said with a casual wave of his hand. The jailer pretended not to hear.
I asked Corrett, “What exactly did he do?”
“He stole my best horse, not that it’s any concern of yours.” His accent on the final word carried enough contempt to bury a man standing up. He gestured at the portly escorts. “My guards found it tied outside his hovel.”
“That’s bullshit!” the boy yelled. “They planted that horse and you know it!”
“Gag him,” Corrett said again, enunciating each word. “And now you must excuse me, I have a young woman to visit. She’ll be delighted to learn that this rascal will no longer be forcing his attentions on her.”
&n
bsp; He and his entourage swept from the jail. The jailer sighed, took the uncomfortable-looking leather gag from its wall hook, and opened the cell.
Jane watched the jailer buckle it around the boy’s head. She asked quietly, “You really didn’t steal that horse, did you?”
The boy shook his head. Drool already trailed down his chin.
“Course he didn’t,” the jailer said as he emerged from the cell. “Doesn’t matter, though. Man like Corrett can do what he wants with us commoners. He even owns the boots on our feet.”
He froze when he felt the tip of Jane’s dagger at his throat. I took the keys from his belt and went to unlock the gag. He raised his hands and said, “Just beat me up so it looks like I put up a fight, okay? I need this job.”
Later, as we sat in the nearest tavern, we heard the commotion when the jailbreak was discovered. There was lots of shouting, and eventually a half-dozen men on horseback tore out of town.
All innocence, Jane asked a stooped, bearded man who’d just entered, “Wow, what happened out there?”
“Horse thief escaped,” he said. “Beat up Clyde over at the jail. Lord Corrett’s guards went after him, but it looks like he’s got a good head start.”
Jane thanked him, then raised her ale mug in a toast and said softly, “To the good guys.”
“If only there were more than just me and you,” I added as we clinked mugs and drank.
“Guess we won’t be coming back to Barre Dumoth for a while,” Jane said. “So now I’m on your payroll. We’re looking for a pirate, who may or may not be dead, somewhere in the whole wide wet world. Where do we start, boss?”
“At the scene of the crime,” I said. “Where he met my client.”
Chapter Three
As we rode away from the Argo cottage, Miles watched us from the door. Jane had unchained him, since we had no idea how long we’d be away. Neither he, she, nor I harbored any delusions about what he’d be up to in her absence. When he was out of sight, Jane asked, “Since I’m working for you now, trying to find a long-lost pirate and his treasure, shouldn’t you tell me who our client is?”
