Thief

by Kris Kramer

  ***

  Hagrim showed up just before the sun rose. He was a large man, well-built, thick-chested, and extremely hairy, except for his bald head. His thick black beard started below his ears and ended somewhere around his navel. His ears were full of piercings, mostly small gold and silver loops, and at least a dozen jeweled bands on each arm, including one solid black bracelet that I guessed was made from onyx. His large eyes made him seem like he was always surprised, and I suspected they missed very little. The edges of his lips seemed to naturally curve up, making him seem friendly of all things.

  Two other men accompanied him to our little corner of the camp. One was dressed like the others in the camp, wool trousers, linen shirt, a mix of leather and chain armor and a variety of weapons arrayed on his body. He was probably one of Hagrim's lieutenants, though I never learned his name. The other was slightly taller than Hagrim, with tanned skin, long, black hair pulled back into a ponytail, a clean-shaven face, and deep black eyes. He wore a thin, silk robe covered by a thicker woolen one that seemed out of place on such a graceful figure. I'd never actually seen anyone from Ochaia, but this man appeared to fit every description I'd ever heard about them. Slavers from Ochaia were legendary because they always bought and sold in bulk. Ochaian lords had an appetite for slaves that was unrivaled since the height of the Pelorin Empire, and I began to rethink my earlier boast about escaping from whatever slaver Hagrim may send me to. The island kingdom of Ochaia was like a giant pit of quicksand - those who disappeared into those islands were rarely ever seen again.

  Hagrim crouched a bit and looked at me. “Yep. That’s him all right. No mistaking the elf in that face." He slapped at my leg. "You’re the one causing trouble in my woods?”

  “I’m not here to cause trouble. I was simply going along my merry way when I was mistakenly captured. It’s people like him,” I motioned to Riose, “who cause trouble. If not for him and his kind, you’d never even have known I was here.”

  "'His kind'?" Hagrim asked. "You mean men after a profit, like me?" I didn't say anything. I actually meant bounty hunters when I said that, but I didn't feel like explaining myself. "Fair enough," he smiled, though it was anything but inviting. “Course, if you hadn’t stolen this gem everyone’s talking about then none of us would be having this conversation, now would we?”

  “I didn’t steal it. I simply retrieved it after it was stolen from me.”

  Hagrim laughed. “I use that one a lot too. It never works for me, either.”

  “It’s not a lie.”

  “We’ll see. I don’t like it when trouble finds me like this, but I’ve never turned down easy money, either. So I’m thinking the best way to figure this out is to invite all those bounty hunters looking for you over for a little meeting. We’ll do some drinking, some eating, some laughing, and then we'll auction you off to the highest bidder."

  I tried not to groan at the thought of Arnum showing up. Or the idea that Hagrim could be more diabolical than he was letting on. “At which point you’ll just kill them all and keep the money and the gem?”

  “I ain’t that dumb, my friend. That gem ‘o yours is popular, and if I keep it then your problems become my problems, and I can’t kill everyone you got chasing after you. I’d rather take the money. It spends easier and it keeps my life simple.”

  "Do I get to make a bid?" Riose asked, and Hagrim smirked.

  "I don't know you, friend. And I don't deal with people I don't know, or who don't come recommended."

  "I'm the one who caught him."

  Hagrim shrugged. "Maybe, but right now, I'm the one who has him. And you." Hagrim nodded to the Ochaian, who crouched down next to Riose and began examining him by squeezing his arms from the shoulder on down, and then moving to his legs, working him over as if he were cattle. Riose pulled away, but the Ochaian’s hand shot out and grabbed him around the neck, and Riose froze. "I doubt anyone's gonna bid on you, though, so we may just let my friend here take you. If he likes ya."

  Riose stayed perfectly still, and I wondered if the Ochaian had some kind of death grip on his neck to keep him so compliant. The Ochaian ran his free hand through Riose’s hair, feeling his skull. Then he opened his mouth and checked his teeth of all things.

  “Half-elf, eh?" Hagrim said, ignoring the strange scene next to me. "Which one was it? Your ma or your pa?”

  “Which was the elf?" I said, distracted. The Ochaian was rubbing Riose's hands and feet now, searching for callouses, I hoped. "My mother. Why?”

  Hagrim shook his head, disappointed. “It always is. Never once met one of you sired from a woman who’d taken an elf to her bed. Not once. I hear about it, but show me the case where it’s true.”

  What the hell was he talking about? Leave it to a backwoods bandit to worry about whether a human raped an elf or the other way around. “Yeah, it’s a real mystery.”

  The Ochaian finished his molestation of Riose and he moved to me. When I started to pull away, he grabbed my neck too, and I figured out why Riose had stopped struggling. The Ochaian had a literal death grip on us. The ring on his little finger had a small blade protruding from the back. Once his hand wrapped around my neck, a twist of his wrist is all it would take to cut my throat. The Ochaian did the same to me that he’d done to Riose, squeezing the vast majority of my body, including between my legs. It was one of the most demeaning things I’d ever been through, and I only managed to keep my composure by silently memorizing his face. He didn’t know it, but he was next on the list of people to die.

  When he finished, the Ochaian stood, nodded to Hagrim and walked away.

  "I thought you were auctioning me off to the bounty hunters?" I said.

  "I am.” Hagrim smiled. “But he gets a bid, too."