That's what you get for trying to sting me, he told it with his eyes.
"Um, good sir?"
The insect's last legs came off, and it fell to the table in a half-living exoskeletal heap. Derek stared at it a little longer, watching it twitch, and then looked up at the inquiring mercenary seated across from him. The world outside of that infernal little creature came back into focus. The inside of the Bentley trading post, the small company of manhunters across from him, the free-length hair of the four company members. There was the smell of cheap pipe tobacco in the air, the kind that didn't grow next to the Fade. Derek had grown tobacco once; knowing the difference had been the line between praise and a tanning more than once. He’d even been brought to this same place as a child to learn about more exotic goods.
"Are … " Hadley, the leader of the mercenaries, frowned. "Are you going to kill it?"
"It'll be dead in a minute,” Derek said shortly. “You were saying?"
Derek spotted another beetle on the ground near the bench. He reached down and gripped it between two fingers at its sides so it couldn't bite him. He placed it on the table in front of him, holding it so it couldn't see the other beetle's corpse. He held it very still while the conversation continued, not hurting it but not letting it go anywhere either.
The mercenary cleared his throat. "We were discussing money, sir. Also, are you sure you don’t want anything for that bruise on your face?"
"I told you, it’s insignificant,” Derek said, in the face of the evidence. “We already talked about money. I agreed to your gouge of a price. And don't call me 'sir', either. I work for a living."
Hadley seemed distracted by the person he was dealing with. He didn't seem so much afraid of Derek as fascinated. Derek didn't want to be feared, and he certainly didn't want to fascinate a fighting man. He just wanted respect, and if he didn't get it soon, they were going to learn more than one lesson his father taught him.
"I see," the mercenary said. "Is 'mister' alright?"
"'s fine," grumbled Derek. "Now can we go? She's gained miles on us while you've been yabbering."
Hadley made a placating gesture that annoyed Derek more than it helped.
"Remember, mister, there's a lot of money on the line with a – " he lowered his voice – "moon-witch, in the picture."
"I know that better than you," Derek snapped. "Believe me."
And he did. Selling a farm was difficult business for a fogcrawler, especially with the Fade being as active as it was nowadays, but his nadderfruit acres and wealth of chickens had been enough to raise money for a band of slave catchers. Even still, it took that slimeball Kebbik's connections to acquire a slave catcher band with the right tools for the job. Phoebe was no ordinary slavecatching contract. Derek was just glad he wasn’t a halorist - otherwise, it would’ve been all the more excruciating to give up all those peridots and amethysts currency was based on.
Derek cursed himself for this whole fiasco, and not for the first time. He shouldn't have hidden that silvery nightmare she turned into that night from Kebbik. If he just told the mage what happened, instead of having her tattoo patched and trying to figure it out for himself, this could have been avoided. The damn scriptomancer had known anyway, from the first incident, but he'd done nothing because he knew Derek would have much more frequent maintenance costs. If she got loose and came after him, Kebbik was confident he could handle her.
Derek knew nothing about lunomancers until it was too late. He'd thought Phoebe was some kind of advanced scriptomancer, one that didn't even need a moon-shard to write spells. Nothing Derek tried made the engram stay on any better. At least she never surprised him with another lapse and nearly killed him again. She slept in chains the entire year since that night. The danger was always after dark, when she was asleep and the engram's grip weakened, and that silver moon was in the sky.
At least Phoebe, his fresh little flower, didn't hurt him this time. Derek knew she didn't hate him. He could tell when someone hated him. Derek's parents taught him everything they knew, but their two most important lessons had been:
- How to tell that someone hates you.
- How to hit back.
Derek's parents knew that personal example was the best teaching method. They stuck to that method to the end of their lives.
No, Phoebe didn't hate him. She was merely confused. She didn't understand that Derek was just waiting for the right time to take her engram off and set her free. She was too impatient. So when her engram fractured again, and she remembered that she was from Aleb, and that silvery magic was flashing all around her, she ran away.
The beetle in Derek's hand started squirming again. He ignored it.
"Of course, of course," Hadley was saying, "but listen. I know you hate that Kebbik guy, the type what hooked you up with us. We hate 'im too."
Now Derek was listening. An opportunity to gang up on a scriptomancer was not to be missed. Hadley gestured to one of his men, and the man took a seat beside him. He motioned for the others to go off and entertain themselves, which really meant distract as many other people in the Bentley trading post as possible.
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"So, a lunomancer," Hadley said in a low voice, "is worth a lot of money out west in Ecliptica. Hear me out, I know you want that girl back. But see here: next year, the Fade throws its two hundredth birthday. Moon-witches, as I like to call them, aren’t the kings and queens they used to be. They scuttle about, scaring powerful people and getting bounties on their heads, taking the blame for natural disasters and so on. There’s only ever a handful in the world at a time, but every time you pick one off, another takes her place in no time. It’s a very sustainable business model, hunting witches. As long as, and this is important, they stay alone and isolated from each other.”
Derek’s patience was running thin, but at the same time, he wished Kebbik had told him this months ago. He glanced down at the bug in his fingers, then back up at Hadley as the manhunter continued.
“But recently, what with the Fade getting all aggressive again and scaring people, there’s a bigjob in Ecliptica trying to gather all the witches in one place, and not so she can wipe them out all at once. She’s got a project of some kind, and she’s paying better than most dead-or-alive bounties for a healthy young witch in her court.”
Derek shook his head. “I’m not selling Phoebe like she’s some piece of meat.”
Hadley frowned. “Isn’t she your slave?”
“She’s mine.”
Hadley raised an eyebrow, but it didn’t take him long to answer his question by looking into Derek’s eyes.
“I see,” he said. “Well, no problem there. Just a few extra steps to the plan is all. Listen, mate, your little Phoebe is rarer than almost any gemstone dug out of the rocks in the Crown Mountains, and there's a few smart people with a lot of amethysts out west."
Hadley leaned closer. "Your farm's sold off. An honest man like you needs a new start, and to be truthful with you, we need to retire. Find new lines of work. The witches we hunt are becoming too coordinated. If we hunt one, we make a lot of powerful enemies. You’re lucky we were heading this way; we were actually out tryin’ to bring back another witch that fled Ecliptica before our client was done with her. But we can’t go passing up on an opportunity to hunt an isolated witch like your Phoebe, even if she is a slave. Right, Larry?” he added, patting the shoulder of the man beside him.
Derek examined the other mercenary, the one who hadn't spoken yet. The witchbinder.
“Larry doesn’t like hunting slaves,” Hadley explained. “But we’ve never been hired for a witch that also happened to be a slave before.”
The witchbinder had piercing green eyes that couldn't help but stick to things. They were like hands covered in glue, with sharp fingernails. Derek was used to people in Halfway not meeting his gaze, but this man met it like ... an equal. There was no better word for it. The Witchbinder had hair the ear-length of a common workman like Derek. He had black Barridian skin, also like Derek's. There was a scar across his face that didn't look like an animal put it there. More like a tool of some kind. His gloved hands held statue still. This, Derek felt confident, was no ordinary scriptomancer. This was a working man, someone who earned his money and had gone into magic to earn it even better. Not avoid earning it.
"So," Derek said, turning back to Hadley, "what's your idea?"
"Way I see it," Hadley said, "there are five different angles on this whole situation. There’s my crew’s, of course, but the second one is your scummy scriptomancer Kebbik's. He's a scriptomancer; he wants Phoebe out of the picture. Scriptomancers hate lunomancers. They're unwelcome competition, and easy to vilify. He was greedy enough to let you keep paying for the engram her magic was eating at, but something tells me he thinks you and your slave are both loose ends he can't abide."
"Yeah?" Derek said. "Then why'd he let me leave instead of just having you go get her and come back? He knows I'm never returning to Halfway."
The smell of cheap tobacco was starting to get on Derek's nerves. His nose refused to adjust to it.
"Because he knew he wasn't stoppin' you," Hadley said, "and because he paid us a little more to bring you back with her."
Derek seethed, but controlled himself. This was a bargaining situation. No time to let a little poor smoke and a typical scriptomancer get under his skin. He glanced down at the beetles on the table. The dismembered one had stopped moving. That was good, at least. He had kept himself from squeezing the other to death so far.
"And you're offering to double-cross him with me," Derek guessed. "What do you want from me?"
"Let's talk about those other angles I mentioned. Yours is simple. You want your girl back, and you want to start fresh somewhere else along the Fade. Am I right?"
"Right enough."
Larry's piercing stare was starting to bother Derek, so he returned it. That made things better, he found. Like walking downstream instead of up. Derek had the stare to match. The beetle had given up, sitting still in Derek's pincer grip.
"Then there's those loaded folks over in Ecliptica I mentioned," Hadley continued. "They want lunomancers. Alive and in good condition."
"Alive?" Derek said, not taking his eyes off Larry. "Why? You didn’t say."
"You've got your reasons for the same thing," Hadley said simply. "And you're broke as a twig. I'm sure people with as much money as them have reasons too. Anyway, that's all the angles we're working with."
"What about the fifth one?"
"Oh, that's just the gods. I'll worry about them. I don't want to forget their desires. Rest assured, they want what you and I want. That's the nice thing about Amethra and Peri, you see."
Ah, so Hadley was a Halorist. Amethra and Peri, deities of money. That could come in handy. Derek knew his way around Halorists. Real ones, not whatever muck Kebbik pretended to be. Derek’s father had been a Halorist. Once.
"So I think," Hadley said, "that you and I should grab Phoebe, which shouldn't be hard. Larry here’s a ... special witchbinder. He’s got an industry-standard way of tracking witches. Won’t even need to bother you for your half of the slave engram’s tether, which I’m sure is broken anyway. We snatch her, then haul you over to Ecliptica and turn her in for the bounty money. Then, with our help, she busts out and you two can start a new life on the Fade border in the Gri'zin desert. Maybe a nice little farmhouse in Vuartina. Or further away from our client, if you prefer. How does that sound?"
Derek considered. He had to look away from Larry again to focus.
"What's the catch?" Derek said. "What do I have to do to get your help getting her away from your other ‘client’?"
Hadley turned to Larry. This unnerved Derek more than he anticipated. The bastard was still staring at him. Derek no longer felt like an equal under that gaze.
He felt like a beetle.
Hadley patted Larry's shoulder again. "I'll let my friend here explain that bit. He doesn't talk, but he's very persuasive. He'll need some room to demonstrate, though, so let's start headin' after your slave."
Derek had never taken an opportunity to pause a conversation so readily. Anything to get away from that stare. He crushed the second beetle between his fingers, scraped both off the table, and left with his new company of scum who preferred the term "businessmen".
Antagonists