Chapter 10: Chapter nine

Shapers store their Siphoned energy in their vis-core. The very heart of the vital-energy network that sustains each of us all, and shapers are filling it full of heat, pain, and even lightning. Modern thought holds that this has no effect on the person’s network. That their vis-networks are specifically adapted to convert their shaped energy into vis and store it. But, this is surely ridiculous. One cannot seriously believe that changes to such a fundamental part of us have no flow-on effects. What, then, are we to say of these people? Are they more alive than us? Less?

One thing is for sure, further study is needed.

• Essay submitted by a student at Inveritus Academy.

 

The argument from incredulity is a fallacy. Next time, find some evidence to support your point or don’t make it at all. Rhetorical pontificating is no substitute.

Grade: Fail.

• Essay feedback.

 

One of the girls entered Carrus’s office. Her name was Elsie and she had been working at the Pit for about a year. Young, pretty, and well-liked, Elsie did well with the customers and gave some of her earnings to her sister to help support her family.

“What can I do for you?” Carrus asked.

“I need some time off,” she said. “About a month at the start of winter.”

“Hmm,” Carrus said. “That’s when Sigfellow will be up from Inveritus to pick up his consignment of salt. He’s awfully fond of you, are you looking to avoid him?”

Elsie shook her head. “Nothing like that. He’s sweet enough. It’s just my sister is having a baby around then and she could really use some help taking care of the little ones what with her man in the mines and all.”

Carrus nodded. “Okay. We might be a little shorthanded, but I think Natalia will be up for working a few extra shifts. You got it.”

“Thanks,” Elsie said.

She left his office and Eve sent a bouncer named Brogue. Brogue had one eye and, as the old saying went, seemed to have given up the fun and games when he lost it. He was a serious man who always looked a moment away from a scowl.

“Ted from the mines is here again,” he said, not bothering with pleasantries.

Carrus grimaced. Ted had been coming in a lot over the past couple of weeks and drinking himself stupid while trying to talk the girls into a freebie.

“See him out, would you?.”

“A bit of a kicking might help him learn some manners,” Brogue said.

Carrus shook his head. “He lost his wife last winter. I don’t think a beating is going to help with that. I’ll go have a talk to him once he’s sobered up some. In the meantime, if you could make sure he gets home okay?”

Brogue nodded, expecting that to be Carrus’s answer. “Sure thing, boss.”

Carrus dealt with a few more minor issues and quite enjoyed focussing on the day to day running of the Pit. He could almost pretend like things were normal and he didn’t have a cloud of blackmail hanging over his head.

He was working on the accounts when the thieves showed up.

One was a darkish man with a shaved head and a brown cloak, Saladeen presumably. The other was a delkin woman wearing leathers and a wicked-looking bow. Eve showed them into his office and the two immediately made themselves comfortable. Saladeen flopped himself down in one of Carrus’s chairs while the woman went to inspect his liquor cabinet.

“Saladeen Hadon, at your service. I hear you’re in need of a thief,” Saladeen said with a grin.

“And perhaps an intrepid bodyguard?” the delkin said, pouring rather a lot of whiskey into a cup. She took a long drink and looked at the cup appreciatively.

“Well, I’m in need of someone,” Carrus said. “I’m being blackmailed by a local crime boss. I didn’t actually set out to hire you though. An employee turned out to be a skard and has apparently taken it on himself to reach out to you. I’m not sure who he is or what he wants, and he seems to have disappeared recently so I can’t very well ask him.”

“Told you,” the delkin said. “Untrustworthy.”

“Well that could be a problem,” Saladeen said. “He is the one who offered to pay me.”

“I’m sure he will be back,” Carrus said, feeling anything but sure. Mostly he felt confused by the whole situation. “But I’m willing to pay you if you can recover the blackmail material. Can’t be any worse than the bleeding Philious is giving me.”

“You’d be surprised,” Saladeen said. “I’m not cheap. Depending on security, this kind of job could run you anywhere from fifteen hundred to seven thousand vi.”

Carrus did a quick conversion to Salitian coin and was stunned. Fifteen hundred vi was just over seven hundred brightmarks and that was the low end of this thief’s price range. The Pit was profitable enough, but it would still take him months to come up with that kind of money. And that’s if he wasn’t being blackmailed.

“I should also say that I don’t negotiate my prices. People who hire me know they are hiring the best there is, and my prices reflect that.”

“I can tell,” Carrus said sourly. “Look, I’m being squeezed pretty hard by Philious, so I don’t have much coin lying around. Do you take payment in instalments?”

“Instalments?” Saladeen said making a face. “No, I very much do not. This is a brothel though yes?”

Carrus nodded.

“Are the girls here workers or slaves?”

“Workers,” Carrus said stiffly.

“Then if your girls are clean and still have all their teeth, I could conceivably take a portion of my pay in trade. Sarina, you okay with that?”

“What would I need with whores?” the delkin, Sarina, pouted. “Everyone wants to take me to bed already.”

“I imagine they have a bar here too,” Saladeen said, shooting a questioning look at Carrus.

“Yes, we do. Quite well-stocked in fact.”

“Like this?” Sarina asked, pouring herself a second cup of Carrus’s whiskey. “And food too?”

“Of course,” Carrus said, feeling like the whole negotiation had gotten away from him.

“Then yes, I do not object to part of my fee being paid in such manner.”

“Okay,” Saladeen said. “Then these are my terms. You will provide us with beds for the night, somewhere to keep my horse, food and drink, and my pick of girls if I deem them to my liking. For this, I will hear you out and take a look at your crime boss’s security then give you my price for the job itself. If our mysterious mutual friend shows up by then and he can pay, great. If not, you pay, and we work out how many of your girls and drinks we will need to partake in to make up the difference. Agreeable?”

“I suppose so,” Carrus said, thinking through what he was agreeing to. “But you can’t hurt the girls. I don’t care how much I owe you, one of the girls winds up thrashed and you’re for it.”

Saladeen arched an eyebrow at him. “Why would I hurt them? Is that how you northerners have sex?”

“No, it… never mind. The point is you can’t beat them and when they are done with their shift, you gotta let them leave. Agreed?”

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The thief looked almost insulted by that. “Of course. Now, let’s hear about this blackmail of yours.”

Carrus laid out the whole story. Killing Denison, Bracken’s strange device that could capture images and the payments he was being forced to make each week.

“Lumographs huh?” Saladeen said. “The things they dream up over at that university.”

“Did you say this man buys babies?” Sarina asked.

“Yeah,” Carrus said, his stomach knotting itself up at the memories of that conversation with Denison. “He’s a monster.”

“Could your problem be solved with an arrow to this man’s heart?” Sarina suggested.

“I don’t do assassination,” Saladeen said. “Besides, a guy like that probably has a contingency plan to make sure the blackmail material gets out in the event of his death so he can keep right on being an arsehole from beyond the grave.”

“That’s what we figured too,” Carrus said.

“Hence the need for a master thief. Okay, I’ll go investigate this Bracken person tomorrow. As for right now, Sarina and I have been travelling a long time and I could use a hot meal, a long bath and an enthusiastic whore. That order.”

So Carrus showed them to the bar and had Eve bring the girls for Saladeen and something to drink for Sarina.

 

 

Two days later, Saladeen, or Sal as he apparently preferred to be called, and his delkin associate had more than worn out their welcome. Sal had been rather pleased with the girls on offer and had apparently made it his mission to bed all of them, all while drinking Carrus’s finest wine. What’s worse, Carrus had promised the girls half again their normal rates to keep the thief happy if they agreed to be paid at a later date. For a few tumbles that wouldn’t be a problem, but Sal was apparently trying to set some kind of record for carousal and the costs were mounting up.

For all that, Sarina may have been even worse. She drunk a staggering amount of expensive liquor, though that description doesn’t truly do justice to the sheer quantity of booze the woman consumed. She also got bored and shot arrows inside the Snake Pit’s bar and flirted outrageously with customers. In another circumstance this wouldn’t have been a problem, but since the Snake Pit was a brothel, it gave men the wrong idea and they often tried to engage her services. This led to two fights with would-be customers and one hump on the premises which the Pit didn’t get any money from. All in all, she was bad for business.

All of that and they were using up two rooms Carrus could otherwise be making money on, and he still hadn’t heard how they were going to steal Bracken’s lumographs. All Sal said was that patience was required. Well, Carrus had had enough of it.

Carrus burst into Sal’s room to find him eating grapes while a willowy brunette named Natalia had a mouthful of something entirely less appetising.

“Could you come back later?” Sal said. “You’re rather spoiling the mood.”

“Natalia, would you give us the room please?” Carrus said in his best stern, professional voice.

Natalia cleared out pretty quickly, only pausing to slip her dress back on.

“I take it you’re not happy?” Sal asked, using a nearby cushion to cover up.

“That’s putting it mildly. You and Sarina are costing me quite a bit of money and you don’t seem to have done any actual work yet. From now on no more freebies and I want to see some progress on the job by the end of the day.”

Sal laughed. “Okay. I can lay out the surveillance I’ve done so far and my plan for getting in right now if you like? Although I’d appreciate a moment to find my trousers.”

This brought Carrus up short. “What?” he asked. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

“Sarina and I had a bet on how long we could abuse your hospitality before you got angry and demanded results. To be honest I had twenty brightmarks that we could get another day out of you.”

Carrus was none too impressed with this.

“Don’t take it personally,” Sal said with a shrug. “You just seemed like a kind man and living the high life at other people’s expense is why I got into thieving in the first place.”

“I’ll try to remember that. Get your clothes on and come to my office and we’ll go over this plan of yours.” Carrus smiled. “And the cut that the Snake Pit takes on any bets made in house.”

 

“Philious keeps his compound very well-guarded,” Sal explained a few minutes later in Carrus’s office. “Multiple guards at the entrances, hounds, windows too small for a man to get through, reinforced doors set in solid stone walls, and the compound is massive so he could be keeping his blackmail material almost anywhere. Plus, he has all visitors give a password which changes daily, to protect against skard intruders. In short, it’s a fortress.”

“Are you telling me this because you don’t think you can do it, or because you need to justify your fee?”

Sal grinned like a child caught swiping cake. “The latter, naturally. My plan to get in is to pose as a thief in position of a rare and valuable artefact that I’m looking to sell. This should be easy because that’s exactly what I am.”

“You’re cover is yourself?” Carrus asked. “Brilliant.”

 “Cover stories get complicated quickly, best to stay simple. Anyway, I’m going to set up a meet to sell said artefact. With luck Bracken will want to do the sale in his compound and I can scope the place out from the inside, get a feel for where he is likely to be keeping his lumographs, possibly even swipe a key, then sneak back in later and take what I need. I will need Sarina’s services for that so I don’t wind up like your employer when I go in to make the deal. That increases my costs, which in turn increases yours. If that plan succeeds, it will cost you three and a half thousand vi.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“It depends. If Philious bites but doesn’t want to make the buy in his compound, we move to Plan B which involves some herbs, a philoweasel and a length of climbing rope. If he doesn’t want to buy at all, we move to plan C, in which I bust in and then improvise. Those plans cost four thousand and five thousand respectively.”

“Do you normally do jobs like this?” Carrus asked honestly. It seemed like an odd pricing method.

“No,” Sal said with a shrug. “Normally I would charge five thousand vi for this job and have done. But I like you. You may be a painfully earnest sort of fellow, but you keep a fine whorehouse and you don’t seem the type to decided it’s cheaper to have me shot full of quarrels than to pay for a job well done, so you’re a big improvement on some of my previous employers.”

Carrus nodded, not really sure what to make of that.

“So, do we have ourselves an agreement?”

“Yes. Do it. But from now if you want to stay here, it’s coming out of your fee. Same goes for anything you or Sarina eat, drink or screw. Deal?”

“Deal,” Sal said.

“And there’s a ten brightmark fee if you want to gamble in the Snake Pit, that’s coming off your fee too.”

“How long have you had that policy?”

“Since about twenty minutes ago.”

Sal chuckled. “Fine. But that means all future bets made, regarding you and otherwise, are covered already.”

With that he left to be about his thievery, or more likely get in some more whoring, and Carrus sat alone in his office and pondered what exactly he had gotten himself into.

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