A House in the Old City, Part I

A House in the Old City

I: A Little Chin Music

Galiard was beginning to believe that he just might have gotten away with it. And then the halfling tried to kill him.

He shouldn't have been surprised. There were a lot of minor indiscretions that went with the territory when you peddled abyss dust: cutting the product with flour, bumping up the dosage cost for the hardcore addicts who'd sell their own souls for another rush, and ratting out your competition to the Sea Lord’s Guard were all within the bounds of proper pusher etiquette. Using the stuff yourself and then lying to your supplier about the cash shortfall, however, were simply things you did not do. It was an unwritten law, but one you obeyed if you knew what was good for you. This was what he thought Bloody Jack had been trying to impress upon him a few days ago.

"Listen kid," the dwarf had begun when two of his Cutthroats had dragged Galiard in, "you're new to the business. You don't know the ropes yet. You're bound to make a few mistakes. Some mistakes, though, are worse than others. You catch my meaning?"

"Yeah," he'd immediately lied. His time on the job might have been short by Bloody Jack's reckoning, five years, but that was a quarter of the time Galiard had been alive. And given his growing need for the dust, he reckoned that he'd be lucky to make another five. Of course, that was before two dwarfs had broken down the flimsy wooden door to his flop and roughly pulled him out of his fugue state for this little meeting.

"Look at you," the gang leader demanded, "you probably couldn't keep food down now if you wanted to. You're paler than some of the corpses that they find floatin' near the sewers. And you stink worse than most humans. How long you been hooked?"

"I—I don't remember." A half-truth. He'd lost count of the days, true, but he'd never forget the day it started. It was the same old story: boy meets girl, boy loves girl, girl goes adventuring and is torn apart by bodaks. One of her compatriots had brought back the letter she had never gotten a chance to send. He rolled his first dose of dust in it, never bothering to open it.

Bloody Jack came around his desk and strode to where Galiard was sitting. The dwarf reached out and grabbed his underling's drawn face with one of his meaty hands and forced the human to lock eyes onto his scarred face.

"Now, don't lie to me, boy," he said. "I need to know if you have any dust left. If you're smart, you still have some. That way, you can still sell a few doses, maybe put down a deposit on what you owe. You had a hundred doses. What's the value of a hundred doses, Stunty?"

"We been havin' trouble with the shipments, boss," the henchman, a quick-fingered gnome, replied. "Must be two gold each, easy."

"So the way I see it," the dwarf continued, "you owe me two hundred gold. But you can make some of that back, you still have stuff to sell. You do still have some dust left, don't you?"

"Yeah, 'course." Another lie, a big one. He'd 'entered the abyss' almost two days ago, and it'd taken half a dozen doses to keep him there. He had thought of parceling them out, keeping a few in reserve, but why wait?

The dwarf had given Galiard a long, hard stare, his scarred visage looking like a map whose treasure wasn't worth risking the dangers along its path. Galiard hadn't been certain what he was looking for, but it appeared that he hadn't found it. In hindsight, perhaps he had.

"Then I'll expect you here one week from today," Jack stated as he returned to his seat, "but you may want to come earlier, if you finish before then. Consider it…an invitation. And no later than a week. Otherwise, the next time my boys pay a visit, you won't be waking up. Now get out."

So he had. First, he got out of the office, then he picked up what remained of his meager belongings and left his flop behind. He traded those belongings to a dealer with less scruples than himself, and then Galiard did his best to drop out of existence.

Aside from the few hours a night he allowed himself to sleep, he kept in constant motion. He tried to stay out of Scurvytown as much as possible, but he became much more familiar with the other parts of Freeport. During the day he would walk the streets of the Merchant District, where the residents would scarcely deign to notice someone of such obvious lower social stature. He’d even been able to land a few coins from the jaded rich who simply assumed that he must be there to beg. While the sun was near its daily peak, he’d shift to the Old City and dodge the rays beneath the shifting shadows of the city wall, then see if he could scare up a bit more coin as the councilors and other well-placed members of the government headed back to their homes. At night, he would haunt the rowdier sections of Drac’s End, the Eastern District, and the Docks, always on the look out for sailors who were either deep enough in their cups to offer a mug to an “old friend” or unwary enough not to notice their purse strings getting cut. In the waning hours of darkness he would crawl to an alley in the Warehouse District for a brief rest, and a few hours in the Abyss if he’d been particularly lucky.

Initially, it was a difficult adjustment for him. As a pusher, he had to be aggressive in order to keep a steady influx of new customers. Now, he had to make himself invisible. He’d had practice hiding shadows before, of course; the Sea Lord’s Guard might not make frequent sorties into Scurvytown, but they did make them. And it was always better if you didn’t stand out when they did. Still, it was one thing to avoid four noticeably armored guards, quite another to remain anonymous when any stranger might be working for the person you were trying to avoid.

Yet it was not the first time he’d had to alter his personality to suit circumstances.

Despite the relative monotony of his new hand-to-mouth existence, the time passed quickly. One day bled into the next to the point where it was impossible to tell them apart. If he’d had to guess, he might have ventured that it had been over a month since his meeting with Bloody Jack, and the fact that he’d not yet woken to a slit throat emboldened him a bit. Which was why he’d never suspected the halfling.

It had been night, and not exactly a successful one at that. He’d been haunting the Docks for the last few hours, but most of the sailors were sullen and sober. There were rumors of war coming from the mainland, and talk that the pirate city might stay out of it. It had to do with something about there not being a new Sea Lord, or some other political nonsense that made Galiard’s head hurt if he thought about it too much, so he went on his way instead. He’d decided to pack it in early when he’d heard someone clear their throat behind him.

“Pardon me,” a polite voice had inquired. Galiard turned to see the halfling, who was wearing a rather natty suit on his diminutive frame and a sheepish look on his face. “Could you perchance direct me towards the Diving Fin?”

“Sure,” he’d replied automatically, turning his back to the gentlemen in order to point the way, “the Merchant District is right over—” The rest of his sentence was sucked back into his lungs as several inches of cold steel were driven into his waist. Enraged, Galiard spun ‘round once more, his dagger drawn.

“That’s the last mistake you’re ever going to make, half-man,” he warned.

The halfling was unimpressed. “Mmm…I should think not,” he replied.

Galiard was about to prove him wrong when a second wave of pain rippled through him. Poison, he realized. He had to fight it, take care of this meddler, get to safety. He went to raise his dagger, and found that he couldn’t move his arm. Or his legs. Or…anything.

“That’s much better,” the halfling said after a moment. “You are the dust dealer, yes?”

“Mmmph,” he replied.

The other took this as assent. “Bloody Jack sends his regards. No do us a favor and go to sleep.”

With that, he kicked Galiard’s feet out from under him. He landed on his back, and his head slapped onto the street with an audible crack. Galiard had just enough time to notice that there seemed to be more constellations in the sky then he remembered, and then all the stars faded out at once.





His stomach informed him he was in a boat long before his other senses were able to catch up. He’d not set foot in a vessel since he’d landed in Freeport, and he had never intended to do so again. It was just his luck that he would die in the one place he wanted most to avoid, the one place he had been forced to see almost every single day: the open sea.

When he opened his eyes, he saw his assailant sitting in the prow, smoking a pipe and wistfully staring out into the night. Galiard found that he was lying in the bottom of a rowboat that was only a foot or so longer than himself. His wounded head throbbed in time with the beat of his heart, which didn’t do much to quell his intestinal distress. His hands were bound together, but his legs were still free. Even so, he didn’t think he could stand if his life depended on it, which it almost certainly did.

The lights of the city were nowhere to be seen.

The halfling didn’t turn to face him, but it was clear he knew his charge had regained consciousness. “I don’t know what you did to get on Bloody Jack’s bad side, but it’s a rare thing for me to get a visit from the Cutthroats. Oftentimes we work at cross purposes. Still, his coin is as gold as any other. More’s the pity for you.”

“Why did you bring me out here,” Galiard asked.

“If I finished you in town, chances are they’d find your corpse, and some nosy detective would want to raise you. I’ve enough trouble without Kovac poking about in my affairs. Out here, you won’t be found, you won’t be raised. Especially once you’ve been cut up into pieces the fish will find palatable.”

“That’s comforting.”

“Mmm,” the assassin agreed as he banged his pipe against the side of the skiff. “Well, enough talk. It’s a rather long row back, and there’s much work still to be done.” The halfling stowed his extinguished pipe in an inside coat pocket, drew his dagger, and advanced toward him. His stomach protested the lack of equilibrium caused by the approaching footfalls, and it was then that Galiard grasped his one chance of getting out of this encounter alive.

The assassin grabbed his hair and forced his head back, exposing his throat to the approaching steel. “This will only take a moment,” the halfling assured him.

Galiard opened his mouth as if to scream…and let loose with a torrent of vomit that struck his assailant directly in his face.

The halfling drew back with a yelp of disgust, and Galiard immediately drew his legs up to his chest and drove both his feet into his opponent’s chest. The killer was driven hard into the prow, but did not go over. More distressingly, he still held tight to his dagger. The assassin wiped his face with his hand, exposing a visage that had exchanged its previous composure for a look of pure rage.

Galiard tried to get to his feet before the halfling came at him again, then settled for his knees instead. He managed a tenuous grip on an oar blade resting in the bottom of the boat and swung it as hard as he could. The narrow end caught the halfling on the side of the head, but still he would not go over. As the assassin came at him again, Galiard tried once more to gain his feet, thinking to meet the charge with one of his own. Instead, he stumbled in his own recently evacuated effluent, causing him to slip forward. Fortunately, he still had his hold on the oar, which collided firmly with the halfling’s forehead with a loud thump. This staggered the halfling, who took one halting step, another, then finally fell overboard.

Galiard rushed forward at once and peered over the side to make certain his assailant wasn’t attached to the side. A flicker of light off the surface of the flung dagger was all the warning he had before it buried itself in his left shoulder. He swung the oar at the water with what strength he had left, and connected with something, whether water or flesh, hard. He didn’t wait to find out. He clumsily forced the oars into their locks, and pulled for all he was worth, aggravating his wound with every stroke.

When he finally stopped long enough to pull out the blade and cut through his bonds, he noticed that his entire side was slick with blood, which was still coming out of his wound in a steady trickle. Too caught up in his own fear to notice before, he now found himself light-headed and weak. He bound the gash with the few still still-dry strips of shirt he possessed, which helped somewhat, but even without his injury he’d be hard pressed to stay alive in the midst of the ocean without food or water. But where to go?

The moon revealed only darkness and more darkness. But, off in the distance…Galiard thought he could see a large shape, darker than its surroundings. Was it land, or some new horror to face? In the end, he decided that it would be better to face the quick death of the unknown then the slow death of dehydration. So he rowed.

His improvised bandage didn’t last long against the continual stress he was putting on his wound, and it was soon just more strips of saturated cloth. Yet he rowed on.

By the time the sun began to rise, Galiard knew that his chances of surviving through the day were slim. The dark shape he’d seen hours before became a lighter shape, and then revealed itself to be an island. There was no harbor in sight, no sign of civilization in fact, but it was solid ground. He’d lost most of his range of motion sometime in the last hour before dawn, but he pulled the oars with what remained of his strength.

His vision had just begun to double when he heard the sound of waves breaking on sand. He gave a last pull, and then, for the second time in less than a day, passed out.