The Price of Faith (12 page)

Jezzet also carried her swords. She never felt complete without a blade at her side and these days she carried three. Her long sword, as always, was sheathed by her hip on her left side. She could wield the weapon as skilfully in either hand but drawing steel with her right felt as natural as drawing breath. Along her belt at her back she kept sheathed dual short swords. Slim and razor sharp she could draw both blades in an instant and Jez was more than comfortable dual wielding.

Given everything Jezzet had no doubt she cut an imposing figure. Even as slim and beautiful as she was no one would mistake the danger inherent in her poise, her posture and her attitude. Though she might never admit it Jez took great pride in her appearance and she liked to appear dangerous.

Another small vessel, this one a gondola carrying a couple bearing the marks of high birth down their arms, Jezzet had never been bothered to learn which tattoos denoted loyalty to which house, passed by the cargo barge. The gondolier pushed against the larger boat with a long pole to stop the two craft from bumping into each other and they passed without incident.

Jezzet stifled a yawn.

“Fancy a drink, Vel’urn?” Sally asked.

She turned to find he had set up a small, square table on the crowded deck. Sal dwarfed his tiny chair, while Lei, the wiry, scarred veteran who barely said a word on a good day, dealt out cards. Jaeryn, the ever amiable leader of the little guard crew sauntered into view from behind a stack of securely lashed crates and sat at the table before motioning for Jez to join them. With a shrug she left her post at the bow and lounged in the one remaining chair. Sal grinned and passed her a frothy mug of something brown and alcoholic. Jez gulped down a mouthful without ceremony much to the big northerner’s obvious amusement.

“In for a hand, Jezzet?” Jaeryn asked indicating the cards.

Jez snorted. “Not after last time, lost half a job’s pay to that blatant cheat.” Lei simply shrugged in response so she continued. “Shouldn’t one of us be watching out at least?”

“Captain will warn us before anyone gets close to board,” Jaeryn replied in his frustratingly non-chalant tone. “Besides, there’s no one will try for us this evening. Sun is long past waning, all the respectable pirates are abed resting up for a night full of debauchery.”

Jez cocked an eyebrow. “What about all the unrespectable pirates?”

Again Lei shrugged but it was Jaeryn who spoke. “Cei am, cha am.”

Sally snorted and Jez spat over the side of the barge. It was a popular saying in Soromo and it meant:
what will be, will be
but Jez was never one to leave things to fate or the whim of the Gods.

Somewhere high above a dragon let out a thunderous roar to announce its arrival. Sally jumped and commenced a wide-eyed staring into the sky but none of the others so much as acknowledged the noise. Lei and Jaeryn were native to Soromo and had grown up with dragons roaming the skies, Jez on the other hand was simply used to the monstrous beasts. A side effect of being a regular in the Dragon Empress’ court was that she had seen many dragons including the current matriarch and mother of them all.

“What’s she like?” Sally asked after he was well and truly certain the dragon was now about to snatch the barge from the water and give its occupants the chewing of a lifetime.

“Huh?”

“The Empress. I hear she’s a wonder, her beauty only being matched by her temper.”

Jez shrugged. All the members of the little guard crew knew of her regular access and enforced attendance to the Dragon Empress’ court and it was a fact they took great pride in; not many crews could claim such a thing nor could they claim they had one of the few remaining Blademasters in the world working for them. It gave the crew no small amount of renown and that, along with a reputation for getting the job done, kept them well supplied with work.

“I suppose she’s pretty,” Jez replied at length, “very symmetrical but I reckon I’ve seen prettier. It ain’t her you want to worry about when a dark mood takes her though, it’s that bloody dragon of hers. I’ve seen some things,”
like a man coming back from the dead after I put a dagger through his heart
, “but when a winged lizard the size of a house gets angry it’s not something you want directed your way.”

“Thought all Blademasters were fearless,” Jaeryn said with a toothy grin. Jez liked the little man but he wore altogether too much make-up around his eyes.
Too much being any at all
.

“Only folk who are fearless are the foolish and the dead. Blademasters just know how to conquer fear, how to use it and not be ruled by it.”

Lei made a derogatory motion with his hand and the others laughed. Jez leaned forward just a little and gave him a hard stare, her dark brown eyes boring into his jade greens.

“Would you like me to give you a demonstration?”

Lei coughed into his hands and decided his cards were more interesting, the others laughed again and this time Jezzet joined in.

There weren’t many folk willing to challenge Jez these days. Even those who didn’t know of her skill with a sword sensed something about her that made them pause and think twice. Thanquil said it was all in the way she carried herself these days, something about projecting an air of danger. He said she was a different woman after Sarth last year, after killing Arbiter Kosh, and it was true to a point. Jez had completed her Blademaster training many years ago but it wasn’t until Sarth that she had truly embraced the teachings.

“So you in, Vel’urn?” Sally asked bringing her out of her reverie. She looked up to find Lei giving the deck an enthusiastic shuffle and nodded her assent.

A few moments later she had a hand of cards and a few moments after that she found herself a couple of lats worse off. Lei proceeded to rob her of a fair portion of her remaining money in a way that convinced her he was somehow cheating but for the life of her she couldn’t figure out how.

Thanquil would know. He’d be robbing Lei right back.
It was true too; Thanquil had always been infuriatingly vague about how he’d learned to steal but there was more than a little thief in the Arbiter and, despite his maddening silence on the matter, it was one of the things Jez liked about him.

Eventually the barge captain called out their arrival and the cargo boat bumped against one of the small wooden jetties that protruded into the waterway. Jez was the first ashore, already having lost more than enough lats.

Their destination appeared to be a small strip of wooden raft that had once been used for public events; maybe announcements or executions, proclamations or auctions but as the city of Soromo had grown it left small areas like these, too small for any useful establishment and usually not very well travelled, behind to become run down relics of a time when the capital was a smaller place. Areas such as these were well known to Soromo’s seedy underbelly and were well used by the criminal class. It gave Jezzet a moment’s pause to wonder just what they were transporting but then the truth was she didn’t really care so long as she was paid. It wouldn’t be the first, nor the last illegal job she took part in.

The buyer was already waiting for them with a crew of his own. He was clearly merchant class though he couldn’t look more different from Jez’s employer. This one was thin where her employer was fat, angular where he was soft and had a hook nose with an ornate pair of glass spectacles perching atop it. His clothing, however, could not have been more similar. He wore a thick woollen dress buttoned first left, then right over the top and thin hat that ran like a crest from his forehead to his crown. He looked like a man who wielded numbers as a warrior wields a sword. He sneered at Jez as she stepped onto the platform and she returned the disrespect in kind.

The buyer’s crew were not so disrespectful, after all, Jezzet Vel’urn had a reputation in Soromo and it was one that most of their kind knew of and knew not to mess with.

Sally was next off the barge and commanded almost as much respect as Jez though for a different reason. It wasn’t that Sal wasn’t formidable but by his sheer size most folk in the Dragon Empire were awed by him. They tended to be a smaller people; stout but short. Some of them even made Jez feel tall.

Lei and Jaeryn stepped off the barge together, Lei as silent as the grave and Jaeryn all smiles and open-armed greetings. The leader of the other crew responded in kind, it seemed to Jez the two knew each other but there was no way to be certain.

After Jaeryn felt certain there was no trap or signs of double cross he gave a sharp whistle by putting two fingers in his mouth and blowing hard. A moment later Jezzet’s employer stepped out from the hold and waddled to the side of the barge. Sal moved to help the mountain of fat from the boat to the platform but even the giant Five Kingdomer wasn’t enough to stop the fat merchant from puffing and wheezing as he leapt across the little gap Jez rolled her eyes at the spectacle and Lei gave her a confidante’s grin.

“Arai,” Gok said with a bow to the other merchant that set his chins to wobbling.

“Arai,” the thin merchant replied with an identical bow.

Jezzet turned her attention to the other crew, she had long since learned there was no point in listening to the merchants of Soromo, they spoke in a language apart from the rest of the world and known only to each other. All haggling and deal brokering was spoken in such and therefore excluding all others.

The other crew was made up of ten men in all and not a single woman though that was not overtly surprising. In the more rural areas of the Dragon Empire Thanquil assured Jez that women took a more active role in society but in the cities and especially in Soromo women seemed almost like ornaments to hang on men’s arms. It both angered, disgusted and confused Jezzet. The Dragon Empire was ruled exclusively by women and had been since its founding; an unbroken line of Empresses dating back further than Jez could be bothered to think about.

Perhaps that’s why the current Empress is so damned fascinated by you, Jez. You’re the only woman in this whole bloody empire, other than her, that doesn’t just lie down and spread their legs on command.

One of the members of the other crew winked at her and waggled his tongue between his fat, worm-like lips. Jezzet snorted and spat and the man adopted a mean look that almost had Jez creasing up with laughter.

The haggling went on for what seemed to Jez like an eternity.
Rich men arguing about who’s richer like the numbers have purpose. Who’s stronger; the person with a coin or the person with a sword?

Jez sighed and settled into an evening of a guard’s most laborious of pastimes: waiting. After near an hour of constant chatter back and forth the two merchants finally struck a deal and each produced a small grey slate from their robes where they proceeded to scratch the terms of their deal and sign it before exchanging slates.

The thin merchant and his crew of ten piled onto the boat Jez had arrived on and the captain pushed them back into the waterway. Within minutes they were a slowly receding outline floating away as the light faded. Gok then led his own crew to the boat the other merchant had arrived in, a large skiff able to sit twenty. The fat man climbed aboard and took a seat at the front, waiting for his hired crew to follow him and take up the oars.

“Think we get paid extra for the rowing?” Jezzet asked with a wink. Gok ignored her, as was his way, but the others laughed as they set to the oars and pushed away from the clandestine meeting spot.

“Once, just once,” Sally said as he crossed his legs and tried to edge his knees under the table, “I’d like there to be some sort of action. Feels like a couple of ages since anyone kicked up any sort of trouble.” His big knees bumped the side of the little table and he gave up, instead turning sideways and relaxing back onto his elbows.

Jez knelt down in the traditional Dragon Empire style and slotted her own knees easily underneath the table. She had been to taverns all over the known world but nowhere did drinking holes quite so differently as Soromo. Instead of the common room seen most places Soromo’s taverns were large collections of rooms separated from each other by thin screens of wood and paper. Customers were given their own rooms and rarely, if ever, saw another customer. Perhaps because of this is it was almost unheard of for tavern brawls in Soromo to take place. Each room contained a table perching roughly a foot off the floor and a number of chairs which in truth were little more than gaudily-coloured mats with wooden backs. It was considered an insult to the establishment to sit at the table without first placing both weapons, shoes, gloves and hats at the entrance to the room. It was also considered an insult for the establishment for a woman to sit at the table but then not many places argued with Jezzet over that insult twice.

It was Jaeryn’s own personal tradition to take his crew to one of Soromo’s taverns after every completed job. As the boss he pulled in a substantially larger cut than his crew mates and was more than happy, much to Jez’s approval, to treat his crew to a meal and a couple of drinks out of that cut. Rarely had she met a boss so generous or amiable as Jaeryn.

This particular tavern was named
Yaname
and Jezzet neither knew, nor cared what it meant but it was one she had not frequented before with, or without the little guard crew and she already knew what was undoubtedly to come.

The waitress entered the little screened room and stopped in her tracks. Jezzet looked up at her. Like all the serving girls in Soromo she wore a large woollen dress that engulfed her, hiding her figure save for her head, hands and slippered feet. Her face was covered by a plain white, ceramic, featureless mask with two slits for her eyes and an even thinner but longer slit for her mouth. By some trick of the light neither the serving girl’s lips, nor eyes could be seen beneath the mask and it was something that was done by design.

If neither her figure nor her features can be seen by the men she’s serving they won’t even think of her as a woman, nor as a person. Truly what a wonderful city this is.