Reborn From the Cosmos

Miniarc-Bad Tidings 06

The young man shuddered at her words and Maxine didn't blame him. If she were the focus of the horrid eyes, a pretty blue made surreal by their star shaped pupils, she'd tremble as well. Artor didn't share their fear, but his expression was filled with reluctance.

"Reynela," he sighed with all the exasperation of a tired parent.

"Rey," she huffed. "Don't give me any shit, ey Shrimp. That chum owes me a hundred gold."

"You will show me respect in my own building, girl." The words weren't spoken with anger or demand. Artor's tone was drab but heavy with certainty. He wasn't making a plea; he was stating a fact of the world and Rey would defy the natural order of things at her own peril.

It would be idiotic to do anything else but obey but Maxine was surprised when the aggressive woman’s shoulders relaxed, a modicum of the tension seeping from the tense room. "He owes me," she repeated, the words less of a threat and more of a petulant grumble. Given her size, the definition of her arms, and the air of violence surrounding her, Maxine hesitated to call her childish, but if she were a braver woman than she might have.

"Then tell me what's going on before you break down my door. You." The young man jumped as Artor's gaze turned to him. "Speak fast and speak clearly."

The story that erupted from the young man was a classic tale of ambition gone wrong. The dangerous woman was a whaler. And while they were normally benign individuals more concerned with the sea than the woes of men, they were dangerous.

Thom had frantically informed Maxine that the whaling crews were the last people she wanted to piss off, unexpectedly tied with the strongest pirate captains. They routinely dealt with the biggest, strongest, and nastiest creatures the ocean had to offer. They were on a different level compared to the sailors who raided hapless villagers and fishmongers whose biggest concern was dragging up a net. It was common knowledge in the city, but some cocky pirate always tried their luck.

The nervous young man made a deal with Rey's crew, the only crew known to take requests. Most whalers took what the ocean gave them but from what Maxine could guess from the conversation was that Rey's crew had a way of tracking specific sea creatures. It wasn't foolproof, but it was an acceptable gamble. Especially when they took payment on delivery.

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The problem was that Rey had delivered the creature she promised and the young man wasn't prepared to pay. Some part of the thing he wanted was valuable, but he didn't know that said creature's biology varied wildly from one individual to another. He got the fish he ordered but it turned out to be worthless. No one would want to pay for trash, but pirates didn’t believe in customer satisfaction or charity. She’d be surprised if the word refund was in their vocabulary.

The crew responded in the only way pirates ever did when someone tried to renege on a deal; they’d sent someone to collect his head.

Artor sighed after Rey finished her story, cradling his bowed head with a hand. “Tell me none of that is true.”

Against his wishes, the young pirate did not. Some details changed; he insisted that he bartered for the valuable organ, not the whole beast. Despite his insistence that Rey was the unreasonable party and that she had broken the unspoken rules of the city by attacking him without going through his captain, the core of the problem went uncontested. He had made a deal with Rey’s crew and they thought he'd reneged.

The captain waited until the end of the young man’s spiel before dismissively waving a hand. The young pirate yelped as a hand grabbed the back of his shirt. Jack ignored his pleas as he threw him into the waiting claws of the nightmarish woman. His struggles meant nothing as she hauled him out of the room, yanking him off when his hands tightly gripped the doorway.

Maxine tried but she couldn’t hold back her wince as his screams echoed throughout the building. “Why?”

“Going to have to be more specific, little lady,” the captain huffed out as he returned to his drinking.

“He’s one of yours. Won’t it reflect badly on you if he’s killed in your building?”

Jack chuckled, something she couldn’t imagine doing with the shrill sounds of a painful death assaulting her ears. Artor didn’t seem amused, a small addition in the positive column of his character. “Politics in the Gray are complicated. Yeah, someone barging in here and making demands isn’t a good look. But two things make this situation special. First being that the dead man screaming his lungs out fucked around with whalers.”

“Whalers are all insane,” Jack added with a sagely nod, as if imparting age-old wisdom.

“Crazy fuckers on and off the shore,” Artor followed. “Common sense says avoid creatures big enough to take a bite out of your ship. Those madhats not only sail toward them, they hook and bring them home for their livelihood. No one sane could live such a life. Second.”

He held up a second finger. “That’s Rey, the very worst whaler he could have pissed off. She’s got a nasty crew behind her, a nastier family, and ever since some evil abyss spawn crawled into her ear or whatever fucking story is going around now, she’s got less self-control than a young shipmonkey on his first shore leave.

“Could I stop her? Sure. Could do so while saving the boy’s life. But there’d be a price to pay for that. One that dumb shit isn’t worth. On the other hand, if I indulge Rey’s temper, it’s her parents that have to pay me. I’m sure you understand the math.”

All too well. A powerful man weighing people’s lives by how much profit they’d generate was so familiar, it made her stomach cramp with an anxious pain she thought reserved for her father. She wondered if this was the end result of power. The detachment. Toying with people’s lives seemed to do something to the powerful. They had to stand above it all to see the whole picture. She supposed at some point they forgot how to come back down. Or maybe they lost the desire to.

Sitting amid worldly struggles, she couldn’t deny that it wasn’t pretty.

She sat in thought and Artor drank until the screaming died down. There was a pause, the air filling with thick tension. Then the heavy clomp of stomping and the wet squelch of leather announced Rey’s return to the doorway. Maxine turned her gaze when she noticed the red spatter on the woman’s shirt.

The pirate captain didn’t even blink. “That boy was your payment.”

“Fuck off! Somebody from yer crew promised me money and I want my gold!”

“Then go get it from his corpse. They’re my shipmonkeys, not my brats. Only way you get gold out of me is if you get a deal out of my mouth. You should know better than to deal with an idiot.”

The rage on the woman’s face was so intense, Maxine tried to discretely scoot her chair back, as she was sure that Rey was about to come after one of the other pirates next. Surprisingly, the scary woman calmed herself with a deep breath, but the rest of the room didn’t follow. Maxine silently gagged as the folds of skin on Rey’s arms moved, vertical eyes with black sclera and sickly green eyes blinking slowly, following the rise and fall of her chest.

“Gah! Yer right, Uncle Shrimp.”

“Brat. You only know how to call me that when you’re causing trouble. Don’t think it’s going to stop me from telling your mother. Someone’s paying for my door.”

“Ehhh. Keep the witch out of it, Uncle. I’ll pay, yeah?”

It was amazing watching someone run roughshod over a man powerful enough to protect her from the many horrible elements in the city, but the merchant didn’t think it was because of fear. Artor simply seemed impatient, eager to remove the problem. “Fine, just get out of here. I’ve got business.”

“Oh?” Maxine froze as the whaler’s gaze turned to her. “Sounds interesting.”