by Wil Ogden
CHAPTER TWO: THE OTHER PROFESSION
Nearly half a century had passed since Sheillene had first played her lute. She'd not seen Thomas in that time and she hadn't chosen to make a career from her music.
Sheillene opened the door to the sheriff's office of Stonewall Village and stood aside.
Her partner Taren dragged a typical bounty by bound arms up to a constable sitting behind a desk. “Twenty gold,” Taren said, setting his custom Matderi-made crossbow on the desk in front of the constable.
The constable looked at the weapon. Sheillene could see his eyes counting the eight locked and loaded bows around the center stock, all pointing at the constable. Sheillene knew the triggers weren't engaged, but the constable couldn't know such a thing. He'd likely never seen a rotary-multi-bowed crossbow. He stood and stepped away from the aim of the weapon then looked at Taren then at the prisoner. “Nice toy, the bounty for this lowlife is sixteen gold.”
Sheillene pulled her Hunter’s medallion from under her shirt and Taren did the same.
“Master’s premium,” Taren said. “Twenty gold, please. Consider it payment for the rope. Or we could untie him before we go. This guy was wanted for pugilizing a constable, wasn't he?”
“No,” the constable said. “Tax Skimping.” He reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a handful of coins. He counted twenty gold crowns onto the desk. “You get your premium, Taren. It’s been a while since you’ve been up to these parts. Who's the new sidekick?”
Taren gestured back to where Sheillene stood near the door. “That's my partner, Sheillene of Whisperwillow.”
“The archery champion?” The man behind the desk focused his eyes on Sheillene and looked her over.
“She's a master in the Hunter's Guild, now,” Taren said. “Be lucky we didn't charge a double premium. We certainly could have.” He picked up the coins off the desk and placed some in his pouch. He gave the prisoner a last shove and kicked him in the rear to ensure he fell forward. “Tax Avoidance, eh? He put up more fight than I'd expect from a purely monetary crime.”
“Taren!” Sheillene yelled. “There's no need to batter the bounty. We've collected, we can go now.” It bothered Sheillene that Taren treated the people they brought in like they were animals, but otherwise Taren was decent enough company. When she was a child, he had been a friend of her mother’s for a few years. It had been Taren that first shown her how to use a bow.
After again crossing paths with him at a dive of a bar in Everton, she'd spent a score of years at his side, learning the trade of the Hunter's Guild. It didn't always entail collecting bounties. Sometimes it just meant hunting for food or skins. Sometimes it meant tracking. Sometimes it meant killing when the bounty was posted for a particularly vile criminal.
Not all bounties were posted by government officials. Sometimes normal people wanted someone for one reason or another. Taren stepped over the fallen tax evader and gestured for Sheillene to join him at a section of wall covered in postings. Sheillene glanced over the names and drawings of faces on the board then dug in her pack for a roll of scrolls. After crosschecking, she posted two more that weren't on the board yet, pasting them over two bounties that she knew had already been claimed.
“Look here,” Taren said, pointing to a poster with two portraits drawn on it. “Twenty thousand, we could both retire.”
“For a little while anyway,” Sheillene said. The poster said it wanted Kita and Leo Phyreshade returned to Romanova alive. A double box drawn around each portrait was a secret guild code. Only the heads were to be delivered. That explained the high price. That and the last known whereabouts: Ignea.
“Ignea is not safe for Hunters,” Sheillene said. “It's a city of pirates and they band together against outside threats.”
“Ignea is six leagues from here and we are never this close,” Taren said. “Its twenty thousand gold crowns and these people don't look hard to deal with. It's not like we're going in with our medallions hanging out. Let's head east and we can talk about it on the road.” He took the poster from the wall, retrieved his crossbow, and then headed toward the door.
“I'm not making any promises, Taren.” Sheillene followed him out to the street and headed east.
When they were outside of town, she spoke again. “You know I don't like these kill contracts.” The Hunter's Guild didn't require anyone to take any bounties. Membership simply gave access to the lodges in most cities and the opportunities to take bounties.
Taren shrugged. “No one's going to pay twenty thousand to get rid of someone who doesn't deserve it. All of these people are criminal scum, whether they are the ones posting the private bounties or those targeted by them. Innocent people don't get involved with lowlifes deeply enough to invoke that level of ire.”
Sheillene had taken two kill bounties in her two decades as a member of the Hunter's Guild. One was a smuggler that had taken a run from a competitor and the other was a murderous noble who was above the reach of the local law. She hadn't known the details until after the deed. But as Taren had told her, innocent people do not make targets of themselves.
Finding leads on the Phyreshades proved remarkably easy. The first tavern they checked with identified them as the owners of an inn at the edge of the dock district: The Hedgehog.
Two men stood beside the door of the Hedgehog. One was a young human with bulging muscles barely covered by a black leather vest and the other was a Matderi that leaned heavily on a war hammer, almost as if it were a crutch.
“You are going to play the part of bard?” Taren asked.
Sheillene pulled her lute out of her pack and began checking the tuning as they approached the doorway.
“Stop there,” The Matderi doorman blocked the entrance with his hammer as Taren approached. “You can't bring that loaded weapon into the taproom.” The Matderi leaned his head a little closer. “Is that Garavan's work?”
Taren smiled and nodded. “Yeah, he made it for me.”
“Not bad,” The Matderi said. “I didn't know he'd gotten past the four bow mark. Eight is damned impressive. You're safe in there, but you can keep swords and boarding axes if it helps you feel safer. But you've got to unload the crossbow to take it inside.”
“If you insist,” Taren said pleasantly. He took the lever out of a belt pouch and inserted it into the stock behind the bows. He aimed it at the ground and pulled the lever all the way back. The bows spun around the center stock and eight snaps sounded out in rapid succession. The dry mud of the street had a small cluster of holes where each bolt had passed completely into the ground.
A look of complete awe passed over the Matderi's face. “Oh, that was nice,” he said, “You didn't have to go and waste eight bolts like that, though.”
Taren put a hand on the Matderi's shoulder and said, “It wasn't a waste. The impressed look on your face made it worth it. It's not every day I get to impress a Matderi.”
The Matderi laughed as Taren stepped through the door.
The other doorman spoke to Sheillene as she stepped through the door. “If you're looking to entertain, you'll want to speak with Kita behind the bar. She handles the rates for bards and minstrels. I can’t promise any luck though. The innkeeper’s daughter has been cuddling up with a pretty impressive minstrel. He’s been on stage every night for several weeks.”
“Thanks, I’ll give it a shot anyway.” Sheillene said. Inside, the taproom was dark compared to the afternoon sun outside. When her eyes adjusted and she could see the human woman standing behind the bar, a hard knot formed in her stomach.
Kita Phyreshade was several months pregnant. When she saw Taren approaching the bar, she panicked. She couldn't kill a pregnant woman and wasn't about to let Taren do it either. She dropped her lute on a nearby table and grabbed the nearest chair and charged at Taren's back. The chair splintered to pieces as she brought it down over the back of Taren's head. Taren crumpled into a heap.
Instantly the two doormen were on top of her, throwing he
r to the floor and holding her down.
“Now missy, that's not the kind of behavior we like to see here,” The Matderi doorman said. He held her right arm at the elbow and at wrist against the floor. The other doorman had a similar grip on her left arm.
Taren slowly crawled to his feet and looked at Sheillene with wide, disbelieving eyes. “Let her go,” he said.
“She could have killed you,” The muscle-bound doorman said.
“Nah,” Taren said. “I'm tougher than a chair and she knows it.”
Kita came out from behind the bar and stood beside Taren. “What's going on here?” She asked.
The doormen hadn't released their grip on Sheillene. She struggled, kicking her feet wildly and screaming, “Run, Kita!”
Kita just stood there, looking more confused.
Taren stood alongside her just shaking his head. “Okay, maybe you shouldn't let her up yet,” he said. He handed the parchment with the wanted notice to Kita and gestured to Sheillene. “She thinks I'm here to take you away.”
Kita studied the document a moment then nodded to the doormen. “Let her up.”
Sheillene stopped struggling and the doormen let go.
“Let me see that,” The Matderi doorman hobbled over to Kita and grabbed the posting. “You two Abvi are Hunter's Guild?” he asked Sheillene and Taren. “Taking a bounty in Ignea: you’re very greedy, very brave or very stupid.”
“Today I’m leaning towards stupid.” Sheillene stood on her feet and stepped to face Taren, just out of swords reach, but close enough that she could stop him from attacking Kita if she had to. She wasn’t expecting violence now that the doormen were so close. The unarmed human wouldn’t be a problem, but even with a gimp leg, the Matderi looked like he knew how to use that war hammer as more than a crutch.
“It looks like Lucius is still peeved at Leo. This is a kill bounty.” The Matderi said.
“What does that mean, James?” Kita asked the Matderi.
Taren answered for James. “It means that someone wants you and Leo dead and is willing to pay a ton of money to see it happen. I don't know how a lame Matderi would know how to read a Hunter posting though.”
James didn't explain. He just placed himself between Kita and the two Hunters.
Taren dropped his crossbow onto his shoulder and said, “I'm not staying to explain. I wouldn't kill an unborn child or the woman carrying it. I probably wouldn't kill the father of an unborn child either for so little gold. I'm sorry you didn't know me better after so many years as partners, Sheillene. I can't trust you to have my back anymore. If our paths cross again, we are friends, we would never be anything else. Goodbye.” He headed out the door without even glancing back.
“So you hit him to stop him from hurting Kita?” The muscular doorman said.
Sheillene just nodded.
“Well then we owe you, even if he wouldn't have hurt her. We can't know if he wouldn't have or if he would have, but we know Kita is safe now because of you.”
“I wouldn't say that, Bouncer,” The Matderi said to his fellow doorman. “She's still a Hunter; she still has a bounty she could collect on. I am not leaving her side until she leaves town.”
“What’s going on?” A man asked as he entered the taproom. Sheillene recognized Leo from the portrait on the posting.
Kita recalled every action and word since Sheillene and Taren had entered the bar.
James handed him the posting. “The box around the portraits means they want you, dead or alive.”
A single box would mean dead or alive. The double box meant only dead would count for the bounty. Sheillene did not correct the Matderi.
Kita and Leo walked over to a corner booth and sat down. James took Sheillene to the bar and offered her a jug of wine. Sheillene accepted. It didn't taste very good, mostly like water. The Matderi would know that such drink was tortuous to an Abvi like Sheillene. Still, Sheillene smiled and thanked James.
A young human woman walked in off the street and stopped just inside the door, “Why are you two not at the door?” She asked.
“It’s a long story,” Bouncer said. “I guess I can get back to the door, James is covering the Hunter.” The muscle bound doorman went back to the door; he stepped aside to let the woman and, a man accompanying her, enter. The man wore a bright blue hat she'd seen before. Sheillene immediately recognized the man as Thomas, though she hadn't seen the bard in decades.
“Sheillene!” Thomas said, and walked over to the bar and sat beside Sheillene. “You seem -- what’s the word? Penitent, you seem penitent. I take it you aren't working as a bard, despite still having the lute we got you so many years ago.”
Sheillene didn't respond verbally, but instead pulled her Hunter's Guild medallion from inside her shirt.
“I'd heard that,” Thomas said. “I'm kind of glad you didn't take up the life of a bard. So, who'd you come to collect on?”
Sheillene pointed to where Kita and Leo sat talking in hushed tones. “Those two, but I won't be collecting. It's a kill contract and I don't kill pregnant women.”
“And James doesn't believe you?” Thomas nodded to the Matderi standing beside Sheillene.
“I'm just being safe about it,” James said. “I can't get paid if my employer gets killed.”
Leo stepped up to the bar, “And for the next few months, your employer is going to be our daughter, Tara.”
The young woman who'd come in with Thomas said, “What?”
Leo took the jug of wine off the counter and drank deeply. He set the jug down and said, “I need to go to Romanova and straighten this out. I'm sure I can at least bribe Lucius to renege the bounty. He's just afraid I'm going to come back and challenge his claim to his senate seat. I'm not interested in ever going back to that political hell-hole. Lucius is a bastard and is abusing his power, I'm sure. But I don't care about anything Romanova any longer. I just want to raise my family and be left alone. If I have to go to Romanova one more time to guarantee that, I will.”
“I'm going with my husband. I still have six weeks until the babies are due and the trip should take three weeks by boat this time of year with a good sea captain. We should be back by midsummer at the latest. We're leaving your brother with you, Tara.”
“I get the whole inn to myself?” Tara asked. “Like, I get to run the place?”
“When are you leaving?” James asked.
“As soon as we can pack,” Leo said. He took Kita's hand and headed towards the living quarters upstairs.
Thomas tapped James on the shoulder after Leo and Kita left the room. “What happens to Sheillene?”
“As soon as Mister and Misses Phyreshade are safely on a boat, Sheillene is no longer someone we distrust. Though she could, possibly get to Romanova faster than Leo and Kita and...”
“She won't be going anywhere,” Thomas said. “I'll be keeping her here as my apprentice.”
“I thought you didn't want me performing anywhere near you.” Sheillene carefully stepped away from the bar to retrieve her lute. She picked up her instrument and began playing the most complex song she knew to remind Thomas why he'd decided not to teach her to play so many years before.
“Right,” Thomas said. “I don't. So for the next couple months, I won't be performing. I'll be living off my sixty percent cut of your earnings.”
Sheillene slowed her song to a stop. “I don't know if I can afford that kind of pay cut. I'm coming off a job that would have paid quite a bit.”
Thomas's face dropped to dead serious. “How about we pretend you weren't a killer-for-hire? It’s something I think we'd all do best to forget, especially, you, Sheillene.”