The city of Ellakar was vaguely familiar to Dago Ai Ji Malzo. He had been here before, and had just delivered a bounty—living, this time—to Lord Shea. He didn’t know street names or establishments, but he knew how to find the clean part of town, and, more importantly, how to avoid it. He had coin to spend. The only time he went to those neat streets and groomed gardens was when he was in need.
Jobless Dago was a much more relaxed man that the sellsword with a mission. He wore a small grey hat on top of his shaved black head, and a loose dark red v-neck tunic hung from his hairless torso. In a tavern called the “Gully Gambler,” he spent twenty reg on a table of Loser’s Trick, and won a hundred by the time the spring rain let up.
Dago knew not to stay in one room for too long, and after he won that game, he wandered the damp streets of the city. The Layman’s District of Ellakar was a squalid gathering of rotten wooden shacks. Though he had never minded the bad parts of cities, these northern places used building materials that were far too weak to weather the storms. He remembered the city of Sheld with nostalgia. Each house there felt like a cave, strong, sturdy and defensible.
The mercenary lost the next game he played, in another inn. He shrugged off the defeat and bought a beer at the bar. The innkeeper seemed to like Dago, and spent most of the time that the mercenary was there asking him questions about his travels.
“What’s the biggest battle you’ve seen?” he asked Dago.
These blasted northerners, Dago thought, as he sipped from a clay mug. “In the jungles, the size of a battle isn’t important. It’s how fiercely you fight. Ten men can accomplish as much as an army, I swear it. Myself, and a few of the Pale Company, we toppled the city of Lo Mallago in the rebellions nine years ago.”
“Toppled the city!”
Dago shook his head. “We killed the leaders, get it?”
“But wouldn’t the guards arrest you for that?”
He could only laugh at the barman’s question. “Why would they do that? The leaders were the only ones paying them.”
“What about loyalty?”
This time Dago didn’t laugh. There was no such thing. Loyalty was a lie. “What about it?” he asked the innkeeper, setting down his beer.
Soon after that, it was time to wander the streets again. His lost game and the salty exchange with the innkeeper had left Jobless Dago with a bitter taste in his mouth, the sort of taste that Hired Dago preferred. He took a small leather canteen of water from a beggar, and drank a mouthful of it before tossing it back with a couple reg. The beggar thanked him, and then went to buy whatever drug he obsessed upon.
Feeling bitterness was not acceptable to him. Not tonight, in the streets of Ellakar. He entered the next alehouse he found, a small place with doors propped open and no signs or names to be seen. “I’ll have your strongest drink,” he told the barmaid, and she proceeded to mix it. This was a house, with cushions and low-sitting tables everywhere, instead of tables and chairs.
He soon found himself drinking next to a small woman with braided brown hair and a netted shirt showing more of her than it concealed. She was likely a woman of the night, though she didn’t ask him to hire her. She talked with him, at length, about how the lords of Ellakar were a greedy bunch. Dago was frank with her, that he depended on the coin of such men, and she just laughed in reply. Likely, she agreed with him. Amused, he bought her a drink too, which got a raised eyebrow from the barmaid.
She was halfway done the drink, when two large men entered the room, through the breezy doorway. They walked right up to Dago and said, “We’d like a word. Out.”
Dago stood to his feet, frowning. He took off his grey hat and gave it to the half-naked woman. “You’d best hold onto this for me,” he said, and she burst out laughing once more. “Nobles,” he said sarcastically, to his two opponents. “Let’s away.”
In the street waited three more. Jobless Dago was now in an outright foul mood. He drew the gold-plated shortsword at his waist, felt its familiar weight and slanting bend—it was not a machete for cutting vines, but a kishar, a blade for cutting limbs—and he planted his feet for a fight. He had taken more men before, and turned them into red smears.
“You’ve a lesson to learn,” said one of the men. All the damn people up here had olive skin and wispy hair. “You got a drink at the wrong pla—”
Dago’s kishar snipped out the man’s throat, before he finished, and the sellsword strode past him, knocking the body across the dirt street. Two of the other men came at him, slashing with single-edged straight swords. Dago stepped back, over the corpse, to keep them at a good distance.
He misjudged his footing and found himself on one knee. One boot was slick with blood from the dead man.
A third attacker rushed at Dago from the side, with a short spear thrust. The bronze tip tore through the collar of Dago’s red tunic, but the man took a slash from the gold sword that split off a layer of skin from shin to waist. The man screamed, stumbling back.
A heavy weight barrelled into Dago, and he lost his grip on his kishar. Thankfully, there was a string for that. As he found himself knocked against the stone wall of the building, toppling a potted tree, he felt the tug of the blade hanging from his wrist. It was the fourth, and final, attacker who had rushed him.
A knife clipped Dago’s left shoulder, and he grunted. He slammed his right arm upward; a punch made his attacker bite out part of his own tongue. Dago’s motion had yanked his gold shortsword up into the air, and he caught it deftly in his right palm.
Standing up from the wall, he slashed upward and spilled the knife-wielder’s innards across the cobblestone. The leather jerkin the man wore did nothing to protect him.
Something solid struck Dago’s left leg. He fell on his back and all his wind was knocked out. He coughed, and sucked in the cool night air, and saw a bronze straight sword just in time to roll to the left. It scraped along his back, and he felt its scalding heat pierce his skin.
With a hopeless jab, he caught the swordsman with his sword, but then another solid blow to his arm broke some bone and he couldn’t even feel the rope that had held his kishar to him.
“Up you go, you shit,” said a gruff voice, and hands grabbed him.
Someone spat, loudly.
Dago found himself held upright, at last. He could feel warm blood seeping down his back and couldn’t move either his leg or his right arm. He coughed again. That fall had hurt.
Two of his attackers were dead, lying on the dirt and spreading red blankets. One was on his backside, his leg bleeding awfully bad. He had already torn his tunic off and was starting to bind the wound.
“Gonna kill me too?” Dago asked, heaving for breath.
One of the others dropped to his knees—it was the swordsman that had caught his back and, seconds later, his sword. Blood was welling from that man’s side, and he had spit some up too. Didn’t look good. They’d want him dead, he knew. He had killed two or three of their friends.
The man who held Dago smirked. He had two eyes tattooed beneath his own, and a black diamond on his cleanly shaved chin. “Boss wants you alive,” he said. He lifted the hammer he’d use to break Dago’s bones, and gave the sellsword a firm tap on the head.
Everything went black.
When Dago’s eyes saw clearly again, he noticed he was in a cell. He could hear a fire crackling. He had a vague impression of being carried indoors after the fight, into a cellar. What surprised him the most, though, was the girl from the alehouse, standing in front of him. He tried to approach her, though she was only a few paces away, but his shoulders and neck were bound with chains and he couldn’t move. The pain hit him, a line of heat—both itchy and mind-numbing—cross the arch of his back, and his broken limbs seemed to surpass that. One arm reached for the woman, while the other hung limply. He held himself on his feet with one leg, while the other was little more than a crutch with a loose, agonized joint in the middle.
“Tsk,” said the woman, stepping forward. She was not, he now guessed, a woman of the night as he had first assumed. She wore the same outfit, with deep cleavage and every curving line and dot on the skin visible through the netting she wore across her torso. A black wrap-around skirt covered her hips and the lower part of her belly. With a purring sound, she brandished his small grey cap, and spun it around on one finger. After a single spin, she whispered, “There’ll be time for action later, but don’t hurt yourself further.”
“What do you want?” Dago asked hoarsely. “What action?”
She laughed. “A job,” she said. “But not one you’ll be paid for.”
“Why?” His throat was so dry it felt crusty.
She stepped right up to him, and he could smell her sweat and the cinnamon perfume she wore. She had small dark eyes, matched by her dark lipstick and the shadows beneath her eyes. “You’d turn it down, Dago Malzo. We know you. But you belong to us, for now.”
He heard someone behind him stir, and a shower of sparks that lit the prison cell he hung in. He could feel the heat before it reached him, but he wasn’t ready for the blinding pain that seared along the curve of his back. His headed nodded forward, almost into the woman’s bosom, as a fiery brand cauterized the gash in his back. After only the first second of it, Dago’s mouth was rent open by the screams that echoed the cell long after he had passed out once more.