Dago’s home had become a small, damp cell. The bricks around him were mismatched colours, a dozen tones of brown and beige, and many were stained with blood. He tried to do stretches each day, but he knew he would receive no aid from his captors if he reopened the wound in his back. His muscles were stiff, and without the proper food, he might be stiff for the rest of his days.
Sitting in the dark, Dago wondered how many more days he might expect.
His arm and leg had been set, when he awoke from the ordeal days ago. They seemed to be biding their time, waiting for jobless, captured Dago to recover. But why?
“Guard,” Dago called, not bothering to stand up. “Did you fix my bones just to let me rot?”
The guard did not respond. Dago couldn’t even be certain there was a guard still. His cell was bordered by an old iron door, icy to the touch. Dago started coughing, noisy rough barks that echoed off the walls.
“Guard!” he shouted, after a moment.
There came the sound of boots, treading on the floor stones outside his cell. The scuffing stopped, in front of his iron door. Dago didn’t breath, but neither did whoever was outside. Then, with an unkind clatter and screech, keys jangled into the lock, and the door scraped ajar. “Lift him up,” a woman’s voice said.
Dago tried scrambling to his feet, but it didn’t really work well. His muscles seized up, then a black-clad man grabbed him with dirty hands and hauled him to his feet. Dago’s back was so cramped he remained hunched, his black skin beading with sweat and his face contorted in a scowl.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” the woman said. Same woman, though she now wore a red dress and a white clasp in her hair, though it hung to her waist on one side of her body.
Dago attempted a shrug. “Don’t have to. Your henchmen took care of that. Madame…”
“You may call me Miss Puzzle,” she said, quietly.
“I’ll call you whatever I want, whore,” Dago said. If he still had his kishar, he’d carve her men into pieces and then get started on her.
The man who was holding him stepped forward a step and drove an elbow into Dago’s gut. Pain blinded him, and he fell to his knees. He tried smiling to her and her grunt as he was returned to his feet by rough hands.
Miss Puzzle gave him a genuine smile, full of delicate white teeth. She stepped closer to him until he could smell the cinnamon she wore again. “You can call me whatever you like, but it won’t make me that. Whatever you call me, I am and shall remain, a puzzle to you, Dago.”
Dago relaxed his shoulders and gave her a dull shake of his head. “Am I to remain rotting here, in this hole?”
“No, what a waste!” She seemed surprised by the question, and the delight on her beautiful face was almost enough to make him forget his predicament. If those goons of hers had not arrived that night in the open-doored alehouse, he would have had an excellent evening with Miss Puzzle. But now she had his life in her hands, and it was not a situation which Dago found at all of interest to him. “No, no, Dago. You’re going to get my men into Yarik.”
Dago blinked. Then he started laughing. “No, I’m not,” he said, after a minute.
“Then you’ll die. It’s pretty simple. You got out of Yarik once. You know the way back in,” Miss Puzzle said. “You either help us infiltrate, or we help you fertilize.”
“I swore I’d never return there. It’s a mountain of bones, Miss, a nightmare that has overlapped with our world…” Dago closed his eyes. They would kill him. It was simple. There had to be another option.
“Very well,” Miss Puzzle said. She reached down to her thigh, pulled back the dress she wore to reveal a knife strapped above her knee. It was a thin little blade, which left its sheath without so much as a whisper. She lifted it up, and stepped close enough for him to feel her quiet, calm breath.
“Fine,” Dago said. It was drawn out from the same instinctual centre in his brain where he had found the willpower to escape Yarik in the first place. “I’ll help you,” he said. “But only because you’re pretty.”
She flashed him her lovely smile again and slid away the deadly little knife. “Excellent. You leave in the morning. You and my team will take a ship around Radregar to Tempera Bay and you will instruct them how to approach Yarik for your arrival.”
“So you’ll just kill me once your men get into the city?”
She shrugged. “I might. If you’re useful though, maybe I will… find some other use for you.”
Miss Puzzle and her guard began to leave, but when the guard grabbed the door handle, Dago said, “One last question, please. By all the gods of man, what do you want in Yarik?”
The woman in the red dress turned back, looking past her guard and said without smiling, “We’re going to kill a commander.”