I:
Flight
She undressed her surroundings with a
singular gleam in her eye: there were a dozen crooks standing around the podium
in the middle of the room, the kinds of professional
crooks who could have made it big in Sitopis if they just hadn't made the wrong
enemies. She could always tell their types apart from the rest of the crowd;
she could see the flames burning somewhere in the hollows of their cheeks and
the snarling-whipped look in their eyes, the look of vicious dogs beaten down
mercilessly, the hard way, with clubs and whips and fists.
The young man in the middle of them all was different, that
one leaning on the podium and watching her with crooked eye and smile. He
reeked of - what an unholy stench - utter confidence;
he was carrying himself too easily, too unwarily, too idly to be one of them.
He was well-groomed; he was clean and his skin flawless. His clothes were
well-tailored; his white dress shirt and black slacks were draped impeccably
over his lean frame. He had an eye
patch over his right eye that clashed incongruously with the rest of his
professional attire, as if he were playing a game of pirates and treasure - most
Sitopis residents couldn't care less about hiding scars and marks; some even
flaunted them. This man was so indiscreetly
concealing his own.
How interesting, she thought.
His
functioning left eye shined the most unnatural shade blue she had yet to see -
she had no doubt that such an eye would fetch hundreds in the market. She
herself had those unexceptional brown eyes that were identical to just about
everyone else’s. He even had white hair - and he was no albino! - tousled and
lovely and careless and would probably fetch just as much as his eyes. The
old-timers thought albino articles were good luck, and they paid good money if
sellers could prove that whatever they had had come from an albino’s body.
She didn’t favor albinos one way or the
other over anyone else, but she couldn't deny this pseudo-albino’s appeal. He was a dead ringer for an Adonis;
even the fluorescent lights illuminating his face seemed to form a halo around
his head. Too bad. She'd actually met an Adonis and resisted a frontal
pheromone barrage without breaking a sweat. This would be like upside down cake
in comparison.
"Gentlemen, good
morning," she greeted them from the door. She didn't expect any welcoming
exclamations. Besides the generally hostile personalities of the criminals
staring back at her, tardiness was one of their especial pet peeves.
They
were the Sitopis Outcasts, fallen stars that had lost all their brilliance, but
most of them retained their old habits, leftovers from their glory days. Like
reliability, punctuality.
Tag
was rarely punctual where meetings were concerned. Meetings or anything else,
really.
"You're
late." Oh, Gilligan, Tag thought, appraising him from afar without moving
away from the door. He was the bitterest in the room, the most ornery, a
wretched man, truly. He'd lost the canal toll works only a few weeks ago - again
- after fighting tooth and nail to regain his position as steward primary of the
canal industry. He'd lost it the first time six years ago due to his own
foolishness, creating an enemy in the canal Baron's son and fooling himself
into thinking that no ill would come of it. He’d become wiser, but he was as
impulsive as he had ever been, and it had been not only the end to his initial
rise to fame - it had been the end to his miraculous phoenix-like resurrection
after that. This time around, he had
been sabotaged by a competitor who had been masquerading as an ally from the
very beginning, a real vulture of a man who had merely been nurturing
Gilligan’s efforts in order to ripen them for the taking.
Lesson:
Gilligan hadn't been paranoid enough.
"I
wasn't sure whether to come or not." Tag took a step forward from the
door, about to join the gaggle congregated around the man at the podium. She
thought better of it when she noted a few hairy upper lips curling in derision
at her arrival and subsequent self-welcome.
Gilligan
clenched his jaw and stared back at her with a particularly disagreeable
expression stamped upon his face. "You didn't know whether or not to
accept Baron Cain's invitation?"
Ah,
Baron Cain Osiris, that
Adonis-lookalike leaning on that podium and watching her with that lazy smile.
He was a powerful man, then, and he had every right to act the way he did -
like a self-content worm, Tag thought. Supposedly endowed with not only
superior senses, but heightened mental faculties as well. But he was beautiful,
Tag thought, and she resisted the urge to curl her upper lip at him. He could
be as dumb as a Defect and they would still call him a paragon.
If
he really was Baron Cain Osiris, then he was the heir apparent of Leviticus
Inks, Incumbent of the "law enforcement" industry. More accurately,
Incumbent of the weapons trade.
"No
need to start using Sitopis fancy-talk around me," said Tag. "Titles
like Baron don't scare me. I'm not
from around here, remember?" she added, knowing full well that such an
admission would only serve to further enrage Giligan. He had always been a
nativist, that rascal.
"It
shows," Gilligan snarled; he was already working himself up and Tag was utterly delighted behind her facade of
stolid impudence. "And we haven't forgotten, believe you me-"
"Why
did you hesitate?"
And
that was Cain Osiris himself
approaching her, no longer standing idly by the podium with his arm draped over
it, no longer acting the part of celebrity Baron, future Incumbent, but of
someone else, something else - he was
on the move. Moving - like a panther, navigating his way between the other
guests he had invited - who else could have been the one to call them all here?
- to this broken down place, a once-upon-a-time conference room. Why had he
even invited them here, of all
places? There were superstitions about this place. Even if Tag didn’t believe
in them herself, others did - many. He had some kind of purpose to all this, a
shadowy motive beneath all this business that he had yet to reveal, some reason
for all these silly antics and theatrics.
Watch
out, Tag told herself. He moves, with purpose.
She
would have grinned if she had been sure that he had no concealed weapon on his
body. Her wariness of such a possibility, actually, had less to do with his
Barony of the relevant "industry" and more to do with the fact that
he was just - a native of Sitopis. Him and everyone else here, too.
"Because
it would have been right shameful to walk right into a trap and get knifed
between the ribs, or blown up altogether. Can't trust invitations these days,
especially if they seem legitimate." Tag cocked her head when Cain came to
a stop before her. "The letterheads were very tasteful, I heard. I'm
surprised no one else thought twice about this - conference, I think you called
it, in the invitation.”
Gilligan
snorted, and his muddy brown eyes rolled up into his head. "Why? You think
you've done something worth getting killed for?" His eyes were narrowed,
accusing. Some of the other guests stared at her as if echoing his sentiments.
Tag
stared at Gilligan then, ignoring Cain's presence although he had advanced
close enough that he was almost upon her. “What an asinine question. We've all
done something."
There
came no answer, only silence.
She
knew Gilligan had spoken out of hatred, but she had been shocked humorless by
his idiocy.
It
was true, after all. Everyone here
had made enemies out of powerful people, one way or the other. Were they all
going to start pretending that they were following some sort of code of honor,
simply because some pretentious Baron had summoned them to a - a conference, as the invitation had called
it? Tag was truly
surprised no one had declined to attend, or at least straddled the fence - were
they all so desperate to throw themselves back into the palms of the Sitopis
mighty?
And
then Cain took that final step, successfully blocking her view of the others
entirely. She found herself staring at his chest, decided that this was a poor
vantage point indeed, and looked up into his eyes. What, was he going to knife
her, as she had earlier suggested he would? It wouldn’t surprise her. After
all, Sitopis didn't like limiting the dirty work to the grunts. Even Barons
knew how to act like proper criminals.
Tag figured she would
be able to bolt before then. He was a Baron, he was Baron Cain Osiris, even,
but there was a reason behind the nickname Coyotefoot, and she hadn’t even come
up with that herself.
"It
was very difficult to find you," he said, looking down at her with a smile
curving his lips. "I'm glad my invitation finally reached you, even though
it had to pass between a few lips and ears and hands, too, on their way
there."
It was then, when the Baron smiled at her and spoke softy to
her in a voice like snowdrifts, that Tag realized why no one else had suspected
any foul play, why everyone had trusted this man implicitly, so
uncharacteristically, why she had
been the only one with her wits about herself. She retreated a step, pressed
her back up against the door. She averted her eyes and kept her eyebrows from
furrowing; one hint of stress and he would probably try to use it against her.
“Cain Osi-” she managed, and then she stopped herself before she fell into the
trap any deeper.
She
wouldn't fall for that kind of cheap trick, she thought furiously. She ought to
have suspected the moment she walked in and spotted his pretty face. Adonis
weren't the only things to steer clear of in Sitopis. Far from it. People like
Cain - his kind - they were at least ten times worse. On a good day.
Tag
was going to guess that today wasn't one of those days.
"If you keep breathing on my face like that trying to feather me down, I'm going to find it necessary to leave," she said. She stood there with her arms akimbo - actually a strategic move to situate her left hand as near to the doorknob as possible. "So give it up."
Some
of the others were surreptitiously edging closer, trying to overhear the
conversation between Baron and Outcast. Evidently, they hadn't heard what Tag was saying and the implications of her words, but she had a feeling that they wouldn't have cared. They were
already caught deep. In the case that they even had any sense left to believe
her, they probably still wouldn't even care. Only Tag was left standing
now, staring off the side with a constipated expression on her face in order to
avoid being taken in with all the rest. It wasn't exactly a winning fight she
was fighting, either. She wouldn't fall for his tricks, fine, but now, with a
little help from his new friends, he was in a position to simply disable her.
Permanently.
“I didn’t know,” she said after a brief pause, in a voice
low and slow but not too wary, because she wouldn’t give him that satisfaction,
“that your kind still existed in a city like this.”
"What
was that?" And then he was leaning closer, as if to better hear what she
was saying, but she knew the reason why he was going to such great lengths to
intrude in her personal space.
Ordinarily,
her pride would have driven her to stand her ground, but now wasn't the time
for a cockfight. Proximity alert, Tag hissed at herself. Do something. But
what? She could stand up to an Adonis any day from now to Judgment Day, but against someone like this - if she breathed in his exhalation, she'd probably fall right there at his feet.
"Back
off." As if she were in a position to make demands. She gave herself a ten
for pure guts. She was literally standing toe-to-toe with this devil of a man and she was still mouthing off to him.
"Come
now," he said gently. He leaned in even closer, as if he hadn't noticed that Tag had turned her head away and clearly didn't appreciate the violation of her personal space. His right hand reached for the doorknob by her
waist, hanging off it as if he were about to open it for her - but it simply
remained there, clearly unmoving.
Cat
scat, Tag though. He'd been a step ahead of her, reading her like a book - he had seen her move her arms and had probably deduced that she would try to make a run for it. Now
she couldn't leave the room. No windows, either. This room was nestled in the
middle of the building itself, so there were no other exits. At this point,
Tag's only option was to simply bust through a wall, and she wasn't all that
certain that it was a bad choice to make, after all, considering the
circumstances. Between Cain Osiris - what he was - and a few bumps and bruises,
she would take the latter any day.
"You
can rest your wings, and I'll be gone. Quick as can be." She kept her
voice low. There was no sense in making too big of a fuss. Besides, alerting
the others to her new-found knowledge wouldn’t accomplish anything; they were
all too far entangled to escape.
He
cocked his head at just the slightest angle. "You came, didn't you? Won’t
you stay?"
"Didn't
know you were one of those."
"Does
it make any difference?"
Yes,
it does, Tag wanted to say, but that would get her nowhere at all. "Start
talking, then. I didn't come here to get feathered down. Try all you want, but
I'm here to do business."
"If
you had come earlier, you would have heard everything already." Cain
raised his hand - the one not on the doorknob, to Tag's utter chagrin - to
arrest the creeping progress of his newest minions, who had been drawing ever
closer to listen in. They stopped immediately.
"Well-trained."
Tag allowed no bitterness to seep into her words, only a bit of jaunty sarcasm.
"If I hadn't come at all, I might have avoided this fiasco." She let
her voice rise in volume just the slightest bit for the benefit of those who
might be near enough to hear. It was hope made in vain, but if even one of them happened to snap out of his stupor, then it might well be worth it.
"It's
not a fiasco, unless you make it one."
She
stilled. His first threat, however subtle. It told her that he didn't want her
running her mouth about him. It also told her that she was beginning to test
his patience. So maybe he was in a hurry, after all.
"Point
taken," she said. "Make it simple."
He
smiled down at her. "Fortress. A way in."
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