Chapter 1- The seeker

Evening was shedding its last light on the immense port, which seemed endless, and looked as if it would engulf the whole of Armanth Bay in a forest of masts. Inland, as far as the eye could see over the tightly clustered roofs of the blocks of tall houses, the city-state stretched out, leaping from canals to islets to hills. Built on the lagoon, the city spanned the middle of the Argas River, and sloped gently upwards between gardens and woods to nibble away at the cliff face that acted as a natural rampart for the city’s entire northern facade.

Armanth is the largest commercial port on the Mares Saeparent, the Seas of Separation, whose shores are home to the vast majority of Loss’s cities and city-states. Armanth is the second largest in the entire northern hemisphere; at least for those on this planet who know that, under the sky still barred by the foggy, bluish immensity of the Ortentia Moon, their world is a sphere.

And so the sun came to die, shedding its last rays on the wooden terrace of an unadorned tavern. A dockers’ and sailors’ pub, it literally had its feet in the water. At this hour, a faded but bold and not clumsy slave girl was dancing on a sandy dance floor, trying her best to entertain her few spectators. There weren’t half a dozen customers to linger over her. All weary from their day’s work, they were enjoying the mild evening after a hot, exhausting summer’s day. As the day drew to a close, a welcome fresh breeze blew away the pungent stench coming from the city of over a million souls.

Standing on the terrace, nonchalantly leaning against the railing, disdaining tables and stools as usual and probably the only one to show any real interest in the dancer, Jawaad sipped a cup of tea he’d never be able to finish, so vile was it. His customary solitary contemplation, taking advantage of these silences to immerse himself in reflections which, to the dismay of those close to him, could sometimes last an entire day, was interrupted by one of the tavern’s drunken customers who, after leaving the counter with a gait that left no doubt as to his condition, joined him on the terrace. He planted himself in front of him after observing him for a good while, capsizing a little on his feet:

“That’s quite a piece of jewelry you’ve got there.”

“And?”

Jawaad deigned to leave his thoughts and lifted his gaze from his cup of infamous brew, to survey the intruder. He towered over his interlocutor by half a head, which was quite common for Armanth; he was seen as a tall man. His face bore the features of a dark-skinned half-breed. He appeared to be half Athemaïc, the regional ethnic group, and half Nordic blood; one might have dared to compare him to a dragensmann or a hegemonian. An aura of impassivity and unreadable expressions further accentuated the sort of arrogant nonchalance he constantly displayed. A dark, incisive gaze, a three-day beard and a mane of neat but deliberately messy black hair, loosely held back by a catogan, completed the picture. His deftly feigned languor emanated a hunter’s aura; something notoriously feline, clearly evoking the predator. If the Lossyans had been lions and other big cats, he could have been a leopard. One who knows that his strength lies in his ability to strike with a single blow, without mercy or warning.

As a further paradox, his only weapon was a working cutlass laced to his bicep in its scabbard. If Armanthians aren’t frequently armed, then they’re usually much better than that. He wore sober black clothes: a kilt of thick leather and linen straps over pants, held in place by a wide belt with pockets overflowing with various tools, and a simple vest, discreetly embroidered, open over his bare torso. No one unfamiliar with fabrics and fashions could see the richness or quality of his finery. In the end, the only thing he wore was a pendant the size of a large coin, held by a chain around her neck and which, up close, resembled a complex astrolabe whose pattern would have perplexed any astronomer. The jewel appeared to be made of bright, shining silver, encased in a rose-gold shrine. Clearly, the intruder, drunk as a skunk, was fixating all his attention on the rich finery in question.

“Well, you know, I know a lot of people who’d be real happy to have something like that. It must be worth a lot.”

“And?”

“Well, you see, I’d be happy to have it in my pocket, your jewel…”

Jawaad made no move, his cup still in his hand. An ominous smile appeared, barely discernible in the folds of his lips. The drunkard in front of him pretended to advance threateningly. He was dressed in a laced tunic of unbleached canvas, which had seen better days, over a pair of discarded baggy pants, dirty enough to stand on their own. He reeked of brine and adulterated alcohol, but carried an imposing navy dagger threaded through his belt. The blade was almost as long as his forearm. Jawaad replied, as impassive as ever:

“You won’t get it. It’s worth more than your life, and that’s what you’ll lose if you try.”

The sailor was practically on top of Jawaad when the latter suddenly straightened up, leaving his support. The drunk put his hand on the handle of his weapon. He had little reason to hesitate; none of the tavern’s patrons would bother to come to his target’s rescue. Chances were they’d rather wait their turn to pillage the corpse and divide the loot among themselves.

The drunkard growled in a pasty voice, raising his arm to seize Jawaad’s jewel:

“I’ll have it if I want it, you bastard! So, are you going to give it to me, or am I going to take it off your carcass?”

He didn’t have time to finish his gesture. He caught the contents of the teacup in the face, flinching in surprise; of course, he reflexively closed his eyes. He regretted it the next second.

In one swift movement, Jawaad interrupted him by grabbing his wrist and kicking him in the kneecap with his heel. Then, with an impulse, he knocked him off balance and slapped him across the ear. The man was already out of the fight when Jawaad pushed him back violently with the flat of his hand, striking straight into the plexus with an impulse that sent him biting the dust three meters away.

Jawaad had hardly moved from his original position; but, upright and alert as his opponent sputtered, coughed and choked pitifully on the ground, he stared at the entrances to the terrace and then the open hall of the tavern. Some of the customers at the counter – half of them, in fact – were suddenly interested in him.

A master merchant was rarely attacked in Armanth. And although Jawaad made no effort whatsoever to display the exuberant toiletry of his colleagues and thus make his rank known, he generally expected to be identified as such given the extent of his fame. Some people, including those close to him, regularly accused this self-assurance of misguided pride; Jawaad would not have disagreed. He didn’t have the allure of his peers, but he was something of a legend in Armanth. So, alone, he became a tempting prey in these ill-famed corners, at least for men who didn’t think beyond the tip of their nose. Attacking a Master Merchant, even a reckless one, in the city they’d built themselves, had the reputation of being a kind of vicarious suicide.

Bending over his stunned adversary, the Master Merchant withdrew the broad dagger from his belt, while the group at the counter in turn joined the terrace. The owner who served them cautiously took cover, whistling to his slave, who stopped his dance and hurried after him. The remaining customers decided that it was high time to spread out too. It was looking more and more like an ambush.

Jawaad turned towards the railing, away from the approaching men. Carelessly tossing the dagger into the dirty waters of the lagoon, he resettled to wait for the small group with crossed arms, after a last glance at the quayside walkways on either side. The situation was clearly escalating, yet he stretched out an incongruous smirk. There were four of them, confidently approaching, and this time they weren’t drunken sailors. They could have fooled an inattentive observer at first glance, looking like dock workers, but they moved methodically, surrounding their prey like spadassins ready for battle, hands on their weapons, far too well-maintained and rich for their beggar’s finery.

The merchant’s confident smirk puzzled one of the men, but he didn’t realize it right away. His colleague had more instinct: he looked to his left, where the terrace opened out onto the docks; he had seen Jawaad’s gaze linger there. It saved his life.

Emerging from the street, a beastly black giant, towering over all the men present by two heads, charged in like a ghia-tonnerre in fury. The lucky spadassin had time to dodge it, losing his balance, but would long remember the horrible sensation of feeling the steel of an enormous Frangian scimitar blade slide against his neck and bite into his flesh with colossal force, cutting into the leather of his collar. His colleague, right behind him, didn’t understand the smile; he never had time to realize why his prey seemed so confident. The giant’s saber continued to cut into his shoulder, crushing his ribcage and lung. He died instantly.

In an instant, the confidence of the three remaining spadassins wavered. Another man, looming like a wraith behind the black giant, charged them too, but before he could reach them, he swung his arm and a dagger slashed into the torso of the cutthroat furthest from Jawaad. The man touched at the heart toppled over the terrace railing, breathing his last in the brackish water.

In just four seconds, two of the men were dead, a third wounded. The last remaining assailant dropped his weapon, which he’d barely had time to draw, and took to his heels, crossing the deserted tavern to flee through the door opening onto the streets. Had he seen a demon rising from the black holes of the Abyss, he wouldn’t have run any faster. Damas, the man with the throwing daggers, was about to pin him down when Jawaad raised his hand to stop him.

“Let him run.”

“What? You want to leave a witness alive?”

The master merchant left his support on the balustrade to approach the wounded man on the ground, who was staring in almost religious terror at Abba, the black giant who had almost decapitated him. Abba towered over him, scimitar raised, and by the murderous madness in his eyes, he knew his life was on borrowed time.

Jawaad replied to Damas:

“Yes, he will tell what happened”; and, addressing the giant: “Abba, no.”

The black colossus reluctantly lowered his weapon, the veins in his neck throbbing with rage. He couldn’t wait to finish off the man who had tried to assault his boss and friend.

Abba was a dark-skinned man from the Fringes. Dressed in a loose-fitting, brightly-colored sarouel, held together by thick leather belts and silk scarves, his hair knotted in countless braids embellished with colorful glass beads, the adjective « giant » was all that was needed to describe him. The man could have been a little over twenty or well over thirty; his face was so powerful, so bestial that it seemed too savage and brutal to give him an age. He was simply massive, in every way, and surpassed the tallest Lossyans in size. Most of the doors had not been designed for such a broadly built fellow; indeed, in a moment of distraction, he often forgot and bumped into them.

Abba turned to Jawaad, standing over his victim; the latter would have been only slightly more terrified, she would have pissed herself.

“You’re too merciful with this scum. At least, if I finish him off, the lesson will be heard loud and clear!”

“The lesson has already been taught, Abba, and he’s going to pass it on.”

“A corpse is a good message!”

“A corpse can’t talk good enough.”

The merchant approached the last spadassin on the ground, who had just begun to urinate in his braies. Jawaad looked at him indifferently, as calm as Abba seemed angry:

“Did you hear? The lesson has been learned. You know what to say to those who paid you and the others. Give your bosses my regards from Jawaad the master merchant, and tell them that anyone who tries to kill me again will never see his killer coming.”

The tavern had long since emptied, so quickly that it would have been difficult to know where the rest of the customers had gone. Even the drunken sailor, who had just recovered from his beating, slipped away belly-down under the particularly sinister and worrying gaze of Damas, who briefly hesitated to add him to his hunting list.

 

***

 

On the other side of the square, a man watched as the henchmen who had survived Damas and Abba’s assault fled and disappeared piteously one after the other.

Raevo was no spadassin. Or at least, he was a far more efficient, trained and discreet version of one; in fact, the best word to describe him would have been: spy. Skilfully concealed in the half-light of the street, as night was taking its toll on the city, he watched the last few comings and goings of the latecomers hurrying back to the comfort of their homes; they weren’t at all keen to know what had just happened to the tavern terrace and the three unsavory men still there.

A cautious man, Raevo had never approached the master merchant, whom he had been instructed to keep an eye on since the previous day. To learn the habits of one’s prey, one must always start modestly; he had therefore remained in the background, invisible and always at a safe distance to disappear at the slightest alarm. The clear summer nights made his task a little more difficult, as Ortentia, in the absence of clouds, largely illuminated the gloom; but this was nothing that would have stopped a man of his talent, which he proudly compared to an art for which he was, moreover, handsomely remunerated. The prey he was charged with studying and monitoring, with the aim of discreetly stealing his every secret, was undoubtedly endowed with resources that would have to be taken into account.

Raevo had expected the famous master merchant to have good bodyguards; he was not disappointed. These two were even to be envied, given their efficiency. Men of his political weight know how to surround themselves, and Jawaad was no exception to the rule. But Raevo was surprised to find that the master merchant didn’t hesitate to dispense with an escort, and with good reason. Even alone, he was apparently no easy target.

Now the spy had an exact idea of the scale of his task and how to proceed. He already had a good estimate of the sum he would require from his sponsor to continue his work. Raevo never killed: that would be a waste of his real talents. Well… almost never, because from time to time, it was a necessity that didn’t weigh heavily on his conscience, whether the victim was innocent or not. He simply found it dirty. But as he faded into the night with such ease that a cat would have felt jealous, he wished ironic pleasure to whoever wanted to kill Jawaad; as for him, he had a report to make, and a contract to negotiate.

 

***

 

“You know, Jawaad, a head on a pike is an excellent message too. Too bad Abba missed.”

Damas addressed his boss, glancing over the terrace railing to see if he could retrieve his jet dagger, which was a lost cause: it had sunk with the spadassin to the bottom of the bay and no one in their right mind would have gone swimming there, even in broad daylight.

Damas was a rather slender man of average stature. He would have easily hidden behind Abba, and even with his coat and weapons, he would have been nowhere to be seen. Others would have said that Damas was so cunning anyway that he could hide in the middle of an empty arena, which wasn’t far from the truth. It amused him greatly to nurture this reputation. He was a Jemmai, of the Rift people; you didn’t see many of them outside their territory, reputed to be almost inaccessible, and dangerous. For centuries, Jemmaïs had been declared heretics by the Church, and the Ordinatorii would surely have paid dearly to get their hands on him.  He had tanned skin, a face cut with a serrated edge, forty or so years of service under the Mothers of All Storms, from which one could be proud to emerge alive. Long, stringy black hair, groomed pretty much as you can when you don’t have the time or the interest, completed the portrait. He always wore loose-fitting clothes, as black as his hair, and a long kilt over his braies, a common fashion for men, which had the advantage of being ideal for concealing many things.

To finish with his reputation, in addition to his naval saber, Damas hid a number of other more exotic or dangerous weapons under his broad clothes, such as his jet daggers and a pulse pistol.

Jawaad looked back at Damas, who quickly abandoned the idea of retrieving his weapon, but not without a grumble. His knives were expensive! He was very demanding with his equipment.

“A severed head doesn’t talk.”

The jemmai looked up at the sky for a moment, then stared at Abba, also a little doubtful, who was letting the wounded survivor go. The latter stammered something unclear that must have been an « all right, understood, sir, very well understood, thank you for sparing me », but he didn’t linger either to try and make his words intelligible, nor to dwell a second longer in front of these three public dangers, slipping away without asking for a second’s rest, one hand clutching the wound on his neck.

The black giant let out a breath that could fairly be compared to the angry snort of a bull, and turned to his boss:

“You’re taking too many risks; why did you make us meet here? You almost got yourself killed!”

“I had business…”

“If we hadn’t arrived in time, it could have ended badly!”

“You arrived just in time…”

As usual, Jawaad didn’t seem to care about the incident, and the jemmai knew his boss: for one thing, he wouldn’t change his habits anyway, even if he had all the Church’s inquisitors after him; for another, he didn’t really need weapons in case of trouble to ensure his protection. Damas interrupted the dialogue of the deaf:

“Who do you think it was this time?”

Jawaad took a while to answer, giving the impression that he was thinking about it, but his mind was made up since he had seen the ambush:

“Amarrus Lokaï, I think.”

Abba exploded:

“What?! That scum-sucking miscarriage of a mangy bitch, unable to button up his clothes without two slaves to hold his guts?”

The master merchant nodded nonchalantly:

“As incapable of paying the right price to murder someone as he is of managing his business. I’ll bring him a present in person to thank him for this distraction.”

After a brief silence, he stared at his two henchmen, and changed the subject to what really interested him.

– Did you find her?

Damas, who wasn’t much of a conversationalist himself, turned the floor over to Abba, a specialist in the subject that had kept them pacing the harbor all day:

“Not much, but I took advantage of the opportunity to win a bid on a lot that’s already been trained up and will resell easily. As for your « special » request, there are still some merchants foolish enough to try and take me for a sucker.”

Damas stretched out an amused smile. Between his jagged face, dark, bushy eyebrows and yellowed teeth, the look was rather sinister.

“You know what they say. The bigger it is… » he commented.

“Yeah, well, you don’t say that twice with me. Anyway, we’ve been touring the paddocks all day, and the Great High Season Market will be more propitious, I mean, redheaded barbarians aren’t the easiest to buys. There’s not much of a market for them, and those who have one often keep it for themselves.”

Damas, who had not been in the merchant’s service as long as Abba, had nonetheless been aware for some time of Jawaad’s interest in a very specific type of barbarian woman from all walks of life, captured and sold on the Armanth Cages Market.

Armanthians call a barbarian any individual who does not know the principles of the Virtues and does not follow the Dogmas and religion of the Church of the Divine Council. By extension, all uncivilized peoples outside the City-States of the Seas of Separation are generally seen as barbarians; their status could be situated somewhere between man and beast, even if recognizing their Virtues often reminds that they too are lossyans. For the inhabitants of civilized city-states, and Armanth is no exception to the rule, dragensmanns are theoretically barbarians, as are the san’eshe, the foresters of Elmerase, the kwanhma tribes, cousins of Abba’s frangian people, and the rare Lost Earthmen. By extension, a stranger to the customs of Armanth, or simply to the faith of the Council like Damas, may well, if unlucky, instead of a warm and hospitable welcome, be hunted like a dog; or quite simply be enslaved.

The reason for Jawaad’s interest in barbarian women was hard to fathom, especially since, as a rule, when a redheaded slave of barbarian origin was offered for sale, he didn’t buy her, except to resell her; the master merchant, like many others, traded in slavery, among other activities. Abba, a trained slaver, was in charge of his own Slave Garden.

Jawaad had been looking for something for a very long time, but in his nonchalant, impassive way, without expressing any identifiable passion for it that might then have provided an explanation for his quest. Collectors of rare slaves are commonplace, and he was wealthy enough to afford such whims; but that didn’t seem to be his motivation either. No, he was looking for something very specific, but had never found it useful to describe what he wanted to find.

Jawaad rarely deigned to provide an explanation for his actions and motivations, even to those closest to him, and even then it had to be absolutely necessary. He clearly didn’t like talking, which could be seen as the last straw for a trader of such high political rank in Armanth. If this regularly annoyed Abba, it suited Damas just fine, who was hardly a talker either, especially about his private life. He had grown accustomed to Jawaad’s oddities – and there were plenty of them – just as Jawaad had grown accustomed to the Jemmaï keeping a tight lid on his past and origins. He and the master merchant had helped each other enough to give Damas the trust of a friend. Not to mention that debt… that was his and Jawaad’s business. But on this occasion, he was curious all the same:

“But why are you chasing after a redheaded barbarian? There’s no shortage of trained and educated captives to buy, and it’s not as if you haven’t already been served, between Azur, Airain and your Slave Garden?”

Jawaad only gave a thoughtful expression, staring blankly in reply as he straightened up to nonchalantly return to his estate high above the city.

“Because I need one.”

Damas knew no more, and Abba gave him a knowing look. Clearly, this quest had been going on for a long time, and even the black giant had never known exactly what his boss had been looking for all these years, except for one thing:

She had to be from Earth.