Peary held the knife up again and turned it in his hands, anticipating its use. “And I suppose I’m supposed to believe that you stole my sarfer and my salvage, left me in the dunes to walk home, and were hiding out here in a whore’s workroom all for my sake. To save my life?”
“And your lady’s,” the Poet said.
“And my lady’s.”
The Poet nodded. “That’s correct.”
The two men stared at one another before the Poet continued. “Hard time for me to choose to be heroic. Damn hard. And now you broke my nose for it.”
“Okay,” Peary said. “Enough chit-chat. It’s time for answers.” He pulled the old man up by his hair until he was standing, then pushed him against the far wall. He held the knife with one hand and with the other he began to untie his ker. “I’m going to use this to muzzle you so you don’t scream like a wounded dog when I start to cut parts off of you.”
The Poet held his hands up, meekly imploring, but he didn’t struggle or fight. “I’m telling you the truth,” he said. “I buried the stuff in the sand fifty meters down. Just out in the dunes. I could take you to it, but I won’t. If I wanted to steal from you I’d have already sold the sarfer, and I’d have sold the information I know, too. I’d be rich and gone already. I was hoping to hide out until you gave up looking for me.”
Peary worked at the knot in the ker, but remained silent.
“I’m telling the truth,” the Poet said.
Peary finished untying the ker and stepped closer to the old man.
“I’m not lying. I just needed time to figure out what to do. I would have gotten the sarfer back to you, I swear. I wasn’t going to sell it, or it would be gone already, scrapped for parts in some dive shop. You know it, too.”
Peary grabbed the old man’s face and held the knife up to his throat. “Where are the packs, old man?”
“I won’t take you to them, because if I do you’ll try to sell that stuff, and your life won’t be worth the coin you spent to buy the beer on your breath.”
Peary heard the door open behind him, and when he turned, he saw Marisa standing there. She had a worried look on her face, and when she saw him holding a knife on an old man, her alarm multiplied.
“Marisa!” Peary said. “What—?”
“I… I… a friend saw you come in here. A coin-changer my father used to use. He—he sent word to me. I’ve been worried sick.”
Transactions
Chapter Twelve
Between his own story and corroboration from the old Poet, Peary was able to fill Marisa in on what had happened during his absence. She eyed the old man nervously, even as she tried to convince Peary to abandon his efforts to make the man talk.
“Let’s just go, Peary. We can start again. You have the sarfer. If this old man won’t at least tell you where to get your dive gear, we can scrape enough coin to buy more. You know where Danvar is, and he says he hasn’t told anyone.”
Peary laughed. “This old man is nothing but a liar and a thief. He’d sell us out in a heartbeat, and I’d never surface from another dive to Danvar. Every pirate and brigand for a thousand miles would descend on that place.”
Marisa pulled at Peary’s arm, trying to turn him from his intentions. “Then let’s just forget it all. We still have our lives. Let’s just go.”
Peary pulled his arm free from Marisa’s grasp. “I’m not letting anything go. This old man is going to tell me where he buried my salvage, or I’m going to bury him. That’s the only way the story about Danvar stays secret long enough for us to cash out. That’s the only way I can pay you back the money you loaned me.”
“I don’t care about that. I don’t want the money back. I just want us to get out of here without you doing something stupid… or wrong.”
Peary turned to Marisa. “I hear you. Really I do. I’m doing the best I can.” He turned his attention back to the Poet and held the knife back up to the old man’s throat. “If there was any other way to make this come out right, I’d do it.”
An explosion shook the room, and Marisa ducked down as gunfire echoed in the distance. “What—?”
Peary lowered the knife. Unconsciously he lowered his head until he was nearly in a crouch. He glanced at the Poet. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” the old man said. “Rebels, maybe?”
After a few moments of eerie silence, there was a knock at the door, and the sandal hop from downstairs poked his head in. He wasn’t smiling or clowning around now. “You should probably either accelerate or terminate your transaction,” he said. “Something’s going on out there. People hearing explosions around town. Rumor is that whatever happened to Springston is about to happen here. Panic coming, by the looks of things.”
“What all did you hear?” Peary said.
The man shook his head. “Me? I don’t hear things. Deaf when it comes to other men’s business.”
The Poet pushed Peary out of the way and headed for the door, and for some reason—perhaps a combination of confusion and a reflexive reaction to the Poet’s immediate projection of authority and single-mindedness—Peary didn’t try to stop him. “Follow me,” the Poet said. “We’ll finish this other business once we’ve gotten someplace safe.”
There were more sharp cracks of gunfire and shouting coming from the pub and out in the streets. Peary, Marisa, and the sandal hop all looked at one another for a few beats before the hop broke the silence with a smile. “I don’t know about you two, but I’m following the old man. He seems to know what he’s doing.”
Outside the pub, bodies lay here and there, their faces splattered with gore and surprise. Everywhere blood soaked into the sand, sanctifying it. The market area had almost magically been cleared of living men and women, and looking over his shoulder, Peary noticed that some sort of confrontation was happening in the market center. The smell of burning flesh filled the air—meat from the stalls whose grills were now unmanned, or perhaps it was the stench of bodies charred by explosions. A group of divers and brigands were in the market center, and in their midst, a column of sand held aloft a shiny sphere. Some kind of religious ceremony? Or perhaps rebels had taken the town. His thoughts raced as he recalled all the messages and whispers about Springston.
Peary saw a pistol lying near one of the bodies. A young coin-changer had been shot in the gut. Apparently he’d dragged himself several meters before he finally bled out. Peary picked up the weapon and checked it; it was loaded and ready to fire. He knew little about guns, but he was certain he knew enough to shoot it if he needed to. He hoped that just having it would be enough for most of the things he might need it for. He tugged at Marisa to get her attention. “We need to get out of here, Mar. Something’s happening.” She probably didn’t know about Springston, and he didn’t want to scare her.
Marisa looked at the gun and then back up to Peary. She nodded her head.
The Poet was waiting for them near the dilapidated stall where he’d failed in his attempt to hide Peary’s sarfer. He was tying a ker he’d snagged from a drying line around the wound on his head when the others ran up to him. He grabbed a couple more kers from the line and stuffed them into his tunic. “Can you get your hands on a second sarfer?” he asked Peary. “With four of us it’ll go faster and better if we have two.”
Peary shook his head. “No.” He wrapped his own ker around his face and tied it in the back. Then he pointed at the sandal hop. “And why are we taking him with us?”