Tim Waggoner: Thieves of Blood

Two men walked side by side down a narrow street in Port Verge. One was human, tall, thin, and garbed in black. The other was half-orc, taller, broad-shouldered, thick-limbed, and wearing a breastplate that had seen hard use over the years.

This was one of the older sections in the city, and the buildings here were weathered and in disrepair. They’d been constructed so close together that in some places the only reason they remained standing was because they leaned against one another. The streets were unpaved and worn by the feet of thousands of pedestrians over the years. Most of the people here were seafolk-sailors and fishermen-but there were a few low-level merchants and sellswords in the mix, along with street vendors hawking cheap tidbits made from shells and the like. Humans were the predominant racial group, followed closely by gnomes and half-elves. There were a handful of dwarves, elves, and halflings around as well but no orcs or half-orcs, except Ghaji, that is, and he received quite a few stares as he and Diran moved through the crowd. Ghaji was used to getting such looks, but that didn’t mean he liked it.

“So… what’s in Port Verge?” the half-orc asked. For the last several weeks they’d been wandering the Principalities, moving aimlessly from one place to another. Ghaji didn’t want to admit it to his friend, but he was beginning to get bored.

Diran shrugged. “The usual. Restaurants, wharfs, warehouses, shops, smithies, drinking holes…”

Ghaji scowled. “I mean, what’s interesting?”

Diran opened his mouth to reply, but then he closed it and frowned. He stopped walking and nodded toward a sailor standing near the mouth of an alley across the street from them.

“How about him?”

The sailor didn’t strike Ghaji as out of the ordinary. He was medium height, stocky, with curly black hair and a cleanshaven jaw. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, black trousers, sandals, and a crimson sash belted around his waist. He carried a blade-from the look of the scabbard, a bastard sword-which rode on his hips just below the sash. This detail did strike Ghaji as a bit odd. Though he wasn’t native to the Lhazaar Principalities, he’d been traveling among its islands for the last several weeks alongside Diran, and from what he had seen of sailors in the Principalities, a bastard sword wasn’t a common weapon. The man looked dazed, eyes half-lidded, a dreamy smile on his face, and he swayed from side to side, as if he were having difficulty maintaining his balance-that or he was swaying in time to music only he could hear.

“Look at his hands,” said Diran.

Ghaji focused his attention on the sailor’s hands, frowned, then blinked several times as if to clear his vision.

“They’re backward,” the half-orc said. They looked as if they’d been twisted all the way around, though the man showed no sign of injury or pain.

Diran’s lips stretched into a small, thin smile. “Exactly. Come, Ghaji.”

The two companions stood on the opposite side of the street from the backward-handed sailor. Diran, without pausing to see if Ghaji would follow, stepped into the street and started heading for the man at a brisk pace. Ghaji had been traveling with Diran long enough to know that when the priest thought he was on the trail of some unearthly menace, he could be more determined than a starving swamp lion tracking wounded prey. With a sigh, the half-orc followed.

Diran Bastiaan cut quite an impressive figure as he crossed to the alley, and the pedestrians who clogged the street parted before him, almost as if they sensed who he was and what business he was about. He wore a black leather armor vest over a black shirt, black pants, black boots, and a black belt with sheaths for a pair of black-handled daggers. He had long black hair that he wore loose, and the breeze coming off the Lhazaar Sea caused his locks to trail out behind him. He wore a black traveler’s cloak, with the hood down, but despite the breeze, the cloak did not billow outward. Ghaji knew this was because it was weighted down by numerous daggers Diran kept in hidden pockets sewn into the cloak’s inner lining.

It wasn’t his manner of dress that caused the crowd to back away as he approached. It was his eyes, arctic blue, piercing and set into a gaunt face with lean, wolfish features. Those eyes glittered with penetrating intelligence. Ghaji had seen strong men tremble when caught in the fierce, dispassionate scrutiny of Diran Bastiaan’s gaze.

Diran could move quite fast when he wanted to, and Ghaji, though well over six feet tall, had to lengthen his stride and push himself to catch up. He managed to do so, and the two of them got there at the same time.

“Good afternoon to you,” Diran’s tone was pleasant enough but with a subtle hint of underlying challenge.

The man’s eyes rolled in Diran’s direction, but they couldn’t remain focused on him and kept rolling away to stare off into space.

“Afternoon? Already?” The sailor paused, and Ghaji noticed that the veins in his eyes, and there were plenty of them visible, were tinted purple.

The sailor frowned. “Still summer, isn’t it? I wasn’t in there that long… was I?”

The man’s voice was breathy, his words slurred to the point where it was difficult to understand him. The idiot had obviously overindulged in one substance or another, though it was difficult to say what. Ghaji smelled no alcohol on the man’s breath or clothes, but there was any number of intoxicants available for a price, especially in a busy seaside town like Port Verge.

“Too much urchin-sting, eh?” Diran said. “How long you were in whatever establishment provided the toxin for you, I can’t say, but I can confirm that it’s still summer, though late enough in the season for there to be a chill in the air. Summers are all too short in the Principalities, aren’t they?”

The priest’s words were friendly enough, but his tone remained emotionless. He was staring hard at the sailor with his ice-blue eyes.

Ghaji had seen that look numerous times, and he knew what it meant. Trouble. The half-orc carried a hand axe tucked into his belt, and he reached down and took hold of the handle just beneath the axe-head, though he made no move to draw the weapon. He did, however, decide it was time to make use of the more bestial half of his heritage. He scowled, prominent brow furrowing, the nostrils of his flat broad nose flaring, lower lip curling back to expose large lower incisors. Ghaji kept his black hair in a wild, shaggy tangle to better accentuate his orcish ancestry, and he sported a thin vertical strip of beard in the middle of his chin that served to highlight his teeth even more, like a black arrow pointing right to them. Add to this numerous scars on his face, neck, and hands, souvenirs of his time as a soldier in the Last War, and Ghaji could present quite a fearsome aspect when he wished, and he so wished now.

The sailor chuckled. “You’ve got that right, Blackie. I’ve never been to anyplace else that…” The man trailed off. He stared at Diran for a long moment, peering hard into the priest’s eyes. “You’re awful talkative, you know that?”

Diran ignored the man and nodded at his backward-twisted hands. “You really should go easy on the urchin-sting. You obviously can’t handle it, or you’d never become so intoxicated that you forgot to keep your hands twisted around while masquerading as human.”

“My hands?” The sailor held up his hands and tried to focus his bleary eyes on them. “Ah, I see what you mean!” The man’s hands twisted around and returned to their natural position.

“There, all better. Thank you for pointing that out. Now if you don’t mind, I’m due to meet some friends of mine.”