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  “Who is it?” Infidel asked. “I’ll talk to them. Make them an offer.”

  “You know that is a confidential matter.”

  Infidel frowned as she crossed her arms. Negotiations weren’t Infidel’s strong suit. I used to handle this sort of business.

  The Black Swan said, “Perhaps there are others who could serve your needs? Commonground is thick with mercenaries. Post a bill and you’ll have a hundred men standing in line for the job within an hour.”

  Which was true, but the Three Goons were worth a lot more than a hundred men. Remember No-Face? The only man who ever gave Infidel a split lip? He’s one of the Goons. And he’s not the one that most people are afraid of.

  Infidel’s hands balled into fists. Aurora tensed up. Infidel’s eyes narrowed as thoughts danced in her mind. She still hadn’t given up. “You’ve tried to hire me before,” she said. “I’ll work for you for the next year. Take any job you give me. At the end of the year, you give me the Goons, no questions asked.”

  The Black Swan nodded, smiling faintly. I quickly sensed this was a bittersweet smile. She wanted to accept Infidel’s offer, but couldn’t. “Tempting. Quite tempting. There are men who would pay a lifetime of wages to use you for a night.”

  The color drained from Infidel’s cheeks.

  “My darling, you don’t think I would waste a year of your service on fighting, do you? As you note, I already have access to the finest mercenaries on the island. I have a high priestess for my chief enforcer. Why shouldn’t I have a princess for a whore?”

  Aurora scowled deeply. It took me a second to realize that she had to be the priestess. It seems I wasn’t the only one with a religious background that never got discussed. But I was even more intrigued that the Black Swan referred to Infidel as a princess. What did she mean?

  Infidel jumped to her feet. Snow began to fall in the room as the temperature dropped to single digits. A sheen of ice glistened on Aurora’s clenched fists, with icicles growing down like spiky claws.

  “That wasn’t what I was offering,” Infidel said, her voice trembling as she tried to control her temper. “Don’t twist my words!”

  “You should be more careful with what you say, my dear,” said the Black Swan. “You’ve offered a binding contract. Alas, I cannot act upon it. My word is my bond, and my previous contract for the Three Goons is sacrosanct. Your virtue — such as it may be — is safe.”

  Infidel stared at the Black Swan, then cast one more glance at Aurora, now encased in a shell of ice that resembled armor. Infidel unclenched her fists, her shoulders sagging. I could sense she wasn’t afraid of Aurora; she just knew that she wouldn’t get what she wanted by hitting anyone in this room. She turned toward the door, then glanced back. “I want the balance of the skull in diamonds.”

  “Of course, my dear,” said the Black Swan. “I’ve often thought you’d look good in jewelry. This new fashion of yours is a step forward, but could benefit from a few simple adornments.”

  Apparently, the Black Swan had never seen one of Infidel’s molar necklaces.

  The poker players were back at their table as Infidel stalked across the main room. The hole in the ceiling already had planks laid across it. As Infidel reached the door, Aurora called out to her.

  “Hey,” she said.

  Infidel paused at the door, but didn’t look back.

  “I... I wanted to say that the Black Swan was wrong about Stagger,” said Aurora. “He’d do a lot of things for a bottle. But he’d never sell out a friend. And everyone could tell you were much more than a friend to him.”

  Infidel sighed, shaking her head.

  “Not everyone,” she whispered, as she stepped outside.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RIPPER

  I FELT SENTIMENTAL as Infidel climbed from the creaking gangplank onto my old boat. She grabbed at rigging and rails as she moved across the slanted deck. I’ve lived my life askew — the mud-locked boat sits at a ten-degree tilt. An objective man would describe the place as a hovel. To me, the place was the closest thing I’ve ever had to home.

  If you witnessed my vagabond lifestyle, you’d never suspect that not so long ago my family was wealthy. My great-grandfather was the famous — or perhaps infamous — Ambitious Merchant. Merchant is a family name stretching back generations, and it’s common for followers of the Church of the Book to name their children after desirable virtues. Seldom has a man been more suitably monikered. Ambitious made a fortune in the slave trade, with Commonground as his base. The river-pygmies have enslaved forest-pygmies for centuries, but it was my ancestor who realized that these squat, muscular men could be sold as a commodity to the mines on the Isle of Storm. The trade goes on to this day, though my family no longer has any role in it.

  The so-called pirate wars had more to do with the slave trade than with actual piracy. Many Wanderers regard slaves as just another cargo, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their claims to hold freedom as the highest virtue. A band of radical Wanderers had taken a stand against the slave trade, going so far as to raid ships and free the captives. For this, they were branded as pirates, and wound up with every navy in the world united against them. Infidel had signed on to a losing cause from the start.

  While I’ve never gone so far as to take up arms to oppose the slave trade, I’ve always had a gut dislike of the practice, and have never been shy about sharing my views. The business corrupts everyone, especially the river-pygmies. They think of forest-pygmies as animals, when anyone can see they’re the same race, just of differing hues. Each of the three major pygmy tribes dye their skin with jungle berries: forest-pygmies are green, river-pygmies blue, lava-pygmies orange. Wash them off with vinegar and they’re all fish-belly white. My grandfather, Judicious Merchant, son of Ambitious, discovered that the bitter dyes were an effective mosquito repellent, which is why I remember him with dark green skin.

  Judicious had been trained to take up the family business until he made the mistake of actually talking to the pygmies. They told him tales of the Vanished Kingdom, a once great nation on this island, its monuments now buried beneath roots and vines. My grandfather burned through a great deal of the family wealth with his elaborate expeditions into the jungle. Judicious bore a son by a forest-pygmy woman; this was my father, Studious Merchant. As a teen, Studious aided his father by traveling to the Monastery of the Book, home of the world’s most extensive library. He went to these archives to read everything that had ever been written about the Vanished Kingdom. But, while he was there, he grew to love the prayerful, contemplative life of the monks and joined their order. As a monk, father had his flaws. My existence is testimony to his difficulty with the vow of celibacy.

  I’m told my mother was a prostitute who abandoned me on the monastery’s doorstep. I’ve never even learned her name. I was raised in an orphanage run by the monks. My father taught there, but barely acknowledged me. Every three or four years, my grandfather, Judicious, would visit and tell me stories about his jungle adventures. He said that when I was old enough, he’d take me with him. I never saw him after my tenth birthday, when he’d given me the knife. I eventually reached Commonground on my own when I was seventeen, but no one had seen my grandfather in years. The jungle had swallowed him long ago.

  My grandfather had owned the sailboat Infidel now stood upon; in his day, it was quite a vessel. As years passed with my grandfather absent from Commonground, the boat had been looted. Pretty much everything that hadn’t been nailed down had been stripped, along with a fair share of stuff that had been nailed down. The husk was still anchored at the docks when I got to town, and no one protested when I moved in.

  Infidel pushed aside the torn curtain that led into the small shack I’d built from cast-off lumber. She found the duffel bag of clothes she kept stashed in the rafters and tossed her sarong onto the floor. I’d never seen her naked when I was alive, but this was the second time since I’d died I’d gotten to see her full glory. Yet, her nudity didn’t provoke
lust. All my ordinary desires seem muted. Since dying, I haven’t felt hungry or sleepy. Of greater interest is that I haven’t felt thirsty. Perhaps I should be relieved. My afterlife truly would be hell if I were tormented by desires I had no hope of slaking. Still, it seems wasteful to finally look at Infidel’s body and feel only dispassionate appreciation of her symmetry.

  She pulled on a pair of canvas breeches, but frowned as she looked through her various blouses. Many were blood stained and torn; she always was hard on clothes. She pitched aside the duffel and picked up one of my old shirts from the back of a chair, holding it to her face to sniff it. At first, I thought she must have found the scent unpleasant; her eyes began to water. Then, she hugged the shirt to her chest as she closed her eyes tightly. After a moment, she composed herself, slipping the shirt on, rolling up the too-long sleeves and cinching up the dangling shirt tails with her thick leather belt. She dug around under the bunk and found an old pair of boots she’d left here. In the jungle, she normally went barefoot. However, the boardwalks of Commonground were littered with things no sane person would want squishing between their toes. She shoved my bone-handled knife into the boot sheath, then rooted under the bed until she produced the scabbard that held my old saber.

  For the first time in two days, she ate, raiding my pantry for dried herring wrapped in seaweed and a jar of pickled peppers. She washed it all down with the ceramic jug of rotgut I kept by the bed. Infidel rarely drank anything stronger than cider, but she chugged down the hard liquor like it was cool water. Afterward, she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and belched.

  Usually, my shack felt cramped with the two of us. Now that it was just her, the place looked larger than it used to. Infidel scanned the room, her eyes surveying the clutter. There were books everywhere. Like my father, I’m an avid reader. A muddied pair of my boots sat next to the door. The oil-cloth coat I wore during the rainy season was still slumped on the floor next to them.

  But the dominant feature of the room were all the empty bottles — wine, cider, ale, whiskey. Somewhere in the world was a glassblower who earned a living due to my habits, though the bastard had never bothered to write me a thank-you note.

  This mound of mildewed books and dirty bottles was all the evidence left that I’d once been alive. Whatever the quirks of my sundry ancestors, at least they’d all successfully reproduced. I’d died childless. The only legacy I left the world amounted to little more than litter.

  THE SUN HAD set by the time Infidel departed my shack. The tide was flowing back out to sea. She wrinkled her nose as the stench of the muck wafted around her. She wound her way through the maze of gangplanks and piers, heading west. I knew where she was going. I had, after all, managed to choke out most of the word ‘fishmonger’ in my feeble dying effort to shed my guilt.

  Bigsby was a rarity in Commonground, a man who made his living in an honest profession. Bigsby did brisk business selling barrels of dried and pickled fish to Wanderer ships, and supplying the more upscale establishments, like the Black Swan, with fresh oysters and rock lobsters to serve their clientele. Of course, Bigsby wouldn’t live in Commonground if there wasn’t something wrong with him. In his case, it’s physical. Bigsby is a dwarf, barely four feet tall, with the torso of a normal man but stubby legs and arms. He spends much of his time haggling with river-pygmies, buying their daily catch. Perhaps he came to Commonground to feel tall.

  I’d sold Bigsby the Greatshadow map for a handful of coins. I’d been quite casual about it. I told him the map had belonged to my grandfather, but was a fraud that he could probably sell as a historical curiosity. My conscience had been assuaged because I knew that Bigsby wasn’t likely to raise a band of adventurers to go after the fortune. Nor would he drunkenly boast in one of the local bars about his treasure map. He was a quiet, timid man, who survived in this rough city by keeping — please pardon the expression — a low profile. If Bigsby did sell the map, he’d do it discreetly.

  The fishmonger rarely went out at night. He was up at dawn every day to buy the night’s catch. As Infidel came within sight of his warehouse on the western edge of the bay, all the windows were dark. I guessed he’d gone to bed. Then I noticed a single dim light in one window, no brighter than a candle. As I focused on the window, I thought I could hear muffled voices. But the voices fell silent as Infidel stepped onto the gangplank leading to Bigsby’s door. The plank squeaked; the candlelight went dark.

  As Infidel neared the door, I noticed that something was off. Specifically, the door was off its hinges. It was merely leaning in the frame, the wood around the lock and hinges freshly splintered. Infidel didn’t notice this detail. Instead, she paused a few feet away and kicked, cracking the door in twain. The halves fell into the room, clattering loudly as Infidel stomped inside.

  The door that Infidel had entered led to the room that served as Bigsby’s office. Bigsby sat on short stool next to an empty pickle barrel he used as a desk. He was scribbling in the ledger he used to record the day’s trades. An extinguished candle sat beside the ledger, a plume of pale smoke rising from it.

  He stared at Infidel, slack-jawed. His face was covered with sweat; dark stains seeped from beneath his armpits. He looked terrified, but this wasn’t fresh terror. His clothes had been soaked before Infidel had kicked in the door.

  “C-can I-I-I... can I help you?”

  “I’m here for my map,” said Infidel.

  “Y-y-yuh-yuh... uh... huh?” All the blood was gone from Bigsby’s face, apparently taking with it the capacity for coherent speech.

  Infidel stalked forward. She slammed her fist on the barrel, which all but vaporized in a spray of splinters. She reached for Bigsby.

  “I don’t... I don’t... I don’t...” Bigsby’s voice fluttered as her hands slowly neared. I thought he was about to faint.

  As her hands reached his throat, Infidel sighed. Her mouth relaxed from its menacing snarl as she stared down at Bigsby’s frightened face.

  She stepped back and crossed her arms.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m having a bad day. Let’s pretend I didn’t just kick in your door and start over. Stagger gave you a map. I want it back. It’s rightfully mine; I killed the last guy who owned it.”

  Bigsby wiped sweat from his eyes as he contemplated this bit of mercenary logic.

  Infidel continued: “I’m willing to pay a reward for the map. We’ll call it a finder’s fee.”

  Bigsby swallowed hard. His eyes kept darting from Infidel toward the door on the side wall. I’d been in this shop a hundred times; there was nothing behind that door except for a small porch, and stairs leading down to the dock where he traded with the pygmies. Was he thinking of making a run for it?

  As I looked at the door, I felt a strange sensation, like the hair on my neck rising, if I’d still had hair, or a neck. I could barely hear a faint, distant buzz. I watched Bigsby’s eyes. He wasn’t thinking of running. He was afraid of whatever was lurking on the porch.

  He whispered, not looking Infidel in the face, “I’m sorry, b-but I don’t know anything about a m-map.”

  “We both know you’re lying,” said Infidel, cracking her knuckles. “I’m trying to be nice, but I’m prepared to be nasty. Don’t be stupid.”

  The Bigsby I knew wasn’t stupid. Nor was he all that brave. Which made his next move all the more shocking. On the short stool, he barely came up to Infidel’s waist. This meant that the hilt of my bone-handled knife, sitting in the boot-sheath, was at the level of his bent knee, on which his hand rested. It took only a fraction of a second for his hand to dart out and grab the knife. He thrust it upward into Infidel’s belly, shouting, “I’m sick and tired of being bullied!”

  The knife had the expected effect, ripping a button from my old shirt as it slid along her impervious skin.

  She reached down and hooked two fingers into Bigsby’s nostrils and lifted him to eye level. Bigsby raised his hands to grab at her fingers, a dumb move considering he had a knife in his hands. H
e cut a gash across his cheek, nearly blinding himself. The blade tumbled from his fingers, landing upright in the floor as Infidel growled, “And I’m sick and tired of your little game!”

  I barely paid attention to her words. There was a line of blood along the edge of the knife. As it slowly rolled down, forming a red bead, I once again had the sensation of a heartbeat. I waved my phantom fingers before my face as they materialized. I sucked in a ghost breath, savoring the sensation.

  “If you like to play games so much, let’s play one called ‘hotter, colder,’” Infidel said as she spun Bigsby around like a fish on a gaff. He squealed from the pain. “When I get closer to the map, you call out ‘hotter!’ When I move away from it, say, ‘colder!’”

  Bigsby’s eyes flicked once more to the door to the porch.

  “Outside, huh? Through that door?” she said. She didn’t wait for his answer.

  He didn’t say ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ as she reached for the doorknob. Instead, he jabbered, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!”

  My foggy guts knotted as she touched the doorknob.

  She yanked the door open and stared into the burlap-covered crotch of a man who had to be a dozen feet tall. Only his legs and lower torso could be seen. The rest of his body was above the level of the doorframe. An impossibly large hand with nine fingers clamped over Infidel’s face. Bigsby tumbled from her grasp. The giant jerked Infidel from her feet and flung her far out over the dark waters of the bay. I could hear her curses fade off into the distance, until at last there was a faint, faraway splash.

  Bigsby curled into a fetal position where he fell, his hands clamped over his bleeding nose. A hunchback suddenly stuck his head into the room from behind the giant. His whole body was concealed beneath a tattered gray cloak; his head hung so low beneath the misshapen lump of his back that it was nearly even with his waist. He supported his ill-distributed weight with a gnarled staff, grasped with equally gnarled fingers. His hands were wrapped tightly in filthy brown gauze; not a single inch of flesh was visible. Beneath his hood, his face was concealed by a burlap sack; blood-red eyes peered through two holes. The inhuman eyes made my ghost skin crawl. I moved in closer for a better look, trying to fathom what manner of creature this might be. The hunchback cast a baleful glare toward me.