Chase's Story - The Lady and the Tiger

Chase’s father was a corsair. When Chase was very young, seven or eight, he didn’t know, he was forced to accompany the man on his raids along the coast. He had no mother, had stayed in an orphanage with the other urchins until his father showed up one day to claim him, and until his death the man never once showed him an ounce of affection. He was a hard, gnarled sea captain, someone who seemed carved from solid oak, stiff with brine and corsair harshness. He made Chase earn his keep along with the rest of the ship’s tar boys.

It was during these months that Chase made his first true friend. A smaller boy named Edric, weak both in body and constitution. An obedient child who shrank from violence, who hid behind ropes and barrels when bellowed at. Chase, only a year older, had his father’s assertiveness, with instinctive coordination and skill and quick strength; he fought any boy who bullied Edric and beat them bloody. They grew like scraps of metal welded together; one wiry and brittle, the other bright and sharp. 

One night, when they were far out at sea, a storm erupted from nowhere, slapping the ship with strange hot sprays of water. The waves lunged and hurled higher than the barquentine’s tallest mast, and, predictably, the sails split. The tar boys were needed on-deck, amidst the fury and the chaos—but Edric wouldn’t go.

“He’ll whip you if you don’t come,” Chase had shouted at him as he tied a rope around the boy’s waist and secured it to a sturdy rail. “Fine then—go and hide over there by the longboat! Make sure it doesn’t crush you!”

“Don’t go,” Edric had said, barely audible over the hiss and roar of the waves.

“Have to,” Chase replied, and he darted off, trying to keep his footing on the wet deck, dodging elbows and lashing, salt-heavy ropes.

He had forgotten to tie one around his own waist. As the ship lunged down the sleek foaming slope of another wave, Chase was caught off-guard—and he was pitched head-first into the sea. 

He still dreamt of it, sometimes, though he never remembered in the morning: the unrelenting iron pull of the water against his body, the fear and brine diving into him, his nose, his lungs, his eyes and arms and chest. The murky green-black sea rushing over his vision, receding again, roaring up again, a mad inescapable rhythm. Edric’s pale face staring over the rail, stricken in a strange shrieking silence as it bobbed farther and farther away.

*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*

After his father had died, after he’d fled inland, after he’d been taken in by a ganglord, after he’d become that man’s assassin and then killed him in a bid for freedom—Chase wound up on the seas again, this time joining another corsair crew as a young man. But the gods—if they existed, which he was dubious about—seemed intent on keeping him away from the wind and sun, so they doomed his ship with a storm and a mutiny after just a few years. He went back to the land, like the ebb and flow of a tide, and this time he found himself in Haven, the seat of the Autarchy.

“And what do you do?” the people he met in taverns and gambling dens always asked him. It was a question you asked a rogue, someone you knew to be suspicious of. He figured he just had that look about him. 

“I’m a professional drifter,” he’d reply with a shrug and an easy grin. “I go wherever the winds take me. Guess it’s in my blood.”

Which was code for: If you disappear for asking too many questions, I’ll have left town before anyone could think to find me.

He’d left the life of a professional killer behind, but he still had a very particular set of skills and nothing to do with them. He made his living as a freelancer, picking up odd jobs from seedy contacts and shadowy figures. He avoided killing people, if only to avoid the monotony of his old life—but it was a thin line.

Which was how he found himself standing outside a wealthy merchant’s mansion in the dead of night, readying himself for the unpleasant hours that lay ahead.

It was an odd job, even for him. After he’d stopped with the assassinations, there’d been less interactions with people, more with their possessions—generally breaking them on the behalf of his employers, for the sake of intimidation or the destruction of blackmail. But he’d never had to break a person before.

He put his hands in his pockets, eyeing the white mansion’s smooth walls, silvered by the moonlight and blank as a mausoleum. He was standing lightly on the age-cracked stucco garden wall, a bit carelessly, but rainclouds were boiling over the moon now and soon his figure would be plunged into darkness. Besides, he’d mapped out the general routes of the patrolling guards in the courtyard out front; he had at least twenty minutes to scale the wall to his victim’s bedroom (fourth-story window on the middle right) and noiselessly pry open the latch. No one would see him before then; no one ever had.

His thoughts were interrupted with a little jolt when he noticed the bedroom window in question suddenly swinging silently open. Chase watched as a lithe figure crawled up onto the sill, glanced around—a slender woman with chin-length dark hair, he thought, dressed all in black like he was and carrying a sack over her shoulder—and then somersaulted gracefully down into the garden. There was only the slightest crunch of gravel when she landed; no one in the courtyard or house stirred.

Chase watched her climbing nimbly up onto the very wall he was standing on and felt his face split into an ironic grin. As her face came level with his boots, he whispered, “You leave any for me?”

The woman whipped out a knife at her belt and drove it towards his boot. Expecting this, Chase simply sidestepped, and he kept his hands in his pockets as a show of deference. He had no interest in fighting her—and, seeing this, the woman relaxed slightly and hauled herself into a defensive crouch.

“Who are you?” she asked him in a harsh whisper, angling her body so he saw less of the bulging sack slung over her shoulder. Her face was mostly shadowed, but Chase got the impression of golden, almost yellow, catlike eyes. 

“Just a bystander,” Chase returned, as casually as if they’d run into each other at a coffee shop. “A fellow professional. Nice haul you’ve got there, by the way.”

She tensed. “It’s mine. I worked for it. If you think—”

Now he held up his hands. “Relax, sweetheart,” Chase told her. “I’m not after gold tonight. My prize is the gold’s owner. He still sleeping? Didn’t cut his throat, did you?”

There was a moment’s pause as the woman watched him shrewdly. Finally, reluctantly, her lips twitched a little. “Not my style,” she returned finally. “Blood gets everywhere.”

Chase tutted lightly. “Quite right. You’re dressed too stylishly to ruin your clothes.”

Now she snorted a laugh. “You going to kill him?”

“Don’t think so. It wasn’t in my instructions, anyway.”

She turned away. “Well, good luck. He is still sleeping—he snores like a pig. But he’s clever. Don’t let him outsmart you.”

Chase gave her a lazy salute. “Thanks for the tip. Happy hunting.”

Her smile was sharp and white in the gloom. “And the same to you.” 

However, she didn’t move from her spot on the garden wall, so it was Chase who turned away and lightly scaled the house, using primarily speed and his gripped boots and gloves. The woman thief had kindly—or sloppily—left the window open for him, so it was with all the ease in the world that Chase swung up into his mark’s room, not bothering to mask the thump of his weight on the plush purple carpet. He drew his pistol and pointed it at the bed just as its owner stirred within, bleary eyes flying open as the portly merchant woke with a sudden start.

“Not a word,” Chase said, clearly enough to be audible across the room. “Else you’ll find a bullet planted between your eyes. Let’s conduct ourselves calmly, shall we?”

The man in bed sat up with surprising swiftness and, to Chase’s vague surprise, fumbled at his nightstand for a weapon. Chase clicked his tongue disapprovingly. By all accounts, Bleir was a businessman, a politician: he had no experience with violence. Still, he had to admire the survival instincts. 

He crossed over in a ferocious burst of speed and knocked the nightstand aside with his leg, sending the drawer skittering away into the darkness. Then he took hold of the older man’s shirtfront and hauled him out of bed. Flung him to the floor. When Bleir lashed out at him, Chase sidestepped, flipped the man over, and tied his hands with the sash of his nightgown in a few deft movements. When the man opened his mouth to scream, Chase put his gun against his temple and said softly, “I just want to talk. You stay quiet, we talk, I leave. You yell, I blow your brains out and get what I need from your personal effects. And maybe if I’m feeling generous, I’ll send them back to your family when I’m done.”

Bleir went still and silent at that. 

When he was sure the man wouldn’t resist any longer, Chase moved away and planted himself in the bedroom’s sole chair. “Thank you for your cooperation.” 

He crossed his arms over the chair and gazed at Bleir with the polite, interested smile he knew unnerved people. He had a disarming, nonchalant air about him, and at first glance his gangling enthusiasm and cheery grin made him appear harmless, even friendly. But he made sure to let his gun dangle insouciantly from his hand—and he saw Bleir’s eyes go to it and stay there. 

“What do you want?” the man croaked finally, keeping his tone muted and subdued.

Chase levelled him with a straight stare. “What do you think I want?”

The man had no reply. Chase watched his mottled, mustached face and thought with sudden amusement that he hadn’t even noticed that his bedroom had been ransacked of its valuables—if Bleir survived this ordeal, which he most likely would, he would probably blame Chase for spiriting away his treasures as well as the information in his head.

“I want,” Chase began, “to know where you’re getting your supply of thoret. You have made some people very, very unhappy about your decision to sell it to the Autarchy.”

“Th-thoret?” Bleir croaked.

Chase rolled his eyes. Thoret was a strange and exceedingly rare metal, some sort of alchemic element that muted Diminished powers—even arma and magic. According to legend, there had been only five pieces of it in the world, two of which already resided in the Sun Court’s vaults. But a few weeks ago this no-name merchant Bleir had come forward and claimed he had a whole supply of it, enough to make twenty manacles and collars, and he was offering the entire stock to the Autarch for an exorbitant price.

Chase’s employers needed to know where he’d gotten it from. And if there was more. It would be a bad day for all Diminished if there was a way to mass-produce those things…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bleir said.

Chase clicked his tongue. “Come now, let’s not dance around the topic like idiots. I’m here to talk about the thoret. You know about the thoret. Just give me the information so I can let you get back to your beauty sleep.” After a moment’s pause he added: “And if you’re lying to me, I’ll find out. And then I’m going to come back, and the second visit won’t be nearly so pleasant.”

He didn’t really know what he was doing, he had to admit to himself. In the past things had always been quite straightforward. Kill person—or people—and leave without being killed. Not all this ‘keeping them alive and quiet and intimidated or trusting enough to spill their secrets’ nonsense. 

Still, he enjoyed a challenge.

“Who sent you?” Bleir asked, his voice slightly muffled from where he was lying on the carpet. His hands flexed helplessly against his bindings; eventually he flopped over so they could fist against the fibers of the carpet, a kind of self-soothing gesture. Chase laughed a little at his audacity and shook his head.

“I’ll ask the questions, thank you kindly,” he said, unperturbed. “You just worry about giving me the answers.” Suddenly he levelled his gun at the man. “Where did you get the thoret from?”

“Oh, God,” Bleir moaned from the floor.

“No, you’ve confused the two of us, but that’s all right, I can understand the mix-up. Let’s try again: where is the thoret form, and is there more of it out there? Quickly, if you please.”

When Bleir failed to reply, Chase cocked the gun. “I should point this out,” he commented. “I need information from you, so you might as well know that I don’t plan on killing you. The worst that will happen is that you’ll do something idiotic and piss me off and then I will shoot you in the kneecap. I assume you’ve never been shot there—it hurts like hell. But otherwise? Dying is not on your to-do list for today.” He raised a finger when Bleir opened his mouth to speak. “But. I don’t particularly want to bloody my knuckles rearranging your face—you really don’t need that to live—so if you’d like to get out of this ordeal pain-free—”

“All right,” Bleir said abruptly, panting and shivering now. Chase’s lips quirked bemusedly. Too easy? “The thoret—”

“Yes?”

“The thoret comes from the mountains.”

When he fell silent, Chase said dryly, “There’s a lot of mountains, friend. Care to be more specific?”

Bleir shut his eyes. Haltingly he continued, “Shield Peaks. Deep in—near the Hunters. There’s a site at the fording of a river, called Understone. My company mines there, for ore. We found the vein of thoret there. I paid everyone involved to keep it quiet.”

Chase’s eyebrows rose. Now they were getting somewhere. “And is there more?”

Now the man bit his lips, squirming under Chase’s green gaze. Finally he turned his face to the wall and admitted: “No. We stripped that whole area bare. Mined for months looking for more. Hired all manner of experts. I think that’s the last of it. It was just a lucky boon.”

Not so lucky for you, really, Chase mused, but he read Bleir’s intentions in the ensuing pause and said aloud: “But you’re going to keep looking. Aren’t you?”

Bleir said nothing, which Chase took to mean yes. 

He sat back and sighed, tapping his chin thoughtfully with the barrel of his gun. Now here was a conundrum. If he killed the man, there was the chance that the deal could fall through, and knowledge of the thoret vein would die with him.

But if Bleir was lying—or if there was something he knew that Chase was overlooking—well. He couldn’t revive him after the fact. Death was always a permanent kind of mistake.

As he pondered this, Bleir suddenly piped up from his position on the floor. “You know,” he began. He sounded calmer now, though his breath still rattled against his lungs like he was a heat-stricken dog after a long run. “Those experts we used to find the metal…”

Chase raised a lazy eyebrow. “Yeah?”

“They were Mages. Can you believe that? Mages used their skills knowing that whatever they found was going to ruin their people.”

“People will do anything for money, I guess,” Chase drawled, stretching his back languorously. Then he stiffened: from this new angle he suddenly noticed there was a patch of carpet cut away from beneath Bleir’s bed, leaving shiny hardwood floor and some sort of scrawled circle with runes. One of Bleir’s bare hands was just touching the edge of the circle, and it had begun to glow. 

The man was smiling grimly. “Those Mages,” he said through his teeth. “Exceptionally good at finding things. And at designing security systems.”

Someone was storming through the front door four stories below. There was shouting, a flurry of boots and the hard clatter of weapons. Chase stood up from his chair with a laugh.

“You sly bastard,” he said. He drew the long, jagged dagger at his belt and held it in tandem with his gun. “I’ll eat those guys for breakfast and then be back to take you to lunch, all right?”

*~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~*

Chase ran. His breath rasped against his lungs like sandpaper and the weight of his blade bumped painfully against his hip, offbeat to the pounding of his boots against the pavement. 

“Gods damn it,” he spat.

There was bedlam everywhere. The once-silent neighborhood was like a ruptured vein, people and panic clogging it up. He was aware of very little, except for the faint orangey glow of the burning mansion somewhere behind him, waning like a fraying sunset. He sprinted at an unflagging speed and clutched his gun, the weapon warm and sticky in his hand. He tried to wipe the exhaustion from his eyes. 

“Gods damn it,” he repeated. Things had gone very, very wrong; the Sun Court’s soldiers had come, along with Bleir’s private army of mercenaries and sellswords. And Mages. And Ket. Chase had been very, very unfortunate tonight—which was strange, considering he was the one who usually brought misfortune to the people around him. And he’d been flippant. That had never failed him before, but tonight it had.  

Suddenly he pulled up short and swore. Bleir stood waiting at the end of his alleyway, his composure regained, his eyes cold. There was a tall man standing beside him with a pistol. Chase plastered on a conciliatory smile.

“I suppose you’re kind of peeved,” he said. 

“Who do you work for?” Bleir asked in return. 

Chase pretended to look thoughtful. “I don’t quite remember. All this ash in the air impedes my memory. The smell of burning wealth distracts me.”

Well, shit, he thought inwardly. So much for not being flippant.

Bleir’s expression didn’t change. Somehow his hair was slicked back and professional, and he was no longer the man who had writhed so pathetically on the bedroom floor; he was the man who was going to have Chase killed.

Chase felt something strange gnaw at his stomach. It might have been anxiety—he couldn’t tell. He waded around it and said jokingly, “You came to thank me for not taking your kneecap.”

“Who hired you to come after me? Who gave you the information? Which group are you working for?”

“I don’t know anything,” Chase said, with a grin. There was a cool little click from the crony with the gun, and for a moment Chase thought he had pulled the trigger. He looked at him, his heart twitching as if it was already having death spasms, but he’d only cocked the hammer. Chase’s own gun dangled loosely from his hand, and anything else he had was of little use. Behind the three of them, the dim glow of the raging fire began to fade. 

“They never tell us much, us freelancers,” Chase said, his hand touching his blade, then his gun again in a flurry. “So there isn’t any use in keeping me around. You know? I don’t have any information to give—just like you, right? And I would have let you go.”

Bleir surveyed with him with red-rimmed eyes. There was no sneer on his bruised face, no hatred—but there wasn’t sympathy, either. Chase felt the thing he’d felt earlier beating hard and fast within his chest, a trickling coldness that rose up from his stomach and twisted and spread through his limbs, bursting through his blood until it heated into a supernatural tension. He stayed calm. 

“It was only about the money,” he said, thinking about what he was going to do when he inevitably got out of this. Go to the tavern, maybe—except he didn’t drink and had no one to drink with. Maybe he’d buy a cake. 

“I don’t believe that,” Bleir broke in, tight-lipped. “That you’re in this just for the money. You’re not like me, not like my Diminished. There’s a thousand other jobs you could have done for the profit. You chose this one for yourself.”

“And that’s why you’re going to let me go, right?” Chase asked brightly. “Because I haven’t sold my soul like you have?”

“No,” Bleir said, “because I hate you for that.”

He made a slight gesture and Chase felt that strange and screaming urgency rise and break and push against him in hot-cool fizzing awareness. He leapt; his gun snapped up in a mad surge of speed; there was a rattle from the other man’s gun, and Chase fell, the bullet pounding into him, his bullet bursting into nothing, the sky spinning green-black above him. There was another shot, and then another, and Chase blacked out. 

When he came to, the warmth of the mansion fire seemed to be much closer, on his face, spreading all over his chest, and someone’s hands were on his shoulders. He looked up and saw the woman thief from earlier, alone, her face white and strained as she tried to drag him from the alley. He couldn’t see if Bleir and his man were gone or if they were still there, watching.

“I was not expecting to die here tonight,” he told the woman, slurring. Some blood bubbled unpleasantly at his lips. “I would tell you something tacky about being an angel, but—”

“Shut up,” the woman said sharply, grunting with exertion as she pulled him into the shadows. “You’re not going to die here tonight. You’re not meant to.”

That tickled him, as absurd as it was. He had never been meant to do anything. He’d always been a drifter. A loner no one wanted. No purpose unless someone else gave it to him. The last thing he’d ever done of his own accord was save a little boy named Edric from falling overboard and drowning. 

Still, her words stuck with him, even as he drifted into the waters of unconsciousness, leaving his fate in the hands of a stranger. Meant to. Meant to. I'm meant to do something besides die.

It ran through his head like a mantra. By the time the pain came back to swamp him, he was clinging to it like a piece of driftwood, riding away on a sea of darkness. His father’s ship was nowhere in sight.