Trouble's Story - Fight or Flight

 [CONTENT WARNING: there are descriptions of death and gun-related violence in this story!]

Trouble was still putting together his gun on-deck when Karzai came into view.

On all sides, razor-sharp columns of rock and ice rose up from the seawater, threatening to pierce the small barquentine as it navigated the haphazard maze lining the coast. Periodically, harsh cracks sounded out as chunks of solid ice broke against the ship, or off of the larger clumpy glaciers surrounding it. To the east, a vast expanse of white, flat, featureless land stretched away into the pale dawn. The city of Karzai, a dark, hulking monolith, rose up from the horizon like a blemish.  

Trouble looked at it all, his mouth set in a grim line. The frigid air, cold and clean as a mouthful of snow, seemed to cut its way through his lungs as he breathed. Standing at the stern of the ship Feria, he felt as if he were stranded in leagues and leagues of desolate emptiness, with nothing to fill him but the freezing wind as it wound its way through his bones.

They had been sailing for a fortnight, now, and even with the northern coast finally in sight, they could not land for fear of the treacherous labyrinth of stone and ice defending it. Sailors called this place the Skeleton Coast, both for the natural formations that jutted, rib-like, from the water, and for the corpses of gutted ships that had been stranded by them. The captain of the ship was forced to navigate his way turn by turn, rock by rock, until he finally found clear passage to land. 

It’s no wonder they never get any mucking trade up here, Trouble thought sullenly. He’d had to barter hard for passage on this ship—and it was packed to the brim with seedy individuals making the journey north. No legitimate trader or merchant took the risky passage to Karzai, leaving behind the lush lands of the Eastern Continent to brave corsairs, dead islands, ship graves, and razor reefs. Only those looking to deal in illegal contraband or subversive magic paid to come here.

And him. 

At least, he thought, none of those seedy individuals had thought to mess with him on this trip. Part of it was his big rifle, slung across his back and shoulder: an advanced thing, welded with Mage bindings and augmentations, which he’d won off a bet and a duel with a fence. He’d seen one or two arms dealers eyeing it with admiration; the rest looked at it with distrust and fear. 

The other part of it was just the look of him: Trouble’s face was open and friendly and had an air of restrained violence, and this often proved so confusing to people that he found very few had the nerve to approach him. Which suited him just fine, at least this time around.

He had a lot of things to think about. 

The waves lapped quietly beneath the prow. Trouble shuddered to look at them. He had always hated the sight of deep water; if he couldn’t see its bottom, he wanted nothing to do with it. It filled him with a squirming, slimy dread: a child of the city had no place in the shadows of the watery deep. 

Suddenly a hand clapped him hard on the shoulder.

“So, you’re getting over your fear of the water!” This was from a friendly midshipman he sometimes spoke to at dinner. “You’ve been staring at the waves so long you’d think they were talking to you!”

Trouble looked at him. “It’s not fear,” he said, “and I’ve just been thinking. Don’t really notice the water much when you’ve got your mind on other things.”

“And what other things are these, pray tell?” 

But Trouble only smiled and shook his head. Blade hadn’t explicitly told him to keep it a secret, but the Ket was never explicit about anything, anyway—and Trouble knew he’d murder him if he told anyone about… whatever was going on. 

The message had been delivered to him on Trouble’s last day in Haven, just before he’d shipped out to deal with this current job in the north. It had given him a bad scare, seeing the Autarch’s seal on this innocuous piece of paper, passed to him by a messenger boy during breakfast at his usual inn. But the message had been in Blade’s writing, which had also thrown him badly—what the fuck was Blade doing with the Autarch’s seal?

The message had been typically-laconic and extremely cryptic: something about starting a new organization, a police force developed to deal with demons and rogue Diminished and all the nasty stuff the stupid Vice-Guard and even the Inquisitors weren’t equipped to deal with. An order of people with extraordinary skills, Blade had said (in not so many words). A small army dedicated to putting those skills to use in protecting the population. 

And he’d asked Trouble to help him get it up and running.

Which just confused Trouble even more. He knew Blade respected his skills, particularly in marksmanship and gunfighting—they’d used each other as seconds on mercenary jobs before. But he was still a Norm, and it sounded like this was meant to be a group of Diminished. Was he really the best person to try and help cobble a group like this together? Wouldn’t seeing a Norm in charge turn away potential recruits?

And, yes, he’d told his friend once that if he ever wanted to do something about the Endarkened problem, Trouble was game to join in, but…

The Autarch?

And Blade? Since when had he anything good to say about the Autarchy that wasn’t just a lip-curl of silent contempt and loathing? 

And him, being a soldier? The very antithesis of everything he thought he was?

And serving—kowtowing, boot-licking—the very devil herself?

But you could help people, another part of him whispered, staring back at him as he stared at his own reflection in the waves. You’re not exactly doing that right now.

He turned away from himself in dislike. The midshipman had wandered off, so Trouble went back to examining his gun. Ahead, Karzai loomed closer and closer.

He felt unhappy. Working with metal usually took his mind off things, but now that he’d cleaned and pieced together and fine-tuned every inch of his rifle, he had nothing more to do but watch the land edge nearer and nearer. And think.

And he did not like thinking. It wasn’t that he was stupid. In fact, he could be very clever, when he bothered to be. He just—did not like standing still. He moved constantly, had since he was a young boy, so that his thoughts could not catch up to him; he forged ahead in a state of unthinking reckless energy because he did not like to leave room for the thoughts and memories that roiled up out of stillness. Two things kept those thoughts at bay: fighting and shooting, because both slipped him into a cool, mindless bubble of detached instinct where all he had to worry about was motion and action and an easy clicking-into-place of things—not whatever philosophies his brain might have developed while his footsteps were still drowning it out. 

Ahead, some seabird gave a harsh, echoing cry. To mirror it, the barrelman in the crow’s nest cried: “Land!”

Trouble sighed and closed his eyes, dreading what was to come.

“Shit.”

#

He met his contact at a grimy bar on the outskirts of the city. Everything in Karzai was grimy, having that “dirty snow” look; it was a thriving city in terms of population, but all of its buildings looked in a state of decay. Trouble clattered into the bar, his clothes crusted with frost, salt, and brine; he spotted his contact at the counter and headed straight for it. Even as the door closed, shutting the light out, noise touched the room like whiffs of smoke: dogs, gulls, the calls of fisherman rowing out to sea, blacksmiths hammering steel. Inside, there was little more than a cluster of scarred tables and a group of burly soldiers, clutching tankards. They had fallen silent as soon as Trouble stepped in through the door.

Inwardly, he tensed, but he gave no outward sign of noticing them as he slid into the barstool beside his acquaintance. There weren’t supposed to be soldiers this far north. Karzai was technically outside the rule and realm of the Autarchy; the presence of soldiers here meant there was either a diplomatic delegation sent here to negotiation with Karzaki Mages… or there was trouble here that the Autarch wanted to investigate. 

Either way, it was not good for him. And it presented him with a nasty little picture of what his own future might look like… if he signed over his life to join Blade’s division in Haven.

His contact caught the disgruntled look on his face and whispered out of the corner of his mouth: “Who pissed in your oatmeal?” The bartender appeared behind the door, looked swiftly at the soldiers staring at Trouble, then vanished again.

“Never you mind,” Trouble murmured back. “Why the bloody eight haels are there soldiers here in Karzai?”

“No one knows,” his acquaintance whispered back. The man was gangly and marked by dozens of strange tattoos he claimed he received during his time of servitude in the Jalis desert, when he was imprisoned by a warlord and forced to brew poisons and potions to kill the man’s enemies. Trouble thought this was a rather tall tale, but it also fit: the man went by Hatred the Scorpion, and his talent for killing people with blowdarts and special toxins was infamous. (Blade, unimpressed, often remarked that he was the only man in the land who had a moniker stupider than Trouble’s.) “Officially I think they’re here to guard to some fancy ambassador of what-have-you. Unofficially, I think they’ve come to bully our mark.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Trouble asked. “That means we won’t have to bother taking care of him ourselves.”

Hatred shook his head adamantly. “Hell no,” he said. “They’re going to press the man, imply they know what he’s up to, and then make him fork over coin so they won’t bring the hammer down on him. So long as he pays up, they’ll leave him alone—and we’ll still have to deal with whatever he’s doing. That’s how things work up here.”

Trouble growled. “Corrupt load of bastards.”

Hatred toasted to that. “And so long as they’re hanging around, axing the guy is going to be all the harder.”

They sat on that for a moment. Hatred had called him here, all the way to the far north, because Hatred had originally been hired to kill a Karzaki Mage who was supposedly cavorting with Endarkened. Karzai was a lawless land, ungoverned by anyone but coin, and there were rogue Mages here aplenty who were willing to experiment with the forbidden and even the obscene. Hatred had employed his usual methods, but his poisons had failed; the Karzaki Mage was protected by powerful wards and magic, so he’d called in Trouble to help him finish off the job for half the pay. 

Trouble did not like the word assassin, although he had killed people, for pay and without; he used the word mercenary because he was content to do any job that would let him sleep at night, whether that was lugging bales of hay on a farm or staking out a corrupt military leader’s compound. And he liked to say he had a code of honor, but the truth of the matter was he often shot first and thought of the consequences later. When he had to, he took jobs that generally involved getting rid of nasty people—but he was also aware that his clients could very well lie about their marks to manipulate him. Blade often said he was the kind of person who would step without hesitation between a puppy and a speeding wagon, for no better reason than a fuzzy sense that this was the way things ought to be, and that that kind of artless courage could be used against him, to control him, by forces more sinister than even he could imagine.

But if Blade had said that… and he was now trying to get Trouble to sign up to be the Autarch’s lackey, using the mission statement of “helping people” like a dangling carrot…

Annoyed by this train of thought, Trouble slapped his hand decisively on the counter, making Hatred jump. “Bartender! We need some drinks over here. And food that isn’t hardtack and gruel.”

Hatred’s head swiveled towards him, wide-eyed, so that the man looked like a startled vulture. “What does keep a low profile mean exactly to you?” he hissed.

“What?” Trouble answered rebelliously. “I’m just asking for a meal.” 

He smiled in a false way when the barkeeper appeared, eyes hooded, with two tankards crowding his arms. 

The soldiers were still watching them, though they had broken their silence to conduct a low, muttered conversation. From Trouble’s hearing it was nothing out of the ordinary—talk of the weather and some whorehouse somewhere in town—but he could feel their eyes burning on the back of his neck. 

He raised his cup and sniffed before sipping—it was the sickly, sweet smell of apple cider. Trouble nodded at the tankard and said, “Don’t have anything stronger?”

“We ran out when that lot came in,” the barkeeper answered shortly. He was a burly, hairy man who looked at least part Ket, but it was impossible to tell. He indicated the soldiers with his eyes.

“Don’t really get to ration when it comes to brutes, do you,” Trouble said cheerily. Hatred punched his shoulder, but the gunslinger ignored him. “Got anything on the menu?”

“Bread,” the man answered, “and goat’s meat.”

“I’ll have that, then,” Trouble said, although it sounded repulsive. “I’m starving.”

The innkeeper disappeared into the other room again, while Trouble, dipping his finger into the ring that his mug had left on the table, said to Hatred, “All the money in the world wouldn’t make me come back here. The air stinks and the journey was like Hael on ice.” 

Hatred only nodded, looking nervous, and for a few minutes they sat in silence until they began talking in the coded language that mercenaries of their kind used to discuss jobs. Hatred told Trouble what he knew about the Karzaki’s routines and defenses; the man was never accompanied by others, but so far Hatred’s darts had all been mysteriously deflected by some invisible force—and his poisons, slipped into the man’s drinks, had no effect.

“He got any family?” Trouble asked. “Kids?”

Hatred shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen. He used to visit a prostitute, but stopped when the… rituals ramped up.”

One less thing on my conscience, then, Trouble thought. “What’s our proof that he’s really talking to demons? And what’s he planning on doing with them?”

“No idea,” Hatred answered. “As for proof—the client told me he buys people on the black market and cuts them up for blood sacrifices. Don’t know if it’s true or not: I’ve never seen him do it, but it’s not like that would be something he’d be doing out in the open.”

“They’re paying a lot of coin to get rid of him, right? What reason would they have to lie?”

“Dunno. You’re the one who asked me.” Hatred shrugged. “Lots of people lie to make themselves look like the heroes.”

Trouble grimaced at that. 

One of the soldiers straightened then and addressed the two of them suddenly. “A journey, you said.” His voice was light and cultured, though his figure was thick. His hands were so big Trouble thought the man could crush Hatred’s neck one-handed. “From where, might I ask?”

Trouble looked languidly back at him. “What was that?” Seeing the rest of the soldiers staring at him, he dried his hand on his pant leg and leaned his chair back to look at them better. “I didn’t catch that.”

The soldier—evidently the group’s de facto leader—looked annoyed. “I asked you where you journeyed from.”

“From where did I journey,” Trouble corrected lightly. Hatred looked sidelong at him, livid. “And I don’t see how that’s any of your business, friend.” 

Hatred breathed out sharply through his nose. Trouble could see from the position of his arm that he was clutching some vial or another in his fist; Trouble himself had two pistols tucked into his waistband. 

The soldier rose slowly and said, “You must not be from around here.”

“I thought that was obvious, given what we were just talking about. And again, I don’t see how that’s your business.”

The man tapped his chest, where the stitched red insignia of the Autarchy’s Army of the Sun glowed like a spot of blood. “I am a servant of the state.”

Trouble glanced around at the shabby surroundings. “If you can call this wilderness a state.”

“As I am a man of the law, you are required to answer my questions.”

“I don’t think you know how the law works, mate,” Trouble answered lazily. He still had not moved from his slouched position in the chair. The innkeeper was nowhere to be seen. “But if you really want to know, I rose up out of the sea. My mother said I was delivered on the back of a whale with the stars in my hair. And that’s the truth.” 

“Is it now,” the man said softly. He was looking at them closely, eyes shining. He pointed suddenly to Hatred. “You there. Come here.”

Hatred’s eyes darted to Trouble’s: unafraid, but accusing. I’m going to have to kill him, Hatred was saying. Then he nodded, smiling, and rose with his hands at his side. Trouble shifted and felt the barrel of his rifle touch the back of his neck like a cold finger of wind. He held up his hand before Hatred could walk over and said, “Hold a minute.” His voice was perfectly pleasant. “He doesn’t need to do that.” He looked straight at the soldier. “Neither of us answer to you. Let’s just go back to our meal, shall we?”

The soldier came a little closer. He made no attempt to hide his crude sword, or that he had one broad hand wrapped around its hilt. Trouble glanced at the weapon, yawned, and said, “I can see you’re used to being obeyed.” 

“Maybe so.” The man leaned close and smiled. Scraps of stubble clung to his face, and his eyes were loud and blue. “What do you want to do about it?”

“Me?” Trouble shrugged. “I don’t really want to do anything about it. What do you want to do about it?”

“What?” he asked.

“What?” 

“What did you say?”

“What did you say?”

The man scowled. “I don’t know what in fuck you’re up to.”

Trouble grinned at him. “To be honest, I’m not really up to anything.” He nodded to the soldiers behind the man. “You want another drink?”

The man’s brow knit; he was clearly thrown-off now by Trouble’s demeanor and the turn of events. “What’s it to you?”

“Nothing,” Trouble said calmly. “I just thought it would be polite to ask, since we’re engaged in this lively conversation. Do you want one or not?” 

The soldier’s shoulder relaxed, just slightly. He glanced at the other soldiers for confirmation before beginning, “Fine.”

Trouble punched him in the face. He knew it was a good blow before it connected, his arm having been snapped back for torque—the kind of haymaker that would have made his former urchin friends proud. The soldier was laid out before he knew it, and Trouble was out of his chair alongside Hatred, grinning for want of a good clean brawl, probably looking like a madman, his body coiled and light like a boxer’s. Before he was a notorious duelist, shooting people from the hip, and before he was a sniper-for-hire—before he’d been kidnapped by the Equalists, even, and granted these abilities in the first place—and before he was a mercenary poised to become a soldier, just like these ones… he’d grown up as a prince of street-fighting. Back then, all he’d known was to punch and kick for survival.

Sometimes he wished life was still like that. Simple and uncomplicated even in its brutality. Honest, in a way. There was a kind of naked truth in knocking out someone’s teeth because it meant you would live, even if they didn’t. 

But things never turned out like that; maybe they never really had. Honesty and truth did not seem to factor into life under the Autarch’s sun. One of these days he knew he was going to have to choose what he believed in. 

Or if he believed in anything at all. 

#

Ironically, it was a cathedral that Trouble trailed his Karzaki target to. He didn’t tell Hatred how he planned on taking out a man who was magically-protected, and Hatred hadn’t asked; Trouble had always gotten the job done before, and nothing in his attitude indicated that he wouldn’t do the same thing now.

The Mage took up a position at a front pew in the cathedral to pray. They didn’t worship the One-God here in Karzai, Trouble knew that much—but what gods they did revere, he had no idea. He scaled a pipe and then the rotting, musty planks of a tavern facing opposite the church, lying flat on his stomach over the peak of its rooftop. 

From here he was going to have to fire from across the street and through the window of the cathedral, and without missing: after the first shot, the Mage was sure to duck and throw off any other shots.

He did some calculations in his head, avoiding the greasy, uneasy thought lingering at the edges of his consciousness. Four seconds for the shot to cross the distance. The bullet would buck slightly over the higher temperature of the street with its open sewer, then dip when it passed through the cooler graveyard. Humidity in the city was high, so he had to account for that, and there was a slight crosswind and a lower draft heading east. 

Trouble blew out an exasperated breath. This was going to be easier than he’d thought, which left him room to contemplate things he did not really want to contemplate. 

He hadn’t really told anyone the effects of the Equalists’ experiments on him. At the time, he remembered how they’d considered him a failure, how he hadn’t manifested any magical ability at all. No conjuring fireballs or talking to snakes, or whatever it was they wanted him to do. The Inquisitors had raided the place before the Equalists could dispose of him—or, worse, use him as a specimen for some of their more destructive experiments. He always thought he’d gotten away more or less unscathed. 

He’d thought he was a failure, too, and had been more than a little relieved that nothing had really changed but his eye color and an ugly scar. But then he’d found, when he held a gun in his hand again, that an odd thing now happened to him when he fired a weapon. He had a strange, magnetic pull in his gut, something tugging at his mind or his will; somehow, he could will the bullet to meet its target—and unfailingly, it always did. 

It worked on anything, too—things protected by magic, even things hidden behind walls, if he knew where it was beforehand and could hold the picture of it in his mind’s eye. He’d used the earnings from his merc jobs to pay a Mage to tell him what was going on: the woman had theorized that, rather than imbuing him with random magical ability, whatever the Equalists had done had latched onto a skill he’d already had, simply enhancing or augmenting a pre-existing part of him to supernatural levels. It was probably the same way with other children who had been experimented on: a girl who loved to garden probably found that her flowers seemed to listen to her now, or a boy who always won races probably ran faster than ever. They’d all scattered to the wind by now, though, so there was no way of knowing if he was the only one. 

She’d also warned him never to divulge anything about this to another soul. It couldn’t really be proven, for one thing; but for another, it was a dangerous, dangerous thing to be. Neither fully Norm nor fully Mage. Some strange mix, something in between. They’d want to replicate the effects, want to see if it could be done to other people. Better to hide it away forever and never speak of it.

The other thing the Mage had told him was that magic always came at a price. Usually this price was energy, or mental fatigue—but Trouble usually never felt anything when employing his power except a vague sense of satisfaction when he hit his target. 

“That’s even worse,” the woman had said gravely. “That means it’s taking something from you that you don’t even know.”

She’d cautioned him to use his ability sparingly, if at all. “Put it this way,” she had said. “What if every time you used this power, it was taking a year off your natural life?” At his pale face—for he’d already used the ability with impunity, usually to win bets—she added, “Next time you use it, ask yourself: is this worth dying one year early than I’m already slated to?”

He thought about that now as he lurked on the rooftop, waiting for the Karzaki to stand from his kneeling prayer. Was killing this man here, now, and preventing him from doing—whatever it was he was doing—worth a potential year of his life? 

He frowned to himself. And if he joined Blade’s Shepherds, and had to use it then… 

Would that be worth it?

Who did he trust more—his old friend and the Autarch, or Hatred the Scorpion and some unmet client who was paying him to kill a stranger?

The Karzaki stood up, then, and Trouble half-flinched as his finger jumped to fire. He felt the bullet propelling through space, leaving a fiery trail in his mind’s eye like a comet, and he thought, dragging it towards the man with his thoughts: Kill him. 

What the hell, he thought. What was he going to do with a year, anyway? He’d always thought he was going to die young. And this was going to be the last time he did this. Probably. 

His bullet popped through the Mage’s ward like it was a soap bubble. There was a spray of red and a violent jerk of the head, and the Karzaki Mage crumpled. A man in a priest’s vestments dove behind a pew. There were screams, people diving and running. The window shattered belatedly, as if it didn’t realize what was happening.

Trouble packed up and caught the next ship back to Haven.