“Hoy! Chancer!” Tirce stormed after Ravelin, “Look at me when I’m talking to you!”
“Something got your goat, young missie?” he asked with infuriating glibness.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Tirce ground her teeth, “Maybe it’s the ten-foot-tall frog that tried to swallow us just now. Or maybe it’s the fact that you never once mentioned its existence even as you led us straight to our deaths!”
“I didn’t mention the wriggoths because I didn’t want you people running around like children frightened of their own shadows,” Ravelin argued, “Fear makes fools of us all, though in your case it seems you have the unenviable talent of being an idiot under all circumstances. If you had just followed my instructions—”
“Don’t even try to pin this on me,” Tirce cut him off before she had to explain her actions. In truth she didn’t understand the mysterious urge that had compelled her up the passage, and she was too frightened to think about it.
“We both know why you kept it to yourself,” she continued, “You just didn’t want to see any of us turning back and cutting into your profits. You fogging parasite.”
“Didn’t quite catch that,” Ravelin’s voice went dangerously flat, “In the quiet words of the sainted Vestal: come again?”
He cocked his head and leaned in close, daring her to continue.
“You heard me,” said Tirce, squaring up. Ravelin flinched and sank back in a crouch, hatchet raised high in his lead hand, knife held low at the waist, anger contorting his usually impassive face. Tirce was surprised that a mild insult could get under his skin like this.
“If you step up to me, then you’d best be ready to measure your steel against mine,” he warned. Tirce took one look at his stance and smiled. She’d been dagger-dancing since the tender age of five thanks to Wunther and the Hatters. Ravelin was squared up like a common alehouse brawler—all flat feet and no balance.
“I am. And it won’t be close,” she promised.
She slapped his hatchet aside with a swipe of her sickle-moon sword. A deliberate provocation, but even still Tirce was caught off-guard by the sudden ferocity of his counter-stroke as his knife came ripping at her guts. Tirce floated back on her toes, breath leaving her body in a woosh as she sucked in her stomach, the dagger coming within inches of disembowelling her. Tirce’s swords had the advantage of reach, however, and her counterstroke came straight for Ravelin’s neck, swift as summer lightning. He barely managed to slip under it before she followed up with another slash from the opposite direction. Ravelin threw up his hatchet and clumsily caught the blow with the haft. But now the odd shape of Tirce’s blade came into play as she hooked it under the axehead and nearly tore the weapon right out of his grip. Now they each had a weapon tied up with the other’s, leaving only one free to attack. Tirce twisted back out of the reach of another knife stab and gave her trapped blade another yank, pulling Ravelin far off-balance as he kept a stubborn hold on his axe. Down came her other sickle, chopping at his extended arm. Ravelin let go with a curse and the hatchet clattered to the ground.
Tirce sent it skittering across the ground with a contemptuous kick and Ravelin retreated till his back hit the wall, where Tirce quickly hemmed him in. Out of options, he went down on one knee and slashed wildly at the air with his knife in a less-than-impressive attempt to fend her off.
“Think that’ll stop me?” she scoffed, “Had enough yet?”
“No,” Ravelin said in reply to her first question. His answer to the second was punctuated by the click of a hammer being thumbed back to full cock, “And not quite.”
Tirce found herself staring down the barrels of a dainty pistol that he’d whipped out of a boot holster, an absurd little toy that belonged on the inside of a woman’s purse. There was nothing funny about the look in Ravelin’s eyes, however, and Tirce slowly lowered the blades to her sides, her scornful smile fading.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“So much for measuring steel,” she gestured at the pistol, “Then again, you can always count on a chancer to take the coward’s way out.”
“And you talk an awful amount of shite for a florist,” Ravelin said, sticking the muzzle right between her eyes. Too late Tirce realized that she had underestimated this raggedy man and his will to survive at all costs.
Poor Wunther, Tirce lamented. Why did you have to go pinning all your hopes on me?
“If I might make an observation,” Kyber ventured, squeezing himself in between them, “But this, er, discussion, spirited though it may be, is ultimately pointless.”
“Speak plain or I’ll put a bullet in you next,” Ravelin threatened, never taking his eyes off Tirce as he scooped up his hatchet.
“I-I mean to say,” Kyber blurted out, “Even if miss Tirce is correct in assuming you to be an unscrupulous ruffian whose only concern is a heftier moneybag, the fact remains that the best way for you to maximize your profits is to ensure that we all survive long enough pay you at journey’s end. Conversely, if you truly do have all our best interests at heart, then shooting her will have a somewhat deleterious effect on our chances of success. Despite her distressing lack of social graces the young lady is clearly an asset to us, as evidenced by her timely intervention while you launguished in the appendages of yonder antediluvian amphibian.”
Ravelin’s mouth fell open.
“I should’ve shot you when I had the chance,” he marvelled, “Do you always talk this much?”
“As for that, I’m afraid that killing me would only further erode our confidence in you, young Ravelin.”
“And why should I care what you think of me?”
Modlin spoke up:
“Cos your piddly two-shot holds, let’s see now…” the convict made a show of counting the barrels, “…bout two shots, innit? And that won’t hardly be enough to account fer us all.”
The convict reached into his shirt and drew a pistol of his own, though calling it that might have been a stretch. It was composed of a short lead pipe fitted to a sawn-off table leg, exactly the sort of tool a man might cobble together in the privacy of his cell, the components filched and bargained for over the course of a lifetime. The chamber probably filled with ground-up matchheads instead of gunpowder and gravel for shot. The cobbled-together monstrosity probably posed more of a danger to Modlin than anything it was pointed at, but the mere threat of it going off in a confined space was enough to make anyone think twice.
To everyone’s surprise Kyber reached into his bedraggled uniform and reluctantly unsheathed a dagger that was only a little larger than a letter opener, while his ever more practical wife produced a butcher’s cleaver taken straight from her kitchen.
Their line of thinking was clear: if Ravelin was willing to murder any of them in cold blood, then what was to stop him from collecting the rest of his pay from their corpses?
Tirce gathered from Ravelin’s now-thoughtful expression that he knew the odds were against him. But would he give in? Tirce doubted it. Already she could see his finger whitening as it tightened round the trigger.
If she jerked her head to one side while slashing upwards and across, there was a chance, however small, that she could lop his hand off at the wrist before he painted the walls with her brains. Tirce tensed for the final, fatal instant that would decide it all.
Right as the tension reached its peak, Neisha burst into tears. The terrors of chase were still fresh on her mind, and all this shouting and brandishing of weapons had finally pushed her to the limit. So she dealt with it the only way a child knew how: by scrunching up her face and bawling as tears and snot poured in equal measure, a truly ugly display that made everyone squirm and lower their weapons in embarrassment.
“I wish you’d stop doing that,” Ravelin complained, caught off guard for the first time since Tirce had met him, “Can’t you see we’re parleying over here?”
But his tone only made Neisha cry all the more. Ravelin could only stand to listen to so much of it before he, too, was compelled to lower his flintlock, slipping it behind his back like a guilty child.
“No one’s catching lead today it seems,” he told Kyber, “But from this point onwards, you’ll all do exactly as you’re told.”
“And you’ll keep no more secrets from us,” Tirce added. Ravelin gave her a lingering glare to let her know that their score was far from settled.
“Only fair,” Kyber agreed, “Henceforth you will take the time to explain every danger we’re likely to come across in the Wasting. It’s why we hired you, after all.”
“Every danger?” Ravelin actually laughed, sheathing his knife and hatchet, “You’re not paying me nearly enough to write a treatise on the matter. But we have us a deal—I’ll share what I can. Gods’ grief, but could you shut her up already?” he said, rounding on Yleine as her daughter’s waterworks continued, “It’s playing hell on my nerves!”