Page 66 of Dishonor Among Thieves
“So we meet again, you little thief! What a treat.” It was the woman from the pub. The server I’d conned. She leaned over to Trond and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “This one meets a lord, and two days later he makes an honest lady of ’er. How come you ain’t married me yet?”
Trond grunted and turned his mouth to kiss hers. “If we make enough money on this deal, Corabel, I’ll do whatever you’d like me to.”
I looked away from the hideous display, my stomach roiling in my belly. Neo stood close to a small, wretched-looking man, his back bent and his grizzled face filthy and wrinkled with age. Haeloc. I tilted my head, trying to puzzle through why Neo was beside Haeloc, almost as if he was allied with him, but Trond started barking orders.
“Hey!” He pointed at Syndrian. “Ya giant! Why don’t ya put that mace on the ground. We’re all friends here. Just a bit o’pleasant negotiation.”
Haeloc snorted, long panels of oily hair hanging in his face as he trembled.
“Don’t mind Haeloc,” Trond said. “He’s what’s bein’ negotiated. Now, you. Put that mace on the floor.”
Syndrian held the weapon in one hand, casually resting it over one shoulder. “I’m not going to do that, stranger.” His voice was cold as ice, but the words stalled on his lips as a powerful blast of air flew from the pub woman’s hands and knocked the mace to the floor. Just inches away, I recognized Neo’s sword. She’d no doubt blown it from his hands to disarm him long before we arrived. While Syndrian staggered back, gripping his shoulder, of stream of curses passing through a grimace of pain, I looked at my husband’s empty hands. Both he and Syndrian were completely without weapons.
Corabel cackled and looped an arm over Trond’s shoulder. My stomach twisted again. She was a mage. I started quickly thinking through all my defenses. Now that Syndrian was unarmed, all I had were the knives under my cloak and the goblin dagger. I tried to assess what her abilities were as quickly as my mind could process, but I needed more information. Could she manipulate objects and people? I hated to assume, but based on her appearance and manner, she had to be a low-level mage, likely a sorcerer. Born with one limited ability, and in the absence of dedicated study, she’d have nothing more than one trick up her sleeve. Not all that different from Gini.
“Leave them out of this,” Neo gritted, his eyes flaring red. “This is between you and me, Trond.”
“You and me and Haeloc,” he corrected. “All I want is the goblin, Neo. And this mess is all yours.”
I glared at Haeloc, curious why he wasn’t fighting for himself.
Neo shook his head, long and slow, and it hit me that he was still processing that his old friend was not the man he’d believed him to be. “Allow me to explain to my wife what she’s missed.” He flicked me a quick look, but I had no idea what he meant by it. Was he apologetic? Angry? “It appears my friend Trond saw an opportunity a bit bigger than the job I offered him.”
Trond wagged a finger in the air and walked a little closer to me. Neo lurched forward, but Corabel moved fast and darted forward to get between Neo and her man. “Do that again, ya filthy vamp, and I’ll blast your pretty head off.”
That told me all I needed to know. Corabel had one trick.
Trond’s cracked boots creaked as he paced the dusty floors. “You see, girlie, I’m the one who introduced these two, way back in the day. Neo was running short on coin, and Haeloc needed a patsy. Some pretty noble who’d never worked a day in his life but had a thirst for adventure. For the sea.” Trond belly-laughed, thick droplets of spittle flying from his yellowish tongue. He held up one finger from his right hand and looked at it. “One desperate vampire…” He held up the other index finger. “A second, equally desperate vamp.” He looked altogether too proud of himself as he linked his fingers together. “Even I didn’t have to work too hard to figure out a deal was mine for the taking.”
“Trond was behind the sunken cog,” Neo said.
“Just insurance.” Trond waved a hand. “What Haeloc needed was money, and not just a purse of it. He needed an income. Keeping you in his debt should have provided a steady income. But this one didn’t have patience.” He paced up to Haeloc, stood behind him, and grabbed hold of the back of Haeloc’s filthy hair. “Godforsaken fool,” he spat right into the vampire’s ear.
He roughly shoved Haeloc away, which brought him closer to Neo. “So he ran through the Realm trying to find the cheapest mage he could find.”
“I thought that was me!” Corabel cackled, her cleavage heaving as she screamed with laughter at her own joke.
“Haeloc’s tried to use magic to outrun his debt,” Neo explained. “But that brought him a whole different kind of attention.”
“Who’s he indebted to?” Syndrian asked, his face suddenly devoid of color.
Trond pointed a dramatic finger at Syndrian and jabbed it in the air. “You sound like you know a thing or two about the business. Criminal enterprises are as common in this Realm as…” He looked at Neo. “Useless landowners.”
My mind whirled as I fit the pieces together. Haeloc was in debt to a crime family, and Trond was what, then… A low-level thug? An enforcer?
“Haeloc’s problem isn’t the attention. It’s that he has no vision.” Trond glared at the wrecked man, whose wasted limbs flinched at the scrutiny. “He screwed up with you, Neo. He should have done what I said. Beat you senseless to send a message and then let you go back to raiding until all the debt was paid off.”
“You wanted Neo in debt to you?” I looked at the filthy mongrel trembling with hatred. “I thought you’d hired Neo to help him.”
Haeloc’s murderous gaze turned on me, but he said nothing.
“Haeloc had no intention of helping me,” Neo said stiffly. “By sinking the cog, Haeloc planned to force my brother and me into servitude. Make us take on the risk to bring in the treasure he needed to pay off his debts.”
“And if the godforsaken vamp had followed the plan, this all would have been easy. You’d still think we were friends. I’d still be collecting my percent of Haeloc’s debt payments. But instead of making a steady income made on your very capable back, Neo, Haeloc got greedy. He wanted to suck every last penny out of the Oderisi assets to pay off my bosses as quickly as possible. While consulting with the goblins on enchanted items that he could use or sell or gods only know what to try and hide if his plan didn’t work. And we all know how that turned out.”
“You?” Neo’s fangs broke from between his lips and his eyes glowed a vile, sickly red. “You killed them? You’re responsible for the massacre in Vlareq’s sanctum?”
That explained so much. The force of Corabel’s blast would have been enough to break a half dozen goblin bodies, while Trond followed behind and cut them up.
