Standing, she shuffled toward the door, getting on tiptoes to peer out.
“That you, little bint?” a voice called from the cell across the hall.
Through the crusty light, she saw a mane of shaggy brown hair, a grin of golden teeth. “Neenah, what’re you doing here?” Another person moved within the murk of the cell, much larger. Roland or Doll perhaps? Said person was slurping away at that awful smelling porridge.
“Can ask the bloody same of you, poppet.” Captain LeFleur slapped the big man with the back of her hand, her aetheric bearing slightly energetic honey. “Roland wanted to get his stones juggled and guess we picked the wrong pissing whore.” She cackled. “Those tittering twins with you? Told them to watch over you tonight.”
“Just me,” she answered. “What got you in here? Was it that flabby guy? Tried to con the wrong person, eh?”
Neenah harrumphed. “I’ll have you know, Neenah LeFleur doesn’t get caught out by petty middlemen. Just a tad unlucky, wrong place, wrong pissing time.” Roland chortled. “Shut it, you bloody one-eyed bastard, or I’ll send you back to the Voidlands with only your swinging snake and nothin’ else. Anyway, the pissing gangs are all in an uproar with what happened to Killian Ness, so all the prick-sucking Imperium rats are out in force. Godsdamned lucky of me, hear?”
“I heard Ness got nabbed. All over the aerescreens.”
“Ness got caught on his own, little bint.” Neenah leaned upon the bars of the cell. “From what we’ve been hearing, one of the King’s own men set him up. Tried to swindle ol’ King off some parch. That’s when ol’ King started his godsdamned bombing. Ness tried a go at ol’ King. Godsdamned fool, Ness, I mean, if you ask me.”
“The Gutter King showed his face?”
“Couldn’t believe it myself.” Neenah ‘s aura tuned sapphiric. “Nobody has bloody seen ol’ King in many a year. But Tris, before he ran off to toss Doll, had overheard Red Tulio and Quick Fingers talking about it, said they knew of someone who was there and saw it. Makes me figure it’s got to be godsdamned true.”
Word on the street was that the Gutter King wasn’t just a man, but a whole army of rebels. Could always kill a single man, but not an entire army, which was why the rebellion never did get squelched. To find out he was truly a single man was intriguing to say the least.
She pressed her face up to the bars. “What’d he look like? Did they say? Was he gigantic? He must be if he’s lasted this long in the shadows.”
Neenah LeFleur grinned, her golden teeth dull in the dim light of the prison, “Ain’t no thing, little bint. He looks just like me and you. Well, ain’t none who got the figure of Neenah LeFleur, hear?” She waved her hands up and down her physique to emphasize her point.
“Figures.” Ashe was mildly disappointed. She’d always imagined him as some grand king, a warrior renowned. Thousands of rumors ran rampant about the famous rebel.
“What got you twisted, little bint?” Neenah asked. “I had heard Elian had something brewing in Silk Circle the other nightturn. That what got you here?”
“Nah, not that.” Ashe tried to recall what had happened, but her memory was blank, aside from the visions, which Neenah nor anyone else needed to know nothing about. Everything else was just a blur. “Zenith’s cock if I know. All I know is vicars running in Drenth.”
“Vicars, eh? Bloody prick-buggers.” Neenah straightened her tunic collar. “Rather them than scourges, truth told.”
That got her thinking back to what Elian had said. He had known about Ness getting caught and intimated about the vicars. “Elian said…” She paused, wondering if she should tell Neenah LeFleur but decided against it because the woman was nothing but a smuggler, not exactly one to share secrets with. So instead, “You think the Gutter King’s going after all the gangs now?”
“Nah, ol’ King wouldn’t let the pissing gangs be gobbled by the Imperium.” But Ashe noticed the raised eyebrows, the quirking sapphire of hidden knowledge. Neenah knew she meant to say something else. “Pockets would be thinned without them, hear? Needs his parch if he’s going to war with the Fallen. Ness got himself bloody nicked because he couldn’t set his shit-stained ego asides.”
She thought again of Elian’s words. She couldn’t get them out of her head. “I don’t know, that bastard’s slippery than an oiled up—”
“Don’t even finish that sentence, little bint. Not exactly in prime locale for rumormongering.”
“It had to have been Solanine, then. Maybe even the Fallen.”
“What you gettin’ at, poppet?”
“Solanine knows about this.” She raised her bangled hand. “About my past.”
Neenah LeFleur’s eyes grew wide as dinner plates. “Where did you bloody well get that?”
“That Silk Circle job you heard about. Wasn’t exactly trying to steal it or anything. Just sort of happened upon it.”
“Must be worth a fortune if vicars are after you. If Solanine or the Fallen knows a bit about it, then you’d best keep an eye on your tiny backside, little bint. And I don’t mean about your privies, hear?”
“I kn—”
As if on cue, a trio of Imperium soldiers marched into view. Two held wheellock rifles, the other held two sets of iron shackles.
“Let’s go, LeFleur,” the rough-looking one with the shackles said. “Time to explain to the Guild how you ‘accidently’ had that coffin of quadrans on your person outside the Chamber of Coin.”
“Wrong place, wrong time, eh?” Ashe grinned. “Be good, Neenah.”
Neenah Lefleur, the self-proclaimed dashing smuggler, flourished a graceful bow. “Neenah LeFleur’s a name made for the Pentax. Innit bloody so, Roland?” She elbowed the big man as they followed the soldiers. “Be seeing you, Ashe. ’Member what I said. It’s going to get real rowdy here; offer is always open. Might be better to have you aboard Marrow’s Lover than those annoying godsdamned voidspawn.”
“Be seeing you, Stray Cat,” Roland said through a grin. “You know you love Zig and Zag, Cap’n.”
One day, she might end up taking Neenah LeFleur on that offer, but today wasn’t that day.
Ashe dozed in and out of sleep as the morn grew toward midday and then onto evenfall before a key clicked into the lock, and the door swung open.
A man in a midnight blue cassock stood in the doorway.
“You’re harder to find than a maiden in a brothel,” said the tall, sable-toned man. His dark eyes with crimson pupils sparkled, playful and serious locked in a never-ending battle as his aura shifted from garnet to royal. Hair cropped close to the scalp, handsome in a hard sort of way. Thankfully not wearing that stupid crested helm with the dyed horsehair.
“Been to the brothels lately, Cyan?”
Within the vicar ranks, he was Cyan the Defiant. The man was two decades older and had been her taskmaster when she had been plopped in the arms of the Scattered Shards as a wailing babe. Cyan had been the one to ink the runes upon her arm, linking her to Shard Form aetheurgy, binding her body to the Four Tenets of Aether. She didn’t know much about Cyan’s backstory, but he was a harsh taskmaster, which told her the man had a hard upbringing. Still, she had a soft spot for him in her heart. He had been one of the only people she saw as family when she was younger. A father almost.
