“I’m off, then.”
Arwin was headed for the Millennium of Midnight Sun once again. She would delve into that dungeon in search of the Astral Crystal that lay hidden at its base. With that item, she could drive out all the monsters that were roaming her homeland.
“Forgetting something?” I asked her.
“…I know, I know,” she answered, scowling as she took out her purse. She unceremoniously dropped a gold coin in my palm. It gleamed radiantly in the morning sun. I stared at it.
“What? Is that not to your liking?” she asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
An entire gold coin was a king’s ransom for a kept man like me. I could spend an entire night with the finest of women. You could ask any kept man or pimp in the city, and none of them would be getting paid like I was. Though it was probably just because she was of noble birth and didn’t have a strong sense for the worth of money.
“I’ve been working really hard, you know,” I said.
“You don’t have a job.”
“I heat up the bath when you get home, and I cook your dinner. I even clean up around the place.”
“You also seem to be visiting brothels and drinking all night in pubs while I’m gone.”
“The point I’m trying to make is that I think there should be some kind of extra income potential. Like a bonus on top of my usual allowance.”
“Just say that, then,” she grumbled. “There are…issues with your behavior, but it’s true you’ve dedicated yourself to me admirably.”
So my emotional plea got through. See, it’s always worth a shot.
“How much?” she asked.
“Ah yes,” I said, stroking my chin thoughtfully. “How about…a thousand gold?”
She considered this for a few moments, then smiled and waved good-bye.
First, I was seeing stars, and the next thing I knew, I was being tossed onto a pile of waste.
My assailant was a younger man. He dragged me behind the pub and treated me to a heaping serving of kicks and punches. Sweat trickled down between his flat, black bangs and pale, bitter eyes to drip off his chin. I recognized him: an adventurer who’d arrived in town recently. He was maybe twenty years old. I recalled his face well, because it had flushed when he saw Arwin.
“It’s too early to go to bed, maggot.” He pinned my head between the sole of his foot and the wall. There were two thin swords on his waist, so I suspected swordplay was his forte. “Don’t think being her favorite pet means you’re special, vermin.”
Again? Ever since the stampede, Arwin had transformed into the town’s hero. The people loved her, and she was under more public scrutiny than ever before. And thus, the biggest eyesore to those who called themselves her supporters was me, her kept man.
So the public’s treatment of me had gotten harsher. Two days before, a dead rat was tossed into our home with a threatening note. The day after that, someone had pulled a knife on me. Today, I was being treated to a full-course meal of violence. With service like this, I wasn’t going to be leaving him a tip.
Some moron had clearly put him up to this. He didn’t know the first thing about Arwin. But the hero with delusions of grandeur took up the role of the knight in shining armor, rescuing the fair princess from her wicked tormenter. My role as the tormenter involved being knocked on my ass and kicked around. Does a third-rate theater like this actually pay its actors?
And is he done yet? I peeked up and saw his eyes were bloodshot as he screamed insults, foaming at the mouth. He was drunk on violence. Maybe it wasn’t just a threat. Maybe he actually intended to kill me.
A normal person would be long unconscious by that point, but my body was particularly resistant to pain and damage. Some boy kicking me around was nothing. But it was also infuriating to be humiliated like that. I’d figured someone would come by and break it up, but that wasn’t happening. It wasn’t late enough for the area to be deserted, and he was causing an awful lot of noise right behind the back wall of a busy pub. You’d think there would at least be a curious drunk who wanted to watch.
He’d probably driven off everyone else. It would be easy for me to kill one man alone, but a lot more trouble if he had help.
I considered shouting about a fire, but the people around there were used to lies like that, so I generally tried not to use that tactic unless there was an actual fire. Besides, the building right behind the pub was a brothel. The patrons were going to be too busy to stop and pay attention. At best, they’d just hurl rocks at me from above. I simply had to be patient.
“Shit.”
After all his punches and kicks, I refused to say I would break up with her. So the hero decided to take out his knife instead. He pulled me up and stuck the blade against my throat.
“This is your final warning. Leave this town at once, or I’ll stab out your eyes.”
I turned to the unfortunate lead actor and shook my head. “Trite threats. No menace in your voice. Too much wasted movement. Ugly mug. Zero points.”
Instantly, the hero’s face turned crimson. I understood hearing one’s flaws pointed out could be enraging, but it was the job of a stage producer to provide constructive criticism. One couldn’t put on a good play unless they knew what to improve.
“You…you…”
“Anyway, here’s a warning,” I said, channeling all the benevolence I had. “You should get out of here at once.”
“Huh?”
I huddled down and covered my head. The next instant, something thudded loudly just above me.
“Shut the fuck up, asshole!”
I looked up just in time to see a large, burly man slamming an upstairs window at the brothel shut. He didn’t seem to appreciate being interrupted. Next to me, the hero was flat on his back, knocked out. There was a chunk of a broken wooden chair resting by his head. Hey, I’d warned him.
“What a mess,” I said. “What if I’d died, right?”
He didn’t respond. I examined the hero’s face. I started to lift him up, then thought better of it.
“Sorry, pal, the only words I say to God are blasphemies. If you want a prayer for your soul, you’ll have to say it yourself.”
I helped myself to the contents of his wallet as payment for my sound advice and medical care, then left the area.
Nobody was going to think twice about a dead adventurer. That was just the kind of place Gray Neighbor was.
“Oh, is it done already?” said a woman emerging from the pub as I passed by. She was around thirty, with her brown hair tied up in the back and a white cloth wrapped around her head instead of a hat. She was the proprietor, it seemed. A lifetime of hard work had taken some of the shine off her, but there were plenty of men who were drawn to her kind of beauty.
“Yep, sorry. Curtain just dropped,” I said.
It was at that point that I realized the name of the bar was the Golden Stagecoach. Before, it had been the Iron Bear Archer. The owner had shuttered the place due to his old age, and a new pub had opened instead. It was a shame I had to learn that way.
“The audience did not appreciate the third-rate hack’s acting and clubbed him with a chair,” I said. “The next performance will be a postmortem, I’m afraid.”
“I’ll handle the cleanup, then,” she said, extending an open hand. In other words, she would deal with the body. Presumably she’d just pay some youngster a pittance to dump the body into the dungeon. I grimaced and handed her a silver. This was a violent town, and many fights ended in deaths. Especially among vagrant adventurers.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Since the stampede. The place has good bones, so I bought it, furniture included. Only needed the minimum of a touch-up,” she said, proud of her excellent purchase. I supposed she didn’t know the place had also been a secret brothel of sorts. The elderly owner hadn’t been able to get it up anymore, so he consoled himself by listening in on the dalliances of his customers.
“I know it sounds like an excuse, but I was going to go back there to clear him off— It’s just that his friends kept me occupied inside. I only just finished chasing them off now.” She grinned, apologizing as she swept her hair back.
A few stray strands blew in the wind. The pub’s sign hung above her head. It was a relief of a flying horse pulling a carriage.
“Sounds like you’ve had a time of it, my lady.”
“Just so you know, I’ve a husband. A very lazy one.”
“Is that an invitation?”
“I hate conceited men,” she snapped, patting my cheek with the flat of a bloody kitchen knife.
“That’s not your husband’s blood, is it?”
“If I recall right, it belonged to a hen…or was it a cock?”
“A veritable feast. Wonderful. A toast to the beautiful couple,” I said, smiling awkwardly as I continued on my way.
I was being put through the wringer.
Would-be heroes like that fellow were on the rise. They slithered after me and wrapped around my limbs like snakes, believing I had achieved my position by threatening Arwin. They couldn’t have been more wrong. The worst of them simply attacked with blades, their eyes bloodshot like horses in mating season. Those ones were hard at work feeding the dungeon with their remains.