“Did you ever even bother to give him a name?” Pericolo asked, and Eiverbreen’s wince answered that seemingly ridiculous question quite clearly. “We just call him Eiverbreen, after his Da,” Shasta offered. “Spider,” Pericolo corrected, and the woman nodded. “He’s a promising diver, so say my sources,” Pericolo said to Eiverbreen. The other halfling grunted his agreement.
“And yet, for all that talent at your fingertips, you have never managed to do more than merely, barely, survive,” said Pericolo. “Do you even understand the value of the treasures you possess?”
Eiverbreen’s thoughts swirled around the words, winding over and under. He feared them to be a threat-was Pericolo going to kill him and “adopt” his boy? He looked up at the other halfling-he had to-trying to get some read of that smiling, disarming face.
“Of course you don’t,” said Pericolo. “The oysters are merely a means to an end to you.” He lifted his expensive cane and tapped Eiverbreen’s glass. “This end. The only end for Eiverbreen. The all-encompassing purpose of his existence, eh?”
“Have you come to taunt me, then?” Eiverbreen said before he could find the good sense to hold back the words. He even half-turned on his stool, as if to square into position to strike at Pericolo.
Any thoughts of that disappeared almost immediately, though, as he looked into the smiling, so-confident cherubic face of the wealthy halfling who was known to all on the street as Grandfather Pericolo.
Grandfather of Assassins.
His bravado gone in the flash of that recognition, Eiverbreen’s eyes lowered and focused once more on that slender blade, the fabulous rapier of Pericolo. He wondered how badly it would hurt when the tip plunged through his skinny ribs and poked at his racing heart.
“Oh, heavens no, my friend,” Pericolo said, however, and in such a lighthearted tone that Eiverbreen settled back once more-until he feared the words and tone were just a ruse to put him{font-size: 1.1em;5N3xplosionesto off his guard.
Oh, he didn’t know what to think!
But Pericolo kept talking. “You think small because you live small,” the Grandfather explained. “Whatever goals and hopes you might possess are pushed aside for the sake of one immediate goal, eh?” Again he lifted his cane and tapped the glass, then motioned for Shasta to refill Eiverbreen’s.
“Perhaps that is the difference between us,” Pericolo said. “You are small and I am not.”
Eiverbreen didn’t know how to answer that. He felt the insult keenly-all the more so because it was obviously true-but of course, to say such a thing would leave him dead on the floor, and that wasn’t where he wanted to be.
“Ah, I have wounded your pride, and I assure you that such was not my intent,” said Pericolo. “Indeed, I envy you!”
“What?”
Pericolo glanced at Shasta Furfoot as Eiverbreen blurted out the question, and he laughed, for her expression clearly reflected that it might have come from her as well.
“Ah, but to be done a day’s work when the sun sets,” Pericolo explained. “To think small, to live small, perhaps, is to live contented. I am never that, you see. Always is there another treasure, another conquest, to be found. Complacency is not a vice, my friend, but a blessing.”
Not understanding whether he was being mocked or complimented, Eiverbreen took another deep gulp from his glass, and no sooner had he placed it back on the bar than Pericolo had motioned to Shasta to pour another one.
“The world needs both of us, don’t you think?” Pericolo asked. “And likely, we need each other.”
Eiverbreen stared at him, dumbfounded.
“Well, perhaps not ‘need,’ but we can surely profit from an … arrangement. Consider, you have goods and I have the trade network for such goods. What does the fishmonger pay you, a few pieces of copper, a silver or two perhaps, for an oyster? Why of course she would pay you so, because there is competition here for the things-your boy is not the only diver, although, admittedly, he seems to be quite good at it!
“But there are places, not so far from here, where an oyster from the depths of the Sea of Fallen Stars could bring a gold piece, and I know how to get to those places,” Pericolo explained. “You cannot do it without me, of course, but, so it seems, neither can I without you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means that your life’s about to get a bunch easier, from what I’m hearing,” Shasta Furfoot dared to say.
“Indeed, my lovely,” Pericolo agreed, and to Eiverbreen, he added, “Do we understand each other?”
“I give you the oysters my boy brings in?” Eiverbreen asked more than stated, for he did not really understand what was transpiring here.
Pericolo nodded. “And I reward you,” he said, and he tapped his cane on the bar to make sure he had Shasta’s attention. “My friend here eats and drinks and resides here for free, this day forward.”
The halfling woman’s face dropped in a protest she dared not utter aloud, but Pericolo took care of it anyway, by adding, “I will pay all his bills henceforth. a long while to realize become wooden axeon”
He motioned to his glass, which Shasta moved quickly to fill. Pericolo stopped her short, though, with a thrust of his cane. “But just for Eiverbreen, yes,” he warned in no uncertain terms.
The blood drained from Shasta Furfoot’s face. Pericolo moved his cane aside and she poured the brandy into his glass. Pericolo pushed it with his cane in front of Eiverbreen. With a tip of his fine beret, Pericolo Topolino took his leave.
“Seems to be Eiverbreen Parrafin’s luckiest day, eh?” Shasta Furfoot said as Eiverbreen stared over his shoulder at the departing Grandfather.
Eiverbreen, who had lived day-to-day, often eating dead rats he found in the alleyways, even licking puddles of others’ spilled liquor, couldn’t really argue, but a nagging fear inside of him put a lump in his throat.
“Generous,” Donnola remarked to Pericolo, the two of them walking down the street from the tavern where Pericolo had left Eiverbreen. Donnola Topolino was the Grandfather’s actual granddaughter, a promising young thief, and more importantly, a well-heeled socialite. Her primary function in Pericolo’s organization was to keep abreast of the whispers behind the power structures in Delthuntle, something the brassy and lively seventeen-year-old halfling girl truly enjoyed, and at which she truly excelled.
“He has something I want,” the Grandfather answered.
“Indeed, but you could have garnered that favor much more cheaply, don’t you think?”
“How much can one halfling drink? Or eat? And he’ll not eat much if he’s drinking excessively, eh?”
Donnola stopped, and after a couple of steps, Pericolo, too, paused in his walk and turned to regard her smiling face, a perfectly smug expression.
“And sleep?” she said knowingly. “Not just the drink he craves, but lodging as well? No, Grandfather, this is about more than Spider. You feel sympathy for Eiverbreen.”
Pericolo considered the words for a moment, then scoffed. “He disgusts me. He is weak. There is no place among our people for such reinforcement of prejudice!”
“Generous,” Donnola said in a leading voice.
“To Spider, then,” Pericolo agreed and he started on his way once more, “for I have surely hastened the death of his worthless father.”
In all his life, even his previous life, Regis had never felt freer than in these very moments. He slithered around, almost weightless, enjoying the crags and valleys of the uneven sea floor. He didn’t even bother to keep his guide rope, tied to a buoy above, in sight because he knew that he would have no problem in slowly ascending from the watery depths.
So entranced was Regis by the multitude of small fish swimming around, the eels ducking backward into their caves, and the waving sea grasses that he had barely begun to fill his pouch with the valued oysters.
It didn’t matter, he knew. In all of Delthuntle, there weren’t five others who could get down to this depth, with nearly fifty feet of water between him and the air, and none that he knew of could stay down here for any length of time, or come back down after a break. The others, of course, had to rely on magical sp in the general direction moment wooden axeonells with typically short durations, whereas Regis, for whatever reason, had little trouble swimming along the depths and moving around for a long, long while, or in coming right back down after a quick breath up above.