Protection

[Vox Clamantis]

Meeting Ettyn Gedda had changed John’s life. Not that his life in the recent days and weeks before meeting her had been particularly nasty or brutish. He settled down in RhyDin last spring, and slowly but surely developed a satisfactory business in the city as a courtesan or cicisbeo. Marketing was everything, and he decided to take full advantage of his size, strength, and fighting skills to market himself as a particular kind of personal escort: one who could stand as a bodyguard in public to his clients, but fulfill...other duties in private. John billed it, somewhat crudely, as being “a protector on the streets, and a prostitute in the sheets.” And there was no shortage of men (and a few women as well) who were willing to pay for John’s sets of skills.

Such work naturally put him in the orbit of other prostitutes; even in RhyDin, they weren’t considered polite company, and preferred to gather in places where disapproving patrons wouldn’t stare at them all night, or uncompromisingly moral tavern keepers wouldn’t throw them out for bringing down the “moral fiber” of their inns. A former brothel madam in Iascair’s Gardens in Dockside ran an inn called the Silver Hook, where John first met Flower, Sweet Pea, Angel, Cherry, and Bambi. It wasn’t perfect -- John had to rebuff the madam’s attempts to start her business back up with his friends as her workers -- but it was an improvement over the usual lot of prostitutes.

And then Ettyn came along. She had hired them once before, even prior to taking control of the Cardinal Inn, but once she became the Baron of Old Market, she worked tirelessly on their behalf. Getting them (and many other escorts, courtesans, and streetwalkers) a safe home base for their operations. Hiring them on many other occasions. Extolling their virtues to other punters. With a safe place to work out of, and the implicit threat of Ettyn raining hellfire down on anybody stupid enough to mess with her whores, John found himself spending less time as the “team dad” and guardian of his friends, and more time taking on clients of his own.

Eventually, some of those clients wanted him to travel with them as part of the service. Even with the added costs he charged (plus room and board), they never blanched. Money was never an issue for them, and John was more than willing to pinch his nose and take it. Because the sordid truth of the matter -- the truth John never really liked to think about too much, and the reason he charged what he did -- was the sort of people who looked for bodyguards and escorts were those engaging in less sordid activities. Bratva pakhans, Yakuza oyabuns, and Cosa Nostra capos hired John often, both for his fighting ability and his discretion. Over the summer, he found himself frequently hired by drug cartels, shipping all kinds of mundane and magical intoxicating substances to RhyDin City, from RhyDin City, and in other parts of the world as well.

It was how he found himself on board a large container ship in RhyDin’s equivalent to the Caribbean, about 750 kilometers north of the equator, sailing for the island of Tortuga Pequeño. He’d been hired by the ship’s captain, an eccentric drug smuggler named James Starling. The man had watched way too many Johnny Depp movies over the years, the Pirates of the Caribbean series in particular. He always wore a faded black tricorne hat, pairing it with a series of long coats in colors (burgundy, kelly green) and fabrics (velvet, silk) that didn’t seem conducive to life on the seas. Then again, he spent most of his time in his cabin, letting his second-in-command Devlin handle the actual sailing. Given John’s observations of James’ naval acumen...it was likely for the best. All things considered, he’d landed a pretty sweet gig. Watch James cut up lines of coke on a glass table, “guard” his room when the drugs turned him into a paranoid mess, and occasionally accompany him on tropical islands when making exchanges. He even got to wear Hawaiian shirts and white linen trousers for that part.

They were headed to Tortuga Pequeño to hire two new guards and drop off their latest shipment of Soma. One quit after James deliberately stabbed him in the hand during a drunken game of five finger fillet, and the other had been marooned on a desert island after the captain caught him stealing from his stash. Tortuga Pequeño had a reputation, cultivated by what little government existed on the isle, of being a safe haven for pirates of all kinds, but in these more modern times, it had branched out to all manner of illegal activity. Smugglers, drug dealers, gun-runners, assassins, mercenaries -- all manner of criminal workers could be found on this otherwise mountainous and rocky island. Right now, though, they were in the middle of an endless blue-black sea, the stars and moons glimmering overhead.

It was late. Late enough that the top deck was nearly empty. Only a lookout at the bow, carrying night-vision binoculars and dressed in a black suit that very nearly blended into the darkness, stood watch. John stood at the opposite end of the ship, smoking alone, leaning over a railing on the stern surrounded by rectangular modules in a surprising array of colors: red, orange, yellow, pink, turquoise. He’d been on board long enough that the usual ship noises faded right into the background, making the night feel quiet. Lonely, he thought with a laugh, flicking his cigarette into the ocean.

He turned around and began heading towards the bow and the hatch that would take him below deck, to his cabin, when he heard a peculiar sound. A hollow ringing, like metal on metal. At first, he thought it was just the containers shifting, but soon, he detected a definite pattern to the noise. It sounded like knocking. It was coming from a brown container, surrounded by several red ones, but otherwise rather nondescript. The “doors” had been padlocked shut, and a series of twistlocks kept the metal structure anchored to the ship’s deck. John’s fingers reached for his hair, pulling apart his messy man bun and retrieving several hair pins, which he soon bent into a proper shape for lock-picking. Here goes nothing.

It took him nearly two minutes to spring the lock, but luckily the top deck stayed quiet and empty while he worked. When he finished, he pulled the body of the lock over, then lifted it out of position, and slowly, slowly, slowly inched one of the doors open, so that he could peer inside without any creaking or groaning from the metal.

Twenty pairs of human eyes, their pupils slowly contracting in the moonlight, stared back at John from within the darkness of the container.