posted 2023-01-01 13:46:42

the man affixes a harsh gaze on the pretty redhead trollop in the window who seemingly has most her teeth and parts in the right place. she shrinks back for a moment then touches her hand to the glass and mimes a gesture that indicates her competence in the realms of pleasure and the man feels a dark shiver come upon him. he shoves Seher away with a bellicose laughing roar and opens the door to the establishment.

I wa’n’t the red one, see. he’s got a thick accent. the whoremaster fingers the two-barreled pistol in his pocket. men who travel far are often getting away from something, he knows. all his girls are either expensive imports or leased from family at dear prices. the redhead’s just a runaway who grew an arse like a fever. the man slaps down three silver coins with the face of a dead warrior-king and says it again. the red one, pleaseya and love to meetcha. the whoremaster knows this man is likely at the least to beat the girl, but as he’s coming off the port direct, mayhap he’ll be done soon. the calculations of accumulated pleasure that drive the whoremaster put the keys in the door and escort the man in.

he takes a seat across from the redheaded girl. he chooses a name he’s used in Crog before, rubs it around his mouth, trying to taste if it’s been spoiled. he last used it aboard a ship long-sunk in black ice. I’m Giergio-Lugadaro Raspa, he says, carefully. some sea slut from the Southward won’t know a Cantacuzino name from the sound the floorboards made. you’re a right pret’ damsel you are. he moves his hands closer to her and she leans towards him. his hand closes like all the savageness in wild jungles that’s ever been done.

after the damage is done, he marches out and beats the whoremaster and takes back his coin and one of the older girls rushes him with a knife and he breaks both her hands and threatens to cut her tongue in half with his knife. she gives him the sullen look of a hale survivor and he respects that enough to not bleed her out then and there. the redhead may recover as well, though doubtful she’ll have memory left of this day, except buried deep past thoughts and spirit. the man who calls himself Georgio Raspa often thinks of himself as far beyond thought and spirit, merely action and essence. he goes through the whoremaster’s things and grabs a few trinkets and notes and makes his way back to the Salz past a nodding, guffawing Seher, his teeth stained brown with coffee. Raspa wishes Seher would choke on the abominable stuff sometime. he’d drown him in a vat of it, if not for the awful black stench of the stuff. I’m headed back to the Salz to sleep off the quim and carnage, he mutters to Seher, seeing as I can’t catch but a wink without water underneath me.

the scientists from the Daiud are filing back around him and he decides to bunk there that night, so’s worst that can happen is the whoremaster’s handlers and taxmen have to split their time between two ships to find him and give him time to move away. having an escape ready isn’t something Raspa does consciously but he does it constantly. a man of angels and doors and hatches, the cool geometry of finding his way through and out of justice’s nooses.

Othogo is there, though. like Raspa, he’s a man on the run. Othogo had been caught with his prick in something that wasn’t all the way human and didn’t set his fancy on having his manhood boiled off and getting sent into the desert colonies. Othogo ran. but Othogo was both valuable and a drunkard, so he fixed the ship’s instruments and told everyone he’d fucked the tar out of a corvidwoman, one of those horrendous beasts that looked like a melting crow coming out of a man’s torso. Raspa just never saw the appetite in something like that.