Erivan Monterro ran the largest crime ring in Castia. He inherited the operation from his father, and he ran it better than his father or his father's father ever had. Or at least, he said he did. He also said he was getting old, fifty-five, that year and starting to consider retirement.The business would go to his daughter. The only child he had. And better still, she wanted it. He was worried, though, because it would be hard for her to get respect from his men. Not because she was a woman, there were lots of women among those men, but because she was overeducated, half-Iskan, and a frequent topic of upper class Miskan gossip.
In a few weeks, she was set to marry a man named Khaled, who Monterro called an up and comer. Over the past six years, Khaled has risen through the ranks from pit fighter to hired street muscle to a numbers man who could collect on his own debts. But, the rumor was, in those years, he’d lost his edge. He hadn’t fought in The Al-Trosk in two whole years and his last match had been embarrassing. He’d lost two teeth to a Lustofian sailor in leather pants and spent the next two months walking the city sucking kefir through a straw while he waited for the new teeth to grow in. It was a bad look then it and it was still a bad look.
The daughter, her name Genniver maybe, but he was unsure of the spelling, couldn’t marry a man who was nothing more than a number runner with glass in his mouth. Erivan Monterro couldn’t call a man who lost a fight to a Lustofian son. It was all very, very embarrassing. But the girl loved Khaled and Monterro didn’t actually mind him, and so he explained, that Third morning, that he didn’t want to have to shut the whole relationship down, but if something didn’t happen soon, he’d have to. And then, he’d lost not just a valuable employee, but an heir, and maybe even a daughter.
Erivan Monterro sat in a leather armchair built for a race of long-dead Iskan giants, and Dunne Volkov scratched at his forearm and felt the phantom pressure of Monterro's claw grip on his balls and his jugular. He should have taken the anemore back when Maathen offered it. He could have died then and there on a decent mattress in that room of a cell. That wretched fucking gargoyle Sherith would have found his body, done whatever it was he wanted to with it, and finally handed it off to a corpseman who would burn it into ash, sell it off in bulk with a dozen other corpse’s worth to Monterro himself who’d fence it to an alchemist who’d use it to make some kind of illegal shampoo for rich young pretty people to make their hair just a little bit shinier. He thought he might have rather been a reflection of light in an escort’s hair than himself, in that regular-sized chair, listening to Erivan Monterro or doing what he was about to be asked to do.
But he would do it, because in the end, he hadn’t taken the anemore, no matter how nice it sounded, and instead, he was alive and alive, there was nothing else to do but solve Erivan Monterro’s problems in exchange for jin. Every few days he would consider the alternatives. The way he saw it, there were three: suicide, sailing, or taking a hacksaw to his legs and begging for coins outside the train station. And because he liked his legs and boats made him seasick, there were really only ever two options, and the jin and the things it bought always slightly outweighed the mild inconvenience of death.
"I can't get him a win in three days..."
Dunne Volkov spoke when Monterro's words started smashing up against his intentions.
"Not clean enough for anyone to buy it, anyway."
"'s what I figured."
Erivan Monterro shrugged and took a sip of tea that was mostly sugar and white frovic. It was the color and texture of gutter slush three days after a snow storm.
"No...I was thinking something else...I know he ain't gonna win. He's fine on the streets, sure, because the only time he's up against anyone on the street they're payers or they're green or they're both and the kid ain't crippled, he can take them fine, but...he's a long way from an Al-Gan right now, you get me? No...I was thinking you could talk Sindal into throwing it.
Monterro took another sip and Dunne smirked and coughed out a laugh.
"Everyone knows she's top three for the year. Even with one L, she won't drop out. She'd have to take two or three to even be up for missing the tourney. So she's in a good spot to take it. ANd it's a win-win. Khaled gets to look like he can still go with the best of 'em, and she gets to throw off her odds in the tourney just a bit."
"Gonna cost more than that."
Dunne smiled because he no longer really cared about any of it. If all Monterro wanted was a line to Gowri, he could be that, and when she turned him down, maybe he’d have to teach Khaled Anders to spit poison, but that was easy money.
"She got a brother she takes care of, don't she?"
Monterro asked. Dunne nodded.
"Alright, then, I'll pay her to throw it. He beats her, she can call it a fluke, and she gets some jin out of it for her boy. You thinks he'd do it, then?"
He leaned forward and peeled his left arm from the leather of the chair.
"I think it'd work. How much you think she'd want?"
"I don't know."
Dunne shrugged and let his eye wander the scaled model of a long-obliterated Iskan city that occupied the coffee table between them. He wondered how anyone could be so interested in the aesthetics of a long dead city.
"Ten? Twenty?"
"Ten? Twenty?"
Monterro shook his head.
"I’m not paying a street rat forty fucking strings just to throw one fight...you talk to her, you’re her Al-Gar, ain’t you? See if you can get her to do it for around five or eight, maybe. Ten’s the top limit. And if she wants more than ten, you tell her I’ll ban her from every fucking arena in this city instead. Let me know by tomorrow, alright? Here—"
The man stood up, adjusting the fabric of his pants, cobalt blue and rustling when he waddled across the room to unlock a safe in the back wall and counted out five two thousand jin stacks.
"You take this. Give her half if she agrees and half when she's done it. Don't give it up front. Kids like that--you can't trust 'em with anything up front, you understand? Even if they don't seem like they will, they'll run."