“I think they’re spies sent by the Trader,” Hawk said quietly, leaning against a marble pillar. His shirt was unbuttoned to the waist, the entire tattoo of the scorpion visible on his broad chest. “Best to chill them. Gather ten, no make that twenty of our best men. We’ll make this a night creep and garrote the bunch in their sleep.”
Soaping his arms, Gaza gazed at his sec chief with saturnine calm. “The women, too?”
“Women we got,” the sec man snorted angrily.
At the far end of the pool, the women of the baron’s harem were slowly washing themselves, the sudsy water carried away into another predark pipeline. Where the dirty water went the baron had no idea, but it was no place local so it wasn’t a challenge to his control over the ville. Once, the wife of a blacksmith had given birth to a tiny baby, and when the boy was ten Gaza equipped the child with several bottles of air and flushed him down the pipeline with orders to return and his family would live comfortably for the rest of their lives. A lie, but the boy eagerly accepted the challenge and dived into the feeder pipe. He was never heard from again.
The women stayed in this wing of the keep, their tongues removed to stop any of them from talking just in case one of them escaped somehow. Whenever one of them got too old, Gaza would brutally kill her in front of the others saying she had tried to escape, and then he would beat the rest as punishment for allowing her to try. Escape attempts were few and far between.
It was something his father had taught him, keep the slaves suspicious of one another and they become the guards. His father had been a very wise man, the founder of Rockpoint ville. Wise and hard. Edgar had been the youngest son of the baron, and one day had been pitted against his older brothers in the Arena. Armed with knives and spiked clubs, the boys were commanded to fight, the winner to be the heir to the ville. Edgar had offered to team with a sibling and share the ville, and when the fool accepted and turned his back, Edgar beat him to death and stole his knife. Now armed with two weapons, he savagely fought the others and won. But the eldest brother had gotten in a few good strikes before dying, and Edgar’s badly broken leg had never healed correctly. He still limped to this day, the old break aching badly when the acid rains came in the fall.
“Well?” Hawk demanded impatiently. “What should we do, Baron?”
Washing lazily, Gaza looked at the desert giant. His loyalty was unquestionable, which was why the baron allowed the mutie to challenge his orders. Only a fool listened to bootlickers. Hawk had been found in the desert crawling with scorpions, stung a hundred times. Incredibly, the man lived and was proved immune to the deadly poison of the tiny killers. A useful skill that became their safeguard on the Scorpion God.
The sec men sometimes referred to him as the Big Scorpion, which amused Gaza greatly. The more the troops feared Hawk, the more authority the baron had over them. It was all a matter of control. Which was why he created the water shortage. If he opened the pipes, the entire valley would be flooded. But a simple twist of the valve and the water slowed to the merest trickle. Now visitors paid for the precious liquid with ammo and horses, food, and sometimes their very lives. His troops had the pick of the sluts, and his people believed that he was their savior and only chance of life.
“We shall ace them, of course,” Baron Gaza said, slipping under the water for a moment, then rising to push back his wet hair. The women waded closer to their “husband,” wrapping him in dry towels as he walked from the pool.
“How is the matter in question,” Gaza said, taking a clean robe from a marble bench and belting a robe about his waist. “They have rapidfires and a predark ammo. And the black hair man, Ryan, has the look of a real fighter. I think it might be best to let them stay for a day or two, sell them water and then track them when they leave. Ace them far from the ville and bring the blasters and wag back for our private arsenal.”