Damascus, Syria
The man who bought Go Yumi was a caravan master out of the continent of Europa. The winning bid came to a staggering 178 gold.
Damn it. Damn it!
I'd been taken for a complete fool. Fifteen gold, paid in a lump sum—and he'd turned around and fried nearly ten times that out of her. I'd known I was moving her wholesale and had already braced myself to swallow some of the loss. I'd figured he might beat me down to about a fifth. A slave who isn't put to work is nothing but a drain, true enough. Even Modric had wages to pay if his caravan was to run, and a mercenary company to hire besides, just to keep the road safe.
But the moment I was staring the reality of it in the face, the truth came clear all the same. If you want to make real money, you have to do it yourself.
They'd said a noble could found a trading house in his own right. So I founded one on the spot. I gave it the same name as my firm back on Earth: the Sahara Merchant Group. What did a name matter?
Registration was simple enough. Among the banners I'd brought was one bearing a gold-coin device, the mark of a merchant house. I took it out and wrote Sahara across it in Gaia's common script, and that was the whole of it. Other houses had to win approval from a kingdom, or from the mayor of a city. A noble had no such need. The title itself carried the same force as a registration.
In this world a peerage was recognized in common across most kingdoms. Should war break out, a noble might be taken and ransomed, or stripped of his title and sold. So if you ever hoped to collect full value later, you had no choice but to honor even an enemy realm's titles. A title was, in effect, a kind of credit instrument, current between nations.
I made the house banner without any fuss and went looking for the city's merchants' guild. I'd already picked up the rough procedure, watching Modric's people go through the motions over their shoulders when we first arrived. The guild clerk looked over my application and my noble seal, and his face twisted as if he'd just bitten into shit. A noble title was too thorny a thing to refuse outright, though, so he had no choice but to stamp the permit and allot me one small stall in a corner of the slave market.
I paid a few silver coins as the registration fee, took the stamped papers, and walked out of the office. Beyond that fee, the arrangement was simple: once I started selling, ten percent of the take would be bitten off as commission. I had no idea whether I'd actually manage to sell anything once I began. Still, there was nothing to lose in gaining the experience.
The stall was mine. Now it was time to go find something worth selling.
I left the fortress and climbed the hills nearby. Set as the place was in open grassland, the country around it lay wide and clear, which suited me fine. Put the other way, it also meant there was nothing out there to get in the way. I ranged the whole area while Aphago recorded the coordinates, and once I had enough of the surrounding ground fixed, I got back in the car and drove the road I'd come by.
The journey out had taken more than three days, but behind a wheel I could cover it in half a day. The place I reached was none other than Gate Number One. I hid the Humvee, stepped through the gate at once, and was back in Cairo.
In the city I bought a plane ticket. The destination was Damascus, capital of Syria—the oldest city in the Middle East, an ancient city where a man could take in mysterious ruins, and at the same time a city where the danger of terror and war never truly lifted. For me just now, though, it was also, looked at a certain way, a hunting ground overflowing with prey.
The distance was shorter than from Seoul to Jeju. By plane I was on the ground in Damascus in under an hour. The airport was all but empty. Fighting was still grinding on all across Syria, and the thing that had snarled the war into such a tangle was ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Fanatic madmen who waged terror against the world and committed every atrocity there was to commit. Which made them, to my eye, excellent stock for the block.
Turning that fearless notion over, I walked into Damascus like any tourist and rented a car. I took the keys and drove at once. Aphago compared the coordinates from Gaia and gave me a heading.
"You will want to go farther to the northwest."
Set beside Ballard Fortress, Damascus—home to 1.7 million—spread far wider. That worked in my favor. I followed the coordinates I'd fixed in Gaia, looking for a suitable match, and among them one caught my eye.
"This'll do."
A rundown motel on the outer edge of the city. On Gaia it lined up with the ground beneath the grassland hill outside Ballard Fortress. Unlike on Earth, mages in Gaia were known to travel by spatial shift now and then, so appearing suddenly out of empty air wouldn't raise much trouble. On this side, all I had to do was rent a room long-term.
I went to the motel at once. The owner of the shabby place stared at me in open wonder when I spoke Arabic, and when I told him I'd pay a full year's lodging up front, his mouth fell open with delight.
"Long as you like. No trouble at all."
Prices in Syria sat even lower than in Egypt. For five hundred dollars, paid in advance, I rented one out-of-the-way room for a year. The room was in poor shape, as expected. Still, it beat taking the dew on the grassland outside Ballard.
I secured the room, opened a dimensional gate, and checked the alignment. The room sat on the second floor, but the difference in elevation put it, on Gaia, about a meter above the grass. Not bad. At that height, even if I had to cross in a hurry and dropped, I wouldn't have to worry about getting hurt.
I left the room, asked the owner, and got directions to a lumberyard and a hardware shop. At a hardware store tucked into a corner of the old market I bought a heap of steel plate, iron pipe, and lumber. The delivery address was the empty lot behind the motel. The back of the place was hidden from view, so I could leave the goods there a while, shift them into a magic pouch, dig, and set a point. All the better.
There was time yet before the delivery arrived. Damascus was hardly a lesser place than Egypt. Thinking there might be men here worth the taking, I packed my bag and stepped outside.
The first place I found was a traditional market on the edge of the city. East Asians were a rare enough sight that the Syrians who saw me wandering the stalls fell to talking as if I were some curiosity.
"Crazy bastard. What's he think is out here?"
"Chinese? Japanese?"
"You ever see Japanese kids come this far without a care in the world? Probably Korean."
"Korean?"
"Yeah. Of the yellow races, they're the ones with the least fear."
While I walked the streets I used an eavesdropping spell to listen in on the merchants. Syria belonged to the Arabic-speaking world as well, so stealing their talk wasn't difficult, and even without that, Aphago's translation magic made it easier still. Against a bombing I wore armor vests layered one over another, and a survival bracelet besides, and a pistol rode at the small of my back. Still an Earthling, it seemed. One look at how much steadier a single pistol felt than all that armor, and there was no mistaking it.
I took my time seeing the market and worked my way steadily inward. A day passed that way, and on the second, someone finally took the bait.
"That bastard?"
"Yeah. The Asian. Wandering around alone like he's got nothing to fear."
"He'll do."
"Right? We get a ransom, good. If not, we just film a beheading."
"Where's he staying?"
"A motel over on the Meli side."
"We hit him there tonight?"
"Why drag it out? Better to finish it quiet, right here, don't you think?"
"True. Drag him into the alley up ahead and there won't be many eyes. We take him in front of it."
"Keep a good watch. I'll go up ahead."
There were men with their eyes on me. A beheading video, though. ISIS, then? If I was going to get hooked, at least it was by the vicious ones. Knowing I'd become the mark of a crime, I couldn't help the tension. At the same time a strange thrill climbed with it. This was the third time. It had been the same ever since I took those thugs in Egypt. Was this what the early stages of a dopamine addiction felt like?
I drew a long breath and quieted my hammering heart, then walked on, glancing around as if I hadn't heard a thing. That had to be the alley they'd meant. At the mouth of it, two men. One of them kept his head lowered and stole glances my way. Our eyes nearly met, and he turned away at once.
Hoo.
I steadied myself, and in the moment I passed him I felt someone coming up behind.
"Hello~ Hello~."
A man I'd never seen pressed in at my side, greeting me like an old acquaintance.
"What?"
"Chinese? Japan?"
I answered the one playing at friendliness as if I didn't follow.
"No, no. Korea. Korea."
"Oh! Korea~ My brother! Ko-rea~."
Brother, my ass.
The eyes of the man who'd been smiling turned murderous in a blink, and something hard jabbed into my side. I looked down. A pistol. I put on a show of being startled.
"What!"
He raised one finger to his lips and hissed a shh. Then a man burst from the alley, caught my shoulder, and yanked hard. The one with the gun shoved me in with his free hand as well.
And like that, I was successfully kidnapped.
Where they dragged me, my arms were bound behind my back and I was loaded into the rear seat. One man took the wheel. Two more sat to either side and shoved my head down against the floor. Trying to keep me from learning the road, were they?
But—
"We are moving northeast from the place you marked as a point. Distance, twenty-three kilometers."
Aphago kept logging our position the whole way. I wouldn't have any trouble finding the place later.
The door opened, and the room inside came into view. For an instant, what caught my eye was a pack of men grinning at me, ugly and hard. One, two, three... ten of them, easy, at a glance. Which meant money. Heh heh heh. I bit down on a laugh before it could get out.
"This the bastard?"
"An Asian? What country?"
"Korea."
"Oh~ Caught ourselves a rich one."
"Stick him in the warehouse for now."
"We'll film in a bit. Film it and send it to the embassy."
"That his bag? Hand it over. Let's see what's in it."
While they yanked the bag off my shoulder and rifled through it, a man with a knife in his hand came toward me. One of them approached wearing a greasy smirk and threw a punch out of nowhere. It slammed into my gut.
Thud!
"Guh!"
The armor swallowed the real force of it, but I played at being hurt and dropped to the floor.
"Look at that. Weak little shit. This is only the start, you monkey."
"Nazir, if you're gonna make noise, drag him to the warehouse and do it there. He pisses himself in here and we'll be the ones cleaning it up."
"Yeah, yeah. Ibega, grab this bastard and follow."
The man called Ibega seized a rough fistful of my hair and hauled me upright. I was dragged down a side corridor after the one with the knife. The whole way they hauled me along, my mind was busy with something else.
These men. If I want full price, I'll have to take them without leaving a mark. How am I supposed to do that...