What do they find to buy that’s more important than honor, though? Why do I even sully myself by contacting them?
It needs to be done, and its more pain I gladly bear.
As the Mandatorians’ skill comes so cheaply, as they have no honor, I can buy them and use them.
So this is a tapcaf. This is where I pretend to be an infidel and speak reasonably to abominations. I can look like them, and I can talk like them; but I must never become like them, and I’ve been hiding among them for so many years now that I fear I might. As a precaution I entreat Yun-Harla, just in case she docs exist, to guide me so that my life of deception doesn’t finally deceive me.
Under the table, where no infidel can see, I pass my knife through my palm and use the pain both as worship and focus. I hare just one more year to endure before the fleet arrives.
I have no faith in the Great Ones, but I might be wrong: and I’m a pragmatist, so I keep my options open.
So I shall order … an ale. And I shall sit, and wait.
Bar Jaraniz. Nar Shaddaa: Buy-One-Get-One-Free Night, fifth month. 24 A.B.V.
The sign above the blaster-charred door frame said char the jars’ never closed, and despite any number or gong wars, shoot-outs, and minor armed disagreements between business partners, it hadn’t yet.
Goran Bcvnn walked through the open doors of the Jara*-welded open, for a reason known only to the owner-and paused to scan the unusually crowded bar.
“Over there.” The bartender, preoccupied with building an elaborate cocktail, jerked his head in the direction of the badly-lit booths in the far corner. His hands were full of fruit segments, skewers, and a sky-blue spiral bottle of two-hundred-proof vosh with those nasty little lumps of geref bobbing in it. “The handsome one in the black suit. Lookin’ for Mando help.”
Beviin turned his head discreetly for an old-fashioned visual check by eyeball. Shah, the man was ugly. Seriously ugly: a face like a speeder smash and half as tidy. Beviin considered offering him a spare helmet for the good of the other customers. But they were as carefully preoccupied as the bartender, studying the foam blanketing their ale or the solid chunks in their glasses of vosh subliming into vapor. It was the kind of bar where patrons tried very hard not to stare at one another. That normally got you vibrobladed. The management was proud of the bar’s strict etiquette on that Beviin held out his gloved hand for a bottle of ale, planning to drink it later. He wouldn’t take his helmet off here. “We don’t do beauty therapy.” The bartender passed him two, and he slipped both into the pouch hanging from his belt. “Seen him before?”
“No.”
“Not a face you’d forget.” There was a loud whoop of female voices and laughter from the far side of the bar, and Beviin noted a human woman and a young girl in full true-style beskar’gam-Mandalorian armor-huddled over a table as if sharing a joke. There were a lot of empty glasses on the table next to their blasters. “Ladies’ night again, I see.”
“Look, 1 don’t want any trouble.”
“Not planning any.”
“I meant them.” The bartender put the finishing touches to the cocktail. “Your womenfolk can get well out of hand.”
Beviin didn’t recognize them. They seemed to be having a good time, and they certainly didn’t seem worried about being the only females in the bar who weren’t actually working. There were small Mandalorian communities in this sector, but the Jara’ was one of the places mercenaries and bounty hunters touted for work, so the women could have been from anywhere. Their armor-dark red, with the same saber sigil picked out in black on the breastplate-marked them as one clan, and they looked like mother and daughter; Their helmets were stacked on the floor.
“There’s only one thing that scares a Mando man,” said Beviin, “and that’s a Mando woman. Just make sure you don’t forget their napkins.”
They were still howling with laughter as he made his way across the bar to the booths. He heard the word Verd’goten. So the girl had finally completed her training as a warrior: she’d turned thirteen, then, a grown woman by Mando reckoning, trained to fight just the same as a boy. They were celebrating her coming of age. He should have put an ale on the table at the very least, or joined in the oya manda, hut he had business to take care of first. Maybe later. The girl-and she looked such a young kid, she really did, even with that unidentifiable dried scalp hanging from one shoulder plate-made him think it was high time he had a son.
Maybe later.
The man in the black suit watched Beviin’s approach, unblinking: the crowd parted to let him through without a word or a glance. Even the gangster clientele here wouldn’t risk offending a Mandalorian, Beviin slid into the booth across the table from his prospective client, lilting his holster clear of the scat. He caught a faint metallic whiff of blood in his environment sensor. There must have been a brawl in the bar earlier.