The Wondermark Gazette

Our story thus far: Aboard a hovering dirigible, and mistaken (at my own unspoken urging) for the ancient healer Grenadon, I now face the ailing wretch Peapoddy, my true identity’s deepest foe.

I was alone with him now.

I had shut myself in. Mr K____’s lantern no longer penetrated the state-room darkness. Only the eerie, bluish glow of Peapoddy’s algae-dusted skin lit the chamber at all. The massive, heaving mound before me seemed to have no edges, the thick blankets covering the man fading seamlessly into the black corners of the room. This was not the Peapoddy I remembered — this was a monster-man, the Peapoddy I feared in my deepest absinthian night-mares crossed with some gross perversion of a glowing hippopotamus or something.

Fishy gasping from that revolting heap of wet meat surrounded me as I looked about for a lantern. “Is there no light in here?” I muttered.

“No light,” came a voice from the direction of the sweaty blankets. “No lanterns. Keep it dark.”

Of course — the algae-dust would shine brightest in utter darkness, and the brighter it shone, the more of its opiate it would leech into Peapoddy’s sickly skin. The Aboriginal powder was narcotic. It had surely killed the nerves in his skin, by now — and had probably, over the years that he’d been applying it as a fey cosmetic, leeched deeply into his brain. The cause of the man’s madness? Or simply — a convenient excuse for it?

If the croquet-mallet I’d requested ever materialised, I would have to make my blows deep and hard for this creature to even feel the pain.

“No light, then,” I told Peapoddy, making sure to harden my tone and be-gravel my voice, the better to make good the illusion that I was indeed the old Grenadon. “So are you going to tell me what’s wrong with you? Or do I have to guess?”

Peapoddy cocked his massive, fleshy mound of a head, squinting at the darkness. “My father used to speak of you,” he burbled. “He called you the most horrible, mean-spirited brute ever to walk the sands of the Continent. He would rock me to sleep with tales of your sadism and cruelty. Your caprice, saving some while leaving others to wither and die, though you had the power in your hands to heal them all.”

The algae cast my shadow on the wall across from the beastly figure, as I wondered how much of what he said was truth, and how much was the fabrication of his bitter, dead father, Grenadon’s ancient enemy.

“Do you remember my mother?” Peapoddy said. “Do you remember that red-tressed girl, coming to you with belly swollen with child, choking through her tears that she would be put out of her village, disowned by anyone that could detect her condition, and that it would really hurt to give birth, since she was only four-foot-seven? She came to you on this very island, old man — and you turned her away. You could have killed me that day, Grenadon, and saved me and my family these past decades of heartache — but you didn’t. You have made your opinion on the matter of my life clear, and all I ask today is that your position stay consistent. Allow me to keep the life you cursed me with.”

Peapoddy’s perfect logic suddenly made me feel like I’d stood up too fast. I was suddenly terribly, nauseously hungry; the last thing I’d eaten was stolen mangoes from the swap-mall back in the village, and that was hours ago, plus they’d been gross and wormy. It looked like Peapoddy had eaten plenty, since I’d seen him last — in fact, a half-eaten chicken-carcass still rested on his massive chest, within easy gnawing distance of his face. I delicately plucked the fowl from its perch and began to chew on its gristle, figuring that with my mouth full, perhaps Peapoddy would continue speaking — and shrill as his voice was to my revenge-starved ears, I would like to learn what had become of him in the months since he had held a boulder over my head and threatened to dash my brains into the black dust of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats.

“I thought,” the beast gasped, sucking the air from the room and leaving me breathing a stale, coal-fired fug that settled dully over the both of us, “that if I found the Tome of the Cowering Sigil, I could become the healer you never were: fair, accepting, egalitarian. Taking all who came to me without prejudice, and sending them away cured of their ailments.” He sighed, and again a dusty, coalish aroma swirled around my chicken. “But I lost the Tome to a simpering fool, and we both know what became of the Tome of the Precious Lore. I am left with very few options.”

I had nearly interrupted Peapoddy several times — firstly to speak up on Grenadon’s behalf, indignant that Peapoddy apparently thought that a happy-go-lucky, everybody-gets-healed ethos wouldn’t immediately degrade into slavering, grabby chaos (the likes of which had nearly torn me asunder back in the yam-runners’ village); secondly, to protest the description of my true self as a ’simpering fool,’ and to suggest that perhaps Peapoddy hadn’t, you know, gotten to know me properly — but I finally did interject, at this last mention of the Tome of the Precious Lore, the very item I had been searching for these last months.

“Yes,” I murmured, “we both know what became of the Tome.” I paused to suck on a chicken-bone, in what I hoped was a dramatic fashion. “But, er — remind me, exactly?”

Peapoddy looked at me directly for the first time, now, his yellow eyes like hollow divots in the glowing brightness of his blue skin, barely visible beneath scarred rolls of burned and calloused flesh. “My father told me you were cruel,” he wheezed, “but I came here vainly hoping you would take compassion on a dying man. Whatever grudge you may have against my father, let it lie fallow today. I have never met you, never done ill to your ilk.”

I bit my tongue on this last point.

“On his death-bed, my father pled with me to set fire to your Isle of Yam-Runners,” Peapoddy said. “He spent the last dregs of his fortune equipping this dirigible with enough Chinese blast-powder to sink the entire island beneath the sea, its inhabitants with it.”

My blood ran cold as I realised what he was threatening.

“You will heal me,” he said, “or I will surely die. And when I die…”

He drew back the blankets covering his body, and black smoke billowed into the room.

I coughed, waving my hands — and when my eyes cleared from the sudden blast of ash, I saw that Peapoddy was part of the dirigible.

A great, hissing piston worked his lungs. A series of thick brass pipes snaked from his chest and down beneath the floor-boards into the deep, thrumming guts of the air-ship. His legs were encased by twin, wrought-iron chimneys, pumping burning life into his veins from the vessel’s furnace. He also seemed to have some sort of clock-work catheter, but I didn’t investigate too closely, despite a certain curiosity…perhaps I could learn more in the course of my upcoming ‘healing.’

He spoke, cutting off my musing, and his words smelt of charcoal and malice. The acrid tang of spite lingered deep in my throat no matter how much I swallowed. It was like a particularly bad night as a Kipper initiate.

“…When I die,” Peapoddy said, “all of your descendants and family — and the thousands of sickly pilgrims that have come seeking your council and touch — will die with me.”

He rubbed a thick finger along the wall, then ground his thumb into his finger-tip. Black dust crumbled from his hand.

Blast-powder.

The entire air-ship was a single, massive explosive. I felt a bead of sweat roll down my spine into my trousers, and the chicken-bone fell from my mouth to clatter on the floor.

A knock at the state-room door startled me, and I blinked at the sudden, yellow light from the hall-way. It was Mr K___.

“I found you a croquet-mallet,” he said, peering into the dark room and handing me the wooden instrument. It felt small and light in my hands, and not quite up to the task before it.

But I had to try.

“Thank you,” I told Mr K____, and shut the door again.

I turned back to Peapoddy. I tried to remember Lara, and her pain at the hands of this monster I barely recognised.

I tried not to imagine the thousands upon thousands of decisions that Grenadon the Healer had made over his life, choosing who to heal, and who to let die. I tried to remember the exhilaration I had felt at up-ending Grenadon’s salt-barrel, knowing it would drive the annoying old man into the earth at speeds approaching a musket-ball.

I tried to work myself into the appropriate mood.

“Let the healing begin,” I said, and with a mighty heave, I sunk the mallet into Peapoddy’s skull.

NEXT: The Trail of the Tome

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