The Wondermark Gazette

Green torch-light cast wobbling shadows onto the mountain-side in the distance, and far-off voices crept into our ears like wobble-bugs straining their six quivering knees for balance as they burrowed deeply and painfully into our collective ear-drums. I ducked back into the still-billowing cover of the air-ship’s deflating gas-sac, not especially wanting to encounter Yam-Runners who’d just used me as their unwitting instrument to annihilate the entire village below — but Rikah, apparently, had other, rather more stupid plans.

She leapt to her feet in a flash, moving with more confidence and surety than I’d seen since before she watched her family and everyone she loved get incinerated in a single brilliant instant. With a yank on my collar, her sudden strength pulled me heavily to my feet despite my vehement struggling. “What madness has you?!” I hissed, angling back towards the relative safety of the gas-sac. “They’ll see you!”

“Exactly,” she said, and turned to point at the green light-beam of Grenadon’s sigil, that thin, perfect finger still spearing the night-time clouds and shining a sharp triangle-shape onto passing air-ships. The cave where the beam originated was out of our view, somewhere around the other side of the mountain, but the light still sliced through the night. “The villagers will heed the call — any who escaped,” she added, silencing my impending rejoinder. “I’m sure there must be someone. They couldn’t have…have…well, not all of them, anyway,” she trailed off, unable to wrap her voice around the horror that we had both watched befall, indeed, all of them.

I struggled to pull her back towards the gas-sac, but she resisted, and I’m a bit ashamed to admit that her obstinate resolve bested my quite-exhausted straining. Realising how difficult this situation was for her, I put on my most sympathetic voice to reason with her. “There’s nobody left! They’re all melted to cinders — those are the Yam-Runners coming, and unless you want to join your boy-friend in Hell then let’s get out of the road!” Not for the first time, I mentally polished my Perfect Attendance trophy from the Kaiser’s correspondence-course in tactfulness.

She shook her head. “It’s the sign,” she said, calmly, clearly, a bit sing-songy, a bit creepily. “You don’t know what it’s like to live your entire life waiting for something to happen, being told that things will go a certain way, never really believing it — and then, in one terrifying, beautiful moment, watching it all come together in a way you never could have imagined.” She turned to me, and the breeze blowing slowly through her hair made her seem like she was floating under-water. “They told us Grenadon would die. And then his sign would lead his people into the womb of the earth for their salvation. It is how it has been written for centuries.”

“Grenadon lied to your people,” I snapped, trying hard to keep my voice below a shout. The green torches were bobbing closer, and I could hear foot-falls now on stone. “He told you he was a healer so you’d worship him. He was a Yam-Runner! Exiled from the mountain to live among the Shorelanders!”

“The Yam-Runners are a myth,” Rikah said calmly, as the Yam-Runners came around the bend and found us.

There were three of them, burly men I hadn’t seen before, but definitely Yam-Runners: their size and awful fashion sense gave them away instantly. “So glad you’re here,” I said to the first man, playing the we’re-all-pals card, which earned me a smash in the face with his torch. Instantly, the night disappeared, and I saw green, then red, then, slowly, black. And it wasn’t even Christmas.

A blinding stab of pain woke me. My face felt like a rail-way spike had been crammed through my cheek and stirred around in my humours. I reached a hand to touch my face — but couldn’t move. My hands were bound. I couldn’t see. I could only shiver in a cold, damp stillness.

“You’ve done us quite the favour,” came a voice from what sounded like the other side of an enclosed room — the words echoed about a bit, and swished about my face like honey-bees around a flower before alighting on my skin and stinging. “Thank you for delivering our letter.”

“Got the wrong guy,” I mumbled, though my teeth felt like they might tumble from my aching jaw any second. “I’m just a simple, ordinary rakish Azerbaijani cheese-twirler.”

“Don’t be so modest,” the voice chuckled. “You did well. Pity you couldn’t hand-deliver the letter, however, like we asked.”

“You wanted to blow me up too,” I snarled. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

The voice seemed to shrug, though I couldn’t see it. “It would have been nice. But so much for regrets.” I heard a clink as the figure picked up a piece of ceramic, or glass — one of the Yam-Runners’ mystical lenses, perhaps? “Grenadine. Dead on that sand-bar, I take it?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, for no good reason other than merely to be contrary. I’d killed the old man on that sand-bar, sure; but that didn’t mean I wanted to brag about it. Okay, I did, a little. But more than that, right now I wanted to be rude. “You butt-head,” I added.

“So much we could do with you,” the voice sighed. “Send you out in a row-boat to retrieve the old man’s skull — now that would be a prize, wouldn’t it? Pecked to the bone by sea-gulls by now, no doubt. And you’d do it, too. Take you a month, but you’d bring it back to me, I’m sure of it.” The voice moved closer as it spoke, until I felt hot breath on my face, foul and stale, like old biscuits gone soft. “Or you’d take a hammer to that jade-stone, in Grenadine’s cubby-cave. Wouldn’t that be fun — knocking the old man’s jewel to pieces, watching it fragment, watching all those flickering images trapped inside, learning everything about my brother Grenadine that you never wanted to know.”

The voice was so close now that I could hear teeth clicking against teeth. “You do present an embarrassment of opportunity,” it went on, when I couldn’t think of a retort fast enough.

“Let up my hands, and we’ll settle this,” I barked. “If you’re Grenadon’s brother, even half the age he was, I could take you in a fair fight. Or do you not care to fight fair?” I dimly seemed to recall Grenadon being a handy sort, hardy and strong, but this fellow sounded a bit more rickety of the lungs. I dare say a good sympathy-fist to that smug voice-box might ease the stabbing pain in my face.

“Oh, it’s not a matter of fighting,” the voice trilled. “Not a matter at all.” A sudden light burned my eyes as the shadowy figure lit a lantern, then carefully trimmed the wick. Light blinked and glimmered and refracted from dozens of tiny surfaces all around the room, until the whole chamber was softly twinkling with lamp-flame — revealing tubes of glass jutting from the walls in such density that I couldn’t even see if there were walls. Huge rods of glass, a foot in diameter or more, descended from the ceiling; smaller cylinders filled every cranny where the larger ones left gaps. It felt like being inside a salt-crystal, except I was alive.

In the faint light, I got my first glimpse at the figure who had been speaking. The man was a Yam-Runner, all right; his courduroy blazer told me that much. He looked old, but not as wizened as Grenadon; he had a full shock of hair, carefully braided in a terrible style. I couldn’t see his face; he was holding the light up to the walls, as if searching for something among the tubes. Light-jars, Ursula had called them. Containers of remnants from the past, telescopic images caught as if in amber within the dense glass.

He held his lamp up to one identical tube among many, then peered into it with squinted eye. “You’ll like this one,” he said softly. “This one sees all the way back to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats.” He clicked his tongue, a parent disapproving of a mischievous child. “Made a mess of that place, they have. Shame, really. Hope that fire doesn’t reach the Hospital.” I felt my heart seize in my chest. Lies? Horrible, manipulative lies? How would I ever know?

“Like I said before, you’ll do what I wish,” he went on, “because I have in my possession the Tome of the Precious Lore.”

My mind ground to a halt, not daring to compose a single thought until he said something else, or did something, or something. I could have stood there for an hour, in permanent stand-by — but luckily he turned to me soon there-after, holding a book in his hands. It was smaller than I might have expected, but clearly heavy, and musty-smelling even from across the room. It must be important. (Get it?)

“So what do you need me to do?” I asked. “Kill the Countess Peapoddy? Because I can do that — just bring her fat face down to me, and I’ll take care of that for you right away, no problem.”

He laughed, a cackle that sounded some-what like two cats wrestling in a bed of dry leaves. “Capital! That would be a sight. No, sadly my alliance with the Countess runs deeper than the affairs in which you currently wade. It’s much simpler than that — there’s a train that leaves here at dawn, and you can take that on to Dublin or London, and from there catch whatever transport you like back to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats, or wherever you like,” he said. “And really, you’re surprisingly close with your suggestion.”

With great strides he crossed the room, and shone his lantern into a far corner — where Rikah lay bound and unconscious upon the floor.

“All you have to do is kill her,” he said, “and the Tome is yours.”

NEXT: A Struggle

Share This