The Wondermark Gazette

“Do you fancy entertainers much?” I asked Lara as innocently as I could pretend. I wished to learn if she’d repeated the Carlton Rube riddle because she honestly thought it was funny, or if perhaps she thought I might have found it amusing. In the one case, she was a simpleton; in the other, a bad judge of character — the latter could be rectified, perhaps, with a fair measure of training, but the former was a tragic flaw even old Hippolychus the Tragic would find eminently scorn-able.

“Oh, I don’t go in for too much frivolity,” she tossed off. “Not like I’d ever traverse the garish halls of an amuse-o-cade, or pay good money to see a rubbish kinetograph, or read the wrapper of a Bazooka-Joseph. Mother raised me to see value in hard labour and to take joy from a job done strictly and well, and I just can’t fritter time away on idleness and vulgarity. Can you imagine? That there are people in this world who earn their keep without engaging the mind or the shoulders for a single day? I can’t reward such crassness, and I won’t have it in my life.”

A harsh strike against Lara, I cringed to admit. For idleness and vulgarity was veritably carved into my family crest, by me, wielding the sharpened bone of an orphan I had rent apart for a giggle. Still — “But that was a Carlton Rube line, wasn’t it? Have you seen him perform?”

“Oh, Rube!” She stifled a laugh — O double-faced harlot, cursing the trade with one breath, but gifting the worst offender of all with a chuckle! “I do like Carlton Rube. What a card, he is! And a friend of the family — why, we’re practically cousins. Our mothers were driven out of a nunnery together.”

From that moment on something changed in the thin space behind my one un-bandaged eye-ball: for Lara’s shadowed form loomed suddenly grotesque to me, her laugh a maniacal celebration of all that was banal in the world, and I felt nauseous for ever thinking of her another way.

What had I done? I had spent so much, suffered so much, in the service of this creature? A common-law cousin to the man who trampled on the integrity of every show-man in History? I felt my substantial cheese-twirler pride well up like vomit in my gullet — I even tapped my thigh to discover, amazingly, that Abu Fromage’s perfect cheese-wand still rested firmly and securely in my uniform’s scabbard — but, agonisingly, I could not act against her. Too weak to move, too reliant on her for the moment; and besides, there was one more thing I had to know:

“Were you there — at the Bon Mot gala?”

She glanced side-long, piercing my gaze in the dawning light with a four-inch nail of a stare. She seemed hesitant to speak, as if she didn’t know how much to reveal.

If I was wrong I could always blame any ensuing confusion on more of her mental problems. “Field-Admiral Richey’s last performance. Tapiorca’s…errand.”

“I thought Carlton was in top form, that night. I only wished I could have waited longer, to see more of the performance — but I had to catch the night-ship out. Besides” — here she sighed, not resignedly, but rapturously, as if the thought of Tapiorca watching over her every move was somehow pleasant — “I was only there in his service.”

“Tapiorca’s?”

“Of course.” Were her eyes narrowing? “As are you.”

“Of course.” The uniform of the Crown’s Regent hung heavily on my bones. “And a top-notch job you did, too — even sprayed his old wife with mind-matter. Really coated that whole seating-box. Crack shot, you.”

“I — I don’t really remember that part.”

“Well, it was the best bit of all.”

We entered Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats through the leeward gate and commenced a winding navigation of neighbourhood cause-ways. This part of town was cramped and shanty-heavy — it was where all the paupers piled on each other to live their pauperish lives doing pauperish things and make thousands of horrible pauper babies all the pauper time. My skin prickled at the potential for ambush or attack — this would be a smashing time for renegades to leap from the burned-out skeletons of the end-less miserable dwelling-spaces and do some smashing of their own on our noggins.

But we saw no-one, for hours.

A few times I heard skittering, but it was easily explained away as weevils or weevil-like monsters feasting on rotted everything. Far-off rumbling may have been Tapiorca’s cannons, or thunder. Or, the approach of air-ships; or, the rumbling farts of the Earth. It was impossible to tell, with my sense of smell deadened by ash.

“I thought there was supposed to be a war on,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Mmm? Nothing.”

“No, you said something. What was it?”

“I was just talking to myself.”

“Sounded like you were talking to me.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Well, what were you saying to yourself?”

Anger roiled within. I would never tell her. This woman was infuriating. The silence that followed was maddening, each of us too annoyed to speak with the other, and all of it her fault.

We arrived at the smouldering ruins of Pool-Party Plaza to find only a few dead Crown troops guarding the entrance. I saluted them jauntily as we crunched through the yawning gates. “Capital defences, lads,” I told them, and for a second I feared that they might actually still be alive — but no, that was elephant-waste in their faces, smeared chunkily and arrogantly by a confident hand; I’d know the pattern any-where. They were cold to the touch, and even the golden crowns had been pried from their teeth.

“Get your hand out of that man’s mouth and come along,” Lara hissed.

I clutched a fence-post to steady my balance, determined not to accept her offer of support; I wanted never to be in danger of touching her again, should her wretched taste in amusements somehow penetrate into my body. But then I realised I should at least put on a good show for the moment, so she’d be inclined to help me find the Tome. As her warm arm encircled me I figured the matter of her horribleness could be tabled just for the time being.

“What’s that?” She whipped around to look at a flash of movement, nearly sending me sprawling. A small shape had darted behind the carcass of an elephant, and I immediately began considering the various methods I knew of harpooning a child at this distance. I’d need a spear-gun, some sort of line, a bait-steak…I wondered how long it would take to saw a suitable piece from one of the guards behind us.

Lara began to coo, some sort of soft, motherly tone, and a little deformed boy came shuffling out into the open, looking like a regular human child that had been passed through a rope-twister and then given the clothes from a hundred-year-old buccaneer-corpse that had been found washed up on a reef covered in putrefying whale-guts.

I was amazed. I’d have to learn this bizarre urchin-call, so easy it seemed for her — the child came right toward her! But how would she kill it? I looked around to spot suitable rocks.

Danger — the ugly thing was leaking water from its face, bawling like an unwanted peacock. “Where are they,” it squealed. “Where is everyone?”

“Who are you looking for?” Lara said, treating the thing like some sort of sentient creature. It would be her last mistake, I feared. “Why are you here?”

A mangled claw-hand went into a soiled pocket. “It’s got a bomb!” I wheezed. “Suicide whelp!”

Foolishly, she extended a soot-stained hand — and the thing dropped a slim brass canister into it, a few inches long, plugged at one end. It looked like a rifle casing stuffed with wax, or brains, or offal, or any semi-viscous substance; in such small quantities they were really only distinguishable by taste.

One hand still supporting me, Lara examined the canister with the other, and despite internal protestations I was convinced to pluck the plug from the casing. As I flinched, she dumped the contents into my palm — but it was not, as I had feared, miniature scorpions; it was a curled wisp of paper.

Together we unfurled it, and to my dismay I found it covered entirely with writing. Useless! The squiggles taunted me with their incomprehensibility. But Lara had no such handicap. The blood drained from her face as she read.

She turned to me with eyes wide. “Do you think it’s genuine?” she gasped.

Ah. She clearly thought I could read. “Uh, eye problems,” I said. “Can’t focus on the…what are they? Letters.”

She turned away, searching all around the camp. “Help me gather wood,” she told the child-thing. To me: “I know where Tapiorca is.”

“Are-are we leaving?” I stammered. “There’s just this thing I want to look for while we’re here, if we could–”

“He could be walking into a trap,” she hissed. “There’s no time to lose!”

I opened my mouth to respond, but my breath caught in my throat, and suddenly my sense of balance tilted a full half-turn. My ankles gave way, and she was unable to stop me from collapsing onto the rocky ground in the manner to which I was becoming accustomed. From this height, the twisted child-thing was even more terrifying; its curious, deformed visage filled my vision, and it looked like mocking, ironic Death. So many of these things I had dispatched in my time, and now I had the bad fortune to find one that possessed psychic powers!

Or perhaps I was just, at long last, exhaustedly succumbing to Fate. I slumped to the side, and glimpsed a huge, growing puddle of blood surrounding my head. This seemed like a bit of a sour development.

Was that rumbling in my skull the furnaces of an attacking armada, the thunder of a hostile cavalry, or simply my o’er-taxed brain rotting through my ears to leak onto this accursed soil?

“You’re right,” I choked. “There’s — there’s no time at all.”

The last thing I saw was her running away, and I was too weak to even appreciate the view.

Next: A Discovery.

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