The Wondermark Gazette

The sinister face of the portly sergeant was the last image my eyes took in for some time. After collapsing on the shore, I dreamt fitfully of Lara, brandishing a silver Colt revolver, hanging lovingly on Tapiorca’s shoulder as he slew rebels by the score with cannon-shot stamped with the emblem of the Crown. After that I dreamt of swimming in an ice-cream lake which I had somehow won the deed to in a raffle; I remember most clearly negotiating with a herd of caramel-pooping moose to work out an arrangement for our mutual benefit. It was from that grand adventure in homesteadship that I awoke — to darkness.

How easy it was to slip back into that pleasant, ice-cream-filled slumber, where my only cares involved residual bodily stickiness and a chronic shortage of nuts! I dipped back and forth several times, until the moose-herd began to take on a decidedly sinister character, citing me for various zoning ordinances and declining to poop on my property unless I parted with a particularly precious tin of Papa’s prized Polish antler-polish. (Antler-wax, to be precise, but the ambrosaic allure of fine alliteration o’erpowers even a common stickler’s desire for accuracy.) But there was nothing to awake to — no light, no pain, no sense of place at all. Just an infinite, inky blackness. I briefly entertained the thought that, while in the roiling sea, I had been swallowed by a squid.

When the squid-option began seeming less and less likely, what with the lack of briny stench in evidence, I admitted to myself that I might be dead. My last encounter with the after-life, back on the Isle of Yam-Runners, had certainly been creepy enough — but I had seen Lara there, among the departed, when I knew now that she lived! What, then, to make of that old dream? Had it, in fact, been just a fevered product of an over-taxed mind? A simple hallucination brought on by the uninhibited consumption of barrel upon barrel of Shamrock Shakes?

Perhaps it had been Fate telling me to let go of Lara.

It had been for Lara’s sake that I had shoved the jade-knife into Rikah’s throat. And for what? A book of lies, written by a crazy man smelling of salt and radishes.

“Wake up.” A woman’s voice, guttural.

I opened my eyes, but no light flooded my vision. The lids felt heavy, as if pressed shut with mucilage. I moved my fingers — like swimming through maple-syrup, except lacking the sweet promise of pancakes — and sluggishly patted my face, only to find it wrapped whole-sale in cloth. A burial shroud? No, not smelly enough. Bandages.

Oh God! I’d been mummified!

“Your eyes were badly burned,” said the woman’s voice. “We did everything we could, but we only have so many leeches and tinctures of moon-shine on the island. Balms of harvested inmate-sweat have cooled the burns, but there was a shard of something in your right eye we were unable to remove. A green fleck — it may have been there before. We didn’t dare disturb it for fear of damaging the eye further. Please don’t sue us; we have no malpractice insurance.” A sigh. “I shouldn’t have told you that.”

A fleck of jade from that accursed knife! My eye was already making it part of its own flesh! I would never see my handsome face in a mirror again!

She went on: “We’ve tried to send word back to Major-Leftenant Tapiorca” — at this, I clenched everything — “but it seems the telegraph is down, and there’s too much fog for lantern-signals. Plus, we have never established a system of lantern-signals.” I relaxed — the less Tapiorca knew, the better, that snake. He’d have the whole garrison after me if he knew I was free of the irons. I wondered — as ranking officer on the island, could I turn this situation to my advantage?

“I order the garrison to arrest Major-Leftenant Tapiorca for multiple high crimes!” I commanded, though the words actually manifested at a volume somewhere between a whisper and a silent fart.

“He’s delirious,” said another voice — and I suddenly realised there were two women in the room. This one had awoken me harshly, and the other had soothed me with talk of leeches and broken telegraphs.

The latter voice continued: “No doubt — he’s been given enough morphine to numb all of Parliament riding on wolverines. Our supply will surely be cut off; they’ll think we have another huffer on staff.”

“I’ll minister to His Excellency; you should tend to the other wounded,” the first voice cut in, presumably addressing the second person, or who knows, maybe some third or fourth person. Maybe there was a dog in the corner. Maybe I was in a surgery-theatre being watched by hundreds — I really had no way of knowing. I felt suddenly self-conscious.

Maybe I was alone. That thought was creepy.

The second voice laughed, and a burst of hot, stanky breath rolled past my face. If I was alone, someone was going to a lot of trouble to convince me I wasn’t. “The wounded prisoner is in the prisoner infirmary,” the woman said. “There’s not much that can be done for him.”

“I don’t understand — wasn’t he weak and starved almost beyond reckoning?”

“Yes, but… Let me put it this way. The difference between a prison-cell — stone, iron-barred, with a chambre-thimble in one corner and abject misery in all others — and the prisoner infirmary is that the prisoner infimary has a wounded in it.” The voice took on a sneering edge. “Better quarter than the blighters’d give our men.”

“All the same — I’m sure you can find something to busy yourself with.” A definite insistence. The second woman got the hint — the air-quality noticeably improved as she left the room.

My skin prickled as I felt the heat of a body in proximity. The voice of the remaining woman dropped an affectation I hadn’t even realised it’d assumed, and my blood froze in my numbed-out veins. “Now then. It seems that we’ve been left alone.” Ursula.

“You’ve gotten your way, haven’t you?” I asked as she manoeuvred me slowly across the infirmary cot. I felt her handling my body from far-away, as if my arms and legs were attached by cords the length of curtain-rods, and I could sense only the echoes of their motion. “You’ve manipulated me from the beginning. From the moment I met you ’til this, I’ve just been a puppet for you!” She set my legs onto something metallic, and hoisted my body through the air. “Is the Countess on her way? Is Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats mere minutes from annihilation? I don’t care! You can’t get credit for manipulating me when I would have done the same thing any-way!”

The squeak of metal wheels and a sense of momentum told me that Ursula had seated me in an invalid-chair. I managed to get my hands on the wheels and turn it sharply into a wall. “Ha ha!” I cried. “Can’t manipulate me now!” I spun the wheels backwards, ramming her legs. “I’m in control now, harlot!”

“Keep it down,” she hissed. “You want to get out of here, or you want to whole place to come down on our heads?”

“What does it matter? It’s all coming down any-how, isn’t it? Peapoddy’s air-ships are on their way, thanks to you, right? On my authority — first day on the job and it all goes up. Well, good riddance! I hope when she lets that lightning loose that the whole city alights like it’s made of green-powder — and it takes you and her with it!”

Then, impossibly, something clicked. The air-ship’s green flame — and the powder beneath Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats — the same powder on my boots that had blown a hole in Lara’s ferry…!

“That’s what she’s after, innit? Blast-powder! The city’s lousy with it below-ground. And she wants to mine it for her armada, to power her weapons!” I had no I idea where I was going with this, but it seemed to be needling Ursula, so I kept it up. “She played you Yam-Runners like chumps all along. You bring her in, and she gets to wipe the site clean and harvest all that green gold, making herself more and more powerful. You’d better watch out — Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats is the master lode. She’ll be the most powerful force in the world with a million tonnes of powder at her disposal. And she sure won’t need your help then!”

“Shut up!” Ursula was really bothered now. “Peapoddy works for the Yam-Runners! Not the other way around. If you even knew–” She stopped herself. “Never mind. You’re right — you’ve played a part in all this. But it’s not like you haven’t reaped the benefits as well!”

Blind, incapacitated, I laughed bitterly. “Benefits. You’re right! Look at me — more benefits, please!”

She sounded like she wanted to say more — and then she did. “Listen,” she whispered. “You need to listen to me know. Right now the only thing that matters is getting back to –”

“Your Excellency!” A man’s voice rang out down the hall-way. Rapid foot-steps heralded the approach of Someone Important. “So good to see you up and about!”

I spun my bandaged head toward the sound. “Here I am!” I shouted. Ursula, behind me, clapped a stern hand on my shoulder — forcefully enough that I knew I was working counter to whatever plan she’d laid for the both of us. Fine.

“If Your Excellency feels up to it — we have a briefing set up regarding the attack on the ferry,” the man said. “We’re still trying to establish contact with Major-Leftenant Tapiorca on the main-land, but in the interim, if you’d care to…?”

“Of course!” I swelled my chest with military fervor. “I can’t wait to get some real strategic tactics going on. To the war room!” I directed over my shoulder, and when nobody moved, I added, “Do you have a war room?”

“Er,” the man replied, “we do have a room.”

“To the room!” I cried, and I could feel the anger mount and fester in Ursula’s steely grip. Good.

Next: The Briefing

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