The Wondermark Gazette

Richey was meat, a hole in his brain-case the size of an under-ripe apple, victim of a burst-ball to the back-hook of his neck-head. This was bad news for me.

Oh, I didn’t care for the man personally, nor for his politics, least of all for his self-important grand-standing at every blasted Dog Show and Farmers’ Pretty-Pony Exhibition; the man took every opportunity to sell himself to on-lookers as the greatest military mind since Cromwell, to what end I wasn’t entirely sure — he had a post over-looking an entire city as a Crown’s Regent, and could scarcely take on further responsibilities, what with the trouble that had brewed under his watch.

Always thinking of the next great post and looking for something better, I suppose he was; now he was looking at the carpet, his eyes mashed into that red-soaked pile with heaps of squishy cognition-burger in great smears and mounds to every side, and I daresay he wasn’t thinking about much at all.

The Field-Admiral was in London to attend the Bon Mot gala, but he was actually stationed in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats, the city from whence I had fled months of adventure ago. Each after-noon, as Ursula and myself took in the city air for our constitutional (pulled along in the chariot by Thigton, of course), we heard rumours and fragmented reports from that city under siege. The reports were bad enough, but the rumours were down-right salacious — for who would have guessed that the long-suffering Mayor of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats was actually a chimera, and that his homely grand-son would be our next pope?

After a while, such rumours began to contradict one another — the boy-who-would-be-pope could surely not simultaneously be the father of the half-buffalo, half-human infant discovered in a school-teacher’s chalk-cupboard — but I had been able to piece together a thin grain of truth from in between the sensationalism.

It seemed that the day I’d fled aboard Cap’n Narwhal’s Dublin-bound steamer was the day that the oppressed classes arose to take the city by force. And while I had been off on my gallavanting escapades hunting for the Tome of the Precious Lore, mean-while rampaging mobs had laid the city half-way to ruin, three-quarters of the way to chaos, and a full fifth of the way to Apocalypse. The Crown’s military brigades sent to restore order seemed, by the accounts that reached our bourgeois ears at least, to be the only tenuous thread lashing the city to anything resembling not-anarchy.

But now Richey, who had been the one fiercely grasping that tenuous thread betwitxt knotted thumb and fore-finger, was stiff and stinking. The perpetrator was unknown, but I knew what the response would be from whichever starched-shirt crony the Crown would appoint as Richey’s successor: pull out the troops, seal the borders, and bomb the city into flat, steaming, barbecue-smelling rubble.

I had seen it happen before.

Ursula came up behind me, stopping short when she saw the splash of crimson on the wall, not even wasting a glance for the man himself. “Oh,” she said, cooing sadly as she was expected to, but I knew how she really felt. I briefly wondered if she or her Yam-Runners had ordered the murder themselves — but no, she would have told me of that. Wouldn’t she have? She kept many secrets from me, and the few I had un-covered had been kind of gross (mucous-heavy genetic conditions, and the like), so I didn’t really pry much anymore.

But she did tell me much, about matters such as these — machinations, plots, conspiracies plotted and executed. She thought I was on her side. Hers, and that vile Peapoddy clan — I still treasured the memory of the day when Peapoddy himself fell from the sky in great, burning gobs of fat and flesh. No matter how weak-willed this London life-style made me, I would never regret killing him, for I would never forgive him for the violence he did to my first and dearest love, Lara.

Poor, comatose Lara, of the Police Bureau back in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats, of the chalk-white skin and the kind, dancing eyes, was surely dead by now. Between the terror in the city, and her serious injury, and the fact that I had not returned to her with the “mystical healing power” of the wretched Tome of the Precious Lore — there was no way she could still be alive.

Besides, there had been that maddening dream.

On the Isle of Yam-Runners, I had been visited by the spectres of the many souls I had committed to the Hereafter. My uncle, whose manor in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats I had gleefully resided in for several years after burying a hatchet in his skull, was there; so too was Peapoddy, a murder I will gladly take credit for no matter who shall ask; and so too, among that cadre, most disturbingly of all, was Lara.

A dream, and nothing more, to be sure… but I then helped Peapoddy’s mother, the equally-vile Countess, rain green, sulphuric death onto a village of thousands of sickly supplicants, and the acrid taste of that flesh-smoke had not yet washed itself from my sinuses. The bitter tang of mass-death welled up periodically in my throat on windy days, and I think I can almost smell the awfulness — invariably it turns out to be a bratwurst-seller or something, but still, it’s plenty disturbing, and sometimes, in the small of the night, with every house on Sixpenny Row deeply asleep, I consider almost weeping.

Whatever — Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats was a hell-hole, and the smouldering ashes of Uncle’s old manor had already been razed and looted by scoundrels, I was sure. With Lara dead, there was no reason for me to ever return to that place. Right?

I was bad at convincing even myself.

A stabbingly-cold night greeted us outside the theatre. Thigton was waiting patiently with the chariot, while Ursula helped me down the front steps. “Good show in there,” she whispered into my ear. “Convincing performance, a nice touch with Amoson and that. I could have done without the tumble through the foyer, but all in all, you looked noble.” Her wide hand on my elbow nestled closer into my side. “Commanding, even.”

Her grip on my arm was firm, leading. Was I really so unsteady? “A shame he’s dead,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. Ursula had some strange allegiances, and she tended to assume my own matched hers, not always correctly.

She shrugged as Thigton took her hand and helped her into the rick-shaw. “Paving the way,” she said. “I expect to send the Countess the order before the week is out.” She turned to me. “Well, come on, then, it’s cold as a Komodo’s hoohoo out here.”

Indeed. My feet felt frozen to the cobble-stones. The Countess Peapoddy, my late enemy’s lugubrious mother, commanded a fearsome armada of air-ships armed with the most horrible, city-leveling weapons known to modern man-kind — and she worked for cash on the barrel-head. In the past, in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats and before, I’d kept my distance from authorities, royalists, and those with sabers clattering at their medal-bedecked breasts; my kind were the affluent class, whose money bought freedom from such authority.

But in three months of entertaining London’s insufferable elite, I’d learned that they often spent their money equally freely, but much more deviously than my type — the same thrill afforded me by commissioning a marble statue of Zeus mounting a pelican, say, would be afforded a Duke or a Count by hiring a gang of cut-throats to do mayhem to foreigners. These were people I could relate to, but only at a distance, from the far side of some type of jewelled sword, because they were dangerous, and usually unstable. Worst of all, they always thought they were bloody brilliant.

“And where does the plan go from there?” I asked, falling heavily into the seat beside Ursula. “The Countess turns the city to bedrock. What happens then, once the place is uninhabitable?”

“Oh, my little cabbage. Sometimes I wonder about you.” Ursula smiled as Thigton began to pick up speed. The cold evening breeze drew red into her cheeks, and her eyes sparkled dark and orange in the passing gas-lights. “What the Crown wants destroyed, the Crown will want re-built. That’s the whole point — to wash the filth off into the sea, and build a new city, cleaner and better. One for our-selves.” She leaned into me. “Keep my blood flowing, it’s deathly chill out.”

I had no fire within me to keep myself warm, much less her. “Is that how Lord Dunburton got to where he is?” I asked. The Earl of Tostada lived in Bakersfieldshire, up the coast, and seemed to rule the place, by all accounts.

“It’s not hard to become a Crown’s Regent,” Ursula smiled. “It just takes being in the right place with the right tools at the right time. And for us — Countess Peapoddy, and the armada, happens to be the right tool.”

“For you and the Yam-Runners,” I reminded her. “You were coming to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats before I even boarded that train.”

“We’re all in this together,” she said, her head bowed and her voice muffled by the collar of my coat. “You keep trying to forget that.”

As she leaned her weight into me and fell silent, I thought about Richey. Who-ever had wanted him dead must have known that his successor would simply turn the whole of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats to ashes; anyone who traveled in royalist circles knew that the admiral was the stodgiest voice among a council of belligerents. The finger of accusation pointed squarely at Ursula or one of her Yam-Runner, Peapoddy-allied cohorts, all of whom left a dreadful, coppery taste in my mouth that copious amounts of birch-rum had never been able to wash away.

And the worst of it was that I knew from the moment I learned of the murder plot that all these dominoes were poised to fall. As much as I hated the thought of returning to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats — descending into the Third Circle, as it were — I knew that, should Richey die, I would be forced to come forward in the city’s defence. There would be no other voice piping up to save the town from utter destruction.

What I couldn’t quite pin-point in my mind was why I cared about the city With Lara dead and my manor in ruins, and my vagrant friends the Kippers all dead at sea, the only occupants left were villains like the Chief Magistrate and strangers. I should welcome their destruction. In fact, in the case of strangers, I’d put many of them to death myself, in past; the Countess’ method would simply be a more efficient way to the same end I’d often desired.

But I’d had this argument with myself before. Back on the Isle of Yam-Runners, running along dark mountain-paths with the village-girl Rikah, watching her family and friends annihilated by a searing column of jade-green fire. I cared little for the citizens, and in fact, held open contempt for the seeping and wailing sick-folk that had over-run the island in search of the healer I was impersonating at the time. (And what a time it had been.)

Yet I felt bad, in that moment. Perhaps it was the personal connection at play: Rikah had been anguished beyond all imagining, as women are wont in such circumstances, and finding her highly attractive, it was hard to avoid something approaching empathy.

And then, in that cold night speeding through London, I hit on it: I didn’t want a Peapoddy to win.

I didn’t care for the people of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats. I’d lived there for a few years, had a few laughs, and then left under horrible circumstances. The place could be swept away in a deluge, for all I cared.

But the Peapoddys of the world — and their friends, the Yam-Runners, of which Ursula was one, I often had to remind myself — had taken Lara from me. Then they had taken away Rikah. (Technically, she had died by my own hand. But a Yam-Runner had basically made me do it.) All along, at every turn, they had played me for a tool. Ursula was probably trying to do so again — her Yammy bosses had put us up in a draughty old mansion on Sixpenny Row, and so I was sure they considered me on their pay-roll. But I was only going to play their game insofar as I could reach my own ends. I just hoped the rules of the game allowed it; there was nothing printed on the under-side of the box-lid, because it was all a big metaphor.

Ursula was sleeping on my shoulder, or perhaps pretending to, as women were wont in such circumstances. I turned away from her, careful as always to play my true allegiances close to the vest.

I spoke into the wind, knowing my words would be whipped away into oblivion at once.

“I won’t let it happen,” I told the air, and Ursula, at my side, shivered.

Next: A Journey Begins

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