The Wondermark Gazette

The next few days went much as I had anticipated, with a few key exceptions. The Crown’s Regents held an emergency settee, ostensibly to settle the Richey issue, but in truth to waggle their prodigious moustaches at one another in the third-fanciest dining room in London (the second-fanciest being previously engaged by a meeting of the Cossack Under-Sea Ballet Academy, and we wouldn’t want to disturb that; the first-fanciest being the King’s own water-closet, to which access was tightly restricted). It seemed that haughty, poorly-veiled moustache-comparisons always took up the first few hours of these types of meetings; a typical exchange between some-Baron-or-other and some-Duke-or-other would tend to go thusly:

Baron: “Dreadfully sorry for the late entrance — had quite the fright when it seemed my specialty whisker-pomade was exhausted. I tend to go through those tins so quickly, you know, as it’s no use scrimping when I’ve gone to the trouble of procuring the finest Indian wax-creams.”

Duke: “Indian? Oh, you do mean Americas Indian, don’t you — I did think you were sporting quite the warrior-fashion, that clean-shaven look that’s such a savage trend, I hear, across the Atlantic. Tell me, do you find the breeze much cooler in the evening, with such a bare lip as you have?”

Baron: “Bare? Why, this is six weeks’ full growth, Sir, in the style passed along by the Barons of my line since the days of Charlemagne, a fine Burnsides man himself,” &c., &c., &c. Such arguments and comparisons could easily stretch for decades if not stopped by a firm hand on the gavel; it was this instrument that I found myself wielding at the gathering in question. And in truth, it took every ounce of self-control within my straining muscles not to bury the little mallet in the fore-brains of all assembled. But I had to think of the bigger picture. The portrait of Lord Keystroke, that is, mounted above the dining-room’s blazing hearth, stern as ever, staring down at us mere mortals quite disapprovingly, with that one lazy eye following one everywhere throughout the room.

It was a bit of a marvel that I was allowed into the meeting at all — as a rather recent addition to London’s Society gatherings, I had not yet finagled a massively over-paid Crown’s Regent assignment to any minor village, nor any royal appointment at all if one discounted my brief stint as a three-generations-removed-Crown-Prince’s bunion-grinder. (We had had a few days to fend for ourselves in London before the first of the Yam-Runner money crossed the wire — Ursula spent the time picking dandelions in far-off meadows and extorting asthmatics for coins; while I spent it with rasp and file, burnishing the crow-like claws of an inbred blue-blooded troglodyte. He tipped better than he thought, though — considering that he dozed off during our sessions and kept his purse within easy reach.)

In any event, the meeting of the Crown’s Regents, like most of the Society gatherings that Ursula and I had deftly inserted ourselves into, was not so much attended as infiltrated. So far as the door-man knew, I was an invited guest; Lord Such-and-Such presumed me a relative of some minor earl, while that same Earl took me for the valet of a foreign general. By turns I introduced myself as an Irish colonel, a last-minute replacement for a Welshman stuck in a bog, the last surviving son of William Wallace, and, in one memorable exchange, a rakish cheese-twirler from Azerbaijan. Given my illustrious pedigree, no soul was surprised, then, to see me take the podium and call the meeting, at long last, to brutish order.

“With Richey dead,” I said plainly, “and with his iron hand fallen from the lid of the simmering stew-pot of Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats, that town will surely be over-run by mobs within days, if it hasn’t fallen already.”

“Where is Eastellshaborough?” the Earl of G____ interrupted, his pudgy fingers raised as if tickling the under-belly of a soap-bubble. “Is it in the North at all? Anywhere near my peaceful village of Hamletshire? Need I be frightened that marauders might do violence to my prize-nominated live-stock?”

“No, it’s a port town along the coast,” I said. “A key importing depot that we must not allow –”

“Ah, then the Naval Brigades can clean up that mess,” Count L____ harrumphed. “Richey was always brooding and asking for hand-outs from the Treasury’s coffers, yammering without end about more soldiers, more cannons, more this and that. It’ll be nice to have that bothersome Eastellsha-whatever-it-is struck from the balance-books this year, what?” This was met with jowl-y nods and a chorus of murmured assent.

“The city is near collapse,” I insisted. Whatever happened, I couldn’t let them decide to write off the town and destroy it — for they’d hire the Peapoddy crew to do it, and I was determined to keep that vile family as far from these shores as possible. “Thousands of lives. Richey was tenuously maintaining order — we can seize the reins from his still-charging steed before it flies from the rails.” I hoped mixing metaphors would make me sound desperate. “In bed.”

“Nonsense,” said a new voice - a powerful tenor that could only be General Hap “Happy” Happydie of the infamous Happydie Infantry, that maddeningly-brave squad that had pushed back the front in every Commonwealth military engagement of the last twenty years. “Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats is a lost cause. Field-Admiral Richey was a determined fool, but a fool none-the-less. The insurgents in that devastated town have cut through his defenses like hot wire through a Turk, and the fact that he’s dead today is no accident. If it weren’t as bad as it is, he’d be alive to tell you so himself.”

The crowd looked to me for a rebuttal, but my mind was spinning. Happydie’s tactical logic was confounding in its plain-ness. How could I fight such an evident and erudite assessment?

Sensing his opening, Happydie continued: “Here, as in the Congo, we must simply contain the damage — with a simple, targeted strike. Come, this is plain to all of us with battle-field experience and who aren’t — like Richey — simply seeking hand-outs from the Royal Treasury. How many sad stories did he plague us with? And how many tear-speckled expense-reports did he submit? Need more imported Champagne for the bunkers, Admiral?” The masses tittered.

“There are monsters in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats!” I blurted. “Bat-creatures! Half man, half animal, half dragon of Hades. Half evil, half malice — bursting at the seams with ever-multiplying halves of terror.” Finally, their attention! “They kill indiscriminately — men of avarice, men of God, it matters not to them.” I pushed my sleeve up my arm, searching for a scar, any scar. “See here? Their claws rent my flesh. And here? Rug-burn from a raping. This mark? Scaly-skin noogie. These beasts are real, and they must be stopped. Richey never mentioned them to you. And see how Richey died for his silence! I shall stay silent no longer!”

“If the halves are multiplying,” ventured the Earl, “shouldn’t they be down to quarters?”

“Silence, nerd,” I bellowed. “I’m no man of maths, ’tis true. But I know my enemy — beasts of fire, borne from Judas’ steaming offal itself. If you bathe that city in flame, you will marinate a bigger, larger, more horrifying creature than even those that roam the Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats country-side today!”

“Here now,” Happydie interrupted. “The insurrection –”

“The dragons are behind the insurrection!” I shrieked. This was going well, now — I could see eyes white with terror all ’round. “They are provoking you to act. They want that fire from the heavens! For then they will rise up, stronger than ever before, their veins running thick with white-hot hate, and take over the country town by town.” I made sure to point to each Regent around the table as I dredged their territories from a roiling sea of adrenalin-drenched memory. “They will devour Hamletshire. They will move on to Grousington and Bakersfieldshire and Farting. They will lay waste to Bloopington and Wanker-on-Thames and Spittingford and Prang. Finally, they will come for London — and, fat with the blood of you gits, there will be no stopping them. Forever!”

Thus, I secured my commission as Crown’s Regent to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats.

Within a day, Ursula and I had set off with Thigton and a few other effects to the harbor, her dark mood in tow. As our ferry-hauler began to progressively empty, port after port, a hazy smudge on the horizon began to define itself into a heavy cloud of sooty ash, and Ursula began to resemble it in disposition. “This is all backwards,” she hissed. “You’ve made more work for us all.”

“There’s still some of Uncle’s treasure hidden beneath the old Manor — and I couldn’t bloody well tell that to the Regents, could I?” I hissed back. There was really no reason to be secretive; we were alone on the deck now, choking in the brownish air. No other passengers were fool-hardy enough to travel this close to the damned city of dragons, or whatever.

And the lies were compounding on lies. The bat-creatures were a menace, to be sure; but they were weak against fire in truth, and a death-blast from Countess Peapoddy’s air-ship would surely turn their colony to dust. The ruins of my Manor did sit on treasure, so long as ‘treasure’ was defined as great, wet gobs of seal-fat; the under-ground tunnels were slick with the stuff still, I was sure. And, of course, we had told Thigton that we loved him. Not true, and awkward besides.

Deceit ran through my veins like alcohol, thinning my blood and numbing my finger-tips. I blew into my hands. Ursula glared at me. I was doing something she didn’t understand. She hated that.

Then: “This’s as far as I go, lads” — an echoing cry from below-decks as the ferry came to a slushing halt. Through the choking haze it was obvious why; the Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats harbor was thick with jutting wreckage– the shattered, rotting skeletons of a hundred half-sunken vessels, and probably more scary stuff beneath the surface as well. Before I could decide to press on, I saw that Thigton was already readying a dinghy — maybe I did love that guy after all. What a champ, he was.

And, of course, that meant that there was no turning back. The imp-man had lowered the dinghy. We were committed.

The water sat still and red. Thigton held the dinghy steady while Ursula made her shaky way down the ladder and settled heavily into the craft. That awful town awaited us all.

Up top, I paid the ferry-man in pennies. On this day, it seemed only appropriate.

Next: Back to Waverly Hill

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