The Wondermark Gazette

The harbor reeked of chamber-waste. As Thigton’s strong, hobbit-y arms pulled our oars through the foul sea, I kept watch for jutting ship-wreck dangers and hidden under-sea obstacles; who knew if the water had been mined, or laced with psychedelics, or stocked for cod season, or what. We passed a poop-barge lashed to a rotting pier, its fly-infested cargo left to bake in the sun for lack of a crew to take it properly out to dumping-depth; then, we saw a merchant-ship, half-sunken and listing, its optimistic, once-new wares ruined by the mere thought of this accursed place, and also by millions of gallons of nasty water.

As we neared the shore, smoke stung at my throat; visible even from our low dinghy-centric vantage point were trailing, smoky tendrils from a thousand barrel-fires and vandal-torches. Occasionally a far-off scream and the sounds of stabbing would punctuate the damp hotness that settled heavily like a muggy Welsh bull-frog atop the lungs; through the hazy air I could almost make out gangs roaming the street dressed as Yankees. This place was rough indeed.

We moored the dinghy without incident. Admiralty Way, once the thriving home to buskers and hustlers, peddlers and vendors, crab-smashers and cheese-twirlers, sailors and those simply lost, was now a desolate ruin. It looked like a fire-brigade’s burned-out training-course, or like pictures I had seen of America — empty, charred, and decrepit. There seemed to be a weight in the air; the echoes of our foot-steps died quickly, as if they were terrified and hiding, or else murdered as they ventured too far — which it was I could not say, for anthropomorphizing echoes was a bit twee even for my taste.

I glanced at the card in my hand, embossed with the ostentatious gold-foil crest of the Crown’s Regents. Some engraver had slaved for weeks on the detail in that emblem, and the Regents used the cards typically for grocery lists and the like, making sure everyone else in the green-grocer’s saw the fancy Crown’s Regent stationery. Whoo, aren’t I a special fat little toadie to the King’s second assistant’s fourth squire’s butt-wiper. The card in hand indicated that I should expect to be met at the harbour by the Vice-Regent, someone named Major-Leftenant Tapiorca — but the wharf was empty, save for the sad, wisful wailing of the city’s ten thousand whinging ghosts.

“I wonder if he got the message to meet us,” I mused aloud, not to anyone in particular except for Major-Leftenant Tapiorca, if for some reason he happened to be around and hiding.

“i think that is the message,” Ursula answered, indicating the card. Typical Regency behaviour — sending a man to meet someone to give him the instructions for the initial meeting in the first place! It smacked of wackiness, which always (in my view) had a whiff of the sour-bottle about it any-haps, as no sober being would stoop to such very tommish of fooleries.

With no-one to tell us different, we took possession of a wheel-cart once used for hauling bodies to the dumping-pier, spread a mostly-mild-smelling burlap over the most questionable of the remaining stains, and Thigton began to pull us into the city.

Aside from the constant, smoky burning, and brief glimpses of rats or children scurrying into rat-holes or children-holes respectively, the city was spookily quiet. It was as if a sand-castle had been abandoned by its sculptor and was now sliding slowly back into the tide, disintegrating parapet by parapet as it caught fire. I recognised certain shop-fronts and mercantiles, now brown-tinged with neglect and damage, their occupants likely dead or driven mad, their sale-coupons never to be honoured again. Thigton pulled our cart steadily up the rutted road to Waverly Hill without being asked to, not once questioning which direction to aim our minor trolley of sadness. The truth was, I didn’t know where the Regency head-quarters even was, and if we would not make for the Manor, then where?

“Do you know where we’re going?” Ursula asked after several dense minutes of cart-wheel crunching and perspiration-inducing proximity. Her voice had a snap in it that I knew from arguments past; she wasn’t getting her way, she wasn’t allowed to tell me what to do, and it made her twitchy and mean. It was her Yam-Runner temperament, a culture crafted by long centuries of pulling men’s puppet-strings. “I don’t see anyone around here. We should go back to the harbour.”

What else could I say? “I know exactly where we’re going,” was my rejoinder, and I even affected the great sighing patience of a correcting parent. “If the Major-whoever will be anywhere, he’ll be on the high-ground. Waverly Hill.” We were cresting under a bridge, and I pointed ahead for emphasis as we emerged into the light.

But the hill was invisible, blocked by the heaped wreckage of carts not unlike our own. Thigton stepped carefully to a halt and looked round tentatively — but this road was barricaded on all sides by splintered wood. It was a constructed road-block, and it was manned.

At first they seemed like more wisps of smoke, moving softly and billowingly between the cart-carcasses. They were dressed in brown, like the air, like the wood and the ground and everything, and they carried long sabers — Royal Battalion sabers, from the looks of them. But these were no Crown troops. They were the enemy, and they were mean-looking, and dumb.

“Ho there,” I called out, and Ursula nearly soiled herself yanking down my hand as I hailed them.

“What are you doing, get us out of here,” she hissed. “We need to find the Major — we need to get back to the harbour — tell Thigton to turn around!”

I did no such thing; rather, I stood on the shaky cart, and spread my arms open. “What a nice welcoming committee,” I said heartily. “Tell me, who is the leader of your school? Bring him word that I have returned to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats.” I would address them as Kippers, members of that ancient, shabby brother-hood of vagrants — should I be wrong, and they be foes of that clan, I would be no worse off than I was before, I reckoned, possibly wrongly.

The swordsmen gave each other weak looks, then retreated to converse amongst themselves. Finally, one stepped forward, coughed up a wad of quavering inside-juice, and pointed his saber at us. “The Crown sends a friend of the Kippers?” he growled. “Those poesy-waisted tuna-humpers have always struck me as eager to snuggle to a Royal teat. We could do with a few less AWWWWGGHH –”

He stopped abruptly as a paving-stone struck him in the toe — Thigston’s blow, to take his eyes from me. I leapt from the cart and, with a cobble-stone chunk clutched tightly in my fist, carefully and precisely collapsed his face into marmalade. The untended saber clattered to my feet, and before I could even bend to retrieve it, the others were gone, vanished into the rubble, fled.

The man was gurgling as I pulled the saber’s scabbard from his belt, so I stepped on his wind-pipe to cease the annoying sound. I turned back to Ursula, who was still in the cart, quaking, white as a Northerner with fright.

“See?” I said, brandishing the blade fiercely in the smoky air. “Cowards all. And you thought this assignment would be dangerous.”

Next: A Fateful Meeting

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