The Wondermark Gazette

Field-Admiral Richey had set up his head-quarters in the old Police Bureau, back when its brick façade presumably still consisted mainly of bricks and not sand-bags lazily buttressed with corpse-logs. The centre of town was ostensibly a refuge from the violence, a sharp-wire fence having been erected to circumscribe old Pool-Party Plaza and the municipal buildings therein, but I found the inside of the wire no less awful than Waverly Hill and the rest of the city — except that here, the filth stacked into every crevice and corner was product of the Crown troops, not the natives, and in these environs it would be troublesome if not outright redonkulous to simply dispatch the most annoying examples of the former.

I tensed as we trailed Tapiorca’s elephant brigade through the thin steel boundary and into the Plaza proper. Tapiorca dismounted from his elephant nimbly, without seeming to stop moving at all; one moment he was riding, the next he was striding along the ground in seemingly the same action, and I got jealous. He was an elegant man in motion, I’d grant him that; promoted quickly through the ranks, I’d wager, with all the Crown’s best interests at heart and an effortless sort of charisma that drew all his soldier’s eyes as he passed, and all their choicest ham-cuts come Christmas-time. I wondered how much of the appeal was the snappily-pressed uniform, and whether there’d be one like it waiting for me in the field headquarters; Field-Admiral Richey, whom I was replacing, had been a larger man than I, but Thigton was a passable seamster and could surely have me looking commanding in no time. The sour-ball looks the soldiers were lobbing my direction were already growing tire-some, and it would be fun to whip them into shape a little: a perk of the position I’d not considered until now. I could yell at slackers with the best of ‘em.

We walked through a labyrinth of ransacked brick-walled rooms, until Tapiorca stooped through a half-collapsed door-way, ducked under a flap of mud-specked canvas, and lit a pipe with an oil-lantern. “Step in,” he snarled through the half of his mouth not clutching the pipe-stem, “but alone. This is Royal Command.”

I looked back to see Thigton and Ursula stopping in their tracks. Ursula narrowed her eyes. “I’m not unloading our belongings,” she said flatly. “Since we’re not staying. Thigton can get us out to the ferry-lanes, at least, tonight.” She glanced at Thigton for confirmation, but the little man just shrugged. Of course he could do whatever we asked of him.

Tapiorca grunted, and with the slightest of gestures he summoned two pith-helmeted soldiers to flank Thigton and Ursula. “‘Round back for now, lads. Settle in after tea. You’ll see Tip an’ Birdie again soon,” he tossed back to me, and disappeared behind the tent-flap of the Royal Command room. I debated for a moment whether to look back at Ursula and Thigton — would it be a show of weakness in front of the soldiers to appear to care about them? — then followed Tapiorca straight-away.

My boots clicked on scuffed mahogany floors — it was the Head Inspector’s old office. Soot-marked and conflict-nicked, for sure, but there was the overstuffed chair the Solicitor-General had collapsed into; there was Lara’s old desk, where she’d first unfurled the fist-thick stack of onion-skin pages detailing my deviances in the mansion atop Waverly. It felt rude to be in here without her; it felt like we were trespassing, tracking the grime of war into her boudoir, rubbing dust in her yellow, long-dead hair. I stopped one step in from the door-flap, letting my eyes pick out increasing details in the dimness, finding her outline dancing in every ill-defined shadow, her scent in every breath not filled with rot. Was this why I had made myself come back to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats? To revisit the loss of Lara? My greatest failure?

Tapiorca settled heavily into the chair — Lara’s chair — behind the wide desk, spreading maps and battle-charts before him, rolling schematics into tight scrolls and binding them deftly with string before setting them neatly into a corner. “This here’s the view of it all,” he grimaced through pipe-clamped teeth, running knotty fingers swiftly across a crinkled expanse of curling parchment. “But let me quicken you up as to how the days roll by here. Given your lack of any military bearing and your apparent total ignorance of our circumstance, my reckon is you’re a blue-blood nance with e’er too many shillings or too little sense. Either way it’s lights-on for me — we’re mid-campaign presently, and as you can read on this man’s face, I’m so bubbling ecstatic that your merry jaunt this after-noon didn’t muck us up irreparably that I’ll allow you to watch the grown-ups play war if you promise to keep it all shut, all times, mouth to mittens, sun to slumber. We’re quiet now for tea-time, but once we’ve cucumbered we’re runabout ’til dark, so find a corner out of the paths, hunker back and pick up your sovereigns from the Treasury fort-nightly. There! Settled, what? Cream or sugar? Reckon you take sugar, you’ve the look of it within you, a deep sort of sadness you prolly mask with cane-root.” He poured a cup of tea and held it out to me, the porcelain clinking in his hand, and I could think of no other action but to take it.

“Look,” I said, after a moment taken to wet my wheedle and gather the shards of my thoughts from the ash-swept mahogany below, “Richey was killed. Shot by an assassin in the theatre — and the Council’s next move would have been to order the air-ships to burn this place clean. Correct me, but I doubt you want that to happen. We both agree there are battles to be fought here — so let’s not take up more arms than we need.” The words came from me unbidden. Conciliatory, almost? It was shocking — the power of his bold, moustached personality had steam-rolled me flat. I could summon no assertiveness to my own defence; instead, the rusty wheels of logical argument fought to gain traction within my oil-slippery vocal-cords. Tapiorca stared at me, brow scowled, bright cinders of eyes fixing me to the wall, one hand resting easily on his pipe, and he did not move for some time. I wondered if it was another unannounced staring contest, and here I’d been blinking all along like a dunce. I would have to get better at reading these soldiery signals — I’d already picked up on one from an elephant-driver that I think meant “you’ve got a little something over here, no, here, other side, there you’ve got it” and felt quite pleased at having established such a manly camaraderie with a man who rode an animal bigger than even the largest oxen I had ever eaten over the course of weeks.

“Richey was good for one thing,” Tapiorca finally said, standing and tapping his pipe into his tea-cup, then taking a long sip. “He could sit quietly in a room and let me fight my war.”

“I’m making it my war now,” I said, because I thought it sounded pretty good, and I thought of it quickly, it being a variant on what he had said. “And I’m staying right here, in this room. I’ll brook no argument. So let’s just start there and move forward.” To emphasize my rootedness to the Royal Command, I sank slowly into the chair opposite the war-desk.

Like a bath-tub, I recalled thinking as I’d watched the old Solicitor-General take this position long ago — and it was nice. Soft, and warm even, as if it had been recently occupied. That thought was a little creepy, but it was comfortable — so comfortable — that I didn’t even care who the mystery warmer might have been. “Fine,” I thought I heard Tapiorca say, far-off somewhere, but it might as well have been the beginning of something else — “Find–”

And then I was yanking myself awake, and it was night-time. A terrible chill blew through the room, and I shuddered with fright. The tent was gone. The canvas that had been erected inside the shell of the old building had been taken away, along with the desk, maps, and all of Tapiorca’s effects — I was left now in a room with four crumbling walls and a distinct lack of a ceiling. “Fine,” indeed.

The camp was dark; only a few flickering torches marked other tents, far-off but still inside the wire-fence. I wondered where they had taken Ursula and Thigton, and if it was a place with a fire, or perhaps a roof, which would be nice. I briefly wondered where all the soldiers had gotten off to, but a rumble of cannon-fire in the distance seemed to answer that concern. An orange flash briefly lit up the horizon, and in the momentary illumination I saw that the night sky was thick with smoke — as always seemed to be the case, any-more.

A floor-board creaked beneath my foot, and I startled a bit, turning aside to stare at nothing, darkness in a corner, a shadow. But of what? Something moved, barely, in the blackness of the room — then it scurried again, distinctly now, a hobbling gait, not-quite human, but upright. For a moment I thought it was Thigton, but his nearly person-like shape moved with more of a cruel sort of elegance borne from vicious instruction. This was feral.

I fished for the oil-lamp in the silver sconce and lit it with my mind. The thin flame near-blinded me, but did worse on the animal. It cowered in a corner, shuffling for an escape, but I had it, dashing the lamp at it and spattering the far wall with fire. The creature hid behind familiar-looking hands, then stared at me in the sudden brightness…

“Master?” it said. It was Sandy, my old hunch-back, and it was covered in blood.

Next: A Dash Through Darkness

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