The Wondermark Gazette

For being a heart-rending war-scape of horrific tragedy, from which no man was said to escape with his skin un-flayed, Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats was surprisingly quiet.

Thigton pulled Ursula and I in the wheel-cart slowly and steadily up Waverly Hill as the sun choked ever-higher through the brown-ash sky. The sides of the roads were more littered with orphans than usual, baking pungently in the mid-day, ensuring that the miserable blight of the town touched all of our senses. (Thigton had shared a bit of salt-jerky with us earlier without disclosing its provenance, and I was beginning to think better of having gleefully wolfed down a double portion.) We were among mansions now, palatial estates once tended and kept by poorly-paid house-staff and garble-tongued immigrants, deeds held by creamy Society wagglers too vaporous of spirit to rise even this early in the after-noon. This milky set was vanished now; the manors of Waverly had gone ramshackle, torn to pieces and looted for valuables ages ago, and what remained were akin to what the Romans left behind — stark, bare, skeletons of once-mighty structures, picked over by poor people who thought that the things that rich people owned were better than the things they themselves owned. Rightly so, of course.

Watching Thigton exert himself in our service, I began to grow weary. The smoke in the air was torturing my throat with every breath. The heat made me feel faint, and I imagined shadows leaping about in the shuttered shells of the ruins we passed; spectres danced in my imagination, watching us from abandoned eaves and darting behind hedge-rows as we trudged through the silent city. Then they were around us, circling with the intensity of ghouls collecting on debts or coal-hearted children scheming to maraud some wandering parson — then the wheel-cart was upturned, and I was tumbling — and with a cracking jolt, then, finally, we were still again, but aching. Pain jolted me from my drowse, as I suddenly realised that we were under attack — the vagrants from before had summoned reinforcements, it seemed, and we were surrounded.

The wheel-cart sat on its side, Ursula and I spilled beside it. Thigton crouched fiercely, ready for action, backing against me and helping me to my feet with his own shockingly-prehensile toes. He and I steadied Ursula against the cart as she regained her senses — the heat had taken a beggar’s ride on her as well. “Awake?” I asked, surprised to find my voice raspy from a morning of breathing ashes.

“A bit,” she growled, her own voice harsh and horrible. I watched the attackers’ eyes widen as she raised herself to her full height, clenching and un-clenching huge, meaty fists. She brushed dust off of her ugly clothing, the billowing mass of mis-matched colour beneath only adding to the whole fearsome effect. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she could certainly look terrifying — moreso when she tried.

I glanced about for bearings — and found us on the grounds of old Wondermark Manor. The garden-shed, to be precise; but there was nothing left of it. Not a wall still standing, not a bone left to mark the plot. I only knew the spot because I recognised the view to the South — the old red light-house (hardly visible through the haze) at the whale-juicing depot, its narrow shape framed by the chimneys of ne’er-do-well nosey neighbours Mr. C____ and Dr. W_____ of the Garden Society. Those chimneys remained, less a brick or fifty perhaps, but not much of the walls surrounding them. I was finally able to see what was so important in Dr. W_____’s bed-chamber that he always kept his North-facing curtains drawn. An iron bath-tub — well, lah de dah. The shackles were a nice touch, though. They looked prescription-strength.

A vicious assault from the vagrants precluded further pondering of the premises. I fished about for any sort of hand-held weapon — a branch? a stone? a soot-blackened skull from some massacre that had taken place here, either after my tenure or during? — but found naught but charcoal and loose sand. The Royal Battalion sword I’d recovered from the earlier attacker must have been lost in the tumble of the cart. Thigton leapt at the first attacker, but his slight stature prevented him from being terribly effective; Ursula was trying to reach high ground atop the cart, at a cost of exposing her back to the mob. With no alternative, I lunged for the nearest snarling tramp, recalling wistfully that my favourite sturdy boots had been left here in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats when I made my hasty escape months ago– these London digs were poseur-grade at best, crafted for showiness and no good for the real jaw-cracking action. One must, however, make do.

As heel met head, and the first man fell, I heard more shouts echoing from afar — more crazies to join the fray, no doubt, and as good as it felt to get my punchin’ mojo back, I began to reluctantly worry. My muscles were warming now, and with one man down I’d struck a bolt of fear into the others that I was cashing in for injury as best I could, but too many of them could simply smother us, and I’d been too close to too many sweaty men in my life to quite welcome the sensation again. In my periphery I made out a large shadow bearing slowly closer; as it grew, the ground seemed to shake with each step, and with a start I realised that we were being approached by a row of shambling elephants.

I’d never seen the beasts in person, only lurid reproductions in penny-mags which probably painted an altogether unrealistic portrait of the fearsome creatures’ marital practices. In the flesh they were impossibly stern-looking, not hardly in the mood for any conjugal delights at all, it seemed; but this was a battle-field, and such a chastity of emotions was, I gathered, to be expected, if one was not me.

Yet the greatest surprise was yet to come: for atop each elephant was mounted a great, dark shape that, as they lumbered onward, resolved terribly into a cannon.

Our road-side attackers seemed as shocked by this development as we were — and I knew why the instant I heard a crisp, aristocratic accent call out “Fire!”

The lead elephant’s cannon cracked open the air with an echoing snap, spitting a blast of orange flame and white smoke in the general direction of the mêlée. The elephant stumbled back a step, steadied by a dozen soldiers on foot, its ancient eyes widening for a moment in fear.

Then, after a heavy, whistling second of nothing, there was everything. Stone, flesh, dirt and bone erupted before me, and my feet suddenly felt no weight; then my back struck the ground violently some yards away. I skidded through the charcoal and came to rest looking like a chimney-sweep before the Reform Act regulated that they swab with moist-towlettes every quarter-hour to prevent racism. I could hear nothing but a soft buzzing, and for an instant I feared I had lost my hearing again, as I had the last time I met violence at this ruined Manor. I should never have returned!

A creeping, peevish annoyance at the sound of twenty men shouting over one another suddenly reassured me that I could, indeed, hear — and then gloved hands were pulling me upright. White leather dusted charcoal from my coat, with a net result of the white leather turning black; I shrugged an apology to the smart-moustached soldier who’d tried his best. Looking around, the vagrants seemed to have vanished again, which only frightened me more — they had run off once, only to return with substantial force; how might they respond to this ridiculous display of violence?

I hobbled over to where several soldiers were helping Ursula down from where the cannon-blast had knocked her clear into a tree. I noted with pride that her knuckles were skinned; she’d either caught some damage in the fracas, or had had a knitting-accident earlier I hadn’t noticed. If it were the former, she was coming ’round to my way of doing business; if the latter, well, whatever. She met the ground heavily, then stooped, and I thought she was going to draw something in the sooty earth until she stood back up with a gleaming sword in her hand — the Battalion sword I’d reclaimed earlier.

Instantly ten clanking rifles were on her, and as many voices shouting conflicting commands. She froze, and I could see the fight brewing behind her eyes — there was terror in there, of course, but also ire, at being told what to do. First she’d been bossed around by me, and now by strangers with overly-coiffed moustaches? But there was no argument to be made. These were Royal Battalion troops. Smart red uniforms, swords at their sides; pith helmets protecting furrowed eye-brows from the noon-time sun. Flared breeches feeding into soot-scuffed boots — decent manufacture beneath the soilage, it seemed. It was a nice look, if you were into that whole uniform-fetishism. These chaps weren’t into mucking about.

“Where did you come by this?” The voice was bold, and smacked of blue-blood; it was the same that had given the Fire command earlier. A strong figure crossed in front of me to snatch the blade from her hand. “This is full property of the Crown. Where did you come by it?”

“We found it,” I called out, knowing she would sooner spite the man than answer swiftly, and the sun and my throat and my ears and the whole mess were quickly conspiring to grumpify my mood. I wanted to get inside and find some chilled water, perhaps a Fresca if one could be had in such a hell-hole, and I had an inkling of who I might be speaking to. “We were attacked on the road this morning, and I recovered this from a man I … detained.”

The figure — a ranking officer, by the gaudily-embroidered epaulets be-decked with ludicrous insignia perfectly suited for battle-field attire — shifted his chin to stare at the meat-spattered dirt where several homely men had once stood before being obliterated by elephantine cannon-fire. “We don’t make a practice of detaining men in Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats,” he growled. “Especially not on the Waverly. This sad place is hallowed to them — and in it, there can never be quarter. Only blood-shed.” He turned further, to stare seemingly at the ruins of the Manor. I well noted the sternly jutting angles of his face, his skirmish-weary eyes, and of course his voluminous moustache. He had the look of a man who makes a grand show of trudging wearily through a corpse-laden war-zone, but who secretly, inside, loves every minute of destruction. He was possibly my sort of fellow, if he wasn’t a whack-job.

“Major-Leftenant Tapiorca, I presume?” I ventured, and he looked at me for the first time. I fished the wrinkled Regency stationery from my coat-pocket — watching him visibly tense as my fingers left his eye-sight, but what’s he gonna do — and extended the paper to him. He plucked it without taking his eyes from me; suddenly it was a staring-contest, and it lasted for three full minutes until one of the elephants shifted uncomfortably and let out a wee little trumpet.

At this startlement he blinked a few times, as if shaking off a fugue, and scanned the paper, both sides. “Reads that I’m to pop you up at the harbour,” he said.

“I think you were supposed to,” I replied.

Tapiorca glanced around, then gestured for his soldiers to make ready the elephants. “It’s a bit out of the way,” he said, crumpling the message in a powerful fist and grinding the it into the dirt beneath his boot. “And I don’t reckon you’re there now.”

He turned away. Watching him recede, I ventured, “Richey’s dead.” I didn’t know if he’d gotten the message already. “I’ve been appointed by the Regents in London.”

“Dead,” Tapiorca laughed, swinging himself up and over the back of a cannon-laden elephant. “Welcome to Easthillshireborough-upon-Flats, lad.” He flashed the reins, and the elephant wheeled, sending a mighty trumpeting echoing from Waverly Hill. “Sooner or later — we’re all dead.”

Next: An Awkward Tea

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