by Luke Arnold
I took a peek into Carissa’s handbag. She had enough cash to keep her going for a couple of days till she found her cousin. It wasn’t an ideal plan but she hadn’t given me much time to make it. Carissa hadn’t just killed her husband; she’d blown him apart with a one-of-a-kind weapon that had also murdered the brother of the most powerful man in the city. They wouldn’t just lock her up, she’d fill so many newspapers with her story that they might as well feed her into the printing press.
I put my head into the carriage. She was lying across the seat, curled up and asleep.
I’m not great at goodbyes, so I was glad I didn’t have to give one.
I stopped on Main Street, worried that cops might already be watching my place and taking notes. I’d been asking around about Harold Steeme. I’d been seen in a bar with him. Shit, Georgio had seen Carissa come down to buy coffee. Twice. Simms had kicked my ass for less, and she was more pissed at me than she’d ever been.
What if they were already inside waiting for me? If they dragged me uptown with the weapon in my belt, I was toast. I needed to hide it. Hell, I should destroy it. That’s what Victor had asked me to do.
But Victor hadn’t given it to me. Not the first time. Deamar had dropped it on my desk and I still didn’t know why.
Mr Deamar.
Was it really possible?
I slunk into the shadows and stayed away from Main Street, taking backroads all the way to the Gilded Cemetery.
The graveyard was reserved for unfortunate Elves who got stuck in Sunder during their last days. Sunder wasn’t that popular with the Elvish population before the Coda, so the grounds had never been overly busy, but there was one Elf of distinction who had always been fascinated by what the fire city had to offer.
Governor Lark had commissioned the crypt in honor of his friend. In honor of my friend. A beautifully crafted mausoleum placed at the heart of the city to signify that High Chancellor Eliah Hendricks always had a home in Sunder.
I entered the crypt and lit one of the torches on the wall. It didn’t look like anyone had been inside since I chased a group of teenagers out of there last autumn. At the back of the room, there was a specially made stone coffin with Eliah’s name carved into it in Elvish.
I’d always taken it for granted that Hendricks had died in the Coda like millions of others. I never asked whether his body had been brought back or whether it had been stuffed into this stone block. I’d always been too scared to have my fears confirmed.
Now, I was terrified of an entirely different outcome.
I put my palms on the lid and the dust moved under my fingers. The wind came through the archway and blew the burning torch till it roared. I pushed with the heels of my hands and the lid shifted, opening the coffin.
And it was empty.
Of course it was.
But that didn’t mean anything at all, did it? Who would have brought his body back here anyway? He could have died anywhere. Probably on his way to take back the mountaintop.
This just meant that I had a safe place to keep the machine for a while.
I took it out of my belt and dropped it into the empty space that had been made for my old friend. Then I pulled the lid back to its original place.
Tap.
Someone else was in the cemetery.
Tap.
A cane against the cobblestones.
Tap.
Coming straight for the Hendricks’ Crypt.
Tap.
Made for my friend.
Pat, tap.
Back at The Ditch with laughter and light.
Pat, tap.
Streets at sundown. With stories and song.
Pat, tap.
The mansion.
Pat, tap.
The second mark.
Pat. Pat, tap.
Leaving town on horseback.
Pat. Pat, tap.
That terrible night and my stupid ideas.
Pat. Pat, tap.
Goodbyes. Empty, unworthy goodbyes.
Pat. Pat, tap.
Pat. Pat, tap.
Pat. Pat, tap.
Deamar stepped into the light.
Black suit, cane, hat, and a body that had been worked over by the Succubae surgeons. I looked past his scarred face and fell into his familiar green eyes.
“Hello, Eliah,” I said. “It’s been too long.”
His old, contagious smile pushed through his new, unnatural face and he spread out his arms as if to hold the whole world.
“My dear boy,” said Hendricks. “It’s been an eternity.”
Emotion surged in my chest, stealing my breath and filling my eyes with tears. I wiped them away just in time to see Hendricks swing his cane at my head.
51
It was an attack six years in the making. Eight, probably. Maybe even more. As the bone handle of Hendricks’ cane glistened in the torchlight, I realized that I’d been waiting for it just as much as he had.
I’d taken a lot of hits since becoming a Man for Hire. A lot of hits from a lot of people, waiting for the one I deserved. And here it was. Some divine retribution delivered by a specter of judgment who had just stepped out of the past.
Maybe there was some justice in the world after all.
The handle of the cane came down on my brow just above my left eye, breaking the skin and splattering blood across the cold stone floor.
Hendricks grabbed both ends of the cane like he was going to snap it over his leg, and yelled out.
“FUCK!”
There was a tormented look of pain on his face, unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
He shouted again, and the walls of the crypt shouted back at him. His hands were white-knuckle tight around the wood of the cane and he curled himself over it as if a great spasm was shooting up his body. I stood there, stupidly, mouth hanging open and blood dripping down my face, waiting for some kind of hint about what I should do next.
He looked at me the way you might look at a stillborn puppy. Like I was a tragedy. A hopeless, nonsensical bit of cruelty that couldn’t be explained.
He swung again. Backhanded. I took it just like I had before. The back of the handle cracked me across the cheek but there was less effort in it this time. Less medicine.
“Do you know how many different pictures I’ve painted of you in my head?” His eyes seemed incapable of looking at me for any length of time. Instead, he examined the smear of the blood that tipped a sharp corner of his cane. “The Human spy who used me. The piece of pure evil I mistook for a good man. The traitor. I convinced myself that you must have planned it all along. That you were some kind of mastermind. But then I see you here and… what are you? You’re nothing. Nothing more than what you were when I first met you. Despite all that I tried to teach you. All we trusted you with. You’re just…” He shrugged, like it wasn’t even worth giving it a word.
“I’m sorry.”
The next hit had some force in it again. It came up under my chin and knocked my teeth together so that they bit my tongue.
“Who do you work for?” Hendricks buried his eyes six feet deep into mine.
“What?”
“Who do you work for?”
“I… nobody. I just—”
He put the base of the cane against my chest and pushed me back against the coffin.
“I was just starting to think that I could forgive you. That you’d made a series of stupid mistakes and were trying to be better. But now you’re with them again. Siding with your own kind.”
Niles. I’d taken his money to find Deamar. And Hendricks had seen me. After everything that had happened, he’d come back to Sunder to find me working with the Humans. Against him. Again.
“I didn’t know it was you. I thought…” I wiped my face, smearing the blood. “I got talked into it. It was just a job.”
Hendricks shook his head and I watched the worst of the anger drain out of him. His expression was back to one I recognized: the slightly bemused, condescending stare of
a teacher who has just heard me say something profoundly stupid.
“You still think, after everything that happened, that what you do doesn’t matter? That because you take your orders from someone else, that you’re no longer accountable for your actions? Nothing is just a job, Fetch. Especially now. Not at a time like this. And not for a man like that.”
“I know. But he didn’t give me much of a choice.”
He jabbed the end of the cane between my ribs.
“You always have a choice. Beware of anyone who tries to make you forget that. They are only seeking to serve themselves.”
We weren’t in the crypt anymore. We were back at The Ditch. By a campfire on the road. In the garden of the Governor’s mansion with cigars at sunset.
Oh, how I missed this! Maybe more than anything else. The Coda had taken a lot of things that would never come back, but my mentor was here. I felt like I could finally see through the darkness.
The words bubbled out before I could think of them.
“I’ll work for you, Eliah. If you’ll let me.”
Despite himself, he smiled. Then he remembered himself and looked me over, suspicious, like he thought I might lead him into a trap.
“You don’t even know why I’m here, boy.”
“Leaving the Opus was the worst mistake I ever made. I can’t fix what was done but if you’re here to make things better, I’ll do everything I can to help.”
He seemed almost disappointed. Like he’d been looking forward to beating my head in, and I’d taken all the fun out of it.
“Please,” I said.
The war inside his head wasn’t over. Not even close. But I hoped that he would look away from it for long enough to give me a chance.
The tip of his cane came off my chest and tapped back against the floor.
“I’d be lying if I said you wouldn’t be of use. My body is rather limited these days. But you can’t work for Niles if you’re working for me.”
“I was never really working for him anyway. Only enough to justify taking his cash.”
“That’s a start. Soon we’ll be taking a lot more than that.”
He wiped my blood from his cane and the sweat from his brow. Then he shook his head and chuckled.
“You’re not giving me much of an option, are you?”
“Nope.”
“Either I let you tag along,” his smile dropped like a guillotine, “or I kill you.”
His eyes were still familiar, more familiar than the rest of that stitched-up face, but they were different too. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, but there was something different inside that deep, endless green.
“See,” he said. “There’s always a choice.” He tapped the cane twice against the floor, like a drill sergeant calling his troops to attention. “Now, let’s get ourselves a drink.”
52
Where do you take a friend who was once the leader of the greatest organization in the world but is now the city’s most wanted murderer? The Ditch was too risky. Even with Hendricks’ new face, the two of us together could spark somebody’s memory. Hendricks’ appearance was unrecognizable but his voice, though strained and raspy, still contained that inimitable essence of wonder. He’d shaved off the mustache and changed his hat but anybody who had heard Deamar’s description might still be suspicious, so that ruled out the Bluebird Lounge or anywhere that collected cops like the Runaway or Dunkley’s. I suggested that we find some dive bar down the bad end of town but Hendricks had other plans. He ducked into a liquor store and came out with a bottle of port wrapped in a brown paper bag. He took a swig and looked around.
“Which way is north?” he asked. I pointed him in the right direction. “Follow me, my boy. I need to show you something.”
He hobbled up the road, his cane tapping away on the cobblestones. After another long sip, he handed me the bottle.
“Why this whole thing?” he asked, waving a hand in my direction but keeping his eyes ahead.
“Why what?”
“This whole ‘hired muscle’ routine. What’s it all about?”
“I uh…” I’d been throwing out snappy half-answers to that question for years but none of those quips would work on Hendricks. “I knew I needed to help but I didn’t know how. This made sense. At the time.”
He was suitably unimpressed.
“I think we can do better than that.”
We walked and drank and Eliah unraveled his last six years with that unrivaled eloquence. He’d been traveling from the Opus headquarters to Agotsu when the Coda happened.
“I only survived because I was given more medical attention than anybody else in the caravan. Opus medics kept me alive and delivered me to a Warlock village in the shadows of the Agotsun cliffs. My boy, I have never known such pain. It was an arduous process of rehabilitation just to be able to move again. And for what? Just so I could reenter the world as an old man. I cannot tell you how tempting it was to let go. The only thing that kept me going was a sense of duty. The belief that it was my obligation to find out what had happened and set things right.”
Hendricks finally made it to the top of Agotsu, a year too late to fight the battle. A year too late to stop the massacre. A year too late to fix the worst mistake in history.
“It was supposed to be the most sacred place on the planet. When I arrived, it was a construction site. It seems that as soon as the massacre was over, the Human Army cleared out the bodies and brought in their machines. Mining equipment. Weapons of defense. But after the deed was done, they just walked away. No soul left alive. No monument. Just waste.”
Filled with anger and a thirst for revenge, Hendricks set off for the closest Human city: Weatherly. On the way, he set traps for Human travelers and sabotaged vehicles so that he could investigate what they were up to.
“The Human Army hasn’t gone anywhere. They just call themselves Mortales and act like they’re only interested in building appliances and helping people get back on their feet. But it’s the same brains behind it. The same black hearts. They have no shame capitalizing on the tragedy that they created. Profiting from our pain. Even now, Mortales works with other organizations to claim as much land, wealth and culture as they can. They know they need to move fast, before the magical species get back on their feet.”
“You… you think that can happen?”
He seemed confused at my question, then annoyed, then patronizingly amused.
“Oh, not like that. The magic as we knew it is gone. But mark my words, Fetch Phillips, this is not over. The Humans know that. That’s why they are moving so swiftly. If we don’t stop them now, we will never have a chance to fight back. We will lose this world once and for all and we will have handed it over like it was nothing.”
I took a healthy drink of the sweet wine and found that I was excited. Hendricks was already speaking to me like I was back on his side. Of course, neither of us could forget that I was a key player in the event that won the war for his enemy. That would be impossible. But he was at least contemplating the idea of letting me return to his ranks.
I realized, with some surprise, that I wanted nothing more.
“For the past five years I have been waging a one-man war against Mortales and its allies. I have hijacked vehicles coming out of Weatherly, followed convoys to new camps and stolen reams of correspondence. Mortales is not a lone company. Weatherly is not the isolated city they would have you believe. The Niles Company is not a just a couple of brothers with a mind for business. It is a network. It is an attempt at occupation. This is an invasion that has been hiding in the shadows since the Coda, preparing to make its move, and Sunder City will be the final battleground.
We passed a construction site where someone had started building a house but given up halfway. A bunch of Gnomes had started a fire on the bare foundations, burning something that emitted black, toxic-smelling smoke.
“Why here?” I asked.
“This place has a gravity to it. It always did, even
in the old days, but now it’s something else. In every other part of the continent, crops are failing and families are falling apart. That’s because they relied completely on the natural world. This place? It had already shaken hands with the darkness. It had Human machines. Human ideas. It’s almost as if Sunder knew what was coming.” He smacked his cane against the ground, like he was scolding the city itself. “Now, every sad village and struggling country town knows that Sunder City could bring them their salvation. Whether we like it or not, we are standing in the center of the new world. Whoever controls this city holds the future in their hands.”
I thought about all the places Hendricks had taken me. Kingdoms where they trained the strongest warriors. Castles with wealth beyond belief. Libraries of untold wisdom. Surely these mean streets weren’t the best of what was left.
Hendricks must have seen my doubt because he went on, deadly serious, as if our lives depended on my understanding.
“The real war is coming and we will not clash with swords and spells this time but with industry. With economy. Right now, the Humans have the lead. If nobody steps in to challenge them, the leaders of this city will decide the fate of Archetellos unopposed.”
I couldn’t help remembering what Linda had told me about the origin of Hendricks’ stolen name. Deamar. The first creature who declared war against humankind.
“So, you came here to…?”
“To stop this Niles Company for good. The citizens of Sunder may be cheering them now, believing that they’re just here to bring jobs and toasters and automobiles, but a ruse is being pulled. I don’t know what it is. Not yet. But this city is far too willing to close its eyes to the truth. I am here to open them up.”
I was conscious of each breath. Each moment. I was fully awake for the first time in years and it was all because of Hendricks. He was magnetic. Inspiring. Terrifying. The dark thoughts that slowed down my days vanished whenever he opened his mouth.
I did my best to ignore the hint of desperation in his voice. To not look too closely at his bloodshot eyes or focus on the way his fingers were shaking. The hardest thing to get used to was his eyes. There was something strange about them. Something more subtle than the obvious changes made to his now-unfamiliar face.