Spectre of War

by Kin S. Law

  Hargreaves made her exit brazenly, through the front, with her hair still mussed by her encounter. Let the guards and the dancer think what they would. She had what she wanted. Or did she? Now Vanessa Hargreaves wasn’t sure, and as she left she felt the cold weight of the knob of Wonderland in her hand. It felt bigger than it was, like a doorknob, and not something the size of a cherry.

  Hargreaves hadn’t thought this through, really. She had come looking for a case to solve, to feel like the inspector she used to be. In a well-ordered society, the inspectors would track down whodunit and arrest them. The culprit would be locked up, preferably forever, and society would be a little safer for it. Cut and dried… but here on the Verdurous, she doubted the barge would have space or spare victuals to house a murderer indefinitely. Half the visitors had probably killed out of survival. She knew Zampano had. She knew the crew of the pirate airship Huckleberry had, and Hargreaves would trust Clemens and the crew with her life. But sadly, she wasn’t there now, and she missed her ragtag pirate crew dearly.

  If anybody stepped out of line on the Verdurous, they would probably be thrown off the top deck and into the calm depths of the Sargasso. The gyre of aeon water was already full of the refuse of a dozen countries, pulled into the whorl by unseen currents. What were a few more pieces of rubbish?

  Now Hargreaves knew what to look for, she saw the dancer Meredith had henna markings all down one arm, suggestions of peacocks and flowers up and down the smooth brown limb. When she moved just the right way, she saw the little circle of henna that marked the crook of her elbow. It was the perfect place to stick a needle. Hargreaves shuddered, but she flicked the girl a coin that Meredith caught appreciatively. Hargreaves held a finger to her mouth in a gesture of silence before she stepped the rest of the way out of the Dusky Forest. As she did, she thought she heard Meredith’s voice drift to her ears with the jingle of bells.

  “It’s no use going back to yesterday. You were a different person then.”

  But when she looked back, there was no sign that the dancer had ever opened her lips.

  For unfathomable reasons, Hargreaves clung to Singh’s hateful bauble as she made her way deeper into the decks. Vagrants were not hard to find. They lived in the bad places, the slums and the bilges of the world. Hargreaves couldn’t hope to bring anybody to justice, let alone the number that all those needle pinpricks suggested. It put her in mind of Caesar.

  So what was she doing heading deeper into the dark decks of the Verdurous’ bowels? There was something she was looking for, she knew that much, but if asked Vanessa Hargreaves had no ready answer. This wasn’t something that could be fixed with a cuppa or a good pint; this was something she wanted to sort out before she left with the Schwartzhaus and Zampano.

  Past the nightlife portions of the barge, the Verdurous was laid out like any other settlement. Vast levels devoted to manufactories and workshops, sprinkled clusters of dwellings like anthills dug out of the firmament. A glittering set of rooms housed a meat-cutting floor, with enormous, slick black Atlantic tuna strung up like hanged men. There was a whole deck full of steam, with people covered head-to-toe in boiler suits and goggles in it. It smelled strongly of sea salt. Hargreaves checked the plaque on a lift—the engine room and water distillery, where the Sargasso was drawn to fuel the great boilers and condensed for drinking water. Next to it, a room for sorting all the junk in the water kept many people busy sorting and tossing. There were bicycles, and old medicine bottles, and wind-up tin toys, amongst stranger things.

  She first noticed the people following her when she passed a pawn shop on the lower levels. Hargreaves was not unused to the behavior exhibited by the glinting pairs of eyes in the darkness: lurking, scrabbling, and oozing through the passages, trying not to let her catch them staring. It was a lot like the fans of her picture house series back in London Town. Sometimes they would pop out of blind alleys and ask for Hargreaves’ autograph. Here, Hargreaves feared the eyes would not come out unless en masse, and with other glinting things to hand.

  Instead of clutching her duster close to her body and exhibiting the body language of a victim, Hargreaves walked straight and with purpose, keeping her coat open and her back straighter than a railroad tie. She kept her blouse titillating and her hand on her Tranter, ready at a moment to pull it out on some foolish soul who jumped the gun.

  As she went along she counted her blessings. Thank you, Scotland Yard, for all those acting lessons. Hargreaves tried to embody herself with the qualities of somebody who frequented the slums of a mobile pirate market every day. A loan shark, perhaps, or a high-stakes bookie. She imagined stepping into a space between packing crates and haranguing the women there for protection money. It was a game she played that allowed her not to feel afraid in a terrifying place. It let her keep her head as she turned a corner and looked for the nearest way back up into the light. But every blessing had a razor-sharp lining. She was counting on her undercover acting because she had left her carpetbag full of weapons with Ivanov. Stupid, stupid.

  Instead of upwards, Hargreaves rounded a bulkhead to find a narrow channel into the very bottom of the barge. The hull sloped down and away into a fogged gloom, where the bilge sloshed. If she turned around she would be showing herself as a lost lamb, ripe for the pickings. So the inspector forged ahead.

  At the bottom of the barge, there was a slick of incredibly salty water sloshing slowly back and forth. It was strong enough to leave the air brackish and harsh. The rafters were hung here and there with sickly green lights, almost as if Hargreaves had accidentally discovered a sort of rotting underworld below the confectioner’s glitz of the market deck. Her watertight boots were a centimeter deep in the wash, and it left a green film on her raised heel.

  Hargreaves stood on a landing that branched off into eight or so platform walkways, assembled out of the sort of flotsam that was dredged out of the Sargasso Sea. Tin and tarpaulin, cable and old meat cans. After taking a moment, Hargreaves stepped confidently out onto one, even though she had no idea where it went. Immediately she could feel it rock and give under her, but she kept going. The feeling of multiple eyes following her from every nook and cranny had only grown stronger, though they were hidden in the dark.

  The walkway led through the enormous bilge that ran under the entire barge. Out over the sloshing bilge, it was possible to see a little farther, but nothing there pleased the eye. This had once been where the Verdurous took on water as it hauled heavy ships back and forth across the world. Their displacement left high water marks on the deck above and on the bulkheads. Half the supports were rusted, replaced with thick beams and columns that looked like they were harvested from wrecks. Vanessa Hargreaves felt like she was in an enclosed marsh dotted with the carcasses of trees, and not inside a vessel.

  Hargreaves started running when she counted six people following her. She could see the walkways jostling, their submerged surfaces sending out wakes across the bilge. Worst of all there were two ahead of her, at the end of the walkway. So at one of the thick supports she took a sudden turn and sprinted off down a thin plank, her boots raising a spray of drops.

  As she predicted, Hargreaves managed to score a few seconds lead on her pursuers before the bilge began to roil with the ripples of many footsteps. Basic Art of War tosh, really; she who acts first shall win the day. Her training was comforting as it came rushing to mind. Afternoons in sun-dappled window seats spent reading old war texts from the Orient, accounts by Arthur Wellesley of Waterloo, and practical urban tactics from the likes of Dupin.

  But really, there was no salve for the terror of running from fiends in the dark. And they were fiends, of that she had no doubt. When the bilge rocked particularly strongly, she caught a glimpse of them through the fog: emaciated bodies wreathed by filthy rags, moving like shades across the drowned planks. One of them had a knife, a happy dirk that shone in the green light.

  Hargreaves put her training to good use as she ran past a thick pile of forged iron suppo
rts, a strong remnant of the original ship’s bones. The edifice of riveted beams climbed high to the ceiling, and it had also acquired a sort of islet of detritus piled high over the water line. Everything was filthy and green, but it was dry and the surface firm to step on.

  Even from high ground, she was only able to shoot the one with the dirk as he came barreling past. Not an instant passed after that before another man was atop her back. Where the blazes had he come from?

  She threw her weight just so, tipping the assailant forward in a practiced judo throw. The pile of reeking cloth, skin, and bone tumbled through the legs of yet another fiend. The two of them tumbled over the edge of the islet, and there were the burbling screams of the tangled drowned.

  Then they were all over her, and Hargreaves felt the stab of a needle drive into her collarbone, missing her vein by an inch. Something hard battered her cheek and she felt surprise in addition to pain. It had been a naked fist, nothing but skin and fragile bones that crackled as they struck her relatively wholesome, well-kept body. But the fiend’s broken hand did not stop him, and Hargreaves twisted as best as she could to avoid the swarm of kicks and stabs raining on her. The dastards were filling up the knobs in their hands. She could see the globes filling with droplets of her life, turning the glass to onyx in the green light.

  Through the pinpricks of pain and her focused attempts to sock a few of them with fisticuffs, Hargreaves found herself strangely empathetic. How many of these needles did it take to kill the woman on the deck? It was a million paper cuts, death from a slow bloodletting. And if there weren’t only three of them, Hargreaves might have stood no chance of surviving.

  She felt three of the needles sink in before she pulled the .22 Tranter out and shot another one of them through the skull. In the dim light, the blood from the back of his head looked black, like an unnatural liquid that filled the air with a rank coppery smell. Was it a woman? Or a man? The body that fell to the water was too thin and ragged to tell.

  The others shrank back, torn between a desire to live and a desire to live somewhere else. Hargreaves could read it in eyes now visible through layers of rags; a glazed, distant look, as if they were only visiting on this plane and their real lives were going on elsewhere. Just stepped out for a tea break; be back in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. The glass knobs in their hands were the doors to another world. Hargreaves looked around at the destitution of the bilge, and now she could see the slum hovels that had sprung up at every dry spot available. There were at least a dozen pairs of eyes in the distance, shades who were not quite so brave as the ones right before her. Maybe the life these fiends were headed back to was one more worth living than this one.

  Instead of shooting another one, Hargreaves drew the Bowie knife she had the good sense of keeping on her person and instead of in the carpet bag. Her clothes were already spotted with dark drops, so when she drew a shallow cut across her arm it wasn’t anything inconvenient, merely painful. She was already too highly strung to feel it very much. Hargreaves let the drip go into a nearby vessel, a sort of trencher that might have once been a sink or a plaster fountain. It elicited a gasp from the denizens. The blood was fresh, the scent almost flowery compared to the sick fluids that ran in their own veins.

  “There. There’s your trough of blood,” said Hargreaves. She thought of Maple Cross as the drip slowly lined the bottom of the trough. “Though I warn you, what you find there may make you want to come back to this Tartarus. My life is… not for the faint of heart.”

  The nearby shades fell upon it with a fury as soon as Hargreaves stepped away. As she bound up her cut with a scrap of her blouse, they came from every corner of the bilge hold, flowing past her in a rippling wave. Ignoring her, they dove for the sacrifice of blood, pushing and jostling each other as they dipped the needles in the fluid. The first of them fell to the ground, the glass knobs pulsing at the crooks of their arms. Their faces were vacant, blissful, and then as the stuff took a dark turn they simply weren’t.

  Suddenly half the rabbit-chasers lay incoherently writhing on the floor, and others stared in horror at the empty globes they had just put inside their veins. Hargreaves wondered if they were seeing the pictures of Sergeant Cook’s mangled, plague-ridden body. She wondered if they were experiencing the engine room of the Nidhogg, that terrible place with the mangled lives holding up a city in the sky. She wondered if they were seeing Maple Cross, but she couldn’t be bothered to ask. She was too busy running.

  It wasn’t until Hargreaves was out of danger, back to the front of the Dusky Forest did she grow faint. When she looked down she noticed her forearm was drenched in red, but the arm felt distant, not quite a part of her. Had she cut too deep? The thought drifted through, looking for an alarm bell to ring.

  Hargreaves clutched at the ramshackle tin of the club for support. When the arms came round to hold her she nearly shot the dancer called Meredith, who had come out to see what was climbing the walls.

  “Come inside. You’re scaring away the customers,” said Meredith. She had a musical voice, the same voice Hargreaves heard leaving the club the first time.

  “The dealer… Singh….”

  “He’s not here,” said the dancer. “I am pretty sure you scared him away for a few weeks at least.”

  “Good….” said Hargreaves.

  Meredith led Hargreaves into the club, and back into the alley where Singh had been subdued. They ducked into the second storage container, where there was a storage room for liquors and a simple curtain partitioning a performer’s ready room. The dancer sat the inspector down on a dressing stool and put some water on to boil, with a kettle on a nearby coal brazier. When the water was boiling, the dancer put long strips of linen in and wrung them out to clean Hargreaves’ cuts.

  “Why are you helping me?” said Hargreaves as the dancer bound the longest cut tight with a cooling liniment.

  “You were kind,” said Meredith. The blood was stark against the dancer’s pale skin and henna marks. “Though the coin you gave to me will not replace Singh’s custom.”

  “Apologies,” said Hargreaves.

  “Do not concern yourself over it,” said Meredith. “I have wanted to see someone plant Singh one for a long time.”

  “Then why give him your life’s blood?” said Hargreaves. “Why, when his poison merely makes all those wretches living under your feet?”

  “You have seen the bilges,” said Meredith. Hargreaves slowly recounted what happened after she left the Dusky Forest. At the end of it, Meredith sighed. “It is not supposed to be like this.”

  “How else can it be?” Hargreaves was beginning to recover a little strength. Meredith set a cup of broth before her that had been in a small pot, and the stuff helped a little more. There was a silence as Hargreaves hesitated before sipping at the broth gingerly.

  “You gave them blood yourself,” said Meredith. “Why did you do it?”

  Hargreaves had no ready answer for that. Without concern for modesty, Meredith began to strip off her dancer’s bells and veils. The body beneath was lithe, but well-cared-for, and she had fine proportions. The clothes she drew from a small locker and on over herself were tough, but showed as much skin as her costume. This woman needed no training to appear confident and not to be mucked with.

  “I suppose,” said Hargreaves slowly. “I suppose those people must feel as if they are traveling on airships when they take the… the substance. This Wonderland.”

  “Headlong down a rabbit hole. Yes,” said Meredith. “That’s how they describe it for me.”

  “You are used to caring for wounds. You have done this many times… but you have not tried it?”

  “I’m not going to be here for long. I go from place to place; I don’t need an escape,” said Meredith. She sounded almost merry, but it could be because Hargreaves was fading in and out. The voice drifted out at times. “I’ve lived the things those rabbit-chasers want to experience. I can always sell a little blood to get by. Some of them get a l
ittle too addicted to it, okay. Not my problem. Someone else will come along with another knob for them soon enough. But you’ve lived it too. And it’s not enough.”

  “I wanted to share it. Spread the misery around,” admitted Hargreaves. “This stuff has aeon in it… I can feel it. And aeons react to emotions. I think it helped me to see other people reacting to what I’ve gone through… it makes me feel stronger.” She had to stop to take a breath and steady the spinning room. How much blood had she lost? “I have an objective measure of how well I’ve handled things. I know I’m not crazy.”

  “It doesn’t always show them what you’ve seen,” said Meredith. “That’s just an easy way of telling someone about it. Sometimes… sometimes it shows them things too true to see. Too blinding.”

  “You have tried it,” said Hargreaves now.

  “Just the once. And maybe you should too,” finished the redheaded girl. She was finished dressing now, but she pulled her skirt up to reveal a spot on her thigh marked out with henna whorls. “Give me the one you have. The knob you got from Singh.”

  Hargreaves, in a state of almost dull compliance, took the Wonderland knob out of her pocket and handed it to the other beautiful woman. Instead of taking it, Meredith clasped Hargreaves’ hand to her skin, pressing the needle tip into her thigh. The woman’s flesh was warm and ruddy, pulsing gently with the same sort of good feeling that animated her dance. Meredith’s head leaned back, and the expression was a blend of lip-biting pleasure and a frown of pain.

  Then the dancer was gone, her dull colored hairpiece and traveler’s roll surely hiding her amongst the crowd. If she bade Hargreaves any words of farewell Hargreaves did not remember. She was busy staring at the glass knob in her hand. With a drop of Meredith’s blood in it, in the light of the coals and the warm yellow lamps, the Wonderland inside the globe was the rich crimson of a ripe pomegranate.