Foreign Devils

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Carnelia sulked into the common area of the tent. ‘Yes, Tata?’

  ‘Not you, Carnelia. I’ve been looking at your face all day. You may go.’ He waved his hand, and slurped some whiskey, sighing again.

  Rumans fascinate me by what they’re able to ignore, in this case his youngest daughter’s look of outrage.

  ‘Secundus! Livia! My legate!’

  Miss Livia appeared, still wearing her riding leathers, a sawn-off Hellfire blunderbuss strapped to her hip. Life in the Hardscrabble Territories had been kind to her, if not clean. There was a rime of sweat-lined dust on her collar and she was wiping her hands on a dirty towel as she approached, but her face was bright, if tanned, and her eyes shone with fierce intelligence. The child she carried in her stomach was just beginning to alter her slim figure after three months, but, if anything, her pregnant state had increased her activity, as if she wanted to do and see everything she could before the child came into the world.

  Fisk followed after Livia, his grey hat removed and his hair wet from his post-trail ablutions. My friend and partner for more than ten years now, but life, rank and marriage had been drawing us apart. Before Livia he was pained, and incomplete – there’s no other way to say it. The meanness of the trail, the loss of his family, the necessities of living on this wide expanse of harsh earth – all had coarsened him. Wounded him. Once, it seemed, wounded him irrevocably. Yet. There came Livia. Now, Fisk was, if not whole – some things cannot be healed – at least content.

  ‘What of the trail, children? Will there be stretchers?’ Cornelius asked as Secundus emerged from his quarters – a partition, really, of the command tent. ‘What awaits us?’

  Fisk pulled out a wicker seat for his wife, dusted his trousers with his hands, and sat down. Cornelius snapped his fingers at Lupina, motioning for her to be free with the whiskey. Lupina poured a dram or two for Fisk, who cupped the tumbler in his hands and breathed the fumes deeply before sipping. Livia motioned Lupina away. ‘I must see to the legionnaires.’

  Fisk swallowed a measure of whiskey, and said, ‘Tomorrow we go north, a few miles to get around that gulch, and then east again. We should hit the spur by evening of the following night, barring any other gulleys or sundered earth. Or stretchers.’ He glanced at me. I knew the look.

  ‘In your opinion,’ Cornelius asked, his voice excited. ‘What are the chances we’ll encounter vaettir?’ Patricians. Sometimes they don’t even have the sense to be afraid.

  ‘Not something I’m willing to speculate on, sir. They are always around. Or never. You just can’t know.’

  ‘I would not have thought they would be found so far east.’

  I stepped forward. ‘We are still in the Hardscrabble Territories. The vaettir travel fast, as you all know. Time was, they were seen in the thousand-acre wood. We are not so far east yet to be out of their territory.’

  Cornelius glanced at me, sniffed, no doubt slightly perturbed that I had the temerity to pipe up during his first drink, yet Fisk and I were the experts in these lands.

  ‘It shouldn’t be much longer, Father,’ Secundus said. He caught Lupina’s eye and removed a crystal tumbler from a tray. She hustled around the table to pour him a measure. ‘If our maps are correct, after we manoeuvre around this gulch it’s a straight shot to the Dvergar spur.’

  Cornelius harrumphed. ‘For years I told Gallius that we’d need a mechanized baggage train line south! Years! He was too intent on scratching all of the taxes he could out of the protectorate and spending all his free time whoring in Novorum.’

  ‘Gallius?’ Fisk asked, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Oh,’ Cornelius said, beginning to smile. Secundus joined him. ‘A little nickname for Rutilius.’

  ‘The commander at Fort Brust?’

  ‘The same.’ Cornelius’ smile had taken on monumental proportions.

  ‘I imagine there’s some shared history between you,’ Fisk said, noncommittal.

  ‘An unfortunate matter.’ Cornelius’ smile grew predatory. ‘When we were both legates during Nerva’s governorship in Gall, he became smitten with a dancing girl in one of the theatres there.’

  Fisk stared, sipping. ‘That doesn’t quite explain that particular nickname.’

  ‘A Gallish girl, she had flaxen hair and was quite thin and he spent a fortune on her, lavished her with gifts, attended every performance where she pantomimed Loumdima’s capitulation to Aemilianus’ army.’

  ‘I’d think they’d prefer Our Heavenly War, what with all the Rumans getting bloodied in that one,’ Fisk suggested.

  ‘No, the Gallish people do not bear us much umbrage for the events of a thousand years ago. However,’ he chuckled. ‘They take their revenge in smaller ways.’

  Secundus laughed out loud. ‘Of course, I wasn’t there, though I’ve heard this story enough times to tell it myself. After wooing her for weeks, he had her brought to his villa for a private audience.’

  ‘Private?’ Fisk said, shaking his head. It doesn’t take a Pandar to know what that means.

  ‘Alone, he disrobed her. Trembling.’ Cornelius slurped more whiskey and then giggled, a surprising sound coming from a proconsul who once ruled Rume itself under Tamberlaine’s watchful eye. He dipped his index finger in his whiskey, licked the tip, and then made it rise like a growing erection. ‘The tension grew. Rutilius’ spear, ever the symbol of the legions, became rampant.’ Cornelius laughed again and drained his glass. ‘Imagine his surprise when he realized that the Gallish lass possessed a spear of her own.’

  Secundus slapped his knee, howling with laughter. Cornelius was overcome with mirth, unable to call for more whiskey. When the laughter subsided and the senator reclaimed control of himself, he brushed his moustache, smoothing the errant hairs, and popped his cigar back into his mouth. ‘Afterwards, he had her – I mean him – crucified.’

  ‘Ia help us, Father, you’re worse than a child,’ Livia said. ‘You shouldn’t be repeating such stories of your peers.’

  ‘Oh, Rutilius is a good chap, reliable as stone. A shame his one bit of foolishness ended so … pointedly.’

  Father and son erupted with laughter again.

  ‘Well, love,’ Livia said, placing her hand on Fisk’s. ‘I will leave you to my father and brother’s dubious company. I hope they’ll act befitting their age.’ She glanced at Secundus and stood. As she passed her father, she laid a hand on Cornelius’ shoulder. ‘Or rank.’

  With that she disappeared in the folds of the tent to retrieve her medical kit and remove herself to one of the optio’s dwellings to offer whatever bloodwork the legionnaires might need. I’d watched her there before at her labours. Half the men of the thirteenth were in love with her and the other half in love with the idea of her – a pregnant patrician woman, a medic, carrying Hellfire at her hip. She was formidable. She lanced their boils and mixed them balms and talcums and bound their wounds while they looked upon her like she was some goddess incarnate upon the earth, holding her in a talismanic position reserved for revered mothers, gods, and the legion’s eagle. Soldiers are terribly predictable. But Livia has that effect on people.

  After her departure, and when the sounds of the camp quieted, four legionnaires muscled in a large box, removed the lid with crowbars, and very carefully lifted up and stood upright a tall still figure while Cornelius gestured with the tip of his cigar as to where they should place it.

  ‘A beauty, isn’t he?’ the senator said, looking over the stuffed figure of the vaettir.

  ‘He is impressive, sir,’ I said. ‘But hardly beautiful.’

  Fisk remained silent, staring at the figure. Whatever taxidermist had prepared the carcass of Berith, the vaettir, they had replaced the eyes with smooth, milky glass, so that the fourteen-foot-tall creature seemed to stare into infinity as an unpainted stone statue might. But frightful he was; tall, his head in the shadows of the tent, the taxidermist had set the vaettir in a pose as if he were about to leap – legs flexed, clawed hands open and eager, lips p
ulled back in a snarl, showing sharp teeth.

  ‘Took the taxidermist two mounts to get the posture right. The damned fool had never seen an elf and I had to explain to him how they leap about,’ Cornelius said. ‘But I am well pleased, now. It will make quite a stir back in Rume.’

  I looked at the mount. Maybe longer than I should have. Whatever they are, the vaettir and the dvergar are the two native intelligent races here in Occidentalia and knowing Rumans – even Cornelius – I would imagine that somewhere, at some time, he might’ve been party to the mounting of a dvergar.

  ‘Damn straight,’ Cornelius said, walking around the mounted figure of the stretcher. ‘That jumped-up whore’s son didn’t realize he prodded the bear in the balls with a pointy stick.’ Cigar in his mouth, whiskey glass in hand, he reached up with his free hand and rapped on the vaettir’s ribcage right where its heart would be: the exact spot where Cornelius had shot the stretcher, punching a fist-sized hole in the creature’s chest cavity, killing it.

  Rubus, the chief secretary, entered the tent and cleared his throat, lightly.

  Cornelius turned, moving smoothly despite the whiskey and artificial leg. ‘Rubus! What do you think of this bastard? Fierce, is he not?’

  ‘Terrifying, sir,’ he said, and it sounded like he meant it. Rubus’ hair was shorn very short and on a metal chain around his neck were a set of ground glass oculars. I’d guess, due to the shortness of his hair, he might’ve seen some of the damage a single vaettir could wreak on the human body. In particular, stretchers have a penchant for scalpings. ‘It is the kalends of Quintilius, sir.’

  ‘Ah,’ Cornelius said, looking a little grumpy. ‘Already?’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Cornelius laughed. ‘Back in Rume there’ll be a great amount of fornication today!’

  ‘The Ludi Florae?’ Secundus asked. From what I heard around the fire, it was some sort of naughty Ruman carnival, but no one in the Protectorate or Territories celebrated it. ‘The old gods rear their fleshy heads. The plebs will be fucking in the alleyways.’

  Father and son both laughed and then, together, noticed Rubus’ scarlet face. The secretary blushed to his roots.

  ‘Well then. Ahem. Place the parchment and device over here then, on the table. I can do the rest,’ Cornelius said. He moved around the table, limping only slightly.

  An intrigued look crossed Secundus’ face and Fisk sat up, quaffing the rest of his whiskey. Rubus left the tent briefly and returned – his blush now gone – carrying a small wooden box wrought with silver pellum wards and threaded with etched intaglios deep in the wood. Waiting until Rubus left the tent, Cornelius flipped the catch on the box’s lid, revealing a velvet interior containing a warded silver knife, a stoppered inkwell, a bowl with a curiously fluted mouth, a stone, and an ornate device. The device itself was small, no larger than a human skull, and resembled the filigreed daemon-light lanterns and fixtures that decorated the Cornelian. Wrought of a detailed webwork of silver, it glowed and the sense of the infernal was strong near it – the device had a sulphuric, charnel smell.

  Cornelius removed the items from the box, placing the inkwell at one corner of the parchment, the knife at another, the box itself on a third and the stone in the fourth so that the parchment remained flat on the table.

  He held the device in his hand, staring into the low light emanating from it.

  ‘This device,’ he said, placing it on the parchment, ‘is the reason for Ruman pre-eminence.’ He waved his hands toward where the legionnaires bedded down in their tents. ‘Not Hellfire guns. Not steamships and mechanized baggage trains.’

  ‘What is it?’ Fisk asked.

  ‘We call it the Quotidian, as a little joke. If you used this device every day, well, you’d be bloodless in a month. It is not a humdrum little trifle. The way I understand it, it is a sympathetic daemon device,’ Cornelius said. ‘Secundus has seen it before—’

  ‘Yes, but it is always fascinating,’ Secundus said.

  ‘It is not a secret, by any means, but it is very valuable and expensive to create.’ He looked at the thing sitting there on the desk and then his gaze returned to Fisk and his son. ‘Eventually, you both will possess similar devices. Or more than one. Indeed, the higher you rise in life, the more Quotidians you will possess. It’s rumoured that Tamberlaine himself has hundreds.’ Cornelius sat down at the desk again and lifted the knife. ‘Currently, I have five.

  ‘I don’t know how it works, truly. I leave those matters to the engineers to devise. But I’ve been told that inside of this,’ he said, looking at the device, ‘is a one of a pair of daemons that are inextricably linked.’ Cornelius looked around the tent, as if reluctant to begin. His gaze fell upon me. ‘You, dwarf. Come here.’

  Suddenly uncomfortable having a senator holding a silver knife with an infernal device in front of him, I stepped forward slowly.

  ‘You’re always loitering about? Eh? Well, this time it’s to your loss,’ he said, face becoming grim. I’ve oft remarked how Rumans – and Cornelius in particular – can swing from comical to deathly serious in a moment’s notice. And I’m eternally surprised that neither state lessens the impact of the other. ‘Put out your hand.’

  ‘My hand?’

  His jaw tightened, lips pursed.

  ‘Go on, Shoe,’ Fisk said. ‘There’s nothing for it but to do what he says.’

  I extended my hand. Quick as a mink, Cornelius slashed my palm – slashed deep, too – then snatched up the bowl and began to collect the blood pooling in my cupped hand. Rumans will always take deep and fast when offered. I’ve known that since I was a brawling little brat on my mother’s mountain.

  When the senator was satisfied there was enough of the red stuff, he unstopped the inkwell, added a measure of the ink into the still warm blood and swirled it about. When it had mixed to his satisfaction, he repositioned the Quotidian device on the parchment, unsnapped a small latch on top of it revealing a mouth to what I could only think was some sort of reservoir, and poured the unclotted mixture of blood and ink into the device. I motioned for Lupina to bring me a wrapping for my hand, and when she was slow to move, I retrieved a cloth napkin from the table and mashed it into my palm.

  The glow from the Quotidian became more intense, pulsing, and small wisps of vapour emerged and rose to join the blue tabac smoke hanging above us in the lantern light. Then, with a lurch, the device began to move. It slid across the parchment at a furious pace: in its passage it left a trail of ink and blood. The air of the tent filled with a scratching, hissing noise. The thing was writing.

  ‘This Quotidian is paired with Tamberlaine’s own,’ Cornelius said, looking away from the device’s movements. Lupina came forward holding the decanter of whiskey and poured him another glass. ‘In this way are the Emperor’s orders disseminated throughout the Empire, almost instantaneously.’

  For a while, Cornelius, Secundus, and Fisk simply watched and drank whiskey as the Quotidian smoked and dashed about the parchment. Lupina handed me a wad of raw cotton, a dour look on her face. I mashed it into my palm. Eventually, Cornelius glanced at me and said, ‘Take up a glass, dwarf. Lupina!’ He pointed at me. ‘Whiskey. You’ve paid for that drink in blood.’ Then he smiled, curling his mustachios upwards. ‘You’re a freeman and a stout little fellow, after all, and a good friend to our family. Have a seat.’ With his bear-foot, he pushed out a wicker chair for me to sit in.

  Rumans are mercurial. I took my seat, making deference to the senator by bowing my head, but all the while aware he could have me crucified tomorrow, on a whim. My hand throbbed with each pumping of my heart and I held my hand over my head to lessen the flow.

  Cornelius watched me, implacably.

  When the Quotidian stopped its movements a few minutes later, Cornelius didn’t move to pick it up. ‘It’s got to cool, a bit,’ he said, sipping his drink. ‘The blasted thing doesn’t get hot enough to scorch the parchment, strangely, but it’s hot enough to burn your hand. It’s as if it’s
got a taste for blood.’

  Finally, he gave the bowl to Lupina to wash and returned the Quotidian and its accoutrements to the box. From a salt-well, he liberally dusted the parchment, allowing the granules to absorb any surplus ink mixture, and then picked up the paper and began to read.

  He stopped abruptly. ‘Get Livia in here,’ he said to me. ‘Now.’

  TWO

  7 Nones, Quintilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis

  I found Livia washing her hands in a bowl of bloody water underneath a daemon lantern. The optios sat near her, chatting in the easy, loose way that soldiers do when not actively on duty and camp has been pitched. She smiled as she noticed my approach.

  ‘Ma’am? Your father requests your presence.’

  ‘I’m almost through here, Mr Ilys. I’ll be with him shortly.’

  ‘He was adamant,’ I said.

  ‘He’s always impatient.’ She wiped her lancets, scalpels, and various sharp pointy things and began to place them them in her bloodkit next to the bottles of acetum and tersus incendia. ‘You’re injured, Shoe. Give me your hand.’ When she’s distracted, Livia will return to using my nickname. And I’d had that particular one so long – Shoestring – that I even thought of myself that way.

  I gave her my hand and she turned it over in her own. ‘So calloused. It’s like they’re made of stone.’

  ‘A gift from my mother.’

  She nodded, thoughtful. Picking out the acetum, and some cotton bandages, she cleansed my palm and wrapped it with gauze. ‘Aurelius says that one’s hands are the truest glimpse into the character of a man.’

  “He is loud and portentous, yet his hands are soft,” I said, grinning, giving her one of the most oft-quoted lines from Bless’ His Infernal Demise. New Damnation’s Cornicen had begun printing that play in serial, and I’d taken an earnest liking to it despite my obvious lack of any sort of education. Much to Fisk’s irritation, I’d even taken to memorizing some of the more penetrating bits.

  ‘What’s the emergency this time, Shoe?’