Foreign Devils

by John Hornor Jacobs

  When I rose to enter my tent to find what warmth and comfort my blankets and sleeping roll would provide, quite chilled from the easterly mountain wind, the moon was fat and white as a grub burrowing into the field of night above me, casting the Gemina, the Big Rill gurgling around us, the scrub-brush and bramblewrack on the shore, the gambel trees beyond in a sickly-strange, washed-out half-light.

  Standing slowly, I shook the blood back into my feet, and stretched out the kinks in my back. A habit of old, I scanned the shorelines. The path of the Big Rill, in this part of the Hardscrabble Territories, was a snaking one, and the banks of the river to the west were eroded and quite high, twenty and even thirty feet above the surface of the water. There were many outcroppings of boulders and granite promontories, scrubbed with pine standing dark and narrow like spears pointing toward the sky.

  I was about to turn away when something made me stop.

  On the pine-wreathed promontory, far to the west, something came from the trees.

  For a moment, I doubted my eyes, since I had been slumbering only a short while ago. There it was, a vaettir coming from the woods to stand openly on the promontory’s peak. I thought maybe it was simply a man out in the forests at night. But the moonlight showed it as if it stood in the rays of an invisible sun, starkly visible. Its massive frame, in proportion to everything around it, gave me no doubt that it was a stretcher.

  And it watched me.

  Gynth, the stretcher had said. We are kin.

  Even from that great distance, I knew this. There was a shiver of recognition within me, something that went beyond predator and prey, something that went beyond hunter and the hunted.

  It had saved me once, but still I thought of weapons. I had my knife in my boot, the silver one that slew Agrippina and put The Crimson Man back in his daemon hand. Slowly, I eased my Hellfire from their holsters and held them, waiting.

  The vaettir was a half-mile away and I had a river between us.

  It moved, almost faster than the eye could perceive. Leaping from the promontory’s peak, scrabbling from rock to rock like some possessed goat traversing a mountain-side, arcing through the air, landing in a crouch and surveying its position and then launching itself in the air again, downward, ever downward, until it stood on the rocky shore of the river.

  It paused then, staring at me.

  Its eyes were like black pools glittering with moonlight, and there was a strange discoloration about its face – its eyes and mouth were dark, bruised even. The creature’s mouth hung open – its matching rows of razored teeth visible even from this distance – but the most curious thing was that it was dressed like some revenant vorduluk recently having pulled itself from the earth. Its clawed hands were dirty and it was dressed in what looked more like a shroud wrapping than a woman’s nightgown. About its shoulders was the skin of a wolf, possibly, or a bear -- but uncured, and a mantle of gore and grime streaked away from its shoulders.

  The elf looked at me, unblinking. Only the width of the Big Rill stood between us now. My six-guns would never reach it from this distance.

  Gynth, it had said.

  Behind me I heard a heavy footfall. ‘Hello, dwarf, fancy meeting you up here,’ a voice said to my rear, rough and cold, making me want to turn but I dare not let my attention wander from the vaettir. An inch of skin squarely between my shoulder-blades began to itch.

  The stretcher moved his gaze to whoever was standing behind me. I turned as fast as I could, backed away, holding one pistol on each.

  The newcomer was the Tempus guard I had encountered below-decks. His grin stretched wider now, and his eyes were blacked to glittering onyx. Daemonheld. Possessed. One of Beleth’s little leave-behinds.

  ‘Rend your flesh, I will,’ the possessed man said, crouching, his arms out, fingers splayed like claws. In a flash, I saw how similar the possessed and the vaettir were.

  Falling backward, I fired; the boom of my Hellfire six-guns tremendous in the still night. There was movement and I smelled the heavy scents of hellfire and sulphur. I was dimly aware of movement off to my right. The vaettir I had come to think of as Gynth raced toward the still surface of the Big Rill, arms and legs a blur. It ran over the surface of the water.

  They move like light on water, I’ve said before, but I always meant that metaphorically. I did not know it was true.

  In seconds, Gynth had crossed the Big Rill and with a thud he was on the deck and standing over me, blocking my view of the daemonheld guard.

  Gynth gave a great screech that descended into a bellow. It sent all my hairs standing on end.

  The Tempus guard took a step back at the sound – there were yells and exclamations of alarm from below – and then the vaettir was airborne, great clawed hands held out. Gynth snatched up the guard like a doll and whipped him about in his hands.

  The possessed guard thrashed and ripped like a shark plucked from the sea in the stretcher’s grip, but he was no match for the vaettir’s inhuman strength. As they rose into the air over the deck, almost faster than the eye could follow, the elf twisted his great hands and one of the guard’s arms distorted and I heard a distinct pop as the ball-joint was ripped from its socket. Before landing, the vaettir gave the man’s head another quick swipe, nearly taking it off. The stretcher let the guard fall and then, at the very edge of the Gemina’s roof, he landed lightly on his feet and launched himself into the air again. When he landed on the surface of the Big Rill, he was already running, silvering a wake behind him.

  The Gemina was coming to life around me, roused by my gunfire. Cries of alarm sounded and yellow kreosote lanterns and daemonlights were unbanked.

  I approached the crumpled body of the Tempus guard, guns still out and trained on his form.

  There was life in him still. The right side of his face was a ruined, bloody mess where the vaettir had swiped him with that terrible hand. The rest of his face was unmarred and his remaining eye fixed on me with malevolent glee.

  From his chest pumped blood, black and shining in the moonlight.

  From a bullet wound.

  I raised my eyes from the dying thing to the far shore. The vaettir stood there, one hand upraised and a curious expression on its face. Gynth. We are kin, it had said. Thoughts of Neruda in the Plaza de Monstruó. Thoughts of hundreds of dvergar voices calling out in outrage and anger.

  ‘I’m sorry I said your mouth looks like an arsehole,’ I whispered to the thing. As I did, it turned and bounded back up the cliff, to the promontory’s peak, and disappeared into the woods.

  It was then the cries of the other Tempus guards filled the air and the bright, high-pitched voice of the sweetboy cried, ‘Murderer! Here! Murderer!’

  TWENTY

  4 Ides of Sextilius, 2638 ex Ruma Immortalis

  Only Cornelius’ papers kept them from hanging me. If I’d told them I was shooting at the stretcher and accidentally hit the guard, they’d have broken my hands so that I’d never hold a gun again, or worse, what with my lesser, native blood. The Tempus Union was its own militia operating by Imperial Charter within the Hardscrabble Territories and once the Gemina docked at New Damnation they were bloody and perfunctorily brutal. Under their own charter, they had licence to be. They frog-marched me to their nearest outpost and threw me in a cell, not without a little physical reprimand for killing one of their own. I was there five days before they started with the questions.

  The lieutenant in charge of the outpost, a beefy, blond, genial-looking man by the name of Decimus Brassus, stopped the Tempus guards before they killed me, but not before I lost a couple of teeth and my nose was broken for the twentieth time in this life. Ribs cracked again like they’d never heal until the sun burnt out. But Brassus, he even gave me an anodyne – in the form of a white powder I would snort into my blood-clotted nostrils – and beer.

  One day, after my nose and mouth had healed enough for talking, Brassus joined me for a little chat. It was a small cell in a small, stone hallway alongside two similar c
ells. As for amenities, there was a wooden chair and a ceramic chamber pot that was emptied once a day by a sour Tempus employee.

  Brassus pulled the chair to him and sat down, leisurely, in general pleased with himself and the world that held him.

  ‘A stretcher killed him, you said to the officer who apprehended you,’ Brassus stated, his legs crossed, pulling a machine-rolled cigarette from a packet and tapping it on his wrist to tamp the loose tabac down. I sat on the lower bunk, watching him. He thumbed a match and drew on it heavily, inhaling, then blew smoke toward the ceiling. ‘A stretcher leapt onboard the Gemina and then committed grave bodily harm on the late Mister Bennett? Was this before or after you shot him?’

  ‘Before, but the man was daemon possessed.’

  ‘Yes, you’ve said that already,’ Brassus said, raising an eyebrow. ‘And that was why you shot him.’

  ‘There should be some marks on his body. Glyphs, wards, whatnot. That should prove I’m telling the truth!’

  ‘Mister Ilys, it’s high summer and we don’t allow corpses to bloat. His body was interred in a Tempus Union cemetery not a day after the Gemina docked in New Damnation.’ Brassus put his cigarette in his mouth and stood, walked out of the cell area and returned with a sheaf of papers. He ashed on the floor and sat back down. ‘This report by his commanding officer says there were markings on his body, evidence of a new tattoo.’

  ‘See?’

  ‘One moment. You said that the stretcher came aboard the Gemina—’ Here his lips gave a wry little twist. ‘And the creature ran across the surface of the river.’

  ‘That’s right. This is the Hardscrabble Territories. You ever seen a stretcher, sir?’

  He ignored that. ‘And then he leapt aboard at the moment you encountered Mister Bennett.’

  I nodded, fearful of how this was all coming together. I’d have a hard time buying this barrel of fish pickle myself.

  ‘Why, then, did the stretcher not kill you?’

  ‘Maybe it thought Mister Bennett was the greater threat?’ I thought for a while. It wouldn’t do to tell him the truth – and especially that I conversed with the damned thing – unless he and the rest of the Tempus bully-boys were going to string me up. And judging by his humane treatment of me – he wasn’t party to the beating the Tempus guards gave me – I didn’t think that was going to happen. ‘It didn’t really have a chance. Before I knew what was happening, I was caught between your Mister Bennett and the vaettir.’

  He looked at me for a long while, face blank, smoking his cigarette.

  ‘I’m not lying, sir,’ said I.

  ‘Mister Ilys, my problem with you isn’t that I believe you’re lying. Or believe you’re not lying. My problem is discovering why you did what you did and who was your accomplice.’

  ‘I had no accomplice, I’m telling you,’ I said. There was a familiar buckskin portfolio tied with leather strands on the table. ‘You’ve got my papers there from the Governor himself. Contact Marcellus. Even better, contact his spymaster, Andrae. He’ll confirm some of the things I’m telling you.’

  Brassus shook his head. ‘Mister Ilys, were you and Mister Bennett planning on robbing Tempus Union?’

  That’s what this was all about. As always. As it is in Rume, so it is in Occidentalia. Money drives the gears of the world.

  ‘As all the old gods and new as my witness, I’d never set eyes or had any contact with Mister Bennett until that day.’

  He stared for a long while. Finally he said, ‘I believe you, Mister Ilys, which is why you are not dead.’ He dropped the tail-end of his smoke on the stone floor and ground it out with his boot. ‘However, that leads to other questions.’

  ‘What are those?’ I asked.

  ‘Why were you on that boat?’

  ‘Heading downstream to meet my partner.’

  ‘A man named Fisk?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why do you carry a near carte blanche endorsement from the governor?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that, sir,’ I said, bowing my head.

  ‘Were you on the Gemina to interfere with the delivery of the silver to New Damnation?’

  I looked at the man. He was well-fed, though not fat, and very clean and manicured. Pink fingernails and hair that’d seen soap recently. A city man. A soft man, used to the comforts of the plate and bed and market.

  ‘Sir, respectfully, you are interfering with something that goes beyond your little band of message-boys and delivery men,’ I said. His face darkened in response.

  ‘You are an ill-kempt half-breed who murdered one of my men,’ he said, in a clipped cadence. ‘It would behove you to remember that the gallows stands right outside this building.’

  ‘I am a freeman and a member of the fifth’s auxiliaries, an agent of Cornelius himself – you hold my bona fides right there – and should you hang me, you’ll have to cover up your crime, because my partner – a godsdamned legate – will make sure Tempus Union and you personally fall out of favour with the fifth and no God old or new will be able to salvage your career after that.’

  His eyes narrowed, lips pursed. ‘I think we’re done here, Mister Ilys.’ He stood and brushed his crisp black uniform’s trousers to make sure the lines were straight and there was no ash on them. ‘I have tried to make you comfortable and will continue to do so, but you’ll remain here until you are willing to tell us why you were on the Gemina and what reason you had for murdering a Tempus man. Good day.’

  He walked from the cells, leaving me alone.

  Dvergar live long and have even longer memories. And while I’m not full-blooded, I’ve been told I’m more dwarf than man. I’ve lived more than a century and a half, so far, and while I can feel my age, especially now, I am in no danger of re-joining the numinous spirits of my ancestors any time soon.

  So the time Brassus kept me on ice was damnably boring, but it wasn’t maddening. My face and ribs healed slowly. I spent my time lost in memory. At that point I had more than a century of experiences to turn over as if I were a child wading upstream against the current of personal history and picking up stones in a creek to turn over in my hands.

  We dvergar are built for time. We come from the earth and to the earth we will return and we take to solitude like a duck to swimming. Maybe that is why we are here. To wait. For what? Maybe that is what we wait for. To find out.

  If there was any discomfort in those days I was incarcerated there, it was by thoughts of Beleth.

  I was tortured by the thought of the engineer making his merry way through the Hardscrabble, unmolested. At night I had dreams of the man, and in them, he would perform lingchi on Agrippina – even though I knew she was dead: mine was the hand that slew her – but with each cut in the vaettir’s flesh, there was not blood, but fire. The fire of war.

  It was morning, maybe the thirtieth day in the cell – and those days were long when I knew Beleth was loose and war on the wind – when Brassus entered and said, ‘Well, this might be your lucky day, Mister Ilys. It seems someone aboard the Gemina that night has been talking. A sweetboy, of all people.’

  He extended a rolled newspaper through the bars, then, unlocking my door, he came within. It was a familiarity he allowed himself and I did not mind. We had reached some sort of unspoken agreement: I was not going to cause him any real trouble and he wasn’t going to treat me like I was an idiot. However, he did not wear a pistol when he joined me in my cell.

  Sitting down on the stool they provided me, he withdrew two cigarettes, lit them and offered me one which I took, gratefully. I unrolled the newspaper – a copy of the New Damnation Cornicen – and began to read.

  Dwarf kills Tempus Guard, Captured on Barge to Novo Dacia the headline read. In a more salacious type, it read DVERGAR GUNNED HIM DOWN. And in smaller type below it An Eyewitness Account of His Capture By Tempus Union Employees.

  I looked at Brassus who, having crossed his legs and looked supremely at ease, gestured with the hand holding the cigarette,
making the smoke form eddies and whorls in the still cell air. ‘It seems you are famous, Mister Ilys.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Brassus smiled. ‘True. A better way to put it is that the “witness” wishes to be.’

  I turned back to the article. It read:

  New Damnation – 6 Nones Geminus –

  Menæ Pallius

  An Awful Crime

  Violent as were the early days of frontier Occidentalia, nothing in recent memory equals the depravity of the events of 6 Ides Sexitilius, where a dvergar pistolero gunned down a Tempus Union guard escorting cargo from Hot Springs to New Damnation. Since the planting of the Fifth Occidentalia brag-rags in New Damnation, our stretch of the Big Rill has become known for its peace and prosperity. The damnable vaettir are scarcer and scarcer with every passing day. Yet violent incidents away from our larger urban centres – Harbour Town, New Damnation, Hot Springs and Passasuego – are occurring with more and more frequency, sullying the good name of our land with the rumour of wildness and outlawry.

  A Hard-Bit, Scrappy Little Man

  Not much is known about the murderer, an itinerant tinker dvergar who booked his passage under the name Dveng Ilys, but who is also known as Shoestring. One of the passengers of the Gemina, Sacchine Duplass, a male ‘entertainer’ from Passaseugo, was a witness to the crime and described the culprit thus: ‘He was a hard-bit, scrappy little man with a face like a walnut and just as brown. He had a bad look to him and he avoided all of the other passengers. We berthed in tents on the roof of the cargo hold and he made sure to place his as far away from everyone else’s as possible.’

  Of the event itself, Sacchine Duplass was a direct witness. He described the murder thusly: ‘I heard voices, rough voices, arguing. About what I don’t know, but there was a lot of gambling and drinking going on the boat. I exited my tent and saw the dwarf pointing his gun at the guard. They spoke to each other again and then the dwarf shot him in the chest. It was a big sound, waking everyone on the barge. Then the little man just walked over to the guard and looked at him. The Tempus guardsmen tackled him and put him in chains.’