“He was your friend!” I yelled at him.
Other people started listening in.
“Yes, he was,” Welf spat, turning angry. “You avenged him, don’t think that means you know him as well as I do. He would want to help, even in death.”
“Then donate the body to science. Not that.”
“Mancers are not allowed to do so, as you well know,” Welf countered.
I couldn’t believe it. Heinrich Welf managed to appall me, instead of the other way around. “I always thought you were a douchebag, but this . . .”
Welf’s anger grew cold. “And despite all you’ve learned you still refuse to accept the way this world works. Death has value, Foul Mouth. Death has honor. Jason is gone, but his body will continue on as a work of art over some disgusting shell for a vampire that thinks black men are fashionable this year or a pile of worthless ashes.”
I shook my head at him, unable to come up with the words. Fucking necromancers.
“Do you think your mother’s corpse is still inside her coffin?” Welf’s tombstone eyes begged me to punch him. Punch him, he punches me. Give him that outlet. That outlet that let him cry so very easy outside of the Tsar’s office. “I can guarantee you she’s not. I can even track where she’s been sold and for what purpose if you would like me to.”
Shaking my head again, I left Welf and his empty casket behind.
Fuck me.
I need out of here.
I need to get home.
Need to . . . he lied, he had to be lying.
I headed off to find T-Bone. Soon as I broke up the snog session we could be on the road back to Fresno. I could be on the road back to having artifacts on me again. Mini could get a meal in. The Employee could get a few days off. I can dig up my mother’s grave . . .
I ran into Ceinwyn.
Literally ran into her.
Just like that.
Fuck.
We blinked at each other.
“Welf’s using Jason as a Construct,” I found myself telling her. I had to tell someone and she was the first person I ran into.
Literally.
Fuck.
“It’s . . . not uncommon among friends of Bonegrinders to agree to that procedure,” she said carefully.
“It’s sick. It’s wrong.”
Her blue eyes smiled a little bit, even if the rest of her was reserved and sad and . . . melancholy. “Good to know we’ve finally found an area where your morals are completely black and white.”
“He said my mom . . . that . . .”
Ceinwyn shook her head. “I personally arranged for your mother to be cremated without your father’s knowledge, King Henry. It was done after the funeral. I made sure. Most corpusmancers are for this very reason.”
“Oh . . . thanks for that,” I managed to tell her.
My lips opened.
My lips shut.
Before I could say anything more, I walked around her.
“Of course,” she whispered.
I grabbed her arm before I knew I was doing it.
She looked down at my hand. “Is there something else?”
“Was . . . just going to ask how Val’s doing,” I lied.
Ceinwyn smiled over my concern. “She’s doing well. Learning how to sign reports and write memos. The Lady and I have a bet about how long it will take Valentine before she realizes she can make up an excuse to go on a recruiting trip herself instead of being stuck in the office.”
“Oh . . . thanks for that,” I said again.
“Of course,” Ceinwyn said again.
I finally went to find T-Bone.
Who was still with Vicky.
I almost told her!
“You two decide if you’re a couple yet or not?” I asked them. “Please agree to it, Vicky, it will make the RV trip a whole lot less mopey and weepy.”
T-Bone snorted at me. “Like it wasn’t on the way here?”
“Yeah, but I’m better now. Man alone against the world. Don’t need no women in my life. All that shit,” I tried to convince myself.
They both regarded me differently than they had before the cage. Everyone did. Pocket. Jesus. Even Welf. I kept catching them glancing at my scarred up knuckles. Could see it in their eyes when they remembered the way blood had dripped off of them. They had to remember and then make themselves forget. Remind themselves about Jason to tell themselves their friend was still their friend and not . . . someone who could do that without a reason.
Or maybe it was in my imagination.
Vicky Welf still hugged me.
That’s a plus.
“I don’t know about boyfriend-girlfriend, real couple stuff,” she told me once she let go, “but there might be some texting and video chatting and I do need someone to show me around Fresno when I fly in a couple weeks from now.”
“Huh?”
Vicky smiled over my confusion. “I’m doing a spectro-portrait for your sister and King Vega, didn’t you hear?”
“No, I seem to have missed a lot of what you two were up to the last few days,” I hinted at deserving some explanation for their disappearance.
“I’m going to go say hello to Mr. Gullick,” Vicky announced before ordering T-Bone, “don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
T-Bone looked decidedly uncomfortable.
I watched everyone else chat . . . waiting.
T-Bone still looked decidedly uncomfortable.
“I know it’s weird,” I said.
“What?”
“That I killed a guy and you watched.”
“Oh . . . it was . . . bloody. But it’s not that.”
“That I saw your big black wang then?”
“Not that either. Please stop calling it that.”
“Should name it.”
“Never.”
“Tyrannosaurus Bone?”
“That’s actually not bad . . .”
We both watched as Ceinwyn was the first person to leave the cemetery, heading for her usual Asylum-issued car.
“I talked to her,” I said.
“Really?”
“Not about Paine.”
“Oh,” he said, sounding disappointed.
“I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t tell her. I knew it would hurt her and . . . she might even cry. Ceinwyn Dale crying is nightmare material.”
“I know the feeling,” T-Bone admitted.
I frowned over at him. “How so?”
“Vicky got it in her head that if she could study every corpusmancer in the arena crowd that she could figure out which one was Isabel.”
“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard.”
T-Bone was the one frowning now. “It’s entirely possible—
“Not that she could, but that you would go searching for Isabel on your own like that while I was distracted.”
“We never got close enough for her to notice us,” T-Bone defended his actions.
“Wait . . . does that mean you found her?”
Silence.
“Did she look like Val again?”
More silence.
“I’m not going to cry, how is this the same as with Ceinwyn?”
“You’re going to be mad. Really, really mad. Vicky was mad. Really mad.”
“Was the Curator actually there?” I asked.
“No . . . but . . . fuck it!” T-Bone announced in the most unlike T-Bone way imaginable and pulled out a picture to show me.
You could tell Isabel was the one on the left. Curvy, beautiful, well-endowed by her creator. Her usual when she made the body herself. But . . . “I’m not mad, I’m fucking terrified,” I told him.
“This is bad, right?” he asked.
I looked at the picture again.
It had not improved.
“This is Can’t Get Much Worse territory actually. How’d Vicky take it? Besides ‘mad’?”
“About like you are. Although . . . she cursed more, which is sort of shocking.”
“Not if you c
onsider her history with them.”
“She wouldn’t say much.”
“Not good, T-Bone, very not good.”
He nodded. “I figured. But we can’t just bury this too, can we? Vicky knows for one and she’ll tell people. Her brother and parents. So . . . what should we do with it? I’d like to give it to Miss Dale, but if you don’t want to—”
I handed the picture back to him to forestall a guilt trip. “Nah, you’re right. Give it to Ceinwyn.”
“Really?”
“I’m not a total asshole,” I reminded him as he hurried off to find Ceinwyn before she got to her car. All so he could show her the picture like a five-year-old at show and tell.
I stood there alone, watching the people around me mingle and chat and try to forget about the death all of us have to face one day.
Maybe some sooner than others.
“World’s about to get a little bloody,” I said to no one and everyone.
Across the cemetery near the parking lot, I watched as T-Bone handed Ceinwyn that picture and her ageless face suddenly looked older than the Lady’s. Her slim-fingered hand rose to cover her mouth, to hold back her shock and fear and failure.
Should tell her about Paine.
Should do it.
But I still kept my foul mouth shut.
The picture fluttered to the ground from Ceinwyn’s grasp.
I caught a glimpse of it again.
Isabel standing next to three women, very unhappy about her company.
Isabel standing next to Mary O’Connell, Teresa Garcia, and Catherine Hayes.
Obadiah Paine had recruited the Three Queens.
Cuz the Devil needs his demon brides.
Not good.
Not good at all.
Especially Catherine Hayes.
Maybe the Devil found herself a husband too.
“The world wasn’t hard enough already and Fate is the Bitch-Queen,” I said to myself and no one. “But I’ve learned my lesson, haven’t I? This time I aim to not be the one reacting to whatever shit Fate decides to throw in my face. No, sir. Aim to be the one throwing the shit.”
Time to grow up whether they think I’m ready for it or not.
Time to steal me some truth.
“Just need to figure out who to steal it from.”
PAINE
TRAIN
COMETH
Sky-Island 1827-E Sample
Hey, Foul Mouth fans, guess what? I have other books! Think about buying them to help you survive the long, horrible, dreary wait until FM6 (The Foul Mouth and the Artificial Court) is released. My other books dare to be ‘different’ and they don’t have King Henry in them, but I put just as much work and love into them as I do everything I put before you fans. SKY-ISLAND 1827-E is a dieselpunk war story with just a hint of espionage and mystery. It also has killer robots. You can’t go wrong with killer robots.
1
==THE CAPTAIN==
After a year’s worth of days and nights living with a telescope pressed against his right eye, Captain Benjen Rahjain had developed a callus in the shape of a perfect circle. It helped his embarrassment that every other man in the observatory had the same affliction, the whole lot of them like stage players mocking Rustanni bankers and their gold-rimmed monocles.
They had attempted any number of remedies: grease, oil, wine, citrus juices; one of the prettier ensigns had even tried a stopper of virgin’s menstrual blood purchased from a rather shabbily dressed Path Seer.
There was no hope.
The circle callus had become an emblem for the whole of the 13th Sky Watcher Company. The more rough the circle, the more proof your dedication to keeping an eye on the skies, waiting and watching for sign of rocket fume or rocket burn. Or rocket anything. Rocket broken or rocket loom, rocket token or rocket boom . . . well, look at that: I’m rhyming to entertain myself. I think it’s safe to say I’ve been at this for far too long . . .
As captain of the company, Rahjain was in charge of the enterprise; all two-hundred and fifty men along with it. A damn fine group of men! Engineers, soldiers, telescopes. The Sky Watcher area of expertise. He’d delegated as much as he could, but still found he never had enough time to his days, especially the days when his turn at the telescopes came upon him.
I am a man who craves the more glorious parts of war and yet I find my only enemy is the boredom of an empty sky!
Rahjain moved his head back a few inches from his eyepiece. He pulled out a flask of oil from inside his jacket pocket, carefully avoiding any portion of the telescope, and rubbed it around his right eye. Whether it worked or not, he felt he had to try something. A man battling against his fate till the last.
His other hand reached to his side, flipping open a waiting chest of material needed to service the telescope. Removing a thin metal tube that ended in a rubber ball, he put the tube near the lens and pressed on the ball, blowing away any lingering dust. He made one last check to confirm the lens was clean and then finally lumbered out of his cushioned chair.
“Replacement,” Rahjain muttered, loud enough for one of the men waiting at the on-duty couch to put down a periodical news-sheet, gulp a tin cup’s worth of coffee, and stand up as well.
“Captain,” the man said. Ensign Agasaad, Rahjain recalled through what they had named Telescope’s Fog.
When he’d been at university, Rahjain had explored every nook and cranny of the Capital in his off days. Once, he’d stumbled upon an opium den, so suffused with the drug that the very air made you drowsy. He left without sampling the wares, but even being in proximity had him stumbling down the middle of the street. Telescope’s Fog was similar in effect.
Rahjain was a man of thirty-two now; he’d also swum cold-water at university, rowed eight-man for a pair of years, and had even practiced gentleman’s caneplay to impress the ladies. Brought up in a Named family, riding a horse, hunting birds with a blundergun, and wild game with a sharpgun had been considered a necessity of station. He was an active man accustomed to active days and, if he did manage to impress the ladies with the caneplay, active nights.
In his thirty-two years, he’d never felt worse off than he did in those first few minutes newly away from the telescope. His neck felt stiff to move in any direction and his knees screamed with every step. Four hours every other day of intense concentration, a piece of sky and nothing else in all of the Levels. Even him, even the captain, almost half the company marked themselves as an observer, but still they had no one to waste in keeping the telescopes active.
I had my choice. Either front. Any service. I could have commanded a landship or led a squadron of interceptors. I could have been a colonel with a whole regiment of soldiers at my back, fought alongside both the White Vicars and Black Paladins against the Clockers—flesh to steel. Glorious, glorious war!
Yet he’d ended up here. The most Path-forsaken outpost on the whole planet, three square sky-miles of rock so close to the Axis-Point that even the Colonials wouldn’t plant a flag to form an island-nation. Where a soldier of the Democratic League wouldn’t be expected within ten-thousand sky-miles of!
Some days, Rahjain felt like a warhorse left in the barn.
Rahjain stumbled to the duty couch, stretched his body out full height, then lowered himself to a paper-covered table. “Any sightings?” he asked the waiting men, both ensigns.
The company had become so inoculated against proper Army structure that neither saluted him, neither even looked away from their tasks—one working on a plate of peppered salt beef and potatoes and the other reading through a magazine on two-month-old caneplay matches from a Second Level colony. “Only one, sir. Lieutenant Sedanan already reported it to the fourth floor; Third Level vectors. Interceptors shouldn’t have trouble taking them before they reach their targets.”
Rahjain nodded, though neither bothered to see it. Reaching for the always present coffee jar, he swirled the liquid about. No more than a mouthful’s worth was left, so he just downed it from the
jar. Along with Army structure, Named manners had been quick to disappear. Not that I ever followed them to my family’s satisfaction! “One of you go refill the jar, I’m heading outside to lift the Fog.”
One rocket sighting for a whole afternoon. Very odd. Usually they saw five or six. There was always the possibility that they would miss them, especially during the day, but never so many. Maybe the Clockers are finally running out?
Clockers.
Cheating bastards.
Turncoats.
Cowards.
Rahjain exited the observatory, heading down the staircase of their tower. The whole structure was made of metal—steel beams, tin roofs, with aluminum walls. There wasn’t a step that didn’t clang. Other than the duty couch it was all metal: the railing, the tables, the chairs. Made in Homelands’ factories and then reassembled out here in the wilderness. The 13th had been forced to put up with a whole sister company of engineers their first months on the sky-island, as their home was readied for habitation one bolt at a time.
Rahjain had been excited then. The whole thing had seemed adventurous and he supposed it still was at times. They were explorers of a sort, living where few dared tread. All alone in the wilderness . . . Some of Rahjain’s fondest memories were of the wilderness. Of course, some of Rahjain’s other fondest memories were of four-poster beds, but he hadn’t seen one of those in a year!
Living inside a tin-can, not so different from landshipping after all, is it? Rahjain asked himself.
The fourth floor was marked by tables and tack-boards, all of them filled with maps, slide-rules, and mathematical equipment that Rahjain hadn’t a clue to work. Men often called him a force of nature, a natural outdoorsman, and many other fine qualities he was proud to be known for, but mathematician wasn’t one of them. All the vector work and equations that the men on the fourth floor went through to track where rockets would land was as mysterious to him as the Path. He nodded at four men who looked bored, waiting for a rocket sign to snap into action. On the return nods, Rahjain kept on going down the tower.
The third floor held the bunks for the telescope operators, not enough room for a single bed per man. Instead, each bed had a duo of trunks nearby where the men kept their belongings. A third of the operators were generally sleeping at any time. Bunks were chosen first-come first-serve, those unlucky enough to not get one having to hitch up a hammock wherever they could find free space.
The Foul Mouth and the Mancy Martial Artist (The King Henry Tapes Book 5) Page 60