by B. Y. Yan
It was the only confirmation Cudgmore needed to fire. Whereas before he had already seen the valet’s handiwork at the Garrisons which cost him so dearly, he was now convinced there had been a stowaway on his train who was the true reason for his defeat. Whatever sabotage he effected aboard needed to be avenged, and it was with the final ringing report of his pistol that his most hated foe—even more so, perhaps, than the baron himself—cried out and fell to the ground.
The discharge of the pistol was the final stroke of the bell which pushed the matter into becoming the international incident that it would be remembered in the history books. As his cousin fell the baron swung on Cudgmore, and the diplomat was dropped like a stone. Over them surged the crowd with their waving arms and trampling feet. Sadly, we must report that at the end of the day, there would be nearly a dozen dead, all crushed beneath the tide of people surging recklessly to and fro, and all of them locals who had come out to see the end of the race. It was a sorry conclusion to a terrible turn of events, buoyed only by the notion that some good would have been achieved by the ordeal, as you will soon see.
It was over breakfast at Gildboors, some weeks later, that the baron brought by the news to his man, along with breakfast. Inside his little apartment Yamcey was still laid up on his bed, with his good hand bandaged and sealed away inside a cast. As the door opened his cousin, a man not known generally for his loving, coddling nature, wheeled inside the tray himself before shutting the door behind him. He had before him a good, hearty meal, as well as a newspaper tucked beneath one arm as he sat down on the stone bed beside his servant.
“I don’t suppose you need to see this,” said he to his cousin with a sideways look.
“If it is the coming divorce I have heard all I need to,” the butler replied coolly. “An international incident is nothing to live down, especially when it is murder-in-plain-sight.”
“Attempted,” corrected the baron. He smiled wryly. “You are, after all, still here, are you not?” He sighed, the newspaper fluttering in his hands as he glanced over the headlines. “Still, it makes for sensational reading, if nothing else. But I must say, Yamcey, yours was a foolhardy plan, coming out of his carriage at the last moment when his rage was boiling over, and eating a bullet for your troubles.”
“Any sooner,” the valet replied blandly, “and he might not have fired.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you managed to catch the bullet. You are now distinguished as the only man in the history of firearms to have done so—mostly, anyway.” Almost casually the baron leaned back until his arm rested over his cousin’s injured hand, and when Yamcey winced Hungary Mandalin only smiled ever so innocently. “I won’t even ask how you managed to do it. I’ve seen you fling steel bullets from your fingertips and you have told me yourself of these strange skills of yours, sticking your hand in a pit of heated gravel and all that, to not even bother with becoming surprised. I suppose it also had something to do with you shooting up the walls of your apartment and all those calculations you were making out when we barged in on you before. I will, however, take full credit for the idea, for you will remember it was me who made the claim—in jest, mind you—to Miss Maddy long before you came bursting out of the Tulip with your ill thought out plan. At least Cudgel is a goner. The matter has seen to his release from his duties, and as he has no highborn ties to fall back upon the rivals in his own lands have been quick to jump on him. Our own king is threatening to sue, and for now he will be held away in jail until everybody can sort things out. We have, in the end, lost our million men, but gained the freedom of one woman, who now has grounds to push for legal separation. But it seems the race itself still encompassed a great many things I was not made aware of beforehand. How long were you hidden away in there anyway? When did you leave me? It was at the Twins, wasn’t it?”
His man gave up a shrug which betrayed nothing. “Why should it matter?”
“No,” agreed the baron, shaking his head, “I suppose it does not. So long as you appeared when you did—and to your credit you timed things perfectly, for Cudgel was by then rabid and looking to bite the first hand he sees which he thinks has struck him the blow he felt—our end is served, and so is hers.” He removed a small envelope from his sleeve, which he laid over his cousin’s knees. Then, propping one leg up over the other, he shook open the newspaper. “You see, Yamcey, I can still sometimes surprise you. The paper is for me, and not you. This letter, however, is wholly yours. It is from her.”
“The Lady of May Tulip, undoubtedly,” sighed the valet. He looked at the envelope, but showed little inclination towards opening it.
“You are not even going to see what she has to say?” Hungary asked him. “It is a letter of appreciation, Yamcey—directed at me, of course—but I thought you should share in the glory of a lady’s gratitude.”
“I am glad for you, my lord,” said the servant plainly. “She will remember you always as her savior in her most pressing hour of need.”
“But it is Miss Maddy whose wellbeing has gripped you most, isn’t it?”
His cousin’s expression was unreadable, as if the name meant nothing at all to him.
“Well,” said the baron sadly, “I can tell you there has been no news. I have people looking all over. The police, our own embassies on foreign shores, and all my worldly contacts have been mobilized, but they have all come up emptyhanded.” He looked to his cousin solemnly. “I think, Yamcey, you must come to terms with the fact that her body might never been found.”
“She is only a woman,” said the valet without much emotion, “and the lot are bothersome creatures.” He pushed the envelope back towards his cousin. “You may keep this. Now that you have once again lost the adoration of your people, I think you will want it as a memento of your moment in the sun.”
“Ah!” the baron laughed. “Well they are a strange lot, aren’t they, and so quick to forget their hero. Truth to be told I am still as much in the dark as to how I acquired their love and support in the first place, as I am now to how I lost it so soon afterwards.”
“You were their proxy waging war on a detested foe they could not have budged otherwise,” he was told by his valet, “and you played to the sentiment of the mob perfectly. It was a show of circus strongmen they were after, and you were their favorite in the ring. But such things never last, my dear Hungary. Now that Lord Cudgmore has been vanquished it is only natural that the masses must revert to hating their former foe.”
“Well, how am I to make them stop, then? I must say I have gotten quite used to being loved these past weeks, and it vexes me some to go back to how it was before. It seems these days the only time I am appreciated is when I am the Lynchman’s Owl.”
At last the valet cracked the barest of smiles.
“There is a very easy way to regain their love, my lord, and it shall not need the Owl to see to it.”
“Please,” said the baron eagerly.
“Their hatred of you has been founded on your successes, your lineage, and the present state in which you have maintained your lifestyle. Your wealth they see as theirs, misappropriated from a dozen channels for your consumption. Your power is a check to their ambitions. Your very blood, upon which you gained this position as their liege-lord, is detestable to them. In short, though you owe them nothing, they still see you as the primary debtor from whom collection is long overdue.”
“Well, what do I do then?”
“If you are prepared to give up your everything for a chance to be embraced as one of their own, you may gain their love again for a time. Abandon your title, your wealth and your very livelihood to them, and they will accept you. But it is a sacrifice not to be made lightly, for you can never come back. If there is anything worse than constantly being suffocated in the shadow of your betters it is watching your peers rise about their station while you still struggle in the mud. If you lower yourself today, you can never climb again or else they shall hate you all the more for it.”
The bar
on looked around him uncertainly, at his great mansion with its long hallway stretching out endlessly from the door of the apartment, and outside his window over the large grounds which had been the estate of his forebears for hundreds of years; he thought on his prized train and magnificent carriage, and his near-limitless font of riches to pay for it all. All these things were as familiar to him as his own hands and feet, whereas the love of his subjects was a welcomed but alien sentiment which sometimes frightened him more than he would have cared to admit.
“Or,” said Yamcey with a careless shrug, “you can just keep things as they are by doing nothing.”
“Yes,” the baron said at once, laughing. “Yes! Let’s do just that!”
The End.
The Lynchman’s Owl will return in Dead Cell, available in September 2016!
(If you enjoyed this story, a review in the proper channels would not go unappreciated – B.Y. Yan)
“To hear a hoot in the hour before dawn is to mean enduring ill-fortunes and worse woes still for the listener, especially if you’ve got something to hide. Here in these parts we call him the Lynchman’s Owl, and this is his call.”
Look for another Lynchman’s Owl Adventures in The Gorilla Press available now! The greatest enemy of the Lynchman’s Owl twenty-years-after appears.
Buy the entire Lynchman’s Owl Origins Collection (includes issues 1-5) and see where it all began…
B.Y. Yan is a Chinese-Canadian author who someday hopes to do this for a living. He currently lives in Toronto, Ontario but spends most of his time travelling between two opposite points on the globe on business with his wife Jeane, sometimes accompanied by a giant orange tabby cat. In his spare time, he has maintained the same great love since childhood for stories told through every medium imaginable.
His debut adult fantasy novel Eye of the North Wind is currently doing the rounds at all major book retailers in E-Book and paperback. You can find him at his street corner at—
http://bigbinofideas.wordpress.com
—peddling his stories with all his imaginary friends.
Keep reading for a sneak-peek at The Gorilla Press and an excerpt from Eye of the North Wind – a cripple’s journey to save an unknowing wasteland king…
The Lynchman’s Owl Adventures: The Gorilla Press
It stands to reason that we all of us have a check in our lives. Like the wily serpent which bows before the modest mongoose, or the rats which flee the presence of a prowling feline, there is a simplicity of the order of things in the natural world of which we are not exempted, if only we had the time to look and the wits about us to see. Even the very mighty, or the very smart are not immune to the effects of their naturally ordained enemies. I hesitate to call them a nemesis, for a nemesis might eventually be overcome. This is then no simple test dealt by the whims of fate, no obstacle in the long adventure of life to be hurdled or surpassed. It is simply an impassable barrier of the most mundane sort before which the best and brightest examples of our species might be humbled and made meek.
Whether or not you believe me, Hungary Mandalin, Lord Viceroy of the Coal Coast, Governor-General of His Majesty the King, master of the lives of seven million people and more recently the terrible avenger of the night known as the Lynchman’s Owl, also had such a person in his life. This creature, this thing which renders one of the foremost powers in the realm an invalid has a humble name; and its name is Thomas.
Eye of the North Wind
Chapter 1: The Three Letters of Sir Boors
It would not be presumptuous to say that Sir Boors was the most powerful man in the wastelands, and that for miles everybody wanted in on his good graces. Thus when his fiftieth birthday came around, there arrived then with the promise of celebration many gifts, some quite unexpected.
He was born low (the exact year of which nobody can agree on), but rose high on the shoulder of his brother who alone amongst his peers had the disposition to follow their king into and out of a long war, first as a beleaguered footman, and then as chief bodyguard responsible for saving him from being riddled full of arrows running in the wrong direction during an ambush. For this service he was handsomely rewarded, whereupon he promptly retired, bequeathing upon his brother—whom he desired to become raised high in the world—a letter of recommendation.
And in the years following, Sir Boors far surpassed this patronage left to him. Armed in the beginning with nothing to his name but the lingering goodwill of the king, but gifted with an abundance of cleverness owing to a character of natural cunning, and possessing of perseverance and courage where it was needed, he soon found himself at the head of court favors, from where he came away with a knighthood, an office of employment as Steward and Minister of Finances, and a frequent seat at the king’s card table. For years he captained the Yulin Hundreds of Gainsworth—who are today the Yulin Hundreds of Garfeld—a battalion of king’s steely and scrapping guard, vanguard and bodyguard, renowned as much for their skill and prowess as for their fixation with prestige and prosperity. For in those days’ titles, occupation, and privileges preceded all else as the standard by which men were measured.
Sir Boors lived in humble lodgings unbefitting for such a power. On any given day we might find him sitting at his desk by the window in his modest chamber on the third level of a wide house with a barren stone face, clad in a red robe of office, cast in a fiery glow by firelight from the hearth cut into the grey wall. One look at the man is more than enough to distinguish him, for his was the mighty form shaped like a barrel, a little less than seven-feet in height, hunched over a great mahogany table prepared with a spread of avaricious proportions—coffee and toffee, desert ham and beggar’s turkey, cheese and cheddar from the oasis, black ale and white chocolate—placed beneath his round chin. But a critical eye would not fail to notice his brow furrowed in obvious frustration, his pale cheeks trembling with every movement as he read aloud a letter in his hand. His breakfast went untouched, and lay forgotten on the table before him.
His shoulders sagged. He looked older than he was, and felt older than he looked. For his was a crushing burden as caretaker of his masters’ holdings, enfeebled then by the absence of her king, who passed away recently at a healthy one-hundred-and-forty-two years of age, and her borders threatened from without by old foes. All of this served as capable proof of character for Sir Boors, who served ably and for some time managed to make sense of the whole thing in order to improve upon it, if only a little.
The letter he was reading arrived early in the morning, and he compared it to a letter he received the previous evening. Both were delivered in the manner as he explicitly bid. A rapid knock on his chamber door informed him of their arrival, and they were slipped inside beneath, unopened. On the one which arrived the night before it was written in a flowing, flowery hand that the queen wished to make of him a birthday gift: a painting he was asked to collect at her home; on the letter he received this morning he was invited to join the Great Yarl, First Lord of the Realm, on a hunting expedition in the Royal Parklands to celebrate his birthday. Both filled him with suspicion, for long experience in dealing with the affairs of royalty has made him wary of becoming attached to matters too sensitive, secretive or scandalous for his own good. Rarely has such involvement led to a favorable outcome, for being called upon to solve their pressing needs entailed usually some great personal sacrifice, leading to the loss of life or worse, of fortune.
Such was the unenviable state of mind of the great financier that grey morning in December when we find him leaving his desk, his appetite having long fled, making preparations for the day. Outside grains of desert sand swirled about in fierce whistling cries, piling high on the sills of the three narrow, tall windows looking high out over the west face of the citadel, before which were drawn heavy green drapes, shutting out a view of the vast desert plains with each grain of sand glowing bronzed beneath the sun, here and there dotted with pointed outcrops like rocky waves washing across a dull red sea, and the great mesas
sitting like the stumps of stone trees, shimmering and hazy in the distance.
A man appeared in the doorway unbidden with a long leather coat, ringed at the neck by furs, and wrapped in it Sir Boors slipped through, descending the narrow stone stairs. He did not have to look behind to find Basil, chief amongst his servants, keeping up in the manner of a shadow. They went down together to the first level of his house, a common hall of many faded white pillars sitting beneath narrow arches, passing long benches where good ale was served and tall men in mail went through wearing formidable looks. All gave way swiftly before him. Master and servant passed through into the antechamber and from there into the court where a gilt litter with a blue canopied cabin waited, taking up almost all of the space. A contingent of footmen gathered round it. Sir Boors was ushered into their midst and they left the house swiftly. Four large men carried the littler, two before and two after, moving along the winding street, ascending in a roundabout manner to the Ivy Keep, a castle of grey mortar seated below the peak of the citadel like a lopsided crown erected over the ruins of an old church by Gainsworth in the first days of settlement, and where today his son lives and rules.
They entered the castle square through tall iron gates, running lightly over wide paved stones beneath the Great Standard of Linberry. On its billowing, swirling face the long journey of Gainsworth and his followers, a great and mighty train passing from East to West, was depicted in gold threads against red and burgundy, running beneath the golden lamb of the kingdom skirting gracefully atop a trailing string of white clouds.