The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)
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The Legend of the Red Specter
M. A. Wisniewski
This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real people or events is a coincidence and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 2018 M. A. Wisniewski
All rights reserved.
Tanuki Press
PO Bos 15212
San Francisco, CA 94115-0212
Tanukipressbiz@gmail.com
First US Trade edition: November 2018
Cover design by Justin Ritmiller www.triplemilled.com
Developmental editing by Allison Erin Wright
ISBN: 978-1-7320167-1-2
Created with Vellum
To my parents,
for always believing in me, even when I didn’t.
Contents
Part I
1. Politics
2. Dragon Egg
3. The Lost Princess
4. Weeping Statue
5. Final Chance
6. The Assignment
Part II
7. Impossible Assignment
8. Hostile Work Environment
9. Assault
10. Recovery
11. Blackballed
12. Workin' for The Man
Part III
13. The Archives
14. Shiori Rosewing, Knight Of The Caliburn
15. Terror Of The Gas-Men
16. Assault On Zalandag
Part IV
17. A Holiday For Everyone Else
18. Meet the Medium
19. Spirit Walk
20. Taking Stock
21. The Soler Family
22. Echoes Of War
23. The Magic Lantern
24. Professor Gelfland
25. Joy Is A Liar
Part V
26. Dockside Blight
27. Guards' Lives Matter
28. The Triad Ship
29. Disrespect
30. Secret Cargo
31. Missing Person
32. Catch As Catch Can
33. Dirty Copper
34. Enter Shiori
35. When Cows Fly
Part VI
36. Kossar Hospitality
37. I Do My Best Thinking In The Shower
38. Chowtime
39. Typewriter Confessions
Part VII
40. Night Swimming
41. Infiltration
42. Exotic Birds
43. Light It Up
Part VIII
44. Shark Bait
45. Who's That Girl?
46. Breakout
47. I'm Helping!
48. Showdown
Part IX
49. Cleanup
50. Interview With A Red Specter
51. Freelance
52. Victory Lap
Part I
Editorial Mandate
Chapter 1
Politics
Garai sighed and tossed Joy’s manuscript back at her across the desk.
“Really, Miss Fan? A political piece? Why in the world did you think the Gazette would print this? This is not what we do.”
No, no, no, thought Joy, though part of her wasn’t surprised. That’s not going to work. Because my savings are depleted, rent is due in two weeks, and you’re the only newspaper that will still talk to me. You’re going to buy something from me. You have to.
“You’ve run political stories before, Garai,” she said. “Two weeks ago, you did one on the arrest of opposition leader Stefan Huang. ‘Crazy Steve in Bed with the Triads.’ Remember that?”
Garai blinked, and looked thoughtful for a second. “Ah. You’re right. We did do that—but that was an exception. Extraordinary circumstances.”
The editor/owner of the Dodona Gazette shook his bald, dark-skinned head. “This is, again, a problem we are having with you. You need to learn what types of stories we do here. Tales of betrayal, corruption, and organized crime are exciting. That works here.
“But this,” he said, dismissively waving at her poor, rejected story. “This is nothing. Just some incendiary political rhetoric. And about the greatest leader in the history of Kallistrate? I can’t print this.”
“Incendiary? It’s not…” Joy started to say, before stopping to think it over. “Well--okay, maybe it was a little—but that was because I knew it was for the Gazette, so I was just trying to punch it up a bit. Make it more interesting for your—”
“Ms. Fan, you are missing the point entirely,” said Garai. “Excess adjectives don’t make a story. A good story needs heroes and villains; struggle and strife; triumph and tragedy. A good story is about extraordinary events, but you constantly seek the mundane.”
“I don’t seek the mundane, Garai—I crave excitement,” Joy protested. “I’m always looking for a story that will grab reader’s attention, shake them up, make them care about the world. I’ve dreamed about that for years. What reporter hasn’t?”
Garai steepled his hands and peered over his fingertips. “Really? Then let us review one of your first assignments, where I sent you to find dragons.”
Chapter 2
Dragon Egg
“What about it?” said Joy. “I thought that was a solid bit of investigation—”
“Your investigation was the problem,” said Garai. “When my readers see a headline about a dragon egg, they want to turn the page and read more excitement and mystery. Perhaps this is the last dragon remaining—the last in all the world. The first ever to be hatched outside the control of the cruel Sidhe aristocrats, and in the possession of a free citizen of Kallistrate, as well. Could a dragon hatched in the Kallistrate heartland inherit those values from a kind, simple farmer? Or, could it be that viciousness is so ingrained to the nature of dragonkind that it would turn on that loving farmer who cared for it before it was even born?”
Joy watched Garai as he ran through each bit of speculation, and couldn’t help but be drawn in, just a bit.
Garai was a top-notch storyteller. Something in his eyes, and the careful intonation when he spoke commanded attention. And then his eyes fixed in on her, and she rather wished they weren’t.
“These are the sorts of things my readers want to hear about,” he said. “Not that the egg is from an ostrich and the farmer is a victim of a juvenile prank.”
Well, Joy supposed that was disappointing. And she definitely understood being fascinated with dragons. For well over a thousand years, the Empire of Albion had ruled over the continent of Nokomis almost solely due to the power of their Dragon Knights. Dragons were huge, covered in tough scales that required heavy cannons to break, and they could spit toxic chemicals that ignited when exposed to the air, turning into a searing, sticky jelly that could melt your flesh from your bones in seconds.
There hadn’t been an army in the world that could do a single thing to stop a Dragon Knight. There’d been no counter, no defense, nothing to do but run or die. And so the Sidhe nobles had conquered everything, and held it, until the rise of the industrial might of Kallistrate, and then everything had gone topsy-turvy in the space of just four years.
Now the dragons were all gone, either exterminated or fled to escape extermination, their great Dracariums demolished, ancient structures reduced to piles of rubble, and a good deal of the world’s magic seemed to have vanished along with them.
But even before that, nearly all details about the dragons were held as closely-guarded Imperial secrets. Only Sidhe and their sworn life-bonded servants were allowed inside the massive domed structures of the Dracariums, and even the Imperial so
ldiers who marched alongside the Dragon Knights only got to see them while on the march.
And the mystery didn’t abate when Kallistrate started massacring the great wyrms. All slain dragon carcasses had been seized by Kallistrate military intelligence and hidden away, save for one that had been stuffed and mounted as a permanent monument in the Sarpedon Museum of Natural History. Joy supposed that meant naturalists had studied it, but that information must have been classified, and at a level well above Joy’s old security clearance.
So when Garai told Joy to investigate the dragon’s egg, the first unanswered question she had was how people knew this was a dragon’s egg when nobody outside the Sidhe Dragon Knights had ever seen one. The answer Jakob, the farmer who’d found the egg, gave her was, “Well, reckon it looks like a dragon’s egg, don’t it?”
Normally, that type of response would warrant a follow-up question, but at that time she’d been worn down by so much culture shock that she’d given up.
It hadn’t taken her all that long to get from Dodona City to the remote farming and ranching village of Knittelfeld—four hours by train and another hour and a half by stagecoach—but she might as well have arrived on another planet. People sure stared at her like she was an alien.
That was another thing. Though Joy had been born in Kallistrate, her family’s lineage traced back to Xia, the ancient empire that had ruled western Nokomis, before being conquered by the Sidhe. So Joy had all the characteristic Xia features: small nose, a pronounced almond-shape to her eyes, and straight, jet-black hair. Growing up in Gortyn, she hadn’t really thought anything of it. Plenty of people there looked like her. But out in the landlocked Strata highlands of Knittelfeld, nobody did.
After the first hour of bizarre, repetitive interactions with the locals, Joy had to fight down the urge to deck herself out in a sandwich-board sign with the following inscription:
1) You don’t need to welcome me to Kallistrate; I was actually born here.
2) Yes, I do speak Kallish really well. That’s because I was born here.
3) Yes, I also speak Xiaish. Two dialects. Actually, I speak five languages.
4) No, Xia people don’t all speak five languages. I do because I was a language major in college, and from my military training.
5) No, I’m not sad about the results of the war. My side won. I served in the Kallistrate Intelligence Bureau as a translator. BECAUSE I WAS BORN HERE.
But making a sign would be time-consuming, and she doubted the snark would be helpful in the long run, especially since she needed to interview these people. And honestly, save for a few exceptions, the villagers were really friendly. She had to remind herself how young a country Kallistrate was. It had been less than a century since Stas Lenart and Rumi Janda had unified the city-states of the Kallis coast and the feudal territories of the Strata highlands, and most of these people were barely two generations out of serfdom, if that. You could hear it in the way they spoke, a regional variant of Kallish that she hadn’t heard before. It wasn’t too hard to parse, but starting out she’d needed to ask folks to repeat themselves.
Still, her patience paid off, and she was able to find the egg’s owner right away. Being so remote, Knittelfeld didn’t have much in the way of entertainment options, so the dragon’s egg was all anyone was talking about. Unfortunately, nobody had anything of substance to say about it, other than the last time they’d swung over to take a look.
Joy’s big tip-off came when she talked to one resident who seemed considerably less enthused about the egg than the rest, though he refused to say it was fake. (”Well, I ain’t never seen a dragon’s egg before, so if Jakob says that’s what he’s got, well… that’s his business, ain’t it?”) It took a bit of coaxing, but when asked if there was anyone in Knittelfeld who was inclined to be a prankster, he gave her a name: Kevin Stoecklin.
Well, that didn’t surprise her. She’d already met Kevin, in fact, he’d come sniffing around almost as soon as her coach had arrived, and she’d had some difficulty getting him out of her hair. Kevin’s father ran the local general store, and he was going to be a full partner in a year when he turned twenty-one.
She knew this because he’d mentioned it himself, several times, accompanied by a smirk like she should be super-impressed, while twirling an oversized jeweled pocket watch around on its gold chain. Kevin seemed to think he was some kind of big shot, going so far as to say she should be talking to him, not any of these other “dumb hicks.” She also had to suppress her urge to tell him that nobody in Dodona used pocket watches any more—the society elite wore wristwatches, and had for the past decade, so if he could please quit spinning his tacky heirloom around like a complete douche, that’d be great. But she’d refrained, diplomacy and all.
Good thing, too. Because this way, she had no difficulty asking Kevin if he’d like to escort her to a nice dinner, which meant taking her to the local tavern, because that was the only restaurant in town. She’d realized this already, and had put a request with the tavern keep that when she ordered wine, he’d serve her grape juice instead. The tavern keep had been suspicious at first, but turned enthusiastic when she mentioned she was trying to get the truth out of Kevin.
Apparently the tavern keep didn’t much care for Kevin.
She’d planned the dinner carefully, running the conversation in her mind, devising multiple rhetorical tricks and traps, and by the time he strutted in through the tavern doors, Joy felt like she was ready for anything. As it turned out, she needn’t have bothered. She’d barely got midway through her opening salvo, noting that she wasn’t sure if Jakob’s egg was real or not, but that if it was fake, it was an extremely impressive one, meaning that the old farmer would have to be a very clever person—and immediately Kevin piped up, taking credit for the whole thing, going on and on about how he’d done it, how he’d gotten an infertile ostrich egg from his dad, hard-boiled and painted it up, and led poor Jakob to discover it. He was so enthusiastic, in fact, it made Joy suspicious, wondering if maybe she’d over-baited her trap, so she peppered him with detailed questions, shooting them off rapid-fire, hopefully at a faster rate than anyone could make things up.
Why’d his dad have an ostrich egg?
How did they know the egg was infertile?
How much water did he use to boil it?
How long did it take? What color was the pot? Tell her the brand name of paint he used, and the specific name the manufacturer assigned to that color.
But she didn’t trip Kevin up, and he’d been able to answer every question plausibly enough. The general store served as a distribution point for even more remote towns, and someone over in Tullen had gotten into ostrich farming, because apparently that was a thing people did now. The Tullen farmer had noticed the heating element on one of the shipping crates’ incubation systems had failed, and had left it at the store. Kevin had actually used two types of paint: two coats of Spring Lilac over one coat of Chrome Silver, which is what gave the egg its “magical” iridescent quality. Joy noted down all the other details to double-check later, but she was already convinced he was telling the truth.
The only question that stumped Kevin was why he’d done it. He’d just looked at her crosswise, shrugged, and said, “Why not?” Further questions got her nowhere. Didn’t he have any sympathy for an old man who was one of his neighbors? Wouldn’t he be horribly disappointed when he found out the truth? How would Kevin feel if someone did that to him? Didn’t he have anything better to do with his time? Kevin just stared at her in baffled incomprehension, like she really was speaking Xiaish, until Joy finally gave up.
She told him that she was very sorry, but she suddenly wasn’t feeling well, and would be retiring to her room. In retrospect she could see how this might’ve been jarring, but at that point she’d endured all the Kevin she could. Kevin didn’t appreciate this, and got rather insistent and pushy about her staying.
Fortunately, Joy had thought something like this might happen, and had mentioned it
to the tavern keep previously. He’d just grinned, and told her to call for Cookie if she had any trouble. Joy had barely begun to turn and raise her hand for assistance when Cookie appeared at their table and seized Kevin by the ear. It turned out that Cookie was an impressively hefty, no-nonsense woman, who served as the town butcher when she wasn’t manning the tavern kitchen, and she didn’t seem to like Kevin much, either, given all the various “accidents” he had as he was bulled out the door, banging himself against various tables, chairs, the support column for the roof, several times on the door frame, the porch railing outside, capped off with head-over-heels tumble over the porch railing. Luckily, the horses’ watering trough broke his fall, so it all turned out okay.
The rest of the tavern regulars seemed to appreciate this rousing entertainment, so Joy decided to stay for dinner and some actual, real wine, all of which was much better than she’d expected from such a remote town. She’d planned to leave a huge tip—or at least, as huge a tip as she could manage, but the tavern keeper had grinned and refused to take her money, saying they should be paying her for the free show. Joy opted not to argue the point.