The Legend of the Red Specter (The Adventures of the Red Specter Book 1)

by M. A. Wisniewski

  “Joy!” Garai snapped. “Are you even listening?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I was just thinking about that story. Look—I guess, in hindsight, I could have made it more interesting if I’d included more of the side details about my interview with Kevin, instead of just recounting the results. I mean, I’m really not a fan of that type of journalism, where it’s more about the reporter than the actual subject, but this is your paper, after all. And if—”

  “Again you are missing the point,” sighed Garai. “You shouldn’t have bothered with that Kevin interview at all.”

  Joy blinked. “Not bother? But I found out the truth.”

  “I see,” said Garai. “And did your farmer Jakob thank you for this? Was he grateful to you when you told him?”

  “Uh… no,” she said.

  “No?” said Garai, raising his eyebrow in mock surprise. “So, how did he react? Can you tell me that?”

  “He… didn’t believe me,” she admitted. She remembered his reaction, and she still didn’t fully understand it. She’d tried to break the news as gently as possible, only to hit an impenetrable wall of truth-resistance. What was she doing believing a word that came out of that Stoeklin kid? Everybody around here knew what a liar he was. And Jakob had shrugged off all the corroborating evidence, like the purple stains on his makeshift incubator from the paint rubbing off, and refused to do anything to confirm that it was a hardboiled egg, like spinning it, or candling it. Of course it was a bit odd—it was a dragon egg, after all. You couldn’t expect it to behave like a regular chicken egg, could you?

  And that was that. Jakob remained resistant to all the evidence she’d collected, to the point of proud defiance. She’d left that bit out of her story, as well.

  “Of course he didn’t,” said Garai. “Yet you insisted on telling him anyway. Are you trying to crush the man’s dreams?”

  “But that would happen anyway, even if I did nothing,” Joy protested. “Jakob is expecting the egg to hatch into a baby dragon, but it’s not going to. It’s going to start rotting. Especially since he’s keeping it warm in that incubator, and then he’s going to feel awful—”

  “Yes, and that was inevitable, that he would feel awful. But now, thanks to you, he will have company, for our readers feel awful as well,” said Garai. “I stay in business by keeping my readers happy.”

  Joy winced at that. Garai had a point, but she’d thought of another problem. If the dragon egg claim had spread and been taken seriously, Jakob Ecker would never have been allowed to keep it. No way would the Kallistrate military allow such a potentially dangerous weapon as a new dragon to exist outside their control. The KIB would’ve descended on Knittelfeld, and either confiscated the egg or destroyed it.

  So she held her tongue. Digger herself in deeper wouldn’t help her sell a story to Garai. Even if her current story was a lost cause, she still had two weeks before rent came due, and that was plenty of time to write something new. She just had to figure out what Garai wanted from her. He must want something. Otherwise, why waste all this time with a lecture?

  Chapter 3

  The Lost Princess

  “And, since we’re talking about depressing things, let’s review your article on the Lost Princess,” Garai continued.

  “All right,” said Joy, trying to fake some measure of enthusiasm for a lecture she’d already endured several times in the past month, while praying her empty stomach didn’t interrupt him with any embarrassing noises. She’d been hoping to treat herself to a blueberry pancake breakfast platter after selling her story, but it didn’t look like that’d be happening today.

  And she’d been so looking forward to it.

  “I had to edit that one to the point where I was practically rewriting it,” he said. “And that should not be my job. I gave you a half-dozen contacts to interview, and you came away with the worst one. Totally unusable.”

  “Okay, I still don’t get it,” said Joy. “I thought I picked the best one. I mean, most of them were pretty boring. They were just like, ‘I caught a glimpse of Kiona Artaxerxes at the grocery store, or passing by on the trolley, or taking a pedicab to the train station, and that’s it. Nothing else to it. At least Stanley’s story had some creativity—”

  “Creative?” Garai turned his face to the heavens and made a pleading gesture, as if begging the gods to lend him patience, before staring back at her. “The man was completely bonkers.”

  Joy figured as much, but she still didn’t get why that was a problem. She thought the point of the Gazette was to print bonkers stories. Joy had thought she’d lucked out, that she’d found a way to give Garai what he obviously wanted and still face herself in the mirror the next morning. Because it wasn’t like she was endorsing any part of Stanley’s story. He said that Kiona had flown in through his window in the middle of the night, and she was reporting on it. That he said it happened. It was a true fact that he’d made that claim.

  “Sorry, I’m still…” Joy rubbed her temples and tried to collect herself. Normally this was the point where she’d smile and nod, hope that she could still get paid for the work she’d done, so she could have a shot at making rent next month. But maybe there was some real point here she was missing. “Uh, could you explain it again, exactly what was wrong with Stanley’s—”

  “He said that she had wings and a tail,” said Garai. “Kiona doesn’t have wings or a tail. Everyone knows this. So obviously the story is false.”

  “Well, to be fair, the Morale Department’s pamphlets have been featuring drawings of Sidhe with tails, and cloven hooves, and—”

  “Ridiculous war propaganda,” snapped Garai. “You should know better than to take that seriously.”

  Of course I don’t take it seriously, Joy wanted to scream. I’m just trying to give you what you want so I can get paid, but you’re making it freaking impossible. Joy pinched the bridge of her nose and took several long, deep breaths. What was the core point of Garai’s objection, again?

  “Stanley’s story was obviously fake,” she repeated, “because it didn’t match up with what Kiona’s supposed to look like. And ‘everybody knows’ what that is.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You know we have the portrait. We even reprinted it with the article.”

  Well, of course they’d reprinted the portrait. It was one of the most well known images to come out after the war. Three years ago—well, almost exactly three years ago, since tomorrow was Liberation Day—the infamous 13th Company of Kallistrate’s Steam Golem Corps broke through the last line of defenses around Albion-Xia’s Terrestrial capital of Cymru and went on a rampage, burning and crushing half of the ancient city, including famed Ontonia Palace. Countless works of art, literature, and architecture were lost, much of it with thousand-plus years of history. But one recent painting had survived, though a good chunk of the upper-left corner had been burned and ripped to shreds: a family portrait of the Terrestrial Royal Family.

  And it was true, none of them had wings or tails. Like all Sidhe, they looked almost identical to the regular humans who hailed from the various island chains in the northern Dagan Sea, fair-haired and light-skinned, with eyes of blue or green. The only true difference that set them apart from normal humans were their ears, which stretched out to long, thin points, extending to just below the tops of their heads.

  Supposedly there were other differences as well. Sidhe lived much longer than humans, up to several hundred years, by all accounts. Their were claims about them being physically stronger, with superior reflexes, but those could’ve very easily been propaganda spread to keep “inferior” humans from questioning Sidhe rule. If anything, constant inbreeding within “royal” bloodlines left them prone to birth defects and other genetic ailments, if Kallistrate propaganda had any truth to it.

  Certainly there was nothing about Kiona’s portrait that said “superior physical specimen.” Ears aside, she looked like a perfectly normal eleven-year old girl, one who was rather slim, extremely pale, and
very pretty. But there was something beyond that—the way she seemed to stare straight out of the painting and at the viewer with an air of plaintive melancholy, like she was trying to send a message with her eyes, a plea for rescue.

  Joy had seen art stores selling prints of that image—not the whole family portrait, just the part with Kiona. Cropping the image like that was pretty easy, since Kiona sat apart from her sisters on the other side of her parents, neither of whom had their hands or arms around her. So isolating the Lost Princess for her own portrait was simplicity itself.

  “Okay,” said Joy. “But remember—that portrait was done six years ago. Sidhe are supposed to mature at the same rate as humans, so by now she—”

  “—Would still not have wings or a tail!” said Garai. “Nobody wants to read that. And nobody wants to read dark, depressing allegations about their national heroes committing massacres. Honestly, if I’d printed your article as you gave it to me, we would have a mob outside our offices the next day—with torches and pitchforks! Is that what you want?”

  “Nobody wants a torch-bearing mob outside their office,” said Joy, because that was a true statement. And, if she thought about it, maybe Garai had done her a favor. She really didn’t have the evidence she needed to take down the “Bad Luck Brigade,” and a weak, poorly-sourced version of the story in the Gazette could be used to discredit her if she ever got the chance to do a real version of the story in the future, for a real newspaper. But it was so hard to resist. This was one of the main reasons she’d gotten into journalism in the first place.

  Joy remembered how it was early in the war, when the young nation of Kallistrate desperately needed heroes like the Bad Luck Brigade. Someone had to protect them from the wrath of the invincible Dragon Knights—a military force that had never seen a defeat for the thousand-plus years of its existence. By all accounts, dragon fire was a horrific weapon. Not only would it stick to you and burn you, it was deadly poisonous as well. If even a drop of it got on you, it would eat through your flesh and burrow into your bones, leaving the victim to suffer a slow, agonizing death as the poison did its work. And the Dragon Knights had no reservations about using their fire.

  Whole towns, whole cities, even whole provinces could be scourged by the dragons as punishment. The toxic dragonfire soaked into the ground, so nothing would ever grow there again, forever.

  But Kallistrate had an answer. And two months into the war, the first Steam Golem rumbled out onto the battlefield.

  It was the culmination of decades of dedicated, secret research, combined with Kallistrate’s industrial might: giant, steam-powered armored knights, piloted by a three-person crew, and controlled through the use of analytical engines—huge masses of intricate clockwork and electric circuits. These were the thinking machines that allowed the hulking Steam Golems to walk and fight without toppling over, and gave Kallistrate its only chance for survival.

  But early on, things did not go well for the steam golems. Political tensions had come to a head before the secret Golem engineering plan was one hundred percent ready. The men and women crewing the machines were all green. There were no established tactics for steam golem warfare. Nothing like them had ever existed before. Early steam golem battles typically ended with the clumsy and awkward machines getting ripped apart by the more agile dragons, or doused in flames so the armored steel cockpits became ovens, cooking the trapped crew alive. At best, they maybe managed to maim or kill one of the great wyrms, either from the shrapnel of their exploding steam boilers, or by desperately grappling the great wyrms, holding them in place long enough for a barrage of Kallistrate artillery to kill friend and foe together.

  And that was when the 13th Company, the “Bad Luck Brigade,” made a name for itself. These were the misfits, chronic discipline problems—and often the only people reckless enough to strap themselves in the cockpit of a death machine. They’d been put in a unit with the unluckiest possible number, which they took as a sign that the upper brass expected them to fail. And they turned that ill omen into a perverse badge of pride.

  Because the Bad Luck Brigade became the first Steam Golem unit to slay a dragon and live to tell the tale. And while part of their success had to do with the fixes and improvements made by the tacticians and engineers of the Steam Golem Corps, the rest had to be credited to their own skills and fearlessness, and their uniquely aggressive style of combat. They were the first surviving heroes of the Great War, and their photos were plastered across the newspapers and on recruitment posters, as Kallistrate forces rolled across the battlefield, liberating province after province.

  The tipping point came when all the dragons retreated from the field, rather than fight the golems. The nature of warfare had changed completely. The Golem Corps had refined its weapons and tactics to a science, which, oddly enough, bore little resemblance to the “Bad Luck Brigade’s” wild brawling. Instead, Steam Golem Companies advanced in patient phalanxes, wielding gargantuan tower shields covered in specially-treated ceramic tiles, daring the Dragon Knights to try and break their shield wall, only to be shot with heavy golem-mounted cannons at point-blank range, or get methodically stabbed to death by the huge bayonets affixed to those cannons.

  In the absence of the Dragon Knights, the war entered a new, uglier phase, for now it was Kallistrate arraying their overwhelming superweapons against hopelessly over-matched Albion infantry and cavalry. And a new side of the “Bad Luck Brigade” began to emerge. Their enthusiasm for combat, so useful and laudable when they’d been facing monsters, turned into something much uglier when they faced regular infantry, or partisans mixed with civilian populations: a lack of restraint that veered into outright brutality.

  And nothing demonstrated that more than the destruction of Ontonia Palace. This was supposed to be the culmination of the long Albion-Xia campaign. Capturing the Terrestrial royals would be a huge coup—it would potentially give Kallistrate enough leverage to force the Celestial Emperor to issue a surrender as ransom.

  The raid was a disaster. By the end of the battle, most of the palace had been reduced to cinders and rubble. And the Bad Luck Brigade had allegedly been found parading around Cymru with the Royal Family’s severed heads, either spitted on pikes bolted to the decks of their golems, or strung along a steel cable hung from Sergeant Aghi’s golem like a necklace. She’d heard there were photos, and that the 13th had posed for them, smiling and looking extremely pleased with themselves.

  But the 13th had one head missing from their collection—Kiona’s. That was the story, anyway. Joy couldn’t confirm it, because the photos had been classified, if they even existed in the first place. Joy had met other people in the KIB who’d insisted, in furtive whispers, that the photos were real and that they’d seem them. Still, full proof eluded her. The official reports simply mentioned that the Royal Family had been killed in battle, and Kiona was listed as “missing.” The 13th Company had been given official reprimands for disobeying orders, but their punishments were light, and they were never brought to a court-martial.

  That wasn’t right. But what offended her most about the story wasn’t the barbarity of the 13th, but the willingness of the rest of the government to cover for them and hide the truth, if that’s really what happened. How she longed for the resources to dig into that story for real.

  But she’d let her mind wander. She flicked her attention back to Garai, who was still into his lecture about her story, and fortunately hadn’t paused to ask her a question or anything. At least, she thought she was starting to understand what was wrong with her story. At the time she’d written it, she’d just presented the evidence for the official story: that Kiona had died in the assault, and had been counted “missing” because her corpse had likely been burned beyond recognition. Then she’d laced the story with dubious “spicy” details that she’d never have put in a regular newspaper; rumors about the 13th that she believed but couldn’t prove, and unreliable witness testimony about Kiona the dragon-girl that she didn’t bel
ieve but could simply repeat without endorsement.

  But she had missed the point. The Gazette wasn’t just about telling wild stories; it was about telling wild stories that its audience wanted to hear. They wanted to hear that the Bad Luck Brigade really were the roguish heroes they’d been made out to be in all the gushing war stories and propaganda posters, not that they were also capable of appalling acts of brutality. Even though those same propaganda posters relentlessly depicted the Sidhe as monsters, nobody wanted to believe in Princess Kiona the monster-girl. Everyone had seen her portrait, and obviously she didn’t have wings or a tail. She just looked like a regular, adorable little girl who needed a hug.

  Of course, they wanted to believe she was alive and that Kallistrate hadn’t killed her. Because Kallistrate was good, and all of its soldiers were heroes. They were the world’s light of freedom and democracy. Albion was the tyrannical empire of callous nobles. They were the commanders of monsters; dragons and huge, flying, carnivorous beetles. They commanded the brutal Caliburn Knights and the Sidhe sorcerers who summoned the giant clouds of poison gas. That was them. They were the murderers.

  The people and armies of Kallistrate were different. They’d suffered, endured hardship after hardship, fought, and died to defend their homeland. Everyone had lost someone, a brother, a lover, a son or daughter, or knew someone who had. Their dearly departed would never murder a cute little girl. How dare she insinuate that.

  Why not just spit on their graves, then? No, of course Kiona was still alive, somewhere: living quietly and certainly not plotting revenge or anything. Because, look at her—someone that sweet wouldn’t hate good people like us. That went without saying. That’s what people wanted to believe, and that was the hope that Joy’s story had failed to feed.